Reading Matters, Vol. 11, Issue 11

From (under) the Chair's Desk

Let me begin with the exciting news: I am delighted to report that Lena and Michael Hill have returned to us their signed contracts accepting our assistant professor positions. The paperwork is all now in place and their plans for moving to Iowa City are in full swing! Many thanks to the search committee chaired by Bluford Adams and to everyone involved in their visits, ably supported by Sharry Lenhart, for helping to make those hires a reality. Our third offer is still under consideration and I should have news to report on that by next week.

In another continuing story, I have now been instructed to prepare to meet the Dean for a budget conference in relation to merit raises for faculty. In accordance with our departmental practices, I am convening a committee comprising the associate chair for faculty (Ed Folsom) and the two most senior elected members of executive committee (Dee Morris and Huston Diehl) to advise me in sorting out faculty merit based on the recently-submitted cvs. The only odd thing this year is what is missing: any suggestion for the likely average annual raise. As you will have seen in the press, budget negotiations within the Iowa legislature are currently in full swing and the outcome of those negotiations is far from clear. When pressed to speculate on the percentage that might be available for a raise, Dean Maxson predicted that it would probably be somewhere between 0% and 5% and conceded that 0% was probably unlikely. In that uncertain budget environment, we will be discussing a structure for merit raises for all faculty but only translating that discussion into numbers once we have some more budget certainty.

As the department follows the university in relying more fully on electronic record keeping, I will include as a separate story the consequent need for FERPA certification by faculty. Going paperless in our undergraduate advising office will represent a considerable saving of time for our undergraduate advisors, which is surely a worthy objective. I bore that in mind when I received an invitation to a two-hour presentation by the Provost’s Office on “Time Management for the DEO.” It was hard to clear off two hours in the middle of a Monday afternoon, but what if this offered the panacea that would free up oodles of productive time for the busy DEO—or for any faculty member? I figured I had to attend. I cringed when I saw that we were in for a powerpoint presentation (are powerpoint presentations ever not redundant?), but figured no academic could lecture unironically for two hours on how to organize our time.

Alas, I was wrong. But that others might benefit from my wasted two hours, I abstract here the three key points that could more efficiently have been expounded in ten minutes and offer them to you for what they are worth:

1. Keep written lists of everything you need to do and check off items once you’ve done them. Periodically check your lists and reprioritize.
2. File items according to the project that they relate to. Give the same name to a file of Word documents and a file of the paper documents that relate to the same project.
3. Work through your e-mail a couple of times a day, tackling the quick items and making note of the more substantial ones, but not just leaving them in your inbox. Turn off the annoying sound notification to reduce the interruption of incoming e-mails.

Not much wisdom for a two hour meeting, but I did get a really good sense of how not to do inspirational speaking.

Next I’m off to a CIC meeting on university budgets and strategic planning which, I fear, may be full of unironic powerpoint presentations. I’ll report on any wisdom gained in the next Reading Matters.

Privacy Matters: FERPA Certification

Our 1018 English majors generate an awful lot of paper as the Registrar’s Office prints multiple copies of a multi-page transcript along with grade reports for each students. All this paper needs filing, yet our academic advisors prefer to consult the DELI online since it is more uptodate (not to mention easier to find). Viewing this flow, Anne Stapleton, in her capacity as undergraduate advisor, has suggested a brilliant move towards saving time and trees: moving towards a paperless advising office. Doug Trevor has been working on the realities and will be sending out a memo to all faculty explaining the proposed changes. If faculty want to look up any student transcript, in the future they will be best served doing so online by clicking on grade report or degree evaluation on OSIRIS, with which you are all familiar (https://osiris.uiowa.edu/osiris/home.page). But, to do that, a faculty member must complete FERPA training.

The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the law that governs the rights and duties connected with access to educational records. FERPA applies to anyone who uses student records and we are all obliged to know and abide by the provisions of the Act. While this is true whether you access the record on paper or electronically, the electronic record is set up in such a way as to check that you have done your homework and are conscious of the Act. It does this by checking whether you have FERPA certification. This is something that you need to do once only and that you can acquire efficiently and painlessly. The details of the Act that are nicely summarized for you by the Registrar’s Office through an online tutorial. Go to http://www.registrar.uiowa.edu/training/ and follow the links for the online FERPA training course. You will need to register (using your hawkid) and then will be guided through a tutorial describing the Act that will take you twenty minutes or so to read. At the end of this, you’ll be faced with a simple quiz that makes sure you have read and digested the material, and that you understand a student’s rights and your obligations are in relation to student records. Once you have passed the quiz, you will be registered as FERPA certified and free to view all student records, now conscious of what you can and can’t do with them.

