Author Archives: melanie

Project Gaga

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Delighted to report that my co-editor, Martin Iddon, has submitted our edited essay collection, Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion and Culture, to Routledge and it should be published in mid-September. My own contribution is very clearly the work of someone with gestational diabetes. It’s about cake and ice cream.

And on that note…. I was going to keep personal info off the website, but the main reason for my prolonged silence was a complicated pregnancy with months of very dull bed rest followed by the birth of a wonderful, healthy baby. She isn’t yet saying gaga or googoo but it won’t be long before she adds consonants to her vocalizations.

Baby daughter in Central Park, not so very far from where Gaga grew up.

Baby daughter in Central Park, not so very far from where Gaga grew up.

Degrees of Social Justice

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In the wake of the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors sacking and rehiring the President, in part allegedly because they perceived her to be reluctant to embrace online education in the way they wanted, there has been a good deal of discussion of MOOCs and online courses more generally. I felt then, as I feel now, that there are potentially serious problems with wholly-online degrees; that at the moment, campus education, especially at a prestigious institution, carries more weight. And indeed, one of my fears is that MOOCs end up being used as ways to keep campuses free of students with particular kinds of support needs. Instead of breaking down barriers to social mobility, MOOCs and online education could reinforce them. I drafted this post some time ago and then sat on it, so it’s not exactly a timely contribution to the debate. But the recent accusations that Oxford University demands postgraduate students demonstrate a degree of financial security that many people lack has prompted me to revisit this post as the points about social justice remain relevant.

I followed the UVa goings on closely, partly because I’d not long come back from a wonderful week spent in Charlottesville attending a conference and doing a small spot of guest teaching. Something one of the BoV members said really chilled me. He implied that online education could be a way to appease those calling for local students to have better access to UVa. My sense was that he wanted the campus to remain unchanged, while he offered the traditionally excluded communities (presumably including the black kids my colleague Bonnie Gordon has been working so hard to encourage to think of UVa as their university) an online education so they don’t need to be seen on campus. Well, that’s my take on his remark. Maybe he meant something else.

Before I began my fellowship, I was involved in setting up a doctoral programme in Digital Arts and Humanities at my home institution, University College Cork in Ireland. I am interested in digital scholarship, although I wouldn’t say yet that I do it. I do use a lot of digitised resources. I am a member of an online academic peer mentoring group, so I do see there are opportunities for online networking. I’m an avid user of social media (Facebook and Twitter) and I’ve found it really a great way of advancing some of my own research and developing my thinking. (This post started life as a comment on a Facebook page.) And I’ve watched lectures from iTunesU on occasion, too. But personal interest and professional development as something that enhances on campus development, research and networking, seems quite different from taking an entirely online degree programme, and that’s something I have not yet done. In case it’s not clear from what follows, I am not anti-online education per se. I’m well aware that it is possible to have an excellent online learning experience and a terrible on-campus learning experience. Both forms of education need to be excellent, and ideally they should complement each other (blended learning is all the rage in some quarters).

My prime concern is the perceived status at the moment of different forms of education and how that relates to social justice and privilege. I probably am being somewhat polemical.

Higher education in Ireland (where I’ve had most of my professional experience) seems very different from that in the US. My students have  ranged from school leavers to mature students, and includes those who entered our daytime degree programs via our adult education evening access program. Throughout my professional life (and in fact my student life), the majority of my students have been middle class and had a considerable degree of privilege. It could be a reflection of the kinds of topics I chose to teach (primarilly feminism, women, gender; my courses also commonly deal with issues of class, status, race), but many students in my physical seminar and lecture rooms in Ireland were juggling multiple responsibilities–usually a combination of two or more of work, young children, families with alcoholism, poverty, poor mental health, poor physical health including chronic and life-threatening conditions, family violence, and sick parents who need help to run the famiily farm. Some students needed a bit of understanding and some help to take advantage of the same opportunities as anyone else, as best they could, including the opportunity to connect with other students, potential employers, and academics. I’ve heard academics the world over complain about flaky students. In my experience, it’s not usually flakiness, it’s something like parenting while dealing with poor mental health, financial problems, and several generations of alcoholism in the family in a culture that believes these are individual responsibilities entirely divorced from systemic failures of society to provide and care adequately for all its members. I have watched students with these kinds of life difficulties graduate and go on to work or to postgraduate education. It can be done, given the right educational, social and financial support. At least until Ireland’s first emergency budget a few years back there were some supports in place (although not nearly enough) to help underprivileged and non-traditional students get a decent education and have an opportunity to access further/higher education. Sadly, state funding has now been axed at all educational levels (primary school through grad school) for programs that helped students with Traveler heritage, school students with English as a second language, students with disabilities; and because benefits (including child benefit) are being cut, students with children are having a tougher time, too. When I return, I wonder whether I will be teaching a student body as diverse as the one I left. (And the one I left could have been more diverse yet: not only was it very middle class, it was also very white.)

I remain deeply concerned that campus administrators and politicians see online teaching as a way to remove certain students from campus, get rid of a ‘problem’ student who requires a lot of support, and save money by axing the supports needed to help them succeed on campus. In order for non-traditional students to succeed on campus, there needs to be important changes in traditional education. Most times, these kinds of changes improve things for everyone. So, I’m not arguing for the status quo. I am arguing that there needs to be proper social, financial, political support for equality of access to education, and various support structures in place so that students from non-traditional backgrounds can complete successfully: in other words, meaningful social justice on campus.

