this is the week that was

And oh what a week it was.

Has the album of the day been 'disappeared'?

These rumors are baseless. What's happened is I've completely lost track of the Album of the Day feature. I'm at the start of the Fs now, and the big highlights of this week are lost in a haze of meetings, class sessions, and grading, and grating.

And the semester, how goes it?

I've hit the perpetual-motion chunk of the semester, and from here until just about the very end there's no respite from the constant shifting tides of student work. So if anyone sees me on campus, or walking around Turlock, wearing bright yellow ducky water wings, it's because I'm trying to float.

You do realize those are not meant to be life-saving floatation devices for adults, right?

Oh.

Yeah, it's more of a novelty item for little kids spashing about in backyard pools.

Now you tell me.

Any new revelations or epiphanies to report? You were up to two or three a week during the high point of the summer.

Huh?

All my epiphantic powers are now focused on the problem of How To Work With Bunches And Bunches Of Assholes - which would be a guaranteed best-selling title - rather than the more pleasurable discoveries of the philosophic life. Plus, I keep playing this same riff, over and over again, that is clearly desperate to turn into a song. I got nothin'.

Still, sanity remains intact, right?

Let's see. This week I've told my students to spend a week not consuming anything made in Asia; suggested it would be a good idea to jam their bodies into the ceiling of elevators whenever they ride them; insisted to them that 10 years ago I was also still male, causing grievous confusion on the part of some, and gender paranoia on the part of others; and I told one class I resented being there because it was Lauren's birthday, then retracted that and said I was just upset because I was longing for the strawberry tart I'd made. In a class discussion of the professional obligation to maintain client confidentiality, I urged a student to tell us the juicy gossip she'd heard about a faculty member.

So, yeah.

What's the outlook for next week?

30% chance of pain!
Grading this afternoon, tapering off in the late afternoon. Pizza this evening, followed by fizzy liquids. Saturday and Sunday, expected in the foothills, followed by the return of grading Sunday evening or Monday morning.
70% chance of thunder-grading Monday night.
For the rest of the week, intermittent grading between classes. For Tuesday's Academic Senate game, expect dense fog, low visibility, and darkness.

Apparently, there's also a 0.00010374% chance of Apocalypse by Wednesday. Be sure to bring your hat.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 6 of ??

1. The Death Of The Clayton Peacock - John Fahey. Eerie tune played with a slide.

2. Diamonds And Rust - Paper Cats/Joan Baez. This is from our latest CD, which is called Do Paper Cats Dream Of Origami Birds?, in case I hadn't mentioned. It sounds really good - way better than I thought it would turn out, on the nth take, the final, successful one, the one after which I said, "Well, I don't care if I never play that song again the rest of my life."

3. Different Drum - Michael Nesmith. Nesmith wrote a handful of terrific songs, and I think I like his version of it better than Linda Ronstadt's.

4. Digging For Fire - The Pixies.

5. Digital Handshake - Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog. Noise. Felt great today.

6. Dirty Back Road - The B52s. Just reaching the corner of Monte Vista and Dels Lane. So if you saw me there at around 9:50 this morning, wondering what I was listening to and thinking about as you passed by, now you know. You'll be more circumspect about asking, next time, too, I bet.

7. Djobi Djoba - The Gipsy Kings. Always brings back strangely fond memories of a time long ago with people I never speak to any more, in a place I hope never to revisit.

8. Do I Do - Stevie Wonder. Friggin' Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solo!

9. Do Re Mi - Woody Guthrie. My favorite Dust Bowl Ballad.

10. The Dolphins - Fred Neil.

11. The Dolphins - Richie Havens.

12. The Dolphins - Tim Buckley.

Now that was a trip. Hearing multiple versions of the same song played by different people is one reason I decided to play all the songs on my iPod in alphabetical order. These are all good, but in this order, Buckley's comes off as the most contrived piece of doggerel ever written.

13. Don't Fear The Reaper - Blue Öyster Cult. Hear that, dolphins?

14. Don't Get Me Wrong - The Pretenders. Oh, Chrissy Hynde, is there any malady you can't salve? Of course there is.

exciting new ideas for your (political) party!

Among the mysteries surrounding the so-called Tea Party movement is what exactly these self-styled zealots stand for. Usually, zealots are zealots because they believe in something with the core of their being - in the holiness of a, the abomination of b, the - uh - zestiness of c, etc. But as far as I can tell, GOP candidates who have associated themselves with this movement, especially successful ones, have no identifiable political beliefs, let alone a considered, coherent ideology. They're sort of wandering in a vast, vacant desert of politics, and apparently, they hate it.

So, as a service to anyone among them, or just anyone who shares their livid, if not altogether conscientious or self-reflective, anger at their existential bereftitude, I'm offering some new positions, expressed in convenient, poster-board-n-magic-marker-ready slogan format.

7¢ NICKEL NOW!

This marvel of economic and fiscal policy has its roots in Marxism, specifically in Animal Crackers (1930). Groucho expounds the prudence of the 7¢ nickel: you could buy a 2-cent newspaper, and get the same nickel back again as change. As Mr. Marx put it, a single nickel, carefully spent, could last a family for years. Obviously, prices have changed since the last Depression, so perhaps what we need here is a $7 $5 bill. But you get the idea. The slogan is symbolic.

US OUT OF CANADA

Foreign policy is often so complex as to defy forecasting, let alone policy-making. Ending conflict with Canada is an easy policy goal to understand, and a campaign promise any aspiring candidate could defend.

OBAMA IS A SECRET AMISH

The depths of rumor-mongering about President Obama have yet to be plumbed. The great thing about insinuating or directly claiming Obama is secretly Amish is that, if you restrict yourself to screaming about it in the media, the Amish will never come forward with proof. Plus, you could demand that Obama prove he was never at a barn-raising, point out that the Amish don't have cameras, and that therefore he can't possibly prove it. QED.

DON'T ASK WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK TO SUPERSIZE YOUR ORDER

Since most Americans already seem to agree that the primary legitimating purpose of government is to assure their access to an endless supply of fries, this is sure to win popular support.

FREE MARYLAND

Poor Maryland!

TIPPECANOE AND TYLER TOO!

Campaign proven! Especially useful if your name is Harrison, for some reason.

KILLING PEOPLE IN COLD BLOOD IS MURDER!

Let folks know where you stand. Someone's got to be bold enough to tell the truth about this issue. All these career politicians try to bend words and line their pockets! But the truth needs to be told! (This is also a terrific slogan to include in any candidates' debate, or city council meeting, or any other occasion when more than one person occupies a defined space: the train, an elevator, waiting for the crosswalk light, intimate moments...)

LEGALIZE PAT

In this day and age, it's just unfounded prejudice that keeps us from making Pat legal. If the government would legalize, regulate, and tax Pat, a large portion of our deficit could be fixed. Everybody knows this.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 5 of ??

1. A Common Disaster - Cowboy Junkies. Cowboy Junkies are one of those bands I feel I should like better than I do. They take more patience than I'm sometimes willing to give to a band.

2. The Con - Tegan & Sara. Unlike Tegan & Sara, who demand more patience than I'm usually willing to give to a band.

3. Conceived - Beth Orton. And unlike Beth Orton, whom I adore without qualification.

4. Countenance - Beth Orton. She named these songs on purpose so they'd turn up in alphabetical order on some jerk's iPod, I bet. Wait, what?

5. Creep - Radiohead. 17 years and multiple parodies later, I submit this still stands up.

6. Crosstown Traffic - Jimi Hendrix. A bajillion years and, I suspect, zero parodies later, still one of the best buzzbox guitar solos ever recorded.

7. Cruelty Humor: Object Permanence - Paper Cats. Lauren's lyric contemplating mortality, our precarious existence, and our dependence on the universe not suddenly becoming offended by that existence.

