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You may have already seen this on the JIL, but if you know of anyone who might be interested, please feel free to pass this along to them...

Assistant Professor in Professional and Technical Writing

The Writing Program at Syracuse University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, specializing in Professional and Technical Writing, to begin in the fall semester of 2009. The following areas of secondary interest/specialization are also welcome: environmental rhetorics, medical rhetorics, rhetorics of science, and/or technology studies.

The Writing Program is a freestanding unit at Syracuse, with a nationally recognized faculty and course offerings ranging from first-year writing to its Ph.D. in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric. As of Fall 2008, the Writing Program is also home to a Major and Minor in Writing and Rhetoric. The successful candidate for this position will demonstrate scholarly promise and teaching excellence and will join an active research faculty, teach undergraduate and graduate courses, provide curricular leadership for our professional writing course offerings, and help us develop undergraduate internships and partnerships with local businesses and industries. That candidate should have PhD in hand by August of 2009.

Applicants must complete a confidential, online summary at https://www.sujobopps.com and upload a letter of application and CV (including the names of at least 3 references). We encourage prospective applicants to visit our website, http://wrt.syr.edu, and to contact the Search Committee Chair, Collin Brooke (cbrooke at syr.edu) with any questions. Review of applications will begin November 15 and continue until the position is filled. Syracuse University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity institution, and we welcome applications from diverse candidates--women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

Big week

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It is not the best week to be (slowly) recovering from back spasms. In a couple of days, we have our annual recruitment visit from prospective students (posts from years past on this process). The good news is that I'm heading into this event with more sleep than I've apparently gotten in years past. The bad news is that I've been getting lots of sleep because there's not much more to do than nap when you're lying on your stomach in bed with a heating pad on your lower back.

I thought I blogged about this, but just about everyone I tell is surprised, so apparently I haven't mentioned it. This year, inspired in part by Wordplay, I'm an entrant in The 31st Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which is happening next weekend down in Brooklyn. So while our prospective students are flying back to their home bases, I'll be taking the train down to NYC to prove just how nerdy I can be.

And actually, I'm looking forward to it. If my practice has been accurate, I'm probably not going to finish much higher than middle of the pack. I'm a little sloppy when I'm under the gun, and I have the same bad habit that sometimes plagued me on multiple choice exams--"how can that be a good clue for this word?!" I've been stepping up my crossword solving to maybe an hour or so a day right now, but other than that, I'm not doing anything special. No stacks of notecards with obscure names of rivers on them for me. Just me and my brain and a bunch of pencils.

If I think of it, I'll try and do a little bit of blogging from the tournament, but it'll depend on how social I'm feeling and how much I feel like putting words outside of the grid...

That's all.

Update 1/19/08: I've updated the list below based on a conversation at WPA-L, and I'd be happy to fill in the 20+ schools listed below that don't currently provide this information to prospective students. I want to stress that the data below lists the number of guaranteed years of funding (assuming satisfactory performance of duties, of course), not "actual" or "possible" years. At Syracuse, for example, a number of students are supported beyond the 4th year, but the 4 years are guaranteed.

Also, I'd like to recommend, as strongly as possible, two things: if you are a faculty member in one of these programs, particularly one for which I couldn't find data, providing this sort of information is an ethical imperative--you owe it to incoming students to tell them, up front, what they're getting into. Seriously. Secondly, I'd love to see us as a field have conversations about these kinds of data, and to provide them in a centralized (online, updatable) location, whether it's attached to the Doctoral Consortium, NCTE, Rhetoric Review, or whatever. It's not the kind of project I have the time or energy to initiate, but clearly I've already contributed my fair share.

---

In light of Steve's mention of the Consortium list (which was painstakingly mapped by Derek last year), I thought I might share some information that could be of use to those shopping for graduate programs. One of the factors that prospective students should consider is not only the fact of financial support, but its amount and length.

One of the things that we've been working on here at Syracuse is the amount of guaranteed support we can offer to students. Currently we guarantee 4 years (as with most places, that guarantee is contingent upon adequate progress and performance), and as almost anyone who's gone through a PhD can tell you, that places a pretty serious burden on both incoming students and on that 4th year, when the equally full-time activities of the job search and the dissertation coincide. The prospect of being able to uncouple those activities is an appealing one, particularly if we heed Semenza's (Amazon) advice, which suggests no less than 2 publications, in addition to having drafted a substantial chunk of dissertation prior to sending out applications.