Right now, it seems like online degrees are shunned by the traditional cohort of single, childless, able-bodied white men and women in their late teens and early 20s from well-to-do backgrounds, with neurotypical approaches to thinking and writing, and allegedly perfect mental health. (I could detour here to discuss the problems with normative masculinity and femininity, but I won’t.) So, the impression is that online ed is second best, because we don’t push the allegedly desirable students toward it. Students from non-traditional backgrounds, though, especially students with caring responsibilities and a job, are often encouraged to consider part-time online education as a solution to the very real problems they have, like finding time to get to a lecture hall. They might be able to find the time if there were adequate structures in place to help, like affordable, good quality child care on campus, a visiting carer to look after the elderly live-in parent, financial support, or day-release from work. I worry that at the moment there is a risk that such students end up in a kind of ghetto. The worst case scenario I can see? If/when online ed (such as MOOCs and so on) start making money, poor and disenfranchised students could effectively be subsidizing the campus educations of the privileged. Of course it doesn’t have to happen like that, and I don’t know an educator who would want to see that happen, but educators often aren’t the people making the policy decisions that ultimately entrench these kinds of social divisions. The prospect of online education becoming an excuse to exclude students from diverse backgrounds, with diverse sets of challenges from campus is very real. I don’t want campus to be a place for the privileged few even more than it already is. And idealist that I am, I can’t help thinking that perhaps Mitt Romney wouldn’t be so clueless about the 47 percent if throughout his life he’d been educated with people from diverse backgrounds and with diverse life experiences. And perhaps there would be more students from non-traditional backgrounds and more diverse students entering politics and so on if they had been able to meet, study and socialise with people with those kinds of connections. (Of course, I’m thinking of Bourdieu here.) Perhaps I’m naive and idealistic, maybe even a socialist feminist, but I certainly do not want to teach in such segregated environments. I’ll believe that online education has achieved equal status to campus ed when the likes of the Clintons, Romneys, Bushes, Kennedys, Heinzs, Haugheys, Aherns, Windsors, Blairs, Camerons etc encourage their privileged offspring to take online degrees instead of applying to top ranked universities. In the meantime, I will strive to make my campus university genuinely inclusive, and a place where people from all backgrounds and with all sorts of challenges can get an education and access the same kinds of opportunities side by side.

More on ImproTech Paris-New York

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Just a heads up: Han-earl Park has collected his live tweets from the ImproTech conference and gigs at freedom, machine subjectivity and pseudo-science: twitter transcript – io 0.0.1 beta++ and he will be following up with a longer post soon. There’s some consideration of historical context, politics of performance, as well as comments and questions about the techniques, performance styles on display, and on the presented papers themselves (e.g. George Lewis on imbuing machines with “integral subjectivity”). It’s certainly worth keeping an eye out for the follow up blog post.

ImproTech Paris/New York 2012 at the Roulette

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My blog has been a tad quiet recently. This was not entirely by choice, but I can’t go in to the reasons here. Anyway, I’m resurrecting it with a post that I wrote on 17 May. I haven’t gone through and edited my original text. What I’d want to spell out more clearly, were I to rewrite this, is that the problems I’m struggling with are in part (perhaps largely) to do with the conventional way of understanding the dynamics between performers and composers. In many cases, performers playing works written for them have lengthy conversations with the composers, and in fact make a substantial input into the piece. This can be recognised by composer, performer, and programme writer, or the piece can be performed and written about in a conventional way. Some of the performances I discuss below staged their creative work in a way that highlighted the collaboration and did away with the customary hierarchy of composer over performer. Others did not. And in the two performances that did not, there were very specific intersections of gender and race.

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Last night, I went to hear ImproTech Paris/New York 2012: Improvisation & Technology at the Roulette. It was a gig bringing together musicians from three institutions: IRCAM in Paris, New York University and Columbia University. The gig prompted lively conversation afterwards over a late night diner meal. (I could just have been hungry—it was almost midnight—but I swear the eggplant rollatini I had at the diner was the best diner food I’ve ever had.)

So, who played what? The line up was:

 

  1. Raphael Imbert: OMax at Lomax – Nine Spirit Company : Raphael Imbert, sax, Simon Sieger piano & trombone, Benjamin Lévy, Omax interaction, Thomas Weirich, Guitar
  2. Robert Rowe : Cigar Smoke (2004) for clarinet and interactive music system – Esther Lamneck, clarinette
  3. Steve Lehman, sax, live electronics, Mari Kimura, violin, live electronics, Vijay Iyer, Piano, Improvisation
  4. Jean-Baptiste Barrière : Crossing the Blind Forest (2011) for flute, live electronics and live video – Margaret Lancaster, flute
  5. Roscoe Mitchell, Saxophone, David Wessel, touch controller & computer , Improvisation
  6. Georges Bloch : Duck Laughs (world premiere) for percussions, preceded by Canaries by Elliot Carter – Laurent Mariusse, percussions, Georges Bloch, OMax interaction
  7. Bernard Lubat, piano, Gerard Assayag, OMax interaction, Improvisation
  8. George Lewis : Interactive Trio (2007) for trombone, two pianos and interactive music system – George Lewis, trombone, Geri Allen, piano
  9. Steve Coleman, saxophone, Gilbert Nouno, live electronics, Improvisation

(Source: ImproTech Paris / NYC 2012 Schedule)

 

I guess it was not a complete surprise to have so few women in the gig, although it was disappointing, particularly since public funding (from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche) went into the event; there were also private institutional sponsors.