8. The Crunge - Led Zeppelin. Erg. Whiplash.

9. Crush With Eyeliner - R.E.M. A note to follow The Crunge.

10. Cypress Avenue - Van Morrison. Thankfully, this was after class, on the way home.

11. D'yer Mak'er - Led Zeppelin. More whiplash.

12. Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Palace Of King Louis XIV Of Spain - John Fahey. This version, from The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick, interpolates some other themes that, Fahey announces, don't have titles.

13. Dancing Days - Led Zeppelin. So there's your Houses of the Holy segment, Al.

14. Dead On The Dancefloor - Earlimart. Yes, they are named after the town about halfway to LA of the same name. They used to pass through a lot on the way to gigs, they say. Sorta indie-post-punk band. For a while, we used to play their album Treble and Tremble whenever we drove through Earlimart, on the Crankster Freeway. The joke lost momentum. Note the "dance" theme dominating.

15. Dear Old Stockholm - Miles Davis. One of my favorite mid-50s recordings of Miles. His version of this old folk tune with his first band with John Coltrane, on his first Columbia album, 'Round About Midnight. This was Miles' first great band, with Red Garland on piano, Philly Joe Jones on drums, and Paul Chambers on bass. Chambers would return for another round with Miles and Coltrane in the late 50s.

Whiplash, dancing, Led Zeppelin. That's been the day.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 4 of ??

1. Chain of Fools - Aretha Franklin. I've had outstanding luck with opening songs this week. I shall risk offense and say that I believe this is better than Aretha's version of Respect. And to quote Steely Dan - "Hey nineteen, that's 'retha Franklin."

2. Chelsea Hotel No. 2 - Leonard Cohen. My favorite line in this most excellent song is "Clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty." Leonard Cohen is allowed in the house, but only if he brings his own booze.

3. Chocolate Jesus - Tom Waits. This completely twisted my entire outlook for the day and established a goofy mood I didn't escape until the walk home. I told my students I became a philosopher when I was 10 in order to impress an older girl I was in love with who was a family friend. It's a true story, but it's still goofy as hell. But how else could I respond to this?

When the weather gets rough
And it's whiskey in the shade
It's best to wrap your savior
Up in cellophane
He flows like the big muddy
But that's ok
Pour him over ice cream
For a nice parfait

4. Christ for President - Wilco/Woody Guthrie. Or maybe it was this that set my mood.

5. Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk - Rufus Wainwright. Or maybe it was this.

6. Cinnamon Girl - Neil Young. Definitely not this.

7. Clap Hands - Tom Waits.

8. Clocks - Coldplay. I suppose I should be deeply suspicious of Coldplay. Oh well.

9. Clubland - Elvis Costello. This was the first song on the walk home.

10. Coal to Cola - Grogshow. Nasty good line: "... the rest of me thinking of all your charms, / and how few there are and how far I go for them."

11. Cocoon - The Decemberists. Pretty and fairly inscrutable song, and not at all goofy, and a great transition from Grogshow to.

12. Coda In Search Of A Song - Paper Cats. An old tune without lyrics, just a 12-string basic track and lead played on an acoustic-electric classical (my trusty Cordoba) with some distortion and echo.

13. Cold Turkey - John Lennon. John Lennon quitting drugs.

14. Come Together - Beatles. John Lennon still on drugs. Time going backwards.

15. Comfort of Strangers - Beth Orton. No evidence of drugs involved.

16. Comfortably Numb - Dar Williams & Ani Difranco. ... and right back on the drugs. Want some cognitive dissonance? Listen to this cover of Pink Floyd.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 3 of ??

I'm skipping a chunk of Bs. They played on Monday, and I neglected to post about them. Sue me.

1. Brown-eyed Girl - Van Morrison. There might be better ways to start your morning walk to work, but I have my doubts.

2. Burn Your Life Down - Tegan & Sara.

3. C'Mere - Interpol. I just started looking into Interpol. But I've always claimed to be a big fan of the Interpol warnings on videos. I cheer them when they come on the screen.

4. California - Semisonic. Found trolling for songs mentioning California. Dan Wilson sings it as "Cal-i-for-ni-a," which is always fun to hear.

4. California Stars - Wilco/Woody Guthrie. This was interrupted by a student walking to school. She asked how long I've lived here (12 years), and I mentioned that, although I've lived here longer than almost anywhere else, I somehow still don't feel like it's home. I think the precarious nature of my employment may have something to do with that. Anyway, home, for me, is where I live with Lauren - and which somehow manages not to be in California.

5. A Call To Apathy (Tentative Title) - The Shins. I typoed the band as "The Shings" twice.

6. Can't Get There From Here - R.E.M. From Fables of the Reconstruction, my album of choice for stomping around the campus at UNC-Charlotte. It still calls up that particular mood of my youth.

7. Candy Everybody Wants - 10,000 Maniacs. Back when this came out, Natalie Merchant had some kind of weird solvent power over me. I melted on contact with her voice. Somewhat less so these days.

8. Caramel - Suzanne Vega. From Nine Objects Of Desire, which was featured very prominently in the late 90s on Harry Shearer's public radio satire program, Harry Shearer's Le Show. For a while, Vega was one of my favorite songwriters. Now she strikes me as a little too neat and tidy.

9. Caribou - The Pixies. Now, talk about untidy songwriting. Like most Pixies songs, this is basically stupid. I love it.

10. Caring Is Creepy - The Shins. Or the Shings.

11. Carolina In My Mind - James Taylor. Confession time: James Taylor creeps me the heck out.

12. Carry On/Questions - CSN. One of the songs that made me want to play the guitar. That gigantic crashing hard strumming opening - woof! The perfect solo that forms the bridge between the Carry On section and the Questions part - I assume by Stills - cazart!

what's philosophy for?

So there I was, preparing for tomorrow's Contemporary Moral Issues class, re-reading the class assignment, an essay by Margaret Urban Walker about Carol Gilligan's work on the "feminine" moral voice. Walker's language is, to me, fluid, clear, and at times evocative, even profound (I adore her line calling respect an "astringent" form of beneficence); but I realize how opaque or abstruse it's going to seem to a roomful of 19-year-olds on Monday morning. My attention has been focused on the problems of articulating the meaning of Walker's essay, the meaning of her language, the connection between the two, the relationship between all that and Nel Noddings' ethics of care, and the relationship between all that mess and Carol Gilligan. Suddenly, Walker says, concerning her own development of an ethics of care from Gilligan's work:

One would not expect a view “systematic” in the philosopher’s sense to spring full-blown from any survey of opinion. It must be admitted, finally, that perhaps these reconstructions are too energetic.

The genius of this statement is its expression of the fundamental problem of the philosopher's prejudice. What I've taken to calling the philosopher's prejudice is the presumption that seems built into philosophical writing and thinking, that everyone thinks like a philosopher about life: that is, rationally, systematically, and maintaining a sense-giving narrative at all times. Philosophers are often better at interpreting life than living it, and so mistake their interpretations for actual lives, in other words.

Walker's lines helped put into focus for me the problem of being a philosophy instructor and making her words make sense for the minds and lives of my students. I don't mean by this that I have to translate philosophical ethics into the vernacular, and I certainly don't mean I have to dumb it down. I have to triangulate between the everyday lives of actual flesh-and-blood people, the abstractions of philosophical theory, and this third thing that philosophers seem very keen to promote, which for now I'll hastily name a self-reflective life.

My students' sense of Walker's articulation of the ethics of care won't be like an academic philosopher's. I believe it shouldn't be, either. The value of the abstract, academic, philosophical articulation is not in-itself, unless your last name is Kant. Nosirree, the point is not to interpret life, the point is to live it. What, then, should be my goal in helping my students understand Walker's essay about the ethics of care?

