Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Dennis Baron on Blogs

Dennis Baron’s Web of Language delivers reliable, humorous, and sometimes controversial commentary on language in the news.  A thirty year veteran of teaching, Dr. Baron is currently a Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He was kind enough to agree to an email interview about Web of Language, blogs, and aspects of adjuncting.

You have been writing and publishing Web of Language for several years now.  How do you see this as contributing to your professional development?  Or do you do this for personal pleasure and satisfaction?

I’ve been doing WOL for just over a year.  I have always looked at—and commented on—current issues in language, writing about them in more traditional forms of academic research (scholarly books and articles) and also in other forms designed for more general readers, such as op eds, and so blogging is a logical next step. But I initially did it as part of a project on the impact of technology on writing.  I wanted to see how blogs worked, so I could write about them.  And language was something that I could blog about.  I continued to do it because I can’t help myself—it’s become a passion.

The role and value of web-based writing—especially in blogging—in professional development does not seem very clear at this point.  Some departments recognize it while many do not.  Do you recommend that young or new adjunct faculty pursue such projects?  How important is this, relatively speaking, when compared to attending conferences and publishing?

So far, my blogging (remember, I’m no Matt Drudge, and that’s probably a good thing) draws some professional attention from colleagues around the country, but no professional “rewards” in terms of having it count for much outside of public service teaching.  But blogs are only one kind of web-based writing.  English is slow to move to online publishing compared to other disciplines (medicine and science seem far ahead in doing this).

Do you see the kind of writing you do at WOL as a viable and useful mode for adjuncts?  Or should they spend their time on other forms of professional development?  Put a different way, is there any kind of online writing you would recommend to adjuncts?

That depends, as all writing does, on the writer’s goal. If the goal is to find a professional outlet for ideas and discussion, then blogging is a fine way to do that, though I have found that few readers respond to my blog posts, in part, some tell me, because they are required to respond with a verifiable email address and many respondents prefer anonymity, particularly those whose responses are off-the-wall and over-the-top.

If the goal is to secure a tenure track teaching post, or to build a resume, then no, blogging does not seem to fit those goals, at least as it is currently viewed.  I myself wish it might count more officially, not because I do it (I do it, as I have done a long series of radio commentaries in the past, and as I have written op eds for newspapers, as a way to connect the academy with the public beyond it, and as such my own blog serves an outreach and public service function, as well as a teaching function).

Indeed the tendency in the academy, especially in the traditional fields, is to be skeptical of the blog as a form of discourse, because it is viewed as non serious and therefore something a true scholar would avoid.

I disagree, however.  And I intend to teach a new course this summer which will involve students in blogging on language in the news topics.

I also teach a unit on the blog in my history of writing technologies course, treating it as a new genre that has coalesced in the past decade. I find the blog to play off such forms as the diary, the belletristic essay, the op ed, and the billboard, but it is different from all of them, not simply because it is digital, inviting multimedia and interactivity, but also because it occupies its own niche in the worlds of discourse.

What do you think newer instructors should remember when they start using blogs in their classroom?

That depends on what purpose they’re supposed to serve.  Since I haven’t actually done this yet, I can only say what I think I want to accomplish, and that’s:

a. to have students writing blog posts on language in the news as a way of getting them comfortable with discussing language and public policy issues which they locate for themselves and explore

b. to have students comment on one another’s blogs—as well as my posts—to get a conversation going

c. to look at the blog and examine it as a new kind of writing genre, from the point of view of the writer, the reader, and also as an observer of the phenomenon of blogging.

Do you have a favorite lesson or application of blogging that you care to share with readers?

Some of the posts on my blog draw some pretty rabid responses. I don’t print these, in part because I don’t enter into public conversations with nut cases—I’ve found that’s a losing proposition.  But what I do is collect these rabid responses (they tend to be rants against immigrants, or angry teachers saying I know nothing about the classroom, or vigilantes who think I shouldn’t be allowed to teach).  And what I write is pretty tame, considering what’s out there in the blogosphere!  My students find these amusing, and scary, as do my colleagues.  I try to shrug off the wilder criticisms, but there’s something unnerving about getting anonymous hate mail in response not just to posts defending multilingualism or assuring readers that immigrants pose no danger to English, but also to nonpolitical posts saying that punctuation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, or that there’s nothing really wrong with splitting infinitives.  Seems like, when it comes to language, lots of people are spoiling for a fight.

How have your students responded to your use of blogs in class?

Well, they occasionally do comment, sometimes even comment favorably, on the posts.  But I don’t impose the posts on the students—I don’t assign them as reading for the class, though I occasionally mention them when they’re on a subject we’re covering.  I do assign them other essays that I’ve written, ones a little more in the scholarly essay mode, so it’s not out of modesty that I haven’t made my blog the center of the course.  And in the course I’m planning, it will be the students’ blogs that will be central, not mine.

Your wife, Iryce, has been an adjunct for a number of years now.  You have an inside view of adjuncting professionally and personally.  When people are offered tenure, what aspect of adjuncting do you think people forget first?  Why do you think this happens?

I spent a year as an adjunct, early in my career (but after I had held a couple of tenure track positions). And my wife has been adjuncting for 20 years or so.  So it’s not so easy to forget how adjuncts feel about how they’re treated (and when I am in danger of forgetting, she is always quick to remind me).  What’s most visible to me, though, is that in real terms—or dollar terms—adjuncts spend as much time as tenure-track faculty on their job, but typically teach more classes for scandalously low pay. 

As a tenured professor, what lesson or lessons of value do you draw from such an intimate view of adjuncting?

In addition to equitable pay and humane treatment—both of which are all too rare—it’s important for those who adjunct long-term to have a career path to prevent such appointments from becoming dead end academic McJobs.

You mention equitable pay and humane treatment as key issues for adjuncts.  When it comes to reforming the use of contingent academic labor, what issues do you think should be tackled first?

Renewable appointments (with a system for professional development as well as performance review and evaluation by mentors); equitable pay; upgraded working conditions; establishing a formal role for adjuncts within a department’s structure (membership on committees, voting rights) that is also accounted for in the salary structure (no point assigning committee work if you pay a pittance or don’t listen to an adjunct’s concerns and advice).

Is there an aspect or two of adjuncting that you wish you had but cannot because you are tenure track?

Do I long for the good old days of not knowing where or whether I would teach, of not having my own desk, let alone my own office, or being able to choose my own books? Or having colleagues who act as if I were invisible?  No.

Is there anything you would care to add?

One of the things I’ve seen that puts adjuncts at my institution at a disadvantage is that while graduate students may unionize under Illinois law, adjuncts can’t do this very easily, as the law is currently structured.  I’m not sure whether this has been a problem for adjuncts at UIUC, but it is potentially inequitable, and organization could certainly be a way of making this important group of instructors visible to the university administration—and to one another across departments.  Humanities adjuncts tend to be treated very differently from those in the sciences and engineering, or the professional schools, but in many cases they—and most other people as well—are unaware of the disparities in pay and working conditions that pertain. The university won’t address this as an institutional problem unless it’s forced to, it seems to me.  I think it’s important for adjuncts to take up this matter.

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