What I want to think through here is not so much the gender imbalance of the gig in terms of numbers, but rather the ways in which gender and race appeared to intersect in some of these performances. I have more questions than I do answers. (Isn’t that always the way?) And I am sure there are other, perhaps more positive, ways to read this. I hope there are, because what I have come up with isn’t exactly heart warming and affirming.

Numbers 2 and 4 were a pair, in a way. In each, a white woman performed a woodwind instrument in front of several music stands. They appeared to be compositions rather than improvisations, although there could well have been moments of improvisation built in.  The electronic wizardry happened off stage: those performers (the composers?) were not visible. In each case, the women were the only performers on the stage. And they staged a particular kind of femininity. The notes they played were written by someone else (perhaps the music stand ‘stands in’ for the composer). There is doubtless a degree of agency in how they interpreted the scores, but in effect they were using their bodies and instruments to sound someone else’s compositional voice. (To my knowledge, there isn’t yet an adequate theoretical model to account for a performer’s input into a specially-written composition and/or a performance. Convention dictates that, even if the performers had substantial input, the concert programme identifies only ‘the’ composer.) And in each case, that person had written some kind of algorithm (I think) to take that sound and respond to it, sometimes with a kind of echo and reverb, sometimes with some more complicated process that produced contrasts rather than repeats. At some points, especially at busy, climactic moments, it became hard, even impossible, to distinguish the sounds coming from the clarinet or the flute from the processed responses, in effect merging the human and the digital into one. A kind of transcendental loss of the self, perhaps? But only of the female performing self: the composer self was controlling almost everything anyway, and already disembodied, invisible but audible. In #4, the embodied performer/disembodied composer had a different spin, in that the performer was also source material for live video, her face and upper body and flute appearing superimposed on to nature walks, including a close up of a tree trunk, and the whole subject to further processing, blurring so that just as the sounds melded human and digital, the images melded human and nature. And in this, I think gender is significant again: in Western societies, women are often considered to be closer to nature than men.

I found it very hard not to see these performances as reinforcing a particular set of binary oppositions, that woman = body, man = mind; woman = reproducer, man = creator; woman = nature, man = culture (or perhaps science, or perhaps technology; all of those work). The woman is visible, and yet is not always audible, often indistinct, with blurred boundaries.

The performer ostensibly generated the sounds, but they were composed by someone else: this is a kind of ventriloquism. The disembodied, invisible composer occupies the performer, in a way, which could sound kind of cool in terms of cross-dressing/trans-of-some-kind, except the performer’s self is subordinate to, subsumed/overwhelmed by the composer’s: it is an occupation. The electronics were reactive to ‘her’ stimulus. The electronic performer reacts to his sounds coming from her embodied instrumental presence. But these electronic systems did not appear to be interactive systems, despite the descriptions, since it seemed that the women were playing already notated music from which they could not deviate. They could not respond to what they were hearing. And nor could the algorithms deal with visual cues in the way that a live performer would. In one particularly memorable moment, almost at the end of the flute piece, the flautist made the most assertive gesture of finality, punctuating the end with her body, her head movements, only to have this ignored as the electronic sounds continued on, as if the performer and the physical stimuli she produced were utterly irrelevant. The performer finished and was flushed with the effort and the intensity; the disembodied performer kept going.

This is in contrast to the two ensemble improvisations with women, in which women had their own creative voices. Mari Kimura (#3) triggered her own live electronics, as did another member of the trio. All three improvised, interacted; all three were on the stage. Geri Allen improvised with George Lewis on trombone and an improvisatory system of Lewis’s devising which played the second piano. This seemed to actually interact—to respond to Allen and Lewis, and they in turn responded to it, just as an all-human ensemble works. No sign of a one-way relationship with the electronics. But it is possible my ears missed something. And in each case, all performer-improvisor-composers were on stage. Indeed, that was true of, I think. every piece in the concert save numbers 2 and 4.

I find myself wondering if it is any coincidence that the pieces in which the performer-on-stage is at times indistinguishable from the disembodied-performer-off-stage, where only the instrumental performer has a body but in effect has no voice, and the little she does is easily con-fused with the digital/electronic manipulation…. Was it a coincidence that those performers were white women, or appeared to be? Is this a kind of good girl white femininity being staged here?

What a contrast, too, with the Roscoe Mitchell/David Wessel duo. Both on stage, both embodied and apparently enjoying it, both improvising, and both interacting with each other: two way communication. (And I had no idea it is possible to circular breathe on the flute.)

Thomas Jefferson’s Soundscapes in Slate

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Congratulations to Bonnie Gordon (University of Virginia) for busting some Jefferson myths for a wide audience with her article in Slate on Thomas Jefferson: The sounds of Monticello, from patriotic songs to the slap of the whip. Great piece! Gordon outlines how Jefferson managed his sonic environment and his sonic legacy, if you like: how he muffled, or tried to muffle, certain sounds in his immediate soundscape, in his notebooks, and in his archive.