How about: to help them to reconstruct, for themselves, the meaning of caring as an ethical standpoint. Not in order to be able accurately to recount this position in correct academic philosophical jargon, but in order to consider their own caring. If the ethics of care is worth something, what I should hope to do is help my students graft an intelligent and reflective caring into their own moral lives, wherever it fits best, and however it fits best.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 2 of ??

Today on my way to and from campus, I entered the Bs.

"At the Zoo" - Simon and Garfunkel. You knew about the hamsters, didn't you? At least suspected?

"Auctioneer" - R.E.M. From Fables of the Reconstruction, and consequently almost entirely inscrutable. Good riff, though.

"Australia" - The Shins. Time to put ze earphones on!

"Ba-De-Ba" - Fred Neil. Fred Neil is one of 3 or 4 singers I hear in my lumbar vertebrae.

"Back In Your Head" - Tegan and Sara. Another Bridge School Benefit concert performer I've been listening to ever since (2008 edition of the show, I believe), but I still haven't decided whether I like them.

"Back to Ohio" - The Pretenders. I bought Learning to Crawl when I was 16, I think. I had read a story in Time about Chrissy Hynde, about the tumult in the band when she fired Pete Farndon (whom she had a kid with) and James Honeyman-Scott died from a weird reaction to cocaine.

"Balloon Man" - Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians. Robyn Hitchcock is not allowed in the house.

"Bambaleo" - Gipsy Kings.

"Bateau" - Marc Ribot. I decided this afternoon that, since he's from Jersey, I shall assume that he poses as French and affects an accent in conversation, so I will pronounce his last name henceforth like the sound a frog makes.

"Because the Night" - Patti Smith. You may not like Patti Smith. You'd be a fool not to like this song.

"Begin the Begin" - R.E.M. First tune on Life's Rich Pageant. I can't itemize or think clearly either, Michael.

"Better than Ice Cream" - Sarah McLachlan. Lovely lovely song, by a lovely lovely chick. Geez, I'd like to bang her.

"Beyond Belief" - Elvis Costello. Well, that certainly ruined that mood. I really like Elvis Costello in his more cynical mood, which is good because he's almost always in it.

"Big Yellow Taxi" - Joni Mitchell. Is it just me, or does the cutesy ending of this song just about wreck it?

"Bike" - Pink Floyd. This came on after "Big Yellow Taxi," and my brain nearly seized. I exclaimed aloud, walking near Donnelly Park, "Fblaugh!" I can't think of a song on my iPod more unlike "Big Yellow Taxi" than Syd Barrett's crazed rumination on whatever the hell was going on in his lunatic head.

"Birds and Ships" - Billy Bragg & Natalie Merchant, written by Woody Guthrie. Then I exclaimed, "Gwuff!" when this came on after "Bike," but I'm not sure anything else would have been much better.

"Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" - Nina Simone. Also not a good fit, but what a thrilling song. This is a live version, first verses with piano accompaniment, then, when Nina switches gender after the bridge, with a sort of blues/flamenco guitar. And she really does switch gender. And she sings bass.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod Part 1 of ???

(Caveat emptor: There is no Money Mark on my iPod.)

I struck on this idea Friday: playing everything on my iPod, in alphabetical order by song title. I actually started then, but the album of the day was already Biff Nerfurpleberger's Greatest Hits. Today's list, with a few annotations:

"Ain't You A Mess" (Mose Allison).

"Airbag" (Radiohead). Brought to mind the concert we went to a few years ago, opened by Christopher O'Riley, whose claim to fame is that he has transcribed a bunch of Radiohead songs for solo piano. He was followed by the Bad Plus, who rocked.

"All Along The Watchtower" (Jimi Hendrix' version of Bob Dylan's song). This followed perfectly from Airbag, surprisingly enough.

"All Apologies" (Nirvana). The MTV Unplugged version, which I like better than the studio version.

"All My Friends" (Land Of Talk). I'm pleased as heck this came up, because I've wanted an excuse to enthuse about Land Of Talk in this space. I listened to them obsessively desperately this past Spring and early summer, and am still acutely susceptible to lead singer Elizabeth Powell's punky, raspy vocals, especially when she's singing about naughty stuff. If more men of a certain age listened to Land Of Talk, I believe Pfizer would be a less profitable operation.

"All The Quirky Singer-Songwriters You Can Eat" (Paper Cats). This remains one of our best written and best produced songs. It has a fun lyric, a nice jazzy tune, I like my lead guitar work for once, and of course, Lauren sings sweetly and innocently about cannibalizing people like Regina Spektor and Rufus Wainwright.

"All You Need Is Love" (Beatles). Believe it or not, that seemed to flow pretty well. Often, as for instance today, when I hear this song, I get the video in my head from the international TV broadcast when the Beatles debuted this song: the room full of celebs, the hippie outfits, etc., but mainly, John chewing gum while singing. That has always bugged me. I've seen the footage dozens of times, and I always expect him to swallow his gum.

"Another Man's Done Gone" (Wilco/Woody Guthrie). From the Mermaid Avenue album.

"Anywhere I Lay My Head" (Tom Waits). We learn that anywhere Tom Waits lays his head he considers home.

"Arena Rok" (Grogwhow). Of course, I just wrote about Grogshow.

"Ashes To Ashes" (David Bowie). Not a good fit sandwiched between the two Grogshow numbers. Poor Major Tom.

"asiwwog" (Grogshow).

"Ask" (The Smiths). I couldn't for the life of me think of a Smiths song starting with A when this came on. (Morrissey is right, you know. But that's probably meaningless.)

"Astral Weeks" (Van Morrison).

"At My Window Sad And Lonely" (Wilco/Woody Guthrie). Okay, this was starting to get weird. I don't think we can safely conclude anything about anything - not the inner workings of the universe, not my musical tastes, not anything about music in general, by the coincidental repetition of Wilco doing Woody Guthrie songs and Grogshow songs in this set. Especially not considering this was followed by...

"At Seventeen" (Janis Ian). Quit yer whinin'!

album of the day: Greatest Hits of Biff Nerfurpleberger

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Like lots of kids, I spent time with a tape recorder making up fake media programming. Unlike lots of kids, I kept doing it through college, and continued to write fake media (in various forms) through grad school, and, well, my whole life. Which means I'm either incredibly immature, or continue to have an active imaginatio. These are not mutually exclusive.

Biff Nerfurpleberger is a character I invented in order to write a spoof of TV advertisements for music compilations by various oldy moldies. It was only meant to be an ad for Biff's compilation, variously identified in the ad as his Greatest Hits, Big Hits, and Golden Greats (in fact, even his name changed at the end of the ad). The album was, according to the ad copy, available in a tremendous array of formats, including LP, cassette, 8-track, or, surreally, hairstyle.

I recorded the ad with my friend Doug one autumn afternoon at my parents' house in Matthews, NC. We'd made up a list of song titles allegedly on the album: "I Didn't Know She Could Do That With Her Nose," "My Dog Is Covered In Lichen," "They Just Pulled My Mailbox Out Of The Ground And Put In A New One" (based on a true story: while we wrote the list, a crew did exactly that, to replace my father's installed mailbox, which failed to meet specifications of the absurdly fascistic home-owners association), "Grease The Cat, Charlie, I'm Coming Home" (one of Doug's, and subsequently also a catch-phrase of our gang of pals at UNC-Charlotte), and "My Ears Are So Flexible." This list excludes many other titles too ridiculous or obscene to be named here.

The main point was to come up with the least likely song titles ever to be hits, by an artist with the least likely name of someone ever to have had any hits, and the least likely music - we played a backing track in the ad of ourselves banging away on guitar and piano. We later played the backing track to a girl who was trying - ultimately successfully - to get into Doug's pants, and convinced her that it was our actual band.

