b l o g o s

the act--and art--of reviewing

Josh has just posted an excellent entry about time and reviewing in our field, and judging from the lengthy comment I left there, that entry pushed one of my buttons.

JM and I were hanging out with a colleague recently, and the colleague, a seasoned scholar with lots and lots of publications, mentioned in passing that it's getting to the point where it's faster these days to take a book through publication than it is a journal article. Think about that for a minute.

Unfortunately, it's not an exaggeration. I want to register a plea, not to peer colleagues, or colleagues who have been in the field longer than I have, but for colleagues who are just now, or have not yet, started their first jobs, who are only now beginning to receive requests to review. Chances are if that is you, you have waited months and months (and months) to receive word about a journal submission. You are, as a result, under the impression that this is how things go in the field, and so when you get your first, second, and third requests to review for journals, you take your time. You are, after all, overwhelmed with work. And this is, after all, the norm.

I'm writing to you to ask you to PLEASE not think that way. Let's put a stop to this trend. It may well take a long time for an article to go from submission to print, but let's not let it be because reviewers are dragging.

Journal reviewing is important work, work that maintains the quality of scholarship in the field. And those who agree to do it ought to be committed not just to maintaining or elevating that quality, but also to a principle of timeliness. And people ought to do this not for the sake of their own careers and reputations (but there is that, and I ranted over at Josh's about it so won't repeat those points here)--but more importantly in the field. Now my presumption is that all rhetorical scholarship is timely, and perhaps that is a faulty assumption. But there are articles that lose something--exigence, relevance of examples--if they are left too long to languish. And Josh cuts to the vital issue of timeliness in his post--the exigencies of tenure and promotion. But there is also an issue that tracks right back to quality: the issue of helping scholars to improve their work--and pronto. If someone submits something weak and is left for nearly a year without feedback, then they are most likely continuing to work on more pretty weak scholarship. But if they got some considered feedback after, say, six weeks, that is presumably less wasted time. In other words, ideas themselves ought not be left to languish.That goes for good ones too. Why make a fascinating idea/method/approach wait any longer than it needs to to get out into the world? Making A HUMAN takes less time than making a journal article, for crying out loud.

One of the main criteria for selecting editors (apart from vision, intellectual leadership, and all the rest) ought to be: is this person willing to be a pain in someone's balls? Can ze squeeze a review out of a slow-ass person?

It's very likely that a large majority of reviewers get their reviews in on time, but too many accumulated anecdotes point to a band of rogue reviewers who are by turns forgetful, irresponsible, or (my favorite) too exacting. ("I need to spend a little more time with this essay." It's not YOUR article, and your brilliance, while handy, is not THAT central. While scholars might benefit from 8 single-spaced pages of feedback 18 months later, chances are a couple of pages synthesizing the issues and making useful suggestions for revision or new directions in a month would be VASTLY more helpful. Stop kidding yourself and get the damn thing in.)

In any event, there is probably more to be said here--like the issue of overburdening responsible reviewers that I also mentioned at Josh's--and we have ALL suffered from recalcitrant reviewers. But to those early in your careers, and if I'm lucky, anyone else in the field: let's all approach reviewing as the thoughtful and timely art it ought to be. 

I wish it were that easy--to beg people to be reflective about time (their own and others'), but as long as such unreasonable waiting remains something of a rite of passage, slow reviewing is likely to continue.

where there's a dissertation there's a whippet

2010's first--and perhaps only!--entry in an ongoing series.

here, here, here, here, and here are some of the others.

on hosting

This November I'll be doing something I have never done before: "hosting" an interview, kind of talk-show style with a pretty large audience. This is exciting to me because it will be fun to be part of something kind of biggish, and also to be playing a supporting role (to the celebrity I'll be interviewing).

Now. The bulk of my preparation is going to be a lot like my preparation for teaching a graduate seminar. To wit:

1) find out all I can about the special guest. This will involve reading interviews and books the person has written, and it will even involve--yes--watching some game footage.

2) come up with some good questions that I'd like to hear this person respond to and that others might find interesting. 

3) generate a thematic order for sets of questions so that we don't meander all over the place or misuse time, and so hopefully there is some kind of narrative arc or at least sensible segues.

Additionally, I will also do these things:

4) remember that this interview is not about me at all, but rather I am facilitating. (this, along with the preparation above, I'm hoping will help with nerves.)

5) try to find some interesting photographs or other visuals to direct questioning/audience eyes. My impression is that my interlocutor is a little on the humble side so this might be appreciated. And I will welcome them as cues.