Takeaway point for me: silences in accounts, collections and archives can speak volumes if you listen.

Gordon organized two conferences at the University of Virginia on Jefferson and soundscapes. I attended one earlier this year.

The Politics of Preservation & Censorship

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'BnF: L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque, Eros au secret'

'BnF: L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque, Eros au secret' by Yann Caradec (y.caradec) on Flickr.

I’m accustomed to tales of librarians sticking up for our rights to read whatever we like. Attendees at the Music: Parts and Labor conference at New York University recently were treated to exactly that kind of demonstration, as Columbia University librarian and activist Aliqae Geraci discussed a variety of labor and access issues (including the move away from owning an item toward licensing of e-journals and e-books: when an item is only licensed, it can easily be removed without the purchaser’s agreement. And even open access e-journals/e-books, she suggested, still have problems, including the hidden labor involved in creating and maintaining them). I also remember the librarians sticking up for Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men in 2002. To be honest, it has been a while since I encountered a recent tale of library censorship, but it transpires that Florida libraries have removed an erotic novel from their shelves: Fifty Shades of Grey banned from Florida libraries (Guardian).

Libraries ‘protecting’ readers from encountering erotic material has a pretty long history. The l’Enfer collection in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France was created in the nineteenth century to make sure erotic materials could only be seen by those who would not be affected by them. (This is the odd thing about censorship: the censors look at stuff that they may then decide would deprave or corrupt others. I’m not a fan of pornography—much of it is misogynistic, and I don’t find misogyny erotic—but I don’t think the way to deal with misogyny is to sweep it under the carpet and pretend it’s not there.) Many books on historical erotic materials open with authors’ accounts of going to the BNF and being taken in to a private room (so they couldn’t corrupt other readers) and having to be supervised while consulting images, pamphlets, poems and books. But back in 2007/8, the BNF put on a public exhibition of materials from the collection, and the catalogue is still available.

The equivalent in the British Library is the locked case book. I read sixteenth/seventeenth century Italian editions of Pietro Aretino’s works that were treated like any other rare book: they arrive, you give your seat number when you collect the book, you carry the book back to your seat and work away until you finish. When I read a modern English translation of Aretino (from the 1970s or 1980s), however, it arrived in a locked case. I had to switch desks within the Rare Books & Music reading room so that the music librarian could watch over me; the issuing librarian brought the case over to me and unlocked it at my new desk. After that, it was the same. But it was really quite bizarre: you can order up any number of English-language scholarly books about Aretino or about eroticism, and even more recent translations don’t seem to be in a locked case, but this book, for some reason, was considered particularly precious. Perhaps it was the only copy left in the world, although I don’t think that explains the locked case since most of their rare books aren’t in locked cases. However, at least I could consult the book, which is more than can be said for Florida library users who want to read Fifty Shades of Grey.

Are Universities Learning from Wal-Mart? Adjunct Welfare, Tuition Fees & Budget Cuts

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The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article on people with doctoral degrees working as adjunct professors who have to claim food stamps to live: From Graduate School to Welfare. Adjunct professors are members of contingent faculty (that is, not on a tenure track or permanent contract) who are paid to teach by the hour, usually just for a few hours a week. Usually their contracted hours do not meet the minimum to qualify for employment benefits like health insurance and pension schemes. According to the Chronicle,

some leaders of scholarly associations … are surprised to hear of graduate-degree holders being on public assistance.

James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, said in an e-mail that he consulted with his staff, and “nobody has ever heard of this among our members or other historians.”

“No e-mails, no postings or tweets,” he wrote. “That doesn’t mean it’s not out there. It just means that historians on public assistance have not crossed AHA communications.”

Perhaps the reason few scholarly societies are aware of this phenomenon of adjunct professors on state support is that if things are so financially tight that you are claiming benefits, you may well be prioritizing meeting your immediate, basic needs over being a member of your professional association. Also, since adjuncts do not normally have any say in university governance (that would require them to be paid to attend meetings), their voices are not heard around those tables, or while walking back to offices afterwards. (Many adjuncts don’t have offices to walk to.) It strikes me that maybe people haven’t thought this through; they just haven’t done the math. The article cites shame as the main reason colleagues and academic societies don’t know about this problem. Rosalind Gill suggests that ‘financial hardship can be masked – and rendered difficult to speak of – by academics’ educational and cultural capital’ (page 8 of the PDF of her article ‘Breaking the Silence’). So, in the spirit of helping to dispel shame and speaking out, I’ll share some of my experiences.

