The End of Lurker Amnesty Week & a Brief Meditation on Professional Identity in the Public Sphere

From now on, any lurker who leaves a comment will face reprisals both terrible and swift.

Or not.

For the most part, I performed this experiment to figure out who I'm writing for because 1) there are many more of you now, but the increase in readers has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of commenters, and 2) I thought knowing who you were might compensate for the fact that I'm not sure who I am anymore.

When I started Acephalous, I was a graduate student in American literature who taught introductory literature classes and believed his dissertation would change the conversation just enough to land him a tenure-track job somewhere significant. My investment in that particular professional identity waned as the odds of its fruition faded, so I remade myself into someone who teaches literary journalism and spent a few years invested in a conception of myself as a candidate who could teach American literature and literary journalism, creative nonfiction, or whatever a particular institution called its program in the writing of things that belong in The New Yorker. But I still considered myself a future literary-critical professional and wrote things that indicated as much, e.g. most everything I wrote about literary theory. Not that my interest in those issues wasn't genuine, but the attention paid to them was commensurate to their foundational significance to an identity that, it became increasingly apparent, the market valued in name alone: the well-rounded literary scholar.

After finishing the dissertation, I became that thing that no one wants to admit exists: the professional composition instructor. When tenured English faculty bother to note the existence of these poor souls, they speak to them as if their lives consist entirely of pain and wasted potential. As you might imagine, it is difficult to invest heavily in the identity that for years had functioned as an object lesson in professional failure. Had I focused on rhetoric and composition in my graduate work, I wouldn't have been in this situation, as my current position would have been an extension of my professional identity. But I didn't. To this day, I'm still not entirely comfortable in my professional skin, so much so that I have to trick myself into thinking I'm an adult by wearing slacks and dress shoes to class, shaving daily, and not punctuating my sentences with as much profanity as is my wont.

All of which is only to say that as my expertise played an increasingly smaller role in what I taught, I began to feel ungrounded. I'd prepared myself to be a well-rounded literary scholar, but ended up a professional composition instructor. Then I realized something tremendously important: I was happy. I was teaching composition to freshmen and felt strongly gratified doing so. I wasn't teaching students abstruse theories about how literature works or arcane theories about how species evolved—I was teaching them the tools they need to interact with the world with a critical distance. Moreover, the online response to the lesson plans I used in the classroom was (and continues to be) overwhelming positive: the posts on visual rhetoric may not have generated as much light as my accounts of randy students behaving inappropriately, but they produced heat aplenty.

That's the only unusual bit about my story: I did it all in full view of potential employers and under my own name. Every person who completes a dissertation can tell a similar story intellectual wandering, but not all of them acquire 2,000 daily readers in the process, so some nights I would sit down to write and produce nothing—not because I had nothing to say, but because I had no clear idea who was supposed to be doing the writing. Did you expect to hear from the failed literary scholar, the jaded former graduate student, the journalism teacher, the amateur political editorialist, the professional composition instructor, or the guy for whom the improbable has it out? My archives may contain multitudes, but at the moment of composition, I need to pick a hat and work it.

Or so I thought. The results of Lurker Amnesty Week suggest that nobody minds when I pull a woolen cap over my backwards Mets hat and, figuratively speaking, write about baseball in winter. Thank you for that, and expect to hear more from me in the coming year than you did the last two.

Comments

[Shane In Utah]

for all the high-minded talk of teaching "critical thinking" that goes on in theoretical circles, what's actually being taught isn't useful in the least. It does an undergraduate no good to be able to perform a watered-down deconstruction of a nineteenth-century novel, but teaching them to be cognizant of the rhetoric operative in their daily lives is something else entirely.

This sounds more like sour grapes rationalization than a serious argument, but as someone who's been lucky enough to get tenure in a job teaching almost entirely upper-division courses for English majors (and has found the work enormously satisfying and happiness-producing), I'm going to challenge it anyway. A while back I taught a course on trauma and memory in postcolonial literature. More than one student from that course has since told me that it changed their lives and the way they think; that it opened their eyes and took them outside the Utah "bubble."

Any subject matter, no matter how arcane, can teach students critical thinking and argumentation if the instructor can get the students engaged. If the analysis of visual rhetoric is where you've found success, more power to you. But why piss on the work of your colleagues who find similar success and gratification teaching literature and theory to English majors?

[P.T. Smith]

SEK:
so I hope my little experiment won't change the way you comment.

I, for one, plan on lowering the standard my comments from sarcastic random comments and half-assed mini-rants meant to seem intelligent but that really do little to full-on moronic lunacy. It should be fun.

Sisyphus:
PS you shaved the beard?!?!?1?!

It seems that way, but I am waiting for confirmation, because if he did, I'm outa here. I only read blogs written by bearded gentlemen.

[mark]

ah, life...pain and wasted potential: that about says it

[era]

If the average quality of the comments were closer to the average quality of the blog postings, and/or if I had a more decent RSS reader, and/or if I wasn't so lazy, I might read the comments more often, and/or enjoy the ones I read more. As it is, I mostly skip the comments, because the blog interface puts them all in a big ghetto which is cumbersome to browse. But then I suppose it's by design that the threshold for composing a decent comment isn't -- and probably shouldn't be pushed up to -- near the threshold for composing a decent blog posting, and also, whether or not you read the comments religiously is a good way to separate the True Believers from the mere lurkers / hang-arounds. Meaning, also, ditto what Asdfsdf said.

