Let me start with news of the latest budget winds. You will remember the picture so far: bleak prospects for graduate funding, with cuts in the General Education Literature program (thankfully quite small), cuts in Rhetoric (5 lines lost), as well as cuts in the Graduate College Block Allocation that funds RAs, and the prospect of minimal or no visiting faculty money. Well, that was all so Last Week. At Monday’s DEO meeting, I heard for the first time projections about next year’s undergraduate admissions numbers. This is all still to be confirmed, but word is that we are looking at a record-breaking incoming undergraduate class, with perhaps some 500 more first-years than last year. In view of the shrinking college-age population, I’m not sure where we’re getting 500 extra students from, but apparently it isn’t Iowa – which is good news, because that means we are looking at large increases in out-of-state-tuition-paying students and hence in revenue. We were warned to expect enrollment pressures to increase average class size, but surely some of that tuition is going to have to be spent on opening some new sections of essential courses. And I can’t help thinking those new students are bound to need courses in Rhetoric and General Education Literature, i.e. just the areas that have suffered the worst cuts. What a difference a week makes! And apparently, those students are all above average.

If that enrollment pressure could represent Good News for the English Department, there was also some distinctly Bad News at the meeting. Remember Outcomes Assessment? Remember gathering essays written by graduating seniors and putting them in a box somewhere? (Where did all those essays get to?) Well, Outcomes Assessment is back with a vengeance, and it looks like we are not going to be able to dodge it any longer. The university is facing its accreditation visit from its regional association and apparently the area we are most threatened on is Outcomes Assessment. Failing the accreditation, or even getting a slap on the wrists, would be distinctly embarrassing, and so the Provost’s Office has established a task force on the issue led by Tom Rocklin. He will be giving guidance to, and ensuring compliance by, each department in the next few weeks and months. As I understand it, we are going to need to arrive at a commonly agreed set of ILOs – Intended Learning Outcomes – for the English major and then figure some way of measuring how effectively we are achieving those ILOs. This all may not be quite so painful as it sounds, if only one can get past the inelegant bureaucratic language. Our Taskforce on the Undergraduate Major made an initial stab at explaining what we think an English degree should accomplish, and we can probably use some of their language as a starting point for a worthwhile discussion. The measuring part will involve some statistical sampling, so we shouldn’t be back to stuffing copies of senior papers into a box. And Tom Rocklin promises to give us plenty of guidance on what is expected and what seems to work. And so, watch this space! This one we can’t avoid much longer.

If that is enough to make you wake up in the middle of the night screaming with the administrative sweats, you should have been at that recent CIC budget conference. “Things aren’t great everywhere, said he who heard the wailing in hell,” runs an Old English proverb that I think means something like don’t complain too loudly because it’s surely yet worse somewhere else. Budgets are clearly challenging in all the Big Ten universities, with all facing similar pressures of diminished state funding, increased costs, skyrocketing utilities, and increased dependency on raising tuition. But there seems to be one big divide which influences how directly the pain is felt. If anyone in our central administration ever starts using the words Resource Centered Management, you know it is time to run screaming. The idea behind Resource Centered Management, or RCM as it is inevitably called by the cognoscenti, is that each unit become responsible for all aspects of its budget – counting the revenue generated by the students’ tuition and by research grants, and budgeting against that the cost of salaries and support staff, of space used and utilities, and a proportion of such indirect costs as admissions and student support and libraries and of all the other services that make the university run. The ideal is that everyone becomes more conscious of the costs involved at every stage and that this encourages savings and efficiencies; the horrifying part is the huge drain on time and energy spent thinking entrepreneurially instead of, say, thinking about teaching and research. RCM is in use at Indiana and Ohio State, with an adapted form at Michigan, and Minnesota just going over to it. And you could tell delegates from schools where it has been adapted because of the wailing and gnashing of teeth!

On an opposite note to which, let me conclude by repeating the wonderful news that we have been successful in securing all three candidates in the African American literature and culture searches, with Lena and Michael Hill and Miriam Thaggert all set to join us next year. You will remember, too, that our own Jeff Porter will be joining the tenure track faculty next year. All in all, we look to have done a good job of revitalizing our faculty in a tight budget year. Good work to all concerned!

Curriculum Matters

The College is looking for first-year seminars in 06-07: one-semester hour courses for first years, offered preferably by senior research faculty. In accordance with departmental custom, the department will make the $2,500 available to the faculty member for research support. See http://www.clas.uiowa.edu/deomailing/2006/03/01/firstyearseminar.shtml.

There is a lot of good news coming out of the NonFiction Writing Program of late, where things are booming. Applications are in, and 106 were submitted this year, up from 68 last year. There have also been a number of recent student and faculty publications:

Patricia Foster (NWP faculty) has an essay in the current issue of The Antioch Review and a story in Southern Humanities Review. In February, Patricia was the visiting writer, giving a reading a leading a workshop, at Georgia College & State University in Midgeville, Georgia (home of Flannery O’Connor).

Brian Goedde’s (’07) guest editorial "Iowa Spirit and Hot, Hot Controversy" ran in the Feb. 10th edition of The Daily Iowan.

Jessie Harriman’s (’07) essay “This Soul Has Six Wings” (originally published in Portland Magazine) was selected for inclusion in Best American Spiritual Writing 2006, to be released in the fall.

Robin Hemley (NWP director) has a review of the January, 1949 issue of The Partisan Review appearing in The Believer in March. Also out this month are his “Sage Advice from an Acknowledged Master of the Form” in Rules of Thumb, edited by Michael Martone (Writers Digest Books) and “Reading History to My Mother,” in The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, edited by Dinty Moore (Longman).

Aviya Kushner (MFA 2005) has story in the spring issue of Zoetrope: All-Story (release date March 11).

Yiyun Li (MFA 2005) has a story in the spring issue of Tin House. Her story “After a Life” was just selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2006, and her story “Persimmons” was chosen for Best New American Voices 2006. Both anthologies will be released in the fall.

Alex Sheshunoff (’08) had an essay accepted for a travel anthology called Tales from Nowhere, to be published in September by Lonely Planet.