For me, adjunct teaching was a temporary situation, a stepping stone in to a full-time, permanent academic post. Before starting my PhD, I’d worked full time for just over two years. I started out doing various kind of temporary office work, then got work as a legal secretary in a Fortune 500 company. I knew being a full time university student was going to be tricky financially, but I had some savings, as well as funding that covered my tuition and paid a stipend, so I wasn’t unduly concerned. During my PhD I successfully applied for different sources of funding. Things were tight, but I did ok. After submitting my PhD, and for the months between finishing my corrections and obtaining a permanent job, I qualified for and claimed housing benefit. At that stage, our priorities were keeping a roof over our heads, feeding ourselves, and paying our bills. My partner had private pupils. I taught tutorial classes for two different courses in my graduate school, sang with a small professional choir, and worked part-time in the university library. That library assistant job required school level qualifications (GCSEs, if I remember rightly) rather than a PhD, and it was paid accordingly. (As it happened, many of us working those hours had postgraduate degrees, which meant that library visitors could get quite a bit of research help on a quiet evening: a bonus both for the person needing help, and for the library. The people who were stiffed were those of us with advanced research skills being underpaid and, worse still, those people with GCSEs as their highest qualification who couldn’t get a library assistant job because of all the underemployed PhDs applying for them.) And I enjoyed my work: all of it. In addition to my paid work, I did unpaid community work. I volunteered as the newsletter editor of a local sustainability organization, and joined a group campaigning for our city to become a fair-trade city. I gained valuable skills from all of those experiences, and I enjoyed working in all those different environments. Nor did I feel personally disrespected. In theory, I could opt in to a pension scheme (I did not: eating was more important), and my salary included a certain amount added on as holiday pay. I no longer remember the rates of pay. What I do remember is that those were very difficult times financially and I don’t think I could have coped another year. My partner and I only managed to survive that period of underemployment with the help and support of friends and family, an understanding landlord, and the state. The state helped me get my PhD, and then helped me through stressful times immediately afterwards, and I’m very grateful. I worked my way back up to (and beyond) the salary I had left.

Hourly paid teaching on insecure, fixed term contracts is a long term employment situation for some. Universities increasingly rely on adjunct faculty work because it is cheap and flexible. Contracts run only during the teaching year—no need to pay people in the summer months when there’s no teaching—and the contracts are fixed term, usually for one year at a time, so if demand for a course changes, the contract isn’t renewed and there’s no need to pay compensation. (There are local variations depending upon employment laws.) Adjunct lecturers don’t get paid for teaching preparation, which can take upwards of two hours for every one hour of contact time (newer courses need more prep, and of course, prep starts in the summer so that the syllabus is ready by the time term starts); they often don’t get paid extra for grading; they don’t get paid to deal with course-related student inquiries; and they don’t get paid to research. Most do undertake research—they need to do it in order to be able to teach their subject well, and besides, research is essential to land a tenure track/permanent post—but they aren’t compensated for it. In the US, many institutions do not offer adjuncts and other contingent faculty any employment benefits like an institutional health insurance plan and pension, thus saving further on costs (and making things harder for the contingent faculty member). And most universities do not offer their adjuncts continuing professional development opportunities. So, it’s no surprise to me to find that many adjuncts do not earn a wage they can live on. Moreover, adjunct professors are unlikely to be the only group of university employees eligible for state support: I was an hourly-paid assistant lecturer and a university library assistant when I claimed housing benefit; I’m sure there are many other groups whose hours and wages are low enough to land them in the benefits office.

The situation of employees with part-time hours and terrible benefits who need welfare to live might sound familiar, because it’s how Wal-Mart runs its business. Of course there are important differences, both in terms of profit margins (Wal-Mart makes a huge profit; universities do not), and in terms of the employees’ situations. As Robert Pankin and Carla Weiss point out,

compared to other part-time workers, part-time faculty are  better educated, experience job instability due to changing conditions in academic labor markets rather than in the larger economy, and have marginal status among their colleagues although they command full status from students. The position carries some prestige and recognition compared to other industries where the part-timer is a marginal worker.

A wide range of people choose to become adjuncts, and there is a corresponding range of responses to the experience. There are positive stories over at Adjunct Nation (e.g. P. D. Lesko and Randy Eldridge), and there are also stories of disrespect, desperation and alienation, as well as poverty. Some, like Dr. Anna Tarrant in England, may have the opportunity to move from adjunct teaching to longer fixed term research contracts: no longer adjunct professors, but still part of the contingent workforce. Pankin and Weiss find that those most likely to be distressed by their situation are those who earn all their income from adjunct work:

The group that sees part-time academic work as most problematical has been labeled “freeway flyers,” those who juggle several part-time jobs at more than one institution in order to make a living…. Part-timers who want full-time academic careers derive less satisfaction from college recognition. They are more focused on the job assignment (teaching) and are detached from the academic community. They have less formal contact with other faculty. On the other hand, part-timers experience less role conflict and job stress than do full-timers.

There are some pluses to adjunct positions. They may be a way to bring people whose main work lies off campus in to the university—people who work full time, or pretty much full time, as lawyers, architects, therapists, musicians (who are accustomed to a portfolio career)—which can enrich the curriculum and the student experience. However, that adjunct teaching is a choice that some relish and that may have some benefits does not make everything all ok. One of the consequences of underpaying adjunct professors is that only those with other sources of support—a partner in full-time employment, say—can keep it up for any length of time. Underpayment, like unpaid internships, may serve to keep certain people out of academe altogether.