6) start asking people who they admire as interviewers/hosts and why.

So maybe yall can help me with #6. Who is your favorite interviewer or host, and what qualities do you think make them do a good job?

In Memoriam: Michael Leff

I was not a student of Mike Leff's, and I know his many students from years past are mourning his passing with a particular and familial intensity. But in a way everyone who studies rhetorical criticism, history, and especially Cicero can't help but have been one of his students.

Leff attended one of my very first conference papers, something I presented on Augustine at the Penn State Conference, and he pointedly told me what I did and didn't need to do. I was ecstatic and a little intimidated to have a chance to talk with him about the work at an evening cookout over at Stone Valley. I remember riding to the picnic in a car with him, getting amazingly lost, and Mike thought it was the funniest thing ever that a car full of rhetoricians couldn't navigate themselves. I've known him since, about sixteen years, a pittance compared to his peer colleagues who knew him for what had to seem like lifetimes.

A few years ago, Mike agreed to be on a panel with me, JM and our Illinois colleague Dale Bauer to talk about our experiences teaching in the Odyssey project. This was a different side of Leff. I knew Leff the professional mentor, but here was Leff the devoted teacher, who believed that everyone should read a little Cicero, not just his Northwestern grad students. He lit up when he talked about his underprivileged students in Chicago, and he told about how this work at least partly inspired his move from Evanston to Memphis.

In the past 5 years, too, I have gotten to know Leff as a colleague and administrator on the board of the Rhetoric Society of America, as well as in business meetings for the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. I learned a lot from him about how to make things happen in meetings. He always managed to strike a balance between serious, thoughtful arguments about the direction of these organizations and gut-splitting jokes: gravitas plus levity. The man liked to laugh as much as he liked to bear down on Latin passages. In fact, one of my best memories of him was at a dinner at an RSA board retreat a couple years back, when he asked me for a gin recommendation, and I recommended Hendricks. After putting away a couple Hendricks martinis, he started telling stories about colleagues at Northwestern that rendered many of us--especially his dear friend David Zarefsky--breathless, speechless, and weeping with laughter.

And now we are all weeping for his recent (and very sudden) passing. He and all of his amazing students have made the field of rhetorical studies the rigorous and lively field it is. Leff's lifetime of scholarly work, combined with the astonishing proliferation of work from those he trained makes each of us, at some remove, his student, and we are as devastated by his death as we are grateful for his life and work. He was a giant in many ways and will long be remembered as such.

while waiting

This blog has been collecting spam comments like dust bunnies, and so I figure I better get in here and add to the mix. I've been busy wrapping up reviews, getting ahead on editing,  matching teeny little socks, and yucking it up on facebook, and so haven't been paying as much attention to this space--I've been too busy waiting.

The longer I've been in this profession, the better I have gotten at Waiting for Something to Happen. I blogged about this phenomenon around the time of my tenure decision here, and since then I've gotten even better at this waiting business. Part of it is that our jobs provide lots of other work to fill the waiting maws--little piddly stuff as well as big, chewy stuff--and I am ever grateful for both kinds of work at the moment, as JM and I endure a Big Wait. 

I was thinking this morning about how this wait resembles the wait for tenure, (only) insofar as there is an imagined reality shift that happens after the moment arrives. I say imagined  because that shift can only be imagined before it actually transpires, at which point it becomes real in ways previously both imagined and unimagined. For example, tenure, for me, brought interpellative changes (how I was hailed by colleagues and institutions), as well as responsibility changes--more like a heaping-on of new responsibilities. No longer is there the singular goal that governs pretty much all professional activities up to that point. There was, for me, a shift from being primarily a "taker" (of time, reviews, tenure letters, etc.) to becoming primarily "giver" of these same things (though to pretend like we give nothing pre-tenure would be dumb--there's just a more noticeable ratcheting up of the requests to give, if not the giving itself). I rather like that about post-tenure; pre-tenure was a bit all-absorbing to me professionally. 

And there is also the crucial point that these Big Changes are not the same for everyone. In different departments, or fields, or institutions, or for people with completely different constitutions or attitudes toward their jobs, tenure can bring both more and less change.

Similarly, everyone with a kid or more tells me that having one will change my life, and I know that. Some changes can be generalizable--less sleep at the beginning, a reorientation of daily schedules (or, schedules, what schedules?) and priorities. But the specific contours of what will change are still not the same as they are for parents everywhere, much as the realities of tenure or any other professional milestone vary widely. This seems to me an important lesson as we consider the ways we talk about such changes.

Such are the matters I contemplate while I wait.