One of the questions that's come up in our discussions about funding is a field-related one. Namely, we've asked what other programs in our field guarantee and/or expect of their students. So I did a little digging, and came up with what follows. It's a list of programs and how many years each guarantees. Some caveats:

  • I only looked at assistantships, assuming (rightly, I believe) that this is the most common form of financial support for PhD students
  • Because we only offer a PhD, I restricted myself when possible to information about PhD students only
  • I made a good faith effort to locate the information, but I didn't perform an exhaustive search of each site.
  • "No Data" means that I located information about TAships, but that I couldn't readily infer information about how many years were guaranteed
  • "Couldn't locate" means that I was unable to find any page that provided information about TAships. That may be my fault.

If there is a program missing, let me know, and I'll add it. Likewise, if you know where a page is located that I've missed, please leave the URL in the comments for me. If there's more up-to-date information than can be found on the web, ditto. I've tried in each case to link to the webpage where this information either is or should be (imho) located.

Alabama: No Data
Albany: 3 years
Arizona: 5 years
Arizona State: No Data
Ball State: couldn't locate
Bowling Green: 3+ years (see comments)
Carnegie Mellon: couldn't locate
Case Western Reserve: 5 years
Central Florida:No Data
Clemson: 4 years (specifies length of program, not TAship)
Connecticut: 4 years (Not guaranteed)
East Carolina: No Data
Florida State: No Data
Georgia State: 4 years (apply for 5th)
Illinois: No Data
Illinois (Chicago): 6 years
Illinois State: 4 years (see comments)
Indiana U of Pennsylvania: 4 years max (2 years asst./2 years assoc.)
Iowa State: 5 years
Kent State:4 years (see comments)
Louisiana-Lafayette: 4 years
Louisiana State: 4 years (apply for 5th)
Louisville: No Data (4 years)
Maryland: 3-4 years (Lectureships beyond 4th yr)
Massachusetts-Amherst: 5-6 years (see comments for link)
Miami (OH): 4 years
Michigan: 4 years
Michigan State: 4 years
Michigan Tech: 5 years
Minnesota: 4-5 years
Missouri: 5 years
Nebraska: No Data
Nevada-Reno: 5 years
New Hampshire: 4 years
New Mexico: 5 years
New Mexico State: 5 years
North Carolina: No Data
North Carolina-Greensboro: 4 years
North Carolina State: 4 years (specifies length of program, not TAship)
Northern Illinois: 5 years
Ohio State: 4 years (conditional on progress--see pp. 64-65 of PDF Handbook)
Oklahoma: 5 years
Old Dominion: No Data
Penn State: 6 years (MA/PhD)
Pittsburgh: No Data
Purdue: No Data (5 years)
RPI: No Data
Rhode Island: No Data
South Carolina: 4 years
South Dakota: 4 years
South Florida: 4 years
Southern Illinois: 4 years
Syracuse U: 4 years (Apply for 5th)
Tennessee: 4-5 years
Texas: 4 years (max of 5, if funding is available)
Texas A&M: 5 years
Texas-Arlington: No Data
TCU: 4 years
Texas-El Paso: 4 years
Texas Tech: couldn't locate
Texas Women's: couldn't locate
Utah: 4 years
Virginia Tech: No Data
Washington: No Data (5 years)
Washington State: 4 years (No data on site; personal correspondence)
Wayne State: 4-6 years (6 may include MA)
Wisconsin: No Data

Rhetopia?

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(Note: I've been sitting on this post for about three days, and gotten to the point where it's keeping me from blogging other stuff. So rather than polish it up, I'm just going to post it.)

Now that the MLA job list has been released, it's been a bit of a challenge for me to turn my thoughts to questions of my upcoming job hunt. After all, this is the first time in six years that I've had to think about searching. I've been solicited for the occasional position, but honestly, not having to assemble materials, worry about MLA, or submit myself to the jaded scrutiny of search committees is in my opinion one of the advantages of the tenure-track. And there are real differences between searching for entry-level positions as an assistant professor and considering more senior positions--I'm only looking at advanced assistant or associate gigs this time round.

Part of it is that there are very specific reasons for requesting senior hires. They require more money, and one of the secret places that colleges balance their budgets is by maxing out the salary differential between retiring faculty and their entry-level replacements. Senior hires screw with that dynamic, and are thus much rarer. Still, there are times where it's warranted, and if you scan the available positions for senior folks in my field, you'll see what I mean. With very few exceptions, you'll find jobs that are explicit about the desire for middle management candidates: established scholar-teachers who can step into a program with minimal fuss and take over the administration of writing centers, writing programs, a large staff of teachers, etc.

Without getting too snarky about it, there are many positions where universities have acknowledged the expertise of rhetcompers, but that acknowledgment has yet to enter into the curricular calculations of the hiring department. And we've all heard the stories about how even search committees haven't really thought through what it means to hire, consider, host, or converse with rhetcomp candidates. I could get specific on either count, but I probably don't need to.

