Writing Maternity

I'm so proud

of my alma mater.  They're literally putting their money where their mouths are about not simply attracting but supporting a diverse student body.  Over the last several years, Amherst has been a part of organizations like Questbridge that help at-risk kids get into and pay for college.  Now, they're thinking even more capaciously.

Years ago, the Boston Globe ran a story -- I think that it was the magazine cover story, actually -- about Harvard's endowment.  That story pointed out that Harvard could be tuition-free for students without dipping into the endowment, simply by using the interest in generates annually.  Why didn't the university do this?  Because, spokespeople explained, they wanted to be certain that students understood the value of a Harvard education.

Ahem.

Princeton put this kind of scholarship-instead-of-loan program in place some years ago, but Amherst is the first (as far as I know) small private to do so.  This is of a piece with a number of other things that they've put into place -- or are putting into place -- and make me deeply proud of the school and its current direction.  And I give the current president, Tony Marx, a lot of credit for helping to make all of this happen.  He's somehow managed to harness the institution's energy, to help make important educational goals reality, even when they involve overturning long-held principles.

For example, Amherst's open curriculum is/was old and hoary and famous (not unlike Brown's).  (I'll confess, it was one of the things that appealed to me about it when I was applying.)  But they've now changed that to include a writing-intensive requirement, and (last I heard) are looking into a qualitative reasoning requirement as well.  And, in the current strategic plan -- which, granted, is all about getting alums excited about what the College is doing so that we'll give money -- the school is dedicating many of the new faculty positions that will result from enlarging the student body size to interdisciplinary departments and programs, as well as these interdepartmental, college-wide initiatives.

Once again, I'm so proud.

milestones

Tricksy somehow manage to cut two teeth without G or I realizing what was happening.  More power to her, so let's give three cheers for a child who can cut those first teeth without incredible pain.  I don't know if this means that she has a high tolerance for pain, or if it was simple dumb luck (I'm inclined toward the latter), but I'm grateful.  (I'm also not counting my chickens.  The first two were the MOST painful for Squiss, but there's no reason for that pattern to hold.  Tricksy's doing her best to make her own path in the world -- not easy for younger siblings -- and I'm all for it.)

The other milestone is mine, actually.  We had a meeting on Friday -- a Faculty Forum, it's called -- to discuss the proposed Strategic Plan.  This is essentially forms our institutional blueprint for (first) a capital campaign and (second) what we do with the money we get from the capital campaign.  And I stood up and opened my mouth.

I've done this a couple of times  in front of the full(ish) faculty: on the floor of a faculty meeting last year, to announce a new Writing Center initiative; and at a faculty meeting this spring, to discuss whether or not to change the time slot of the first-year seminar.  Both went fine, although I wasn't at my best.  And in both cases, they felt like fairly small or obvious things, somehow.  They were moments when I felt as though I could NOT speak, so I spoke.

The purpose of Friday's meeting was for faculty (and staff?) to give the faculty committee on the draft document.  I had two comments:

1. Where the bleep is writing?!?!!!
2. Don't you think we should think about subsidies for childcare under the general rubric of "Health and Wellness"?

I've written here (and here) about the latter.  One nice thing about my comment was that it catalyzed a small outpouring of comments about the situation of staff (underpaid, many dead-end jobs, etc.) at the College.

The writing piece is separate.  (Although, shortly after I sat down and stopped shaking from nerves, I realized that there actually was a connection: in talking about writing I was implicitly [well, almost explicitly] talking about how hard I work; in talking about childcare subsidies I was talking about what makes it logistically possible, if not always emotionally easy, for me to work so hard.)