[Intpanentheist.blogspot.com]

I missed Lurker Amnesty Week as well, but I seldom comment on blogs anymore because I am so busy. Please don't eat me., or at least leave my hands if you do since I need them to ply my trade.

I am a twenty-five year old former Marine, which is why I will seem to old to be doing what I am doing currently--I am a first-year student majoring in English Comp and minoring in Women's Studies and Music. I have problems with parallel structures and write slightly more carelessly online than I do in my papers, so forgive me for any errors.

My partner-in-crime is a regular reader of LGM and I read it as well, albeit sporadically. I enjoy most of your posts, but especially the ones about teaching and Mad Men. Oh, and politics. So, all of them. Yeah.

You may not see me again, but at least count me among the student demographic, and thanks for writing.

[thusgone]

i also missed lurker amnesty week. i'm a 50-year old lawyer (which is the answer to the question, "and what are you going to do with that?", which i seemed to get every day in college when someone found out i was an english major). i read this blog, lgm, acephalous and others for the argumentation mostly, and for the politics.

[Captain Haddock]

Late to the party as well. I studied Philosophy and Mathematics at a west coast state university and managed to come away with a B.A. and M.A. Now I'm in my final semester of law school in D.C. and planning on joining Marine Corps JAG after I pass the bar this summer. I think I got here through Unfogged ages ago and I stay for the snark.

[Captain Haddock]

And it occurred to me that the commentariat here might find this to be a significant development in the history of English literature: http://runleiarun.com/lebowski/

[Wax Banks]

Any subject matter, no matter how arcane, can teach students critical thinking and argumentation if the instructor can get the students engaged. If the analysis of visual rhetoric is where you've found success, more power to you. But why piss on the work of your colleagues who find similar success and gratification teaching literature and theory to English majors?

Pardon me for butting in.

Scott's colleagues who find 'similar success and gratification teaching...English majors' are part of a professional apparatus that's notoriously bad at mapping its main internal activities (e.g. close-reading increasingly obscure texts utilizing abstruse theoretical frameworks within a narrow political spectrum) to popular discourse. Scott is making a conscious effort to write for an audience that would otherwise never encounter critical terminology knowledgeably employed; by teaching comp rather than e.g. postcolonial literature he's providing a (hopefully) intensive and immersive intellectual experience to people who will then disseminate some version of what they've learned to their 20-year-old peers, not just in the English department but (again, hopefully) in other academic/work/social venues. Outreach - increasing points of contact between discourse networks - is a problem for professionals of all kinds, but worth it: when sophisticated students (and Scott's writing places him in this group) devote themselves to the hard-as-you-can-imagine task of interdisciplinary and interdiscourse translation, something huge can happen.

Atop which: in my experience, instructors in advanced/grad classes tend to be less skilled at 'getting students engaged' than their freshman-lecture counterparts, because they can get away with it, as the students already have a vested interest in displaying mastery. Teaching freshmen most subjects may require less area-specific knowledge than teaching grad students, but the skills it does require are so complex, and so essential, and so portable, that it's easy to imagine a positive argument for the relative (moral? awesomewise?) superiority of intro-rhetoric teaching over grad-theory teaching. Especially this close to goddamn cultural sunset.

Not that I feel like making that argument, but you can imagine it. I wave my hands in that general direction.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Outreach - increasing points of contact between discourse networks - is a problem for professionals of all kinds, but worth it [...]"

True, but beside the point (that I was making, at least). If no one takes care of children, there's no next generation, if no one plants fields, we all starve, and if no one teaches freshmen, industrial civilization breaks down (I guess). Those are vital activities, in the sense that they are absolutely necessary for society to go on. They are also capable of being done poorly, indifferently, well, or brilliantly, and many intelligent people have put a lot of thought and effort into doing them well.

None of which changes the fact that they aren't peak intellectual jobs. Peak intellectual jobs are supposed to be what you get a Ph.D. to get. If people are getting Ph.D.s and not the jobs that a Ph.D. is supposed to prepare you for -- and Scott's is not simply an individual case of this -- then something in society is broken. In this case, I'd say, something in society has been more or less purposefully sabotaged. The alternative explanation involves yet another re-read of _Social Limits To Growth_, but I think there are specifically late 20th century American elements at work here.

Sticking this into the memoir narrative -- "I discovered happiness" -- is problematic, as I've said, because it's so often true at an individual level. But, as the responses hear have started to show, the minute you get away from Scott as an individual with an individual life story (in which we all of course hope that he's happy) and into any kind of generalization, the narrative becomes toxic.

[Ahistoricality]

Peak intellectual jobs are supposed to be what you get a Ph.D. to get.