Pat Summitt's Definite (half) Dozen, selected and redescribed for those of us in academia

One of the pleasures of being an alumna of Tennessee women's basketball is that each year I receive in the mail a copy of their media guide, a glossy, heavy-duty preview of this year's team, with a good dose of reflection about teams past. Debby Jennings and the media relations crew at UT do an amazing job on this publication, as evidenced by the many awards they have received in years past for their efforts.

This year, the page following a two-page spread chronicling Coach Summitt's road to her 1,005th win (since win number 1 in 1975), lists "Coach Summitt's Definite Dozen," a sort of twelve-commandments or set of be-attitudes for members of her team. I remember these vaguely from my years there, and I believe the pointers were evolving at that point. But as I was browsing through the list while gnoshing on my turkey salad sandwich, it occurred to me that Pat's definite dozen also includes advice that I wish were followed by more people in my current occupation. I have therefore pruned down Pat's list to a half dozen maxims that could help make English departments (and academia in general) a better, even healthier place, were more folks to abide by--or at least try to abide by--them. I am also fully aware that some of these (e.g., the first one) aren't unique to Coach Summitt and may as easily be learned in Sunday school. Even so, they're worth thinking about in terms of our jobs, our relations to our work, to ourselves, and to each other:

1. Respect yourself and others. This one makes me think particularly of all the self denigration that goes on in academia, especially--though not exclusively--among women. The other-denigration happens with even more regularity, and the two are no doubt related, though the self-denigration might well be more damaging. I have learned the lesson about respecting others from lots of people--an anonymous reader who pointed out that a footnote in an early draft was unnecessarily harsh on a particular scholar; a colleague who teaches grads to be very strategic about criticizing, and never to be seen as "going after" someone; others who model this sort of respect while also earning it themselves. I try when possible to call attention when people go the self-denigration route, or I refuse to engage it even by disputing the claims to (stupidity, incompetence, etc.) There are times and places when it's harmless, or even charming, but guess what? It can also be convincing and is best avoided or at least countered by a hefty dose of self-praise (even if that is practiced in private, for which, see number 6).

2. Take full responsibility. Oh lord, don't get me started on this one. I have precious little time for people and their excuses. Taking responsibility doesn't even have to be all that big of a deal. Pat teaches her players a short-hand code for when they screw up. We would say "rebound." Sounds gimmicky, but it was a good way to acknowledge and recover. Taking responsibility was something the seniors on the team did quite well, so I think we all developed it over time. No excuses! And also, we all screw up! Acknowledge your mistakes and get over it.

3. Discipline yourself so no one else has to. I admit that this member of the definite dozen is what prompted me to think of their broader application to work in academia. I struggle a lot with grad students who need discipline, even as I've been blessed with some of the hardest-working advisees ever. This relates a little to number 2. If work doesn't get done, it's usually no one's fault but your own. Yes, life dishes out some crazy shit, but that's why it's so important to stay on top of things, to know your limitations and work with them. I dislike nothing more than to have to be the person to try to teach someone this stuff. I'm a much better mentor when I can help someone focus on other ways to improve than simply spending more time with their work. So, to all you burgeoning scholars: spare us! DIY!

4. Develop and demonstrate loyalty. In the context of Tennessee basketball, this one obviously means loyalty to the team. But I would urge academics to think about it this way: who is your team? It could be your institution or department or immediate cohort in your field. It could be a network of people outside your institution, even a national organization. I would think it's most important to remain loyal to the people with whom you work most closely. Of course, this is more difficult when the loyalty doesn't travel the other way. Goodness knows loyalty seems low on the list of qualities to value in academe. I don't think I've ever highlighted this quality in rec letters, for instance.

5. Don't just work hard, work smart. I like this one a lot. It reminds me of teammates who would throw their bodies in all directions in order to demonstrate their willingness to do so. But sometimes that's not the smart thing to do. It can take you out of position, for one. The analogy in academia is when someone "shows their work," or describes the number of articles they have read, the number of pages of notes they have taken--evidence, no doubt, of their effort. But to work smart is to convert that effort into what is supposed to be produced. Efficiency might be a good word here, though I would clarify that I give the term an elastic meaning, not just a factory-style pump-it-out approach. Working smart may well entail taking longer with things. It all depends. (Burke is good on this concept of efficiency.) Note too that this one also assumes hard work. Well, yeah.