And there are consequences for the permanent/tenure faculty, students and the department, too. When full time ladder faculty leave (even temporarily on research contracts, like me) and are not fully replaced, or when student numbers go up but there is no corresponding increase in ladder faculty, the ratio of students to ladder faculty changes. And while adjuncts mean the student population can stay high, that change in ratio means ladder faculty workload (especially pastoral care and student-related admin) increases. The faculty then have less time available for research and teaching and…. Well, you get the picture. In most universities, adjuncts and fixed-term contract staff cannot be primary supervisors of research students because the university cannot guarantee that person’s contract will be renewed for the duration of the doctoral degree, so departments find themselves with fewer faculty to attract doctoral students in the first place. Planning ahead and making curriculum changes is hard when a department doesn’t know whether staff numbers will be the same from one year to the next. It can be difficult to experiment with new approaches to teaching if the professors delivering the courses are not being offered appropriate development opportunities and training. (The American Association of University Professors has identified a wide range of difficulties contingency can cause all flavours of faculty and institutions.)

Why the move to contingency? I assumed it was a result of funding cuts: when governments/states reduce the amount of money they invest in higher education, employee wages and benefits go down, and tuition costs rise. However, ‘diminishing investment in education‘ is also the result of management decisions to allocate more money to building projects than to teaching. Rosalind Gill (PDF) situates these developments within the context of changes in the creative world and university structures—within the ‘neoliberalisation of the work place’ (18). She also points out that many ladder faculty, who may have done a spot of adjunct work on the way to a full-time, permanent academic post, are complicit in the casualisation of academic labour.

The link between states cutting HE budgets and tuition rises is pretty clear. Students end up paying more for their education directly rather than paying indirectly through taxation. Not long after I arrived in Los Angeles in 2011, the University of California announced it would raise tuition fees to close a $1 billion budget shortfall. Students understand the challenges, and they protest the situation nonviolently. Last year, their protests were met with violence by campus police at UC Berkeley and at UC Davis, where non-violent protesters were pepper sprayed directly in the face. (The response both that day and in the following days when the UCD Chancellor walked to her car through hundreds of silent students was very powerful.) In Ireland, the state currently pays the tuition fees of a first undergraduate degree. Students do have to pay a registration fee which rises annually and the state sets the upper limit (and presumably universities lobby hard behind the scenes). The 2012 budget increased the maximum registration fee by €250, from €2,000 to €2,250. In 2010 in England and Wales, the ConDem government decided to phase out the teaching grant for arts, humanities and social science subjects. Fees have gone up (trebled, in some instances). Institutions that only teach arts subjects, like art and music colleges, are left in a particularly difficult situation without any state teaching support at all.*

A recent recruitment advert by the Royal College of Music may be the first indicator that English and Welsh institutions may respond to uncertainty by hiring contingent professors. The RCM intends to hire hourly-paid professors for various duties including postgraduate research supervision. Moreover,

as hourly-paid professors of the RCM, successful applicants would be expected to keep informed of developments within the relevant curriculum area both nationally and internationally, and would be encouraged to undertake research in areas consonant with the College’s research strengths.

The emphasis on research and the opportunity to supervise research students suggests to me this is a slightly different kettle of fish from the hourly-paid ‘stepping stone’ internal appointments filled by doctoral students and very recent graduates, and the hourly-paid positions that bring professionals in to the classroom as part of their portfolio career. In particular, I’m concerned about the ramifications for the graduate researcher. What are the ethical issues of hiring someone on an hourly basis to supervise a research student? How will it work? Does the professor bill by the hour, so that when the student needs more support, they get it? Or will professors be put in a situation of having to decide between telling research students they’ve had their quota of supervisory contact this month and simply going beyond their contracted hours? Will an hourly-paid professor be able to attend a research student’s conference presentations and give feedback? (I know even when the supervisor is full time, sometimes things come up which make it impossible to attend a conference. But as a general principle, faculty support their grad students by attending their conference presentations. And in my experience they often support their graduates that way too: if you’re reading, thank you!)

There’s a lot more to be said on the changes in higher education, but not by me just now. Professor Caroline Fennell, the head of my college at University College Cork, has shared her musings on the changing face of academic life in Ireland. There’s a really good analysis of the end of the public university over at Inside Higher Ed. I thoroughly recommend Rosalind Gill’s reflective essay: it’s worth linking to a third time.  And thinking more generally about hiring practices, I encourage you to look at J.P.E. Harper-Scott’s blog and help with his inquiry into unusually specific academic job ads.

What are your views/experiences?

 

* Can anyone can fill me in on developments in Scotland? I only found old info from 2004, and this 2008 piece on commuting to England for better pay. My own experiences as an undergraduate are rather out of date now. And what about other countries?

Cleaning up

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Sarah Werner has posted the text of her paper at the recent ‘Geographies of Desire’ conference at the University of Maryland: where material book culture meets digital humanities » Wynken de Worde. It’s a really useful overview of and reflection on the utility of digitized versions of early books and digital aids for studying books. Apparently it is possible to measure dirt on manuscripts:

 

One recent paper about the use of densitometers to study levels of dirt on the pages of medieval manuscripts suggests that we can learn about book usage through analyzing how and where dirt is distributed across a book. It might seem obvious that pages that are used more often will be dirtier, and that is in part what the author found, but the use of the densitometer revealed that it’s more complicated than we can always assess with the naked eye. The paper’s author, Kathryn Rudy, points out, for example, that she had assumed that two different patterns of dirt on an opening came from two different users, but the densitometer’s analysis suggested that the patterns were similar enough that they were likely to have been made by the same person—perhaps they held the book in different ways suitable for different prayers. The analysis also pointed out that even books that retain visible marks might have been cleaned by modern owners to such a degree that the dirt is no longer viable as an analytical tool, something that might help us think about the changes books undergo during modern ownership.