I'm still deciding about where I'm going to apply, but I've basically decided that I'm going to be forthright about it. There are good reasons for me to apply widely (e.g., leverage), but I've been on too many committees to feel good about applying for positions that I have no earthly intention of pursuing. For one thing, I'm not that great a liar. For another, there's a great deal of emotional and intellectual labor that goes into a search, and if someone's going to take the time to read my materials, they deserve some minimal amount of respect from me for doing it. If I'm not willing to go there, then it's disingenuous of me to apply.

And no, that doesn't reduce my list of possible applications to zero.

But what I've been thinking about lately is exactly what I would expect/want/need if I were to move. Some of those things are personal, certainly, and some are matters of taste. But I've had a couple of conversations in the past few days, where I've been thinking out loud about what makes a "good program" in rhetcomp. And I mean this specifically from the perspective of a potential senior hire--what makes a program attractive to people at the stage that I'm at?

So for example, if I were advising a PhD applicant looking at programs, placement would be a big issue. What structures are in place to help their students find positions, and how successful are they at it, both in terms of percentages and in terms of position quality? That stuff matters to me as someone who does a lot of that work locally, but it doesn't fall into the category of "make or break" for me as I look at programs. Make sense?

(I should note from the getgo that I'm only really interested in other PhD programs. I went to a liberal arts school for college, and have taught at a really good MA-granting program, but for me, a doctoral program takes advantage of my greatest strengths as an instructor, in my opinion. At some point in my career, that may change, but not right now.)

So here are some of the things I've come up with. I may add a post or two later on as I think through this stuff, but feel free to add things in the comments as well...

1. A critical mass of faculty

How many rhetcomp faculty are enough to maintain a thriving program? I'm tempted to say at least 8-10, and almost as tempted to go back and change that to say double digits. Does that mean that smaller faculties are somehow less than real? Of course not. But in terms of curricular variety and in terms of sharing exam and dissertation load, it's hard for me to imagine not feeling stretched pretty thin without that many colleagues. I may be relying too heavily on my own experience in a freestanding program without an MA, but if a program is admitting 3-5 PhDs in rhetcomp a year, as we do, and graduating them at the same rate, as we try to do, then 8-10 seems modest enough. Feel free to disagree, though.

2. An articulated rhetcomp curriculum

I don't expect that other programs have the degree of control that we do at SU over graduate curriculum (or undergraduate, for that matter). But still. Rhetcomp students have certain curricular needs (methods, e.g.) that literature students do not, and vice versa (e.g., foreign language requirements, although how much of a need is debatable). I think that a good program is necessarily one where the rhetcomp faculty have some say over how their students are treated curricularly, i.e., not as lit students who take a pedagogy course or two. That definitely means different courses, and it may even mean different procedures, honestly.

3. Sponsored Networking

This may happen in the form of external events (e.g., Watson or the Penn State Conference) or internal (in the form of ongoing Speaker Series, annual symposia, etc.), but good programs set aside the resources to bring in people. (Sending the program's faculty and students outward in the form of travel support is also important, but not quite enough.)

4. The Vision Thing

This can be many different things, and perhaps this is a sign of my quasi-administrative status, but more and more, I find that I'm impatient with programs where the vision is just "keep on keepin on." Y'know? I have my own opinions about what a responsible vision is, and I know that it's not the only one, but having some long-term goals to work towards feels more important to me than it used to, and I think good programs think beyond the immediate semester. Not all the time, and it's not to say that their plans can't change, but some sort of guiding vision is a good thing.

5. Doing unto others

I wish that this went without saying, but I think that part of a program's vision has to include how everyone in the department is treated, not just the TT faculty. If nothing else, everyone in an English department has some sort of stake in the teaching of FYC, and how they account for that stake and support or neglect it institutionally is one of the things I think about.

* * * * *

So those are five things I'll think about this fall as I consider where to apply, and as I go deeper into the process. I could say much more about each of them, but considering that this entry has been clogging up my blogging passages for the last few days, I'm going to post it, and add as I feel like it...

Unbounded idiocy

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One of the things we like to do in the graduate program here, especially considering how young we are as a program, is to buy program copies of our alumni's dissertations. This would be a substantial project at a program with the history of a Purdue or Texas or Ohio State, but it's not been so bad here. With a minimal budget, though, and at $63 a pop, we have to be strategic. It's not an automatic thing because we can't always afford it.

With a little money left over this year, and having fallen a bit behind in the stocking of our dissertation shelf, last week I placed an order for 6, 4 fairly recent ones and a couple from the days when we had occasional comprhetters earning degrees through English. So I head over to UMI, which I've used before for this very purpose, and like last time, I struggle a bit with their site, which seems to be designed specifically to prevent people from placing orders.

Finally, I punch through, and place the order. Hooray. But not, apparently, processing the following bit of information, sandwiched between the "secure server" and "delivery whenever we get to you" lines:

Dissertations ordered online are available in unbound shrink-wrapped format only.