6. Handle success like you handle failure. This one, I think, is meant to balance number 1 and attempts to keep in check the towering egos that are the occupational hazards of sports and academe. When something good happens, be humble and reflective (though maybe keep the reflective part to yourself), and, as Pat always used to say after a loss, "learn from it." Don't take either one--success or failure--as a grand commentary on you as a person or even your future. If this advice were followed on a large scale, we would all be more sane for it.

on being edited

Yesterday I received two documents via email from the editors of a special collection on Burke and the archives. Since my co-prof and I are in the process of wrapping up a seminar on Kenneth Burke, and just this week, we ran a class on academic publishing that included some tips on incorporating archival findings into their nascent articles, I have archives--and Burke--freshly on my mind. So rather than wait until close to the deadline the editors gave me for turning this thing around, this morning I figured I'd settle in with the editors' suggestions to see just what I needed to do to make this piece a better contribution to the collection. 

And then it dawned on me: this is the first real line-by-line feedback I have gotten since I don't know when. Sure, there are reader's reports for journal submissions and book manuscripts, but sometimes those come down to cantankerous quibbling or generalizations about writing style. In the past few years, I have been doing this sort of editing/feedback work for others in the field--for dissertations-in-progress, for jr. colleagues, for journal and book submissions, for (especially) book reviews that I edit for QJS.

Academia is strange this way. We spend the first parts of our careers receiving more feedback than we give (obviously there are exceptions, like writing groups, etc.), and then once that first book is published we find ourselves squarely in the realm of giving far more than we receive. I by no means want to discount the importance of my "first reader" JM, who sees and helps improve everything before it leaves this house, nor do I want to discount colleagues who have lent a pair of eyes on chapters or articles-in-progress. In all, though, what we have is a pay-it-forward model that I have usually not given a second thought to.

Until this morning. This morning I find myself giddily--that's right, giddily!--plotting changes my editors requested and reworking sentences they have marked as trying to do too much. The piece is getting the benefit of two pairs of eyes, and the result is the most informed, thoughtful, and smart comments I've received since my dissertation advisor combed through my limp-along chapters some years ago. And I'm only now in a position to really appreciate the kind of time it took to offer this feedback. My essay has been in the hands of two very talented and knowledgeable in-the-field colleagues, and I couldn't be happier with or more grateful for their labor.

bureacratization of the nonimaginative

Most other people probably realize this, but at NCA this past week, it finally hit home with me that the longer we are in the field, the more our conference experience becomes bureaucratized. For all the board meetings, business meetings, individual meetings, meetings with publishers, and mentoring meetings, I pretty much didn't get to attend a panel unless I presented on it.  I'm also fairly sure--because we talked about it--that the other senior people in the meetings I had on my docket were having the same kind of conference. 

This is a sad state. I generally like to be in the conference audience, to see what's going on in the field, to ask questions and get conversations going from the other side of the podium. I hope to do more of that at RSA in May. I remember one president of ASHR who made a point to go to every single panel that made it onto ASHR's schedule. Tiring, I'm sure, but boy did he get a good sense of what kind of intellectual work the organization is supporting.

nca, yay. chicago, double yay.

The dryer just shut off, so I really need to go finish packing and therefore need to make this short. I am giddy about heading to Chicago for NCA. It's the Chicago part, more than the NCA part, that has me giddy. But NCA is okay, I suppose. I like the people, no doubt, and look forward to running in to everybody.

As an extra bonus, I convinced JM to fly and meet me there after his teaching obligations for the week are done. Chicago is where we always used to go to shake off the end of the semester, to eat some good food, and to catch a film that we might not otherwise catch in a theater. Mornings will be early for me--chock full of meetings and panels--but Friday and Saturday evenings, back to our favorite spots we will go. I even managed to work in an appointment with my favorite hair stylist. So if you don't recognize me, it's either because I'm 6.5 months pregnant, or because my hair has been blown straight. Come to think of it, the combination might not work very well, but I don't even care.

I do know that we miss you, Chicago. We look forward to toting our kid there. But in the meantime, we are excited to have you all to ourselves, even in the midst of the crazy convention.

guarding the guardians & c.

During our last weeks in Urbana, C asked me to translate a phrase into Latin. A rare request, since usually it's the other way around. But it was a phrase that deserved to be rendered into Latin and then magic-markered onto a bright collar for their greyhound Rocket. The phrase was this: "who will retrieve the retrievers?"

You'll have to hunt down the collar to see the Latin.

I thought of this story when I hung up the phone today after nearly an hour and a half of talking with a former advisee. We don't usually talk on the phone really, mostly email. But the cool thing about today's conversation is that my advisee was the one giving me advice. At least someone will advise the advisors. As for the retrievers, I think you ought to check with Rocket, because I'm pretty sure he knows the answer.