That reminded me of the controversy over Thomas Jefferson’s little-used sheet music at the Soundscapes of Early America conference at the University of Virginia that I mentioned in my previous blog post. I wonder if densitometers might be useful there, too? Although to be honest I think there’s so much at stake in that debate that any kind of analysis is going to be controversial.

Reflections after Soundscapes of Jefferson’s America

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Morris Dancing in Charlottesville, VA.

Morris Dancing in Charlottesville, VA, April 3, 2012. Snapped with terrible camera on my phone.

 

I spent the last few days of March and the first few days of April in Charlottesville, Virginia, attending a two-day conference at the University of Virginia on the Soundscapes of Jefferson’s America, organised by the ever energetic Prof. Bonnie Gordon and her stimulating and equally energetic grad students (high energy must be a UVa recruitment requirement). While I was there, I guest taught a grad class for Bonnie (I think I probably learned more from the marvelous discussion than anyone else did), sat in on one of her undergrad classes (a lively and enjoyable conference debriefing), and met up with a UCC graduate Sarah O’Halloran who is now a UVa Jefferson Fellow working on her doctorate in composition. I would like to thank UVa Department of Music, particularly Bonnie Gordon and Prof. Richard Will, for giving me such a warm welcome and generously including me in the conference hospitality. I learned such a lot from the people I met, and I hope we can stay in touch. I really enjoyed my brief time in such a vibrant environment. I also thank Bonnie’s family for putting up with me for almost a week.

It was a particularly interesting time to be talking about the use of sound to create racialised experiences because the complex history of slavery and racism that I heard about that weekend, and interpretations of the US Constitution, lies behind so many then-current news stories—the lynching of Trayvon Martin for walking while black, for example, and the murders by police of Dane Scott Jr., and Kenneth Chamberlain, an elderly veteran who was shot and killed in his own home. I’d suggest there may also be racist and sexist thinking behind the attempts to limit women’s access to contraception and abortion: rich women may be able to buy their way around those limits (paying the full price for contraception, and traveling for abortion services if necessary [that is what happens in Ireland]), but poor women (of all ethnicities and races) are hit with a double whammy. And that touches not only every heterosexual woman who is sexually active before menopause, but also any woman who takes contraception for other reasons, as Sandra Fluke reminded the House Democratic Steering & Policy Committee back in February. What these forms of discrimination have in common, it seems to me, is a return to a narrow definition of ‘men’: men as Thomas Jefferson at the time of the Declaration of Independence seem to have understood it: wealthy, land-owning, adult, white males, rather than men in the expanded notion that means US people of all ethnicities and races and sexes and abilities. That is, an individual killing a young black man for being suspicious, the state’s initial failure to charge and prosecute that murder; a state’s murder of black men even outside of the ‘due process’ of trial, verdict and death penalty (moreover, as many death penalty abolitionists point out, black men make up disproportionate numbers of those in prison and on death row); and a state’s requirement for unnecessary penetration of a woman’s vagina removes each woman’s right to determine what happens to her body (since she is not even asked to consent, she no longer has full rights over her body: the state is claiming rights over her body—and slave owners like Thomas Jefferson claimed rights over their slaves’ bodies, male and female: how much choice did Sally Hemings really have when it came to bearing TJ’s children?)…. All these actions suggest that, to certain conservatives, only elite, white men like Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and other male former GOP candidates for nomination, are entitled to bodily integrity, autonomy, subjectivity, personhood, and constitutional rights. In effect, there is an attempt to scale back the advancements that recognize all US citizens and residents as ‘men created equal’ with ‘certain unalienable rights’ including ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’.

So, what follows is a brief ‘review’ of some of the papers from the first day that really stuck in my mind. It’s by no means comprehensive and I haven’t tried to summarise every single paper. I intend to write a future post taking in the concerts, and the second day of the conference, but that’s going to take me a little longer still. (Although I’ll try not to do that at such great length.)

The conference has an associated exhibition, Sound in Early America, curated by Bonnie Gordon, Amy Coddington, Stephanie Doktor, Emily Gale, Courtney Kleftis and Gretchen Michelson. It is on display in UVa’s Small Special Collections Library until 20 August 2012. Their close examination of Thomas Jefferson’s music library invited conclusions that have caused controversy in some circles. While TJ’s daughters’ music was used heavily, the violin music does not look like it has ever been played and that casts doubt on TJ’s reputation as a violinist.