(We also played the ad to a friend of ours in my dorm room, mainly in order to agitate my roommate - the ad was included in our lengthy, thoroughly obscene, completely blasphemous parody of Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker's PTL Club "religious" program, which we called "Praise The Money." It worked. He was so enraged, in fact, that the residence adviser on our floor intervened, and eventually pulled strings to get me and Doug both moved out of our present situations and into a room together, where we'd presumably cause less trouble. It was shortly after that that we put the "God is Dead" sign in our 3rd story window and began receiving hatemail.)

(I had a marvelous and frequently illegal time in college. But back to our story.)

I have no idea why this, of all things, should have remained indelible in my memory. And I really haven't a clue why I took up Biff Nerfurpleberger as an alter ego and started writing and recording his "songs" last summer. The first one I wrote for our friend Christina. We planned a trip out to Berkeley to celebrate, and she somehow received two large ice cream cakes. These were the central themes in Biff's first "song," "Xina's Birfday," and to the plaintively bellowed refrain, "Too much cake!" In what's become a Biff tradition, I conceived, wrote and recorded the song, including several lead tracks, in an afternoon. "Xina's Birfday" includes a very bad electric piano solo.

Biff followed with "End Of The Year," written for New Year's and based roughly, not to say crudely, on the changes to "Auld Lang Syne," which is quoted at the beginning and end. Lauren played harmonica and provided slap percussion, but in the album she isn't credited for this performance.

Then there's "New Place!" written to commemorate Christina and Guerin moving. Then, I think, "Sad," which advises listeners, "Don't be sad. It'll make you feel bad. That would be sad. Which would make you feel bad."

Somewhere in there, I wrote "Monkey" for Guerin. The lyric is "Monkey." The entire song is played in only one chord, E major, because a bottle of wine we bought for Guerin had a cork on which was printed "Let the monkey out! EEE EEE EEE". Lauren sings the "EEE" parts, and adds a couple extra "monkey"s as well, and is listed in the song credits as "Typhoid Lulu."

More recently, I've done the endless, worthless, experimental "My Ears Are So Flexible," the only song of Biff's to have a title based on the original ad copy. It's terrible. The last one I've done is actually very clever. It's a parody of "I Am The Walrus" that I wrote last Saturday when I suddenly realized that Biff believes he used to be in the Beatles.

For me, the most fun about all this is that Biff's "songs" have a logic to them, as well as recurring themes and musical elements. He almost always botches a rhyme in a "song," the joke here being that he's obviously written the thing, but still seems unable to come up with the simplest and most obvious rhymes, and is sometimes surprised when he can find a rhyme. The solos usually include very surprising instrumentation, and do not work. They are often in the wrong key. He can be relied upon to scream a lyric. The lyrics, when they make any sense at all, inevitably somewhere fail. I think the "songs" actually stand up to some scrutiny as bits of amusement, and some of them even stand up to some scrutiny as music - though not much scrutiny.

There's one more song to record, and then I plan to offer free copies of The Greatest Hits of Biff Nerfurpleberger to my Facebook friends. Several of my friends will receive copies whether they want them or not. You know who you are.

new song: The Assassination of the CSU by the Coward Charlie Reed

As always, sorry about the autostart if it bugs you. It is the only workable Soundclick widget.

Now playing: Paper Cats

album of the day: Blood on the Tracks

Blood on the Tracks is, I believe, the 3rd Dylan album I ever bought. When I was in high school, among my peers, anything approaching respect or appreciation for Bob Dylan was derided. He had released Infidels and Empire Burlesque, and while the latter was critically acclaimed and both were reasonably successful, practically anyone I heard say anything at all about music thought of Dylan as a washed-up, ridiculous anachronism. Of course, that drove me further into Dylan's catalog. (I had bought both Infidels and Empire Burlesque, and actually did like them, but haven't bothered to repurchase them on CD.)

So while any mention of anything vaguely 60s-related prompted very bad parodies of Dylan singing "Blowing in the Wind," I was secretly playing the Greatest Hits compilation over and over again, fairly amazed at how good the songs were. I never did, and still don't, observe any of the rites of the Bob Dylan cult, and I don't believe in his holiness or omnipotence, but I think anyone who fails to admit that Dylan's best work is enduring, timeless, genuinely poetic, and excellently composed (if musically derivative in the best folk tradition), is not taking the issue seriously.

And if a debate should arise regarding whether Dylan is really great, and I had to point to any single album as Exhibit A, it would be, without question, Blood on the Tracks. It can't be beat for range, good tunes, strong musicianship, and above all, emotional pitch. For instance, I love "Idiot Wind," which is just about exactly what you might need to hear thinking about a bad breakup, some years past. Dylan relentlessly attacks the memory of whatever lover it was, how awful she was, how wretched he felt then, and refuses to feel now. It's caustic and nasty and extremely satisfying. But the clincher, to me, is the twist at the end:

I can’t feel you anymore, I can’t even touch the books you’ve read
Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishin’ I was somebody else instead
Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory
And all your ragin’ glory

I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I’m finally free
I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me
You’ll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry

Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

... because it takes two to fuck up so spectacularly.

The song I think most people think is the best is "Tangled Up in Blue," a story song in a way, about another memory of a former lover, this time sweetly but sadly reminisced upon (I don't know for sure, but I've always thought that the bit with the girl in the topless bar that brings Bob home and gives him poetry to read is just a girl who reminds him of the former lover. I have also always thought that, in the song, they don't do it). The refrain that people love is the title, sung over a totally predictable and ordinary chord progression that is just absolutely perfect.

This album has had a big influence on lots of musicians. Us, for instance.

Lauren and I have covered the long ballad/story song "Shelter from the Storm." She adores singing it because of the strain she can get in her voice. It's a lot different from Dylan's version. (It also inspired my own long story song "What I Lost in the Flood," which uses a true story - a flood that filled the basement of a place I lived in Pittsburgh destroyed about 12 years of my writing, including several plays and over 1000 poems - as an allegory for how I battled through a long, ultimately very bad relationship.)

Lauren wants to cover "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts," which is something like 7 months long and has 68,293 verses, and seems to be about events in a sorta Wild West town that cycle around each other. It's rather cinematic, and one wonders if Dylan was either recycling something from the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid project, or hoping for another Hollywood gig. We're still in negotiations.

And I made an early crude recording of a bunch of solo guitar things that I made like 4 copies of for people, and named it "Buckets of Cheese," as a play on the closing track, "Buckets of Rain," which has always charmed me. It's a bit silly, but the silliness evokes how stupid being in love makes you. Dylan sings in what, for him, has to count as a sweet voice:

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets comin’ out of my ears
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand
I got all the love, honey baby
You can stand

I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear
If you want me, honey baby
I’ll be here

Like your smile
And your fingertips
Like the way that you move your lips
I like the cool way you look at me
Everything about you is bringing me
Misery

So, uh, yeah, I kinda go around singing "Buckets of rain, buckets of cheese. Got all them buckets coming out of my knees." Oh well.

college Faculty Professionalism – Ethical Responsibility and Precarious Work Pt. 4

4. Ethical responsibility in the context of contingency and bureaucratization

In his contribution to the AACU report, Gaff discusses the erosion of the professional claim of the professoriate, and develops a set of general proposals for restoring the social contract underwriting the professionalism of college faculty. In this regard, the effort parallels studies of professions that have appeared for over a decade. Among the factors contributing to the decline of the academic profession, Gaff notes in particular the heavy reliance on temporary and contingent appointments of college faculty. Indeed, institutions of higher education at every level rely on contingently appointed non-professor faculty workers to do the bulk of undergraduate teaching, throughout the United States.