Oh. Hooray. We got a box today that was full of reams of unbound paper, just the thing for our shelves. It was my screwup, I know, and it pisses me off that it cost us $250, but then I thought to myself: I can rage at myself anytime. Really: What. The. Hell? Why can I send a piece of paper to them to order bound copies, but they can't handle an order placed over the internet? Honestly, would it cost them that freakin much to offer 2 options instead of 1? And what's with defaulting to unbound reams of paper? And charging a price for it that makes Kinko's look like the bargain bin?

From their crappy website to their prehistoric e-commerce to their unchallenged monopoly, I'd rather save up my rage and extend it, wrapped and ribboned, to our friends at UMI, purveyors of the single-worst commercial experience I may have ever experienced. Thanks, UMI, for all your damn help.

Actually, you know, I'm thinking about how much more effective, both in terms of cost and personal satisfaction, it would be to keep ms. copies of our dissertations, and to go with a POD company like Booksurge. Instead of paying $63 dollars per dissertation through them, if we had .pdfs of our dissertations, a 300 page hardcover book would cost us less than $30, and it'd probably be a better product than we get from UMI anyway.

Hmm.

Update: I've never been happier to eat crow. MB called ProQuest today, and I don't know what she told them, but they've offered to send us bound copies, and rather than making us pay for the full price ($63 per), they're only charging us the difference between the bound and unbound price (about $22 per). The site is still far more of a pain to use than it should be, but I can't complain now about the overall service or their willingness to bail me out of my mistake.

Visiting Days

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There's not been a lot of blogging round these parts recently, in large part because we're right at the peak of activity for our graduate admissions cycle.

As part of that cycle, each year, we bring in several of our top applicants for a two-day event that we call Visiting Days. The program pays to fly them in, current graduate students volunteer to host the visitors, and we either cater or pay for meals. It gives these applicants a chance to meet the faculty and students that we will potentially join, and it gives us more information about each of them as we make our final decisions about funding.

I can say this without sounding immodest, because it wasn't my idea to start with: I think that this is an exceptionally ethical practice, and one that I'm proud to be a part of. I had hoped for better weather this week (it snowed every single day, I think), but other than that, we gave our top candidates a chance to ask a lot of questions, to learn what they'd be getting into if they came here, and to meet the people with whom they would conceivably spend the next 4-5 years of their life. Visiting Days takes a lot of the guesswork out of coming here, and we're able to do it in a way such that the students themselves incur none of the costs. We book the flights, arrange the stays, and pay for the meals.

(By the way, this is a constant source of amazement to me, that universities ever ask students to bear the cost of recruiting trips, particularly when that student is applying for a job. I refuse to believe that universities with budgets in the millions of millions need to force graduate students to bear the costs of such trips. If I were in the position to do so, I would blacklist schools that continue to require graduate student applicants to purchase their own plane tickets, and then reimburse them after they've incurred interest. Unacceptable.)

So anyway, Visiting Days was Thursday and Friday, and by all accounts, it was a success. A nice combination of formal and informal conversations, and as much access in both directions as we could manage.

Next year, though, I'm going to try to get more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night during the week leading up to Visiting Days.

That is all.

1 week down, infinity to go

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Yeah, yeah, I know.

But this is actually a brief post of semi-serious reflection. This is not the first time I've been called upon to do a little administration--in Virginia, I was the coordinator for the Professional Writing part of our MA program. This involved a little bit of curriculum design/revision, a little bit of scheduling, a little bit of advising, and, in my recollection at least, was largely informal.

But this is the first time where I've occupied a more formal position, one that carries its own office, and one where I actually rate assistance. M is not an "assistant" or "secretary" per se--her official title is Graduate Program Coordinator. I'm tempted to observe that M in fact does the "real work" while I strut around singing the praises of J. J. Abrams, Tony Shalhoub, and Junior Mints. It's not quite that bad, though--take a look at my schedule for next week if you don't believe me. Programs of all sizes and inclinations need both direction and coordination.

But see, one of the things that she coordinates is my calendar, which is both odd and tremendously liberating. It's odd, because I'm pretty self-sufficient as far as my professional life goes. I generally prefer to make my own copies, run my own errands--I don't like to make work for other people. And yet, there's a real luxury in allowing someone else to manage my calendar. In my first week, it's the biggest felt change in my life. I don't have to worry about setting up appointments, juggling demands, etc. They just talk to M, and I show up when I'm supposed to.

I could get used to that. I know that pretty much everyone from middle management on up in pretty much every industry already takes this for granted, and maybe someday I will too. But not for a while yet. Right now, I'm deeply appreciative, for something as silly as a printout of my weekly calendar that someone else has generated for me.

That is all.

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