Bonnie Gordon’s introduction set the tone of the conference: this was to be no Thomas Jefferson love-in, but rather a critical evaluation. Gordon’s paper was so rich I can’t do it justice here, but three points Gordon made about soundscapes at TJ’s home, at UVa and in present-day Charlottesville particularly stuck in my mind. Thomas Jefferson lived in a large house on a hill, Monticello, carefully oriented so that he and his family were not disturbed by the existence of their plantation slaves; Bonnie memorably argued that the careful design and the plate glass windows were equivalent to noise-canceling headphones. The architecture and landscaping was soundscaping that blocked out the sounds of his slaves housed out of sight at the bottom of the hill. And as Bonnie notes, the University of Virginia and Charlottesville more generally are not exempt from a racially charged sonic history. As Gordon noted, the bell that called privileged young white men to their higher education also sounded to exclude slaves and former slaves. Henry Martin, who rang this bell on the hour, every hour, from 4am until 10pm, was himself a freed man.(1) In effect, Martin was a tool of the institution and spent his life re-sounding his exclusion, except for one day after the Civil War when students silenced the bell by cracking it. Finally, Bonnie noted that this history of segregated sound worlds persists into present-day Charlottesville. Inadequate public transport links, among other structural inequalities, make it hard for those living in predominately African American neighbourhoods to get to the main music institutions. And live performances of hip hop are just not heard in Charlottesville.

A couple of days after the conference, I was walking through Charlottesville and came across the morris dancers pictured above, their bells claiming a sonic presence in the town that it seems is not available to other groups. And the historical significance of tying bells on bodies varies by community: for these men, perhaps it is a way of sounding their connection to a long-standing European folk tradition. But bells on bodies could mean something entirely different: slaves were sometimes braced or welded in to ‘ponderous’  with bells so they could be heard if they tried to escape.(2)

That detail came from a book co-authored by the second conference speaker, Prof. Shane White. White spoke about the kinds of noises that Jefferson excluded from his house: the sounds of slavery (the title of his book, in fact). These ranged from plantation bells, the crying of people whose family were sold away, the sound of vicious beatings, baying dogs, as well as sounds that slaves made for themselves to commemorate the dead, to celebrate, to entertain. (Themselves and their owners: Sally Hemings’ sons played dance music for TJ’s daughters.) Slave masters had varying responses to the music produced by African American slaves and in African American churches: some were intrigued, others dismissed it as noise. And there’s plenty of evidence that the white perception of African American music as noise persists into the present. Jazz may have become America’s classical music, through a process Jeff Farley examines in a freely-available paper, ‘Jazz as a Black American Art Form: Definitions of the Jazz Preservation Act’(3), and President William Jefferson Clinton could play jazz saxophone at one of his inauguration balls, but that wasn’t always the case, and some outgrowths of jazz (and I know I’m stepping into a contentious area here) are rejected as too noisy by the jazz mainstream and too ‘jazzy’ by the mainstream (if that’s the right word) of experimental music. I’m thinking here of free jazz/free improvisation/creative music in particular, but Farley suggests various fusions of jazz with pop/rock also upset the Jazz Police (the latter not Farley’s phrase). This is just one example: as George Lewis asserts, ‘virtually every extant form of black music has been characterized as “noise”.’(4)

Prof. Mary Hunter (Bowdoin) gave a brilliant paper on the work of Thomas Jefferson’s daughters. Hunter pointed out that there are real problems with simplistic notions of amateurism and professionalism, and music was women’s work even though they were not paid for it. TJ’s daughters, and no doubt many women like them, practiced daily and felt guilty if they didn’t do their work. The music written for them gave them an opportunity to show the fruits of their labour (‘It’s no accident that I play this passage correctly three times in a row; it’s the result of diligent work.’), and to display their bodies. And in this regard, it turns out women rubbed almond paste into their arms. Apparently almond paste is advocated by some today as a skin whitener. If that is what it was for back then, I would guess that accentuating pale skin would further highlight the ‘refinement’ of being able to spend most of one’s time indoors and out of sunlight.

Richard Will, with the aid of some students, gave a lively lecture-recital arguing on Scottish song as America’s national song. The thing that really interested me about this, as a Scot, is that I didn’t know any of the songs (maybe one; I don’t now remember) that were the best known songs in Virginia and America at that time, even though several Americans in the conference audience knew the songs. I’m not sure whether that was because I’m not a huge folky, or whether that’s the difference geography makes. Anyway, I was really taken with Ellen Randolph Coolidge’s description of encountering ‘a sweet Doric’ in her visit to Scotland. I know the Doric as the dialect spoken in the area I grew up in—I used to have a few words of it myself. Yet Coolidge seemed to be using it to describe the probably quite well-to-do accents of those she met in Edinburgh. This seems to a different usage from that current in Scotland at the time, when the Doric was a term used to describe the dialect spoken by low-status country dwellers.

Prof. Sophia Rosenfeld (Virginia) gave an excellent talk on ‘Atlantic Revolutions and the Right to be Heard’. This was about the relationship to the French Revolution and who gets to talk in parliament/national assemblies. Again, this has contemporary significance, since the ability to speak and to be heard is something that people have been thinking about quite carefully in the Occupy movement.

In many ways, the conference, even though it was ostensibly about the past, really connected to current political events as well as to current scholarly debates. And that is one of the things that made it such a successful and exciting event.

 

References

(1) On Henry Martin, see this fascinating roundtable discussion from UVa earlier this year. It’s well worth the hour. The final three panelists share important critical insights into the stories told by and about Martin, the politics around his life and his commemoration by UVa.

(2) Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery (Boston, MA: Beacon Press 2005), 6.

(3) Jeff Farley, ‘Jazz as a Black American Art Form: Definitions of the Jazz Preservation Act,’ Journal of American Studies 45 (2011): 113-129.

(4) George E. Lewis, ‘Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in “Voyager”,’ Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 10 (2000), 33-39: 34.