Without considering here the question of why contingent, temporary appointments have become the overwhelmingly most common employment status of college faculty, I would like to conclude by further discussing the paradoxical status of the majority of college faculty, and what it could mean to state principles of ethical responsibility for “the profession” as it really exists today. I am borrowing from Michael Davis the notion of “bureaucratized” labor, as he developed it in a discussion of engineers’ ethical responsibilities. In the Epilogue to his book, Thinking Like an Engineer, Davis considers the impact of large organizations on the work and ethics of engineers:

Large organizations exist to do large jobs, doing them by dividing them into manageable parts. If these parts are too small, engineers assigned one of them could not determine what effect their work would have on the public health, safety, welfare or even on their employer. Their work would be “bureaucratized,” in one of the uglier senses of that ugly word. If most engineering work is bureaucratized in this sense, engineering ethics must either be irrelevant to most engineers or consist of matters tangential to engineering as such – for example, treatment of other engineers. Engineering ethics – as now constituted – presupposes a world in which engineers generally know what they do. (Davis, 177f)

I argue as follows: colleges and universities are large organizations under whose auspices the routines and conditions of faculty work take place. The 40-year trend of college faculty deprofessionalization, increasingly precarious employment status, and so forth, corresponds with what Davis calls “bureaucratized” work. The full scope of the work of college faculty – teaching, research, scholarship, curriculum development (through faculty governance), peer review – has been divided. For instance, at most elite research institutions, the large number of teaching faculty are outside the tenure-track, while the “professors” teach little, supervise some, and do a great deal of research. At for-profits, faculty are often hired to do piecework, not paid for research or scholarship at all, and have no control over curriculum.

The AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics addresses “professors” of 1966 vintage, and not the bureaucratized faculty of the present. If we must abandon the fantasy of professorial authority and autonomy imagined in that document, because that document’s presuppositions about the world are false, must we also abandon the notion that there could be a meaningful professional ethics for college faculty?

Davis suggests that under conditions of bureaucratization, engineering ethics would either be irrelevant or “tangential” (and, it seems from Davis’ tone, superficial in both scope and intention). For the majority of college faculty, I believe the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics is indeed irrelevant, in its present form. It is hard to imagine a situation in which a conflict between a precariously employed faculty member and a well-paid administrator would be resolved by reference to the Statement’s principles. In any case, no prudent lecturer would take that chance.

Yet I don’t believe we can, or should, abandon the notion of a meaningful professional responsibility for college faculty, one that would realistically address contemporary working conditions. In Davis’ discussion, I see two areas for potential development of a new faculty ethics. The first draws from his wording about the presupposition built into codes of ethics, namely, that members of a profession “generally know what they do” (Davis 178). I would like to make the provocative suggestion that many members of “the profession” are ignorant of what they do – that is, ignorant of the real working conditions of faculty, including themselves. This is doubly significant. On the one hand, since any reasonable claim to professional status depends on a claim to expert knowledge, a profession whose membership does not know what the profession does has a weak claim. Facing, studying, and understanding what faculty do – what faculty really do, and how they do their work, and under what conditions they do their work – would be fundamental to further claims to be able to judge that work, to know how to use that work for the public good, etc. On the other hand, it is difficult for the majority of college faculty to acquire this knowledge, not only because of their difficult working lives and institutional obstacles to organizing and learning about and from one another, but also because of the difficulties of organizing across the US, across disciplines, and so on. The more faculty know about faculty work, the more strongly we can assert a claim to expert knowledge, the more we can substantiate a claim to work for the public good, and the more we can demonstrate that we do indeed serve that good.

The second area for development I see in Davis’ discussion regards the “tangential” ethics of how professionals treat other members of the profession. The status of people who work as faculty in colleges and universities is significant for their working lives and their relationships to one another. For faculty, how we treat other members of our profession could not be more significant both as an ideological force and as a factor in developing solidarity. Accepting that there are worthies and unworthies who work as faculty serves the division and bureaucratization of faculty work, and dismisses the demoralization of the majority of the faculty as somehow merited. On the other hand, faculty addressing one another as peers, as members of the same profession, would constitute the faculty – the whole faculty – as just that kind of self-consciously organized group who could speak with genuine authority about who they are, what they do, what they value, and to what standards they hold themselves.

As William Sullivan has stated, the renewal of the social contract between professions and the public must involve dialogue. In the case of college faculty, there has been precious little of this, and most of that driven by the same ideology that has led to the deprofessionalization of faculty in the first place. My observation is that the public in the United States is generally ignorant of the working conditions of faculty, but also of what exactly it is that faculty do. Only if college faculty, at all levels, have and avail themselves of opportunities to understand and articulate that for themselves as well as in dialogue with the public, can there be any meaningful notion of professional ethical responsibility of college faculty.

album of the day: Grogshow

I believe I found Grogshow on one of my routine ventures to find new music by following link after link on the All Music Guide site. I start with a band I like - say, R.E.M. - and look at what somebody connected with AMG thinks are similar musicians. I proceed through each of those to further links, and usually by the third or fourth degree of separation I find something I haven't heard of before.

Nobody's ever heard of Grogshow before. They were around for a couple years in the middle 1990s, a two-piece band from Duqubue who were trying to break into the Portland music scene when the guitarist and singer, Marc Kisting, died of some kind of pulmonary illness (as far as I've been able to work out - information about the band is extremely hard to find).

The only posterity left by Kisting and drummer Jason Williams is an EP of 8 demos they recorded in somebody's basement, and that was cleaned up by a producer in the Portland scene and released, sort of, in 2005 on future appletree records (sic). It's basically proto-emo alternative music, and the key difference is in their instrumentation, and the benefit of the lack of production on the EP.

Kisting played 12-string acoustic-electric guitar, played with amplification to give a sound halfway between acoustic and electric. He also played tuned mainly down a step, and I believe on some tracks even lower, so that his bass strings give a bit of a bass-guitar sound. It's easy to imagine their live sound from the recording - jangly, loose, looping melodies and rhythms tangled up with each other, with the strains of Kisting's pained (and occasionally whiny) tenor over the top.

My favorite thing about the music is its unfinished, unpolished character. It hasn't been cleaned up, slicked up, and made ready for the big time. We're capturing Grogshow at a creative high-point, not after the recording industry has chewed on them and spat them back out.

Everything I've read on teh Interwebs about Grogshow was written by the same guy. It's all just quoting the same handful of paragraphs that, along with these demos, is all that remains of the band. It was a labor of love, but also a labor of misinformation. The notes on the album insist that it was recorded with only Kisting on guitar and Williams on drums, with no bass. This is clearly false - there is undoubtedly bass on most of the tracks, and on one without bass, the most jangly "Here to Corner" which closes the album, there's two guitar tracks.

college Faculty Professionalism – Ethical Responsibility and Precarious Work Pt. 3

3. Am I an academic professional?

All of this is, for me, largely a matter of academic interest (pardon the pun), because I am not a professor, even though I work as a faculty member of a university. Indeed, I’m tempted to say that nothing in the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics applies to my work, since the only persons whose rights and responsibilities are named in the Statement are people who bear the title of professor. For the Statement also shares in common with other professional codes of ethics that it addresses members of an occupational group who assert for themselves a high level of professional authority, autonomy, and self-regulation. It speaks to a relatively powerful group about the appropriate use of its power. Not being a “professor,” I may ask to be forgiven if I suppose I need not seek and state the truth, nor encourage the free pursuit of learning by my students, nor accept a share of responsibility for the governance of my institution, nor abide by its policies. To take up the gambit of Hamilton’s criticism of professors’ “failure,” I may assert, on my behalf, that since I am offered none of the job security so jealously defended by the tenured minority, that I shall not be governed by any professional ethical responsibility.

Strangely, I am generally mistaken for a professor, by students and by professors. To most outside observers, too, I look almost exactly like a professor in almost every way.