All faculty should take this tutorial and become FERPA certified. There are all kinds of good pedagogical reasons why faculty should look at student records, but you must be FERPA certified to legally do so. Once we have gone paperless, the computer database will enforce this requirement, since you will only be able to summon up a student record if the database knows that you have been FERPA certified (which it will recognize once you have entered your hawkid). The information is useful and the quiz is even quite fun. I recommend it to you highly! If you haven’t already received FERPA certification, now would be an excellent time to do so.

News Matters

1. Klaus Talks Writing, Wiener Schnitzel (Chicago Tribune, Feb. 21)

Carl Klaus, a memoirist who has been acclaimed by publications ranging from Money magazine to the Christian Century, was in town recently from Iowa City, where he was the founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. He had two goals. One was to give a lecture at DePaul University on the glories of accurate description of everyday life -- the rising tomato vines in his back yard, the struggles of his retirement and, most recently, an agonizing loss. The other was to eat a final meal at Chicago's legendary the Berghoff restaurant, what he called "the last great German restaurant in the country."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0602210246feb21,1,3119187.story?coll=chi-newslocalchicago-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

Linda Bolton has received funds from the Perry A. and Helen Judy Bond Fund for Interdisciplinary Interaction to bring sculptor Barbara Grygutis to campus.

Carl Klaus's book Letters to Kate: Life after Life is now available at Prairie Lights.

Tom Lutz’s Doing Nothing received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly and was the featured book on www.publishersweekly.com; he is pleased that he had the proofs long enough to add a dedication to Ken Cmiel. His essay on Dorothy Braudy’s paintings is officially published this Saturday at the opening of her show “Marking Time” at the Hamilton Galleries in Santa Monica. He is giving talks this month at Penn State, CalArts, UNC Chapel Hill, and UC Riverside. He has been elected to the board of PEN USA and is helping organize their Los Angeles reading of banned books in June.

Montpellier Matters (from Barbara Eckstein)

Notre Madame à Montpellier écrit: Students at Paul Valéry, if the ones in my classes are representative, take seven, eight, nine as many as twelve and thirteen classes per semester. Each class, again if my second-year and third or final-year classes serve as models, meets once per week for an hour and a half, sometimes two. In recent years the schedule of the semester has been regularized to coincide with academic schedules throughout the European Union. As it happens, this also coincides with U.S. academic semesters. Often of dubious merit, standardization in this case seems a real benefit to students who can spend a semester or a year at another institution within the E.U. with little difficulty. My classes have within them students from Germany, Spain, sites within the former Soviet Bloc, and Scandinavia. It speaks well of the interdisciplinary program in anglophone studies here that students come from so many sites. A colleague tells me that their program has been awarded a substantial grant from the E.U. to help a university in Georgia—not Flannery O'Connor's Georgia—model its anglophone studies program after the one at Paul Valéry.

The French students are still discontented with the current governmental proposal for the employment of young people. Last week they and their supporters filled a major pedestrian route that leads to the Prefecture, the site of the regional government arm of the French state, the place foreigners like me go to wait in line for the carte de séjour. This morning when I arrived on campus two young men were standing on top of a building unfurling a cloth larger than a bedsheet. Its hand-painted words urged students to mobilize. Next week being a vacation, I don't know what that will mean for political momentum. But at least this week, they are persevering.

A librarian I met says the students are lazy, don't want to start at the bottom and work their way up. A colleague says they are an instrument of the socialist party that rouses them every February. The students, he surmises, look for the romance of 1968. Meanwhile, he claims, the French bureaucracy—academic and otherwise—has all the maneuverability of an oil tanker that must shut down its engines at Gibraltar just in order to come into port at Sete. And if it also changed its course just a degree at Gibraltar, would it come to rest somewhere else?

The method of evaluating students in my classes has been standardized somewhere by someone. Second-year students write a final exam on an excerpt from a work read in the class. This is 80% of their grade. The other 20% is derived from an oral examination. For the third-year students the percentages change to 50-50 and the written exam responds to a more capacious question on the course's major theme. Scores are recorded on a 0-20 scale, 11—or is it, 10—being a passing grade. A colleague told me he has awarded a student a 17 only once in his career. Many students expect to fail and can retake the exam once. Still, many fail, if the winnowing percentages I have been told are accurate. All of these written exams occur in classrooms where students write by hand with elegant tools, many in a distinctive script that my daughter's teachers are trying, with mixed success, to teach her. As I watch them work on their practice essays, I stand in awe of the facility many have with fountain pens, rulers, and erasure devices that they twirl between their fingers like a baton.