Rich, I think you've finally hit on the point which brings me to total disagreement on this. The grad school-tenure track-R1/SLAC career course was never available to more than a small percentage of those getting Ph.D.s in the last few decades. Anyone who got a Ph.D. expecting a "peak intellectual" job has been ostriching, but Ph.D. programs have, rather irresponsibly, continued to fuel this myth even into the Century Of The Adjunct. (See Tenured Radical, among others, for the latest round of this discussion. I don't endorse her solutions, but the comments will give you a fairly good idea of the state of debate)

The best advice I got, very early in my graduate career (not before, mind you, but early enough) was that you get a Ph.D. because you want to get a Ph.D., not because you want a certain type of career. That's where the life of the mind lies, and then you figure out what to do with it once you actually understand it. My career isn't anything like the R1 career of my advisors, but I still live a life of the mind; I'd actually argue that being required to teach World History and broader geographic histories has actually sharpened my sense of the importance of my research, developed historiographical wisdom and depth that I'm not sure an R1 career would have engendered.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Ahist, I'm tracking this back to the Reagan years. So telling me it's been a small percentage "in the last few decades" is something I know.

I couldn't disagree more about getting a Ph.D. because you want "the life of the mind." Anyone can have the life of the mind. The life of the mind was had by many people long before Ph.D.s even came into existence. No, the Ph.D. teaches you how to do a certain kind of work. Getting it because you think you have to in order to drive a cab yet still be an intellectual is the worst kind of credentialism-as-self-image. You can drive a cab and be an intellectual without the Ph.D.

[Ahistoricality]

Anyone can have the life of the mind.

Yeah. I never said the Ph.D. was necessary, but it can be great fun to do; what I meant is that getting the Ph.D. just because is the real life of the mind whereas getting the Ph.D. because of a careerist myth is no less instrumental a path than our MBA-bound accounting students. And it increases your chances of landing a job where your intellectual capacities (including the skills you developed in the process of getting the Ph.D.) are well-used. But there are no guarantees in life.

No, the Ph.D. teaches you how to do a certain kind of work.

Sort of. Many Ph.D. programs now are actually better professional training now than they were when I went through, because they now acknowledge that most students aren't going to be R1 faculty.

[PatrickWM]

"I thought knowing who you were might compensate for the fact that I'm not sure who I am anymore."
As if any of us do.
I categorize the blogs I read into interesting subjects (such as 538, naked capitalism, Real Climate) or interesting people (James Fallows, John Rogers, John Cole, Scott Kaufman) among others. The interesting people blogs are more personal, more eclectic and more fun to read. I get a sense of a person. I also usually get a sense of generosity of people sharing their knowledge and insights (so thanks for that).
I am a retired high school graduate, and the blogs I read have given me a lurker's access into wonderful conversations that had not been part of my everyday life. I don't comment often because I generally feel outgunned, but I will say you are too young to know who you are anyway. It is fun and interesting (and oddly one-way friendly) to read, and thanks for sharing.

[P.T. Smith]

I can only weight into this little debate as someone who has considered/is considering grad school. The best advice I've recieved so far was that if I were to do it, I'd need to do it because I wanted to the work, because I would enjoy and love the whole process. Everything afterwards, everything imagined afterwards, shouldn't really be considered.

The main reason I would want a PhD would be to teach college. That's really it. So that's not enough. Right now I am quite happy reading and watching absurd amounts of books and films, having friends and former professors who read a lot, talking deep into books and film with them. Do I need to make myself do a little writing/blogging? Yes. But right now, this "life of the mind" is enough for me. I don't want the extra bullshit of grad school, don't need it. Maybe someday I will, but if I do decide to get the higher degrees, it won't be because of any end goal besides the degree itself, and I don't think it should be.

[Adam Roberts]

"I hope my little experiment won't change the way you comment."

In Soviet Russia, blog comment on you!

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Many Ph.D. programs now are actually better professional training now than they were when I went through, because they now acknowledge that most students aren't going to be R1 faculty."

In other words, they are being "professionalized" to better teach their graduates how to do teaching rather than research, with correspondingly lower pay scales.

If a factory worker told me that vocational training was better now because instead of a guild teaching craftsmen all sorts of useless stuff, you now concentrated on learning the skills suitable to the factory floor, I wouldn't be impressed.

[JPool]

I left a longish comment yesterday, but typepad appears to have eaten it.

P T Smith, you have the right attitude. It's important to do something you enjoy, or at least something that doesn't get in the way of enjoyment in the rest of your life (it's one of the great privileges of living in the developed world), but intellectual life doesn't have to come in the form of vocation.

[Richard Pennyfarthing]

I most enjoy your skewerings of the Protein Wisdom klan.

[JPRS]

Scott, I think I know what you're saying. I taught comp for a couple years, even "developmental writing," and I had the best experiences ever teaching those courses. It was fun and rewarding. I applied for a bunch of different jobs, including some comp teaching jobs. I didn't get them, and instead I got the TT in anthropology, which I'm very glad to have. But let's face it, if we're teaching and have benefits and time to write, we're pretty well off in contrast to many, many folks out there.

I get where Rich is coming from. It is exploitative within the small world of higher ed. But outside of that world, exploitation exists to make non-tenured and part-time college teaching look like a walk in the park.