I hold a Ph.D. degree in Philosophy. Before completing my degree, and in the years since, I have engaged in multiple long-term scholarly projects, published several peer-reviewed articles, as well as book chapters, conference papers, and book reviews. I have also presented several dozen papers at academic conferences, mainly at the international level. I have taught numerous courses in the philosophy major, many general education courses, including courses in the university’s honors program, and I have designed several courses. I have served as a thesis advisor, and written numerous letters of recommendation for students aspiring to enter graduate and professional schools. I have served for many years on my university’s academic senate, and participated in numerous committees. I have been on editorial boards for journals and scholarly societies, and of course as a peer reviewer as well, including writing letters of support for colleagues at other institutions pursuing tenure, promotion, even a Fulbright fellowship. I have performed as much of the work of a professor as many tenured professors — and if I may say, much more than some.

I have also never held a tenure-line appointment. For the past 12 years, I have taught at a campus of the California State University, an institution whose primary mission is decidedly teaching and preparation of graduates to serve in professional positions – though, in most cases, admittedly not elite professional positions. Our university graduates large numbers of future teachers, nurses, management personnel, and a handful of future professors, doctors, and lawyers. My teaching course load has never been less than eight courses per year. Officially, my workload includes nothing but classroom instruction, meaning that any scholarly work or work on university committees is not only strictly voluntary (i.e., unpaid), but also unrecognized by the university. In common with the vast majority of my non-tenure-track colleagues at colleges and universities throughout the United States, I am also deemed ineligible for many forms of support for my academic work, in particular support for research and scholarship — monetary support for travel, access to grants, allocation of paid workload to research, etc. The protection of academic freedom and of the integrity of academic work provided by tenure is expressly and permanently forbidden to me in this position, as is the rank and status of “professor.”

I am in a paradoxical position. I meet any reasonable minimal standard of academic professional prerequisites. I have engaged actively in the academic and other professional pursuits at the core of the ideology of the professoriate. Yet clearly, the perquisites of professionalism are in large measure denied to me. If it is the case, as Hamilton and Gaff suggest, that the social contract of academic professionals is based on the proposition that the educational and research mission of academic institutions requires that the professoriate be assigned the rights and responsibilities of professors, then I believe I must conclude that my work is not governed by this contract.

Nonetheless, I have also been extremely fortunate that the union representing all faculty employees in the California State University – the California Faculty Association – has successfully bargained an agreement that provides among the very best working conditions for non-tenure-track faculty in the US. The vast majority of my similarly deprofessionalized colleagues across the US have much lower salaries, less generous or no benefits, worse teaching workloads, and even less institutional support. To some degree, at the CSU, the similarity of our working lives to those of our tenure-track colleagues has led to broader recognition of our commonality of interests, and even of the right of lecturers to be treated with respect. This respect for lecturers is rarely expressed by CSU administrators, and in other systems, lecturers, adjuncts, part-timers, or whatever they are locally known as, can generally count on a permanent working condition of demoralizing, dehumanizing treatment. We know a great deal about some of the worst conditions this majority of the faculty face. They must scramble to make ends meet, often teaching at multiple institutions, not all of which provide them office space, a phone, a computer, or other basics. They wait until days before – or even after – the beginning of academic terms for their work assignments and contracts (contracts they have no power to negotiate without collective bargaining, where that is legal and available to non-tenure-track faculty). They are often asked to teach courses for which they have limited academic or professional preparation, but just as “warm bodies” in the classroom. Their work is subject to oversight, but almost never peer review; evaluations, if any regular system of evaluation is in place, are generally in the hands of department heads or administrators. They must be wary constantly to avoid offending students or administrators, so as to avoid instant termination. Even when able to handle all of these problems, these faculty are, in the phrase repeated by many contingent faculty activists, never more than 15 seconds from complete humiliation.

Under these conditions, not only is there no institutional or collegial support for upholding any of the professional ethical obligations in the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics, it is often the case that a lecturer’s job and livelihood depend on that lecturer’s failure to observe those well-meant principles. I do not mean to suggest that these worst-treated college faculty become unscrupulous; they simply know, as an everyday part of their working lives, that they cannot afford to seek and state the truth as they see it; that they can only encourage their students’ free pursuit of learning to the limit of each student’s comfort and each administrator’s whim; that they are largely forbidden membership in the community of scholars and prohibited from taking part in faculty governance; and that academic freedom is not their right, but a privilege enjoyed by the tenured elites.

Certainly, these faculty experience the failure of the social contract to sustain college faculty professionalism. Contrary to Hamilton, it does not follow that the failure of the social contract is the faculty’s failure – at least, not this faculty’s failure, not the failure of the vast majority of faculty in the United States. The majority of the faculty never had a chance to fulfill this social contract.

album of the day: Astral Weeks

Simply stated, Astral Weeks is among the very best albums of popular music in the rock idiom ever recorded. And what's most amazing about that fact is that it isn't really a rock album. It's just music.

Even if you don't know who Van Morrison is, you know him, because, unless you've been exiled to a part of the world without electricity, pop music, radios, or people, you've heard something, something, Van Morrison recorded in the 1960s or 70s. You've got to have heard "Brown Eyed Girl," or "Moondance," or "Jackie Wilson Says." If not, I strongly suggest reconsidering the question of your own existence.

Oddly, you may not have heard anything on Astral Weeks, except maybe "The Way Young Lovers Do," the big production number with the horn section.

It's impossible to pigeon-hole this album in any genre. By turns, the songs are like British Isles folk, contemporary hippy-psychedelia, blues, or a mixture of all that and more. My favorites are the simpler recordings, of Morrison belting away with his own guitar accompaniment and Richard Davis' bass, or maybe a bit of flute, as on "Cyprus Avenue" and "Madame George."

People consider Morrison, and the album in particular, to be "spiritual." I have no idea what that means. It's a bit ethereal - the title track opens the album on that note, to be sure. But the mood shifts in and out of that. What's consistent in the album has a certain feeling, but I would call it something like "organic." I sorta think the album just grew wild. It feels like you found it, like the meadow that opens up in the middle of a forest. Something like that. Call that spiritual?

Van Morrison is another hero of mine. If I could sing, or do whatever it is he does, not only would I, I wouldn't do anything else. No more teaching. No more cooking. I'd just sing, or whatever it is he did back then. Holy jumpin'.

college Faculty Professionalism – Ethical Responsibility and Precarious Work Pt. 2.2

2.2 The crisis of professionalism

A foremost proponent of the social contract view of professionalism, William Sullivan, is well-known for his discussion of the erosion of what he calls the “professional ideal” experienced in certain fields over the last 40 years or so. Sullivan’s analysis focuses on two key factors in the decline of professionalism. One is the rise of public doubt that professionals in a field are truly committed to benefiting the public. Public perception of the negligence or greed of physicians, for instance, led to widespread mistrust and demands for greater client autonomy, bureaucratic regulation of the field, cost containment, etc. A contemporaneous shift in political and economic understandings of the role of professionals has had as much, if not a greater part to play in the changing circumstances of professional labor. Public suspicion of professional peer review and tenure has been both aroused and exploited by those driving the agenda of “frictionless capital,” “privatization,” and “market solutions” (Sullivan, 17) – the economic ideology that considers all goods to be essentially private interests to be pursued by private means and actions. Under that “simplistic” (Sullivan, 17) conception of human interests and professional work, professional self-regulation appears illegitimate, and only bureaucratic regulation or market-driven competition appear as legitimate principles for the organization of the labor provided by members of “professions.”