Au revoir,
Barbara

Feb. 23 (Thr.), 1-5 p.m., Northwestern Room (No. 345), Iowa Memorial Union - Publishing a Scholarly Book seminar

Feb. 27 (Mon.), 12-1:30 p.m., 331 EPB – The Early Modern Reading Group will discuss Gina Bloom’s "'Boy Eternal': Aging, Games, and Early Modern English Masculinity." Gina’s paper will be available for photocopying in 308 EPB or by emailing her at gina-bloom@uiowa.edu.

Mar. 2 (Thr.), 3:45 p.m., Gerber Lounge - Promotion and Review Meeting: DCG Meeting to discuss 3rd-year review of Lara Trubowitz

Mar. 2 (Thr.), 5-6 p.m., Art Building E109 - Talk by Tom Gretton, Professor of Art History at University College London: “Aftermath and New Dawn: The Role of the Artist in the Graphic Work of J.-L. David and N.T. Charlet, 1815 – 1830." This talk is part of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium. More details here.

Mar. 3 (Fri.), 4:00 p.m., Gerber Lounge - Mark Hansen, Professor of English at the University of Chicago and author of Embodying Technesis and New Philosophy for New Media, will give this spring's Freedman Lecture. Professor Hansen will speak on the phenomenology of real-time media in a lecture and video presentation entitled "The Politics of Presencing."

Mar. 3-4 (Fri.-Sat.) - 2006 Liberalism and Its Legacies: A Conference on Latin American History in Honor of Charles A. Hale. Conference information and program available here. Organized by Claire Fox.

Mar. 9 (Thr.), 3:45-5:00 p.m., Gerber Lounge - Faculty meeting with Provost Hogan

Mar. 10 (Fri.), 5-8 p.m., UI Museum of Art - Jon Wilcox joins Christopher Merrill, Dianna Cates, and George Greenia on an installment of Know the Score Live dedicated to the mystery of pilgrimage. The show will also be broadcast live on KSUI, 91.7 FM. More details available here.

Mar. 20 (Mon.), 4-5 p.m., 315 Phillips Hall - Talk by Caroline Webber, Professor of French at Barnard College, Columbia University: “Marie Antoinette’s Catastrophic Costumes.” This talk is part of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium. More details here.

Mar. 27 (Mon.), 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge - Farewell Luncheon for Vicky Dingman

Mar. 28 (Tue.), 7 p.m., Shambaugh Auditorium - Carl Klaus will read from his new book Letters to Kate: Life after Life at Live from Prairie Lights. The reading will be broadcast live on WSUI, 910 AM.

Mar. 29 (Wed.) - Talk by Walter Benn Michaels: “Never Again: Neoliberalism and the Persistence of the Holocaust." Michaels is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is author of The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, and numerous articles on American literature, literary theory, and cultural studies.

Apr. 3 (Mon.), 12-1:30 p.m., 331 EPB – The Early Modern Reading Group will discuss Alvin Snider’s "Lucy Hutchinson and the Lucretian Body: Order and Disorder."

Apr. 10 (Mon.), 7 p.m., The Englert Theatre, 221 E. Washington St. - Noam Chomsky will speak on human rights in an event cosponsored by the English Dept.

Apr 24 (Mon.), 12-1:30 p.m., 331 EPB – The Early Modern Reading Group will discuss Doug Trevor’s "Quaker Love: The Case of Margaret Fell."

Apr. 25 (Tue.), 7 p.m., Gerber Lounge - Talk by Susan Bernstein, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison: "Roomscapes: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf." This talk is part of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium. More details here.

April 27 (Thr.), 3:30-5:00 p.m., Willis Atrium, UI Museum of Art (Please note the change of location this year) - Undergraduate Honors Awards Ceremony

May 1 (Mon.), 12-1:30 p.m., 331 EPB – The Early Modern Reading Group will discuss Mark Dowdy’s "Vagrancy and the Professional Theater."

Other Calendars

Future Issues

Please send any items for Reading Matters or the departmental calendar to Carolyn Jacobson at carolyn-jacobson@uiowa.edu. Reading Matters will appear every other Wednesday, and submissions should be received by 5 p.m. on the preceding Tuesday. Please send submissions for the next issue by 5 p.m. on Tue., Feb. 21. Thanks very much.