Extra! Extra!
Chuck reports that Georgia universities are seeking a 10% tuition increase. The four University of Missouri campuses have recently seen a 7.5% tuition increase approved . If this trend continues, eventually the amount of money contibuted by students will far outweigh the amount of money contributed by the state, which raises two important questions. First, won’t this situation undermine the goal of public education? Second, has anyone thought about how much worse the The student is the customer, and the customer is always right problem will become?
As I was leaving for SHARP 2003 last summer, Kari asked, “Will you blog the conference?” Having just gotten back from CCCC 2004, Jeff writes, “I really canít see how people manage to blog conferences in real time. I canít listen, talk, or type at the same time.” I found that I could get a wifi signal in one of the conference meeting rooms at ASECS 2004, but I did not try to blog live. I worry about getting the details wrong in someone’s paper (or worse, missing the point altogether). I did take some very detailed notes on my legal pad, imagining myself blogging it later, perhaps in bullet-point format like Kathleen at SCMS 2004, and in this way did thoughts of blogging make me pay better attention than I usually do. But when it came time to consider what to post, I decided that I didn’t feel comfortable putting the details of someone else’s argument online. This is not to say that I think it’s wrong in principle to do this, just that I wasn’t confident enough in my own summary of someone else’s argument to do so. If this blog were just for my own use, my attitude would be different, but my latest stats say that I get about 400 visits a day, so…
The nicest part of ASECS 2004 was being able to catch up with friends from grad school. The University of Maryland English Department had a powerhouse group of eighteenth-century graduate students there for awhile, and I was as influenced by the remarkable group of peers I found in grad school as I was by my professors. A surprising number of us ended up in tenure-track jobs. Liza Child teaches at Trinity College in D. C. Leigh Eicke is at Grand Valley State University. Mark Pedreira teaches at the University of Puerto Rico. Eleanor Shevlin is with West Chester University. (There are several others who were at UMD with us, but they were not at the conference.) Sharing our experiences and exchanging advice helped me to put my own life into perspective. I feel fortunate.
We’re on spring break this week, and in addition to reading about the history of reading in preparation for finishing up my paper to be delivered later this month at ASECS, I’ve been watching movies. One of them, School of Rock, is just pure escapist fun that easily transcends a fairly tired trope: the substitute teacher who turns out not to be what s/he seems.
A highlight of the movie is Jack Black’s character, Dewey Finn, leading his young, prep-school students in a rehearsal of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock & Roll)”, originally released on the 1976 album High Voltage. While I now have fairly eclectic tastes in music, I used to be a big fan of hard rock and heavy metal, and AC/DC was one of my favorite bands in high school. The lyrics to this particular song, however, resonate in a completely different way now that I’m involved in a profession where so many smart people spend so much time in adjunct positions with meager benefits and no job security: “Gettin’ ripped off / Under-paid / Gettin’ sold / Second hand.”
Complete lyrics below the fold.