As a result, many professions have entered a period of crisis. Through a rough and unstable compromise between ideological factions in US political life, bureaucratic regulation of some sort, often subjected to measures serving the interests of market-driven owners of corporations, has come to rule many formerly more autonomous professions. The demand for oversight and control – in particular control of costs – made by the mistrustful public is made to appear to be somewhat satisfied by hierarchical control over the work of individual professionals. For example, managed care now sets limits on physicians’ conduct as part of a complex new arrangement of authority, autonomy, and resource allocation. What has not come to pass is any restoration of public trust, or renewal of the social contract of medicine. Modern medicine faces a paradox, one that Sullivan generalizes to other fields: on one hand, public mistrust continues; on the other hand, the technical advancement of medicine and increasing demand for medical care force the public to continue to rely on physicians. The result for doctors has been a trend of deprofessionalization — loss of control over their work, loss of independence, and the creation of working conditions and limitations on provision of service that conflict directly with serving the public good (Hafferty and Light, 1995). Ironically, bureaucratic measures imposed in the name of serving the public interest by controlling professional behavior have created institutional conditions of work that make it all the more difficult for professionals to serve the public interest, leading to still more decline in public trust (arguably now misplaced on professionals instead of bureaucratic constraints). For instance, legal changes demanded by consumers of medicine, but written largely under the direction of lobbying from the health insurance industry, led to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996). The Act’s Privacy Rule imposes restrictions on individual practitioners’ sharing of patient information, satisfying public demand for greater control over how doctors and nurses discuss their cases, but, unbeknownst to many US citizens, the Privacy Rule provides health insurers wide latitude in sharing that same information, in large part to determine whether to provide, or continue to provide, care to patients.

Sullivan argues for the need to restore professionalism as a civic ideal, through public dialogue in which the purposes and expectations of a professional field come under rational and open inquiry. For him, the crisis of professions is a wide-scale social crisis. The public still needs – in fact, increasingly needs – the services provided by technical experts, yet it mistrusts those experts, and mistrusts the bureaucratic regulatory apparatus they themselves have demanded to oversee the work of professionals.

The parallels between professional fields in crisis, and the contemporary professoriate, have been explored by Neil Hamilton, most recently along with Jerry G. Gaff in the AACU report. Hamilton’s basic account of the professional crisis of the professoriate is that “[t]he continuing failure of the academic profession adequately to socialize its members has resulted in a steady erosion of the profession’s rights of academic freedom, peer review, and shared governance” (Hamilton 1). Hamilton claims that this socialization has failed on the individual level to develop “personal conscience” and on both the individual and collective levels to lead to “professional identity formation” (Hamilton 6). Instead, Hamilton claims that the professoriate has not merely passively but actively undercut its claim to serve the public good, by corrupting tenure. According to Hamilton, in practice, the professional rights of peer review and academic freedom have been used by professors as a system of employment protection: “Job security and self-interest concerns undermine effective peer review” (Hamilton 11, citing Hamilton 2007). Hamilton also suggests a parallel between the public demand for increased bureaucratic regulation of finance, accounting and medicine with the apparent demand for similar regulation (and concomitant loss of self-regulation – i.e., academic freedom and tenure) of faculty (Hamilton 9f).

Taking the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics as a guide for determining faculty’s responsibilities, in what specific ways has the professoriate failed to uphold its social contract? Has peer review resulted in widespread academic fraud? Has faculty self-interest led to dishonest evaluations of students? Have professors abandoned their collegial responsibilities or become lawless rogues in their institutions? Certainly there are a few who make these claims — quite often politically-motivated persons with little or no relevant and reliable evidence (Gaff, 23). In fact, the only substantial claim regarding direct failures to uphold faculty ethical responsibility in the AACU report is Hamilton’s discussion of research misconduct and the role of peer review in either failing to catch it or (more seriously) looking the other way (Hamilton, 15). Further, Hamilton cites, as a reason to doubt that faculty uphold their social contract, the existence of “only three national, multi-institutional socialization initiatives” (Hamilton, 13) — two of them federally mandated research oversight programs, the third an AACU program from 1993-2003. In addition, Hamilton claims that “[a]cademic ethics is not a significant field of study,” and this fact leads to greater public mistrust (Hamilton, 14). Gaff elaborates that the AAUP’s committee investigations of academic freedom violations is an “antiquated and increasingly ineffective” mechanism, largely because it does not enforce standards for conducting research in addition to addressing violations of faculty academic freedom. What is needed to restore the integrity of faculty work, Gaff says, is for institutional trustees, executives, and administrations to take fiduciary responsibility for faculty work, joining with faculty leaders “to recommit” to the principles of faculty ethics (Gaff 27).

Another aspect of the social contract must be discussed in order to fully comprehend the current situation. In Hamilton’s view, the social contract of the professoriate depends on a three-pronged mission of institutions of higher education, involving teaching critical inquiry along with knowledge-creating and knowledge-disseminating. It is beyond my scope here to critique the tacit and clearly positivist epistemology underlying this view, but I would like to consider its implications for the problem of identifying to whom and for what the social contract of “the professoriate” ought to apply in institutions of higher education. For Hamilton, apparently, these institutions can be distinguished into those who have the full mission of higher education and those which lack either a significant commitment to teaching critical inquiry or to knowledge-creation. In the sort of institution that lacks these elements of the mission, “it is difficult to identify a transcendent public good its teachers are serving that is different from that of high school teachers” (Hamilton, 16). In such an institution, the social contract would not apply: “without a substantial reason to justify occupational control of the work by the professoriate, such an institution may decide to manage its teachers in a way similar to the nonprofit organization model typical in a competitive market. The institution may decide to employ an inadequate number of tenured faculty to provide effective peer review and shared governance” (Hamilton, 16). In such institutions, where there are inadequate numbers of tenured faculty to advance a claim for peer review or academic freedom, the social contract of the professoriate is null and void.

College Faculty Professionalism – Ethical Responsibility and Precarious Work Pt. 2

2. Social contract professionalism in crisis
2.1 The social contract model of professionalism

The basic conception of professionalism as a form of social contract is likely familiar. Briefly, under the model of the social contract, a profession is an organized labor group that claims to have technical expertise necessary to perform very specialized work that fulfills a public need. The profession claims, further, an exclusive right to make judgments about the work done by its members, based on this expertise. In exchange for social recognition of the legitimacy of these claims to the exclusive right to practice and to judge practice — sometimes referred to respectively as monopoly over service and peer review — the profession pledges to employ its collective expertise to serve the public good. On the social contract theory of monopolistic, peer-review professions, sustaining the claim of professional status depends on making a convincing case to the public that the profession serves the public’s vital interest, by marshaling the technical expertise of a specialized knowledge base, through the independent judgment of practitioners, in service to the public’s needs. In pursuit of that case, most professions promulgate codes or statements of ethics.

The social contract between professors and the public has been articulated in various documents published by the American Association of University Professors, principally among them the 1915 Declaration and the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The basic bargain of the professoriate’s social contract seems to be that professors are to pursue and disseminate knowledge for the sake of the public good, in exchange for the public’s acknowledgement of the expertise and the right of professors to do so – hence, the emphasis on academic freedom, peer review, and tenure in discussions of faculty work. In his contribution to the AACU report, Jerry G. Gaff explains that the justifying rationale for academic freedom and the authority of faculty is that “[t]hese principles are essential to scholarly integrity and to providing students a sound education…; that is, they are essential for the fulfillment of the professoriate’s responsibility to the larger society” (19f). In short, the professional rights claimed by academics are justified by an ethical responsibility they incur as part of a bargain that establishes their specialized role and status.

The AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Professional Ethics (revised 1987 and 2009) expresses professors’ obligations and rights with respect to disciplinary knowledge, their students, their colleagues, their institutions, and finally the society at large. The Statement on Professional Ethics is fairly ordinary, in comparison to other professions’ ethics statements, regarding the general language and tone used to state principles. For instance, the first principle begins:

1. Professors, guided by a deep conviction of the worth and dignity of the advancement of knowledge, recognize the special responsibilities placed upon them. Their primary responsibility to their subject is to seek and to state the truth as they see it. To this end professors devote their energies to developing and improving their scholarly competence.