In fall of 2004, the faculty here voted to 1) do away with a required writing placement exam and 2) the remedial basic writing course those who failed the exam were required to take.  They also voted to create my job, in part so that I could give the faculty teaching the first-year seminar "expert" guidance on how to teach writing.  These were all good decisions.  (Although the following spring they also voted to do away with an upper-level writing-intensive requirement.  That wasn't such a good decision.)  Part of the logic of the first two decisions was the notion that writing isn't a simple skill that, once learned, merely needs  to be praticed.  (I.e., it ain't like riding a bike.)  Another part of that logic was the idea that, therefore, teaching writing should be the province of all faculty at this small elite college where faculty really care about undergraduate learning and think that assigning lots of writing and giving lots of feedback on it are ways to foster that learning.

But, somehow, between fall of 2004 and spring of 2007, writing dropped out of the College's statements about its missions and plans.  Part of this is my fault, since when  I arrived in fall of 2005 the then-Associate Dean kept pushing me to "think big" about writing at the College in order to get things into the Stategic Plan.  Yeah, I just got here, I don't know anything about this place, and I'm supposed to what??  There also weren't obvious places for my kinds of suggestions to fit in the various ways the discussions about the Strategic Plan were happening.  (Not to mention a weird fixation on physical centers -- it seemed  as though everyone wanted a building to hang their ambitions on.)

So.  I got up on Friday and said, basically, "where's writing?"  I pointed out that there seemed to be an assumption that writing was taken care of, that things or (ahem) a person had been put into place who would "fix" the "writing problem."  I explained that things had grown a lot in the last two years and that -- as pleasant as it was sometimes to imagine otherwise -- I didn't see the growth rate slowly down for another five.  So, please.  I need an Associate Director.  I need more space for the Writing Center.  In essence, I can't do this alone.  (Segue to my next point: I need money to help pay for childcare.  Because I can't do this alone.)

I got a few laughs, at the right places, so that seems to have gone well.  And a couple of people told me later in the day that they'd liked what I'd said about childcare.  And we'll see.  We'll see what goes into the final report.  And then we'll see what happens when the folks in the Development office hit the money trail.  It's a long road ahead, but aren't they all?

subsidies for child-care

I'm linking to this news about Stanford's new initiative to help faculty with child-care costs mostly to keep it on my radar.  It's something that my own institution (which currently offers a mere $500) needs to think about, and they need to think about it for staff as well as faculty.

coffee

In a rare night out, we saw Black Gold on Friday, a documentary about the coffee industry, specifically focusing on the situation of coffee growers in Ethiopia.  The screening was actually sponsored by Human Rights Watch and Oxfam, and included a panel discussion afterwards.  The film was quite good -- moral of the story, drink more coffee, but make sure that it's fair trade (and be willing to pay for it!) -- and the panel discussion interesting at times.  We were most impressed with the guy who runs Groundwork coffee (a chain in LA, mostly on the west side), who seemed to be that best and most beautiful of things, a truly socially responsible business-person; and with another guy who managed to explain how agricultural subsidies in the U.S. affect (say) coffee farmers in Ethiopia more efficiently than either of us had ever heard before: we subsidize sugar, which means that the international price of sugar is low.  If we stop subsidizing sugar here in the U.S., then international price will go up, which means that Brazil (his example) will stop planting so much coffee and will start planting sugar, which will relieve some of the coffee glut on the international market, which will raise prices for the Ethiopian farmers we saw in the film.

This is all G's field, not mine, but I thought I'd pass on the news and the recommendation.  Drink more coffee, but make sure that it's fair trade.  There's a lot more to it than that, but that bit helps.

Oh, and green LA girl got a nice plug.

Ruth Rosen has a good article in

last week's The Nation about the "care crisis."  The point she makes that is, to my mind, most worth underscoring is that one of the big reasons why care for the elderly and for children hasn't made it on to a national (legislative or feminist) agenda is that women assume that their problems are individual rather than systemic.

And, of course, in the moment of crisis the problems are individual.  But we all have to figure out how to take longer views of these moments, so that we can string them together in a way that makes meaningful change possible.

no, no, no!!

This news about the British Library is profoundly depressing.  Go see for yourself, and then go here to write Parliament.