One perfectly ordinary feature of this statement of principle is its banal, yet high-minded, rhetoric. On one hand, the “professors” sound superbly principled; on the other hand, given that most “professors” become “professors” by having already devoted their energies to their scholarly pursuits, this principle is hardly self-sacrificing. Interestingly, the address of this statement is not simple to pin down. It seems clearly enough to address “professors” regarding their ethical responsibilities to their disciplines and to the pursuit of truth. Yet it also announces to all who would care to read it the intent and the right of “professors” to declare the truth “as they see it.” That is, the statement seems to have a complex audience, and to address either, or both, professors and the public, regarding professors’ claims of responsibility. A lengthy excerpt follows of the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics, highlighting particular rights and responsibilities I will want to reflect on later.

2. As teachers, professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students. They hold before them the best scholarly and ethical standards of their discipline. Professors demonstrate respect for students as individuals and adhere to their proper roles as intellectual guides and counselors. Professors make every reasonable effort to foster honest academic conduct and to ensure that their evaluations of students reflect each student’s true merit…
3. As colleagues, professors have obligations that derive from common membership in the community of scholars… Professors accept their share of faculty responsibilities for the governance of their institution.
4. As members of an academic institution, professors seek above all to be effective teachers and scholars. Although professors observe the stated regulations of the institution, provided the regulations do not contravene academic freedom, they maintain their right to criticize and seek revision. Professors give due regard to their paramount responsibilities within their institution in determining the amount and character of work done outside it. When considering the interruption or termination of their service, professors recognize the effect of their decision upon the program of the institution and give due notice of their intentions.

Any experienced academic professional will know that adhering to this set of responsibilities, which is to say exercising these rights, requires rigorous intellectual exertion. Demanding though they are, given the proper setting, preparation, and commitment to responsibility, they appear to be reasonable expectations for persons of ordinary moral feeling to meet. No one needs to be heroic or saintly, or of astounding individual genius, to succeed.

College Faculty Professionalism – Ethical Responsibility and Precarious Work Pt. 1

I'm posting this in multiple parts. This is the current draft of a paper on the precarious nature of college faculty work (70+% of us work without tenure eligibility, 50+% work part-time) and what happens to ethical responsibility in those work conditions.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Draft completed August 15, 2010


1. College faculty as professionals

In graduate school, I heard no end of discussion of how our educations and apprenticeships were preparing us for entry into “the profession.” For the past two decades, disciplinary groups like the American Philosophical Association (the general professional association of academic philosophers in the US) have dedicated resources to consider the status of their various “professions” as well. Professors appear to possess typical markers of professionalism: expert knowledge, a high degree of self-control of their work, social prestige, and a conception of their work as providing a public benefit. By these measures, at least, professors seem to be professionals, or at least seem to regard themselves to be professionals.

The status of college faculty as professionals is destabilized when we unpack the concept of professionalism, and in particular when we consider the widely varied working lives of the people who, in one condition or another, serve as college faculty. My intention in this paper is to articulate briefly the social contract model of professionalism as it applies to the work of college faculty, and in particular how that model helps describe a contemporary crisis in college faculty professionalism, before considering the significance of that crisis for the working lives and careers of college faculty in the United States. The occasion for this discussion is presented by two events — the publication of the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ 2009 report, The Future of the Professoriate: Academic Freedom, Peer Review, and Shared Governance (hereinafter AACU report); and the surpassing of majority part-time employment status of college faculty in the United States, probably some time in 2008.

My focal interests in considering the professional status of college faculty arise from my academic interest in professional ethics as well as my experience as a college faculty member in an ambiguous work status (an issue I’ll clarify along the way). Though one primary concern in this paper is the professional ethics of college faculty, I take that in an expansive sense and a deliberately provocative direction. I will attempt to articulate a critical question about faculty professional ethics, namely, what is the relationship between faculty employment status, the social contract between academic labor and society, and faculty professional ethics responsibilities. I must admit that in this paper I will not be resolving any fundamental issues, but merely presenting them as I see them. The situation for those who work in the crisis professions is dynamic, and possibly historic, and there is to my way of thinking no way to establish what the next phase will be.

menu!

I think any good dinner party should be followed be recovery time. I may never eat again. Below is the menu, in French, of course, because I'm silly like that. I'll post pics some time.

The first entrée course, "tiramisu" savoreux, is basically insane. I had the idea to make something that looked just like tiramisu, but out of savory ingredients. Instead of ladyfingers, mine had thin slices of foccacia. Instead of painting those with espresso, we concocted a mixture of reduced balsamic vinegar, melted bitter chocolate, and various spices. The sweet marscapone layer was replaced with a cheesy custard layer made with fontina, mozzarella, and blue cheese. The top is the intensely silly bit: instead of shavings of chocolate or sprinkled cocoa powder (as per the dessert), I sprinkled the top with minced black truffle, grated nutmeg, and a teeny bit of cocoa powder. It looked exactly like tiramisu. Insane.

The best dish was, in my estimation, the second entrée, salmon fillets marinated with sesame oil and crushed coriander, seared up, and served with beurre françoise, a French butter sauce with cream and chicken stock and a couple tablespoons of parsley.

The dessert was pear halves oven-braised in a bed of grapes and sweet wine, with the braising liquid reduced to a thick syrup and drizzled over the pears. Freaking awesome.

Much wine was drunk, much merriment was had, we didn't get to bed much before 2 am. Nothing like an 8 hour meal to prepare one for a busy academic year.

Here's the menu:

Amuse gueule

amandes rôties
noisettes rôties

tarte d’oignon et fenouil avec gorgonzola
tarte des champignons avec parmigiano reggiano
tarte de Swiss chard et gruyère

Soupe

velouté des épinards

Entrée

“tiramisu” savoureux

Salade

Entrée

saumon avec beurre françoise

Entr’acte

sorbet de citron et lavande

Plat principal

London broil aux herbes de provence avec legumes d’été grilles

Dessert

poires rôti avec raisins

And here is the recipe for the tiramisu. Madness.


Savory “tiramisu”

Base: foccacia strips

Schmear:
balsamic vinegar reduction:
½ cup balsamic vinegar
pinch of sugar
a few drips of fruity booze (apricot brandy, e.g.)
Vinegar in pan, medium-low heat. Add sugar, booze, stir. Reduce to thick syrup
chocolate sauce:
1 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted
3 tbsp chicken stock
2 dashes cinnamon
1 dash red pepper (cayenne)
2 grinds white pepper
8 specks of clove
Mix vinegar reduction and chocolate sauce: 1 part reduction to 2 or 3 parts chocolate

Custard:
2 egg yolks, beaten, sprinkled with generous pinch of flour, beaten in
2 cups of milk
3 oz. crumbled blue cheese
5 oz. grated fontina
5 oz. grated mozzarella
several grinds of white pepper
several gratings of nutmeg

Heat milk in saucepan over medium heat. Meanwhile, separate egg yolk, beat, add flour, beat. Add some of the nearly-boiling milk, dribble by dribble, to the egg, while whisking. Pour egg-milk mixture slowly and evenly into milk pan, stirring with whisk. Whisk vigorously, allow to thicken. Add cheeses, Kirsch, pepper, nutmeg, and allow to thicken until it resembles pudding. Take off stove, pour into thick glass bowl, cover with plastic wrap, chill in fridge.

Topping/garnish:
Minced black truffle
Grated nutmeg


Foccacia strips in dish. Shmear. Add custard. Layers can be achieved: Foccacia, shmear, custard. Then top.