On Tuesday, September 4th, we had an FSG planning meeting. Although not everyone could attend, we went ahead and brainstormed/rehashed a few ideas for our events this fall. It would be really great if we could use the comment section under this blog entry to discuss and respond to those ideas, so we can get started setting some plans into action. If you have other ideas that aren't listed here, please put those in the comments, as well.

Potluck! We're looking at Sept. 21st or 28th as possible dates. What do you think? More info coming soon on the listserv.

Last fall, The FSG had a grad student panel called "Feminism in the Classroom," which was really well-attended and interesting. We would like to do something similar this semester, maybe with a more specific focus. The two ideas we tossed around were:

Authority in the Classroom—Catherine B. brought this up at last year’s potluck. It would be a panel about teaching, particularly addressing the ways that we establish authority as grad student teachers and deal with conflict or confrontation in our classes.

Maintaining Public Spaces in Grad School, like Broken Eggs and Chez Cal--Every once in a while, we're reminded of the issues inherent to the shared spaces we use in our department and on campus. This would be a panel about the ethics and practical concerns regarding "policing" these spaces and using them effectively.

If you have thoughts on one of these panels, please be sure to comment below.

Fathers Version of the Academics and Parenting panel: We had a really successful panel on parenting last fall, but it was an all-woman panel, and several people expressed an interest in doing one for fathers this year. Lydia W. is sounding out interest in the panel in our department and among the grad student parent community, but we definitely know that some professor-fathers are interested. What do you think?

Mentor Panel—We've talked before about setting up a panel about mentorship, possibly with some grad student mentor pairs and professors who are involved in mentoring. At this meeting, we talked about tabling this idea for a little while and seeing if people are interested. What do you think?

Finally, last year we hosted a presentation from the Gender and Sexuality Center called LGBTQ 101. As we look toward the spring, we would like to look into having more educational programs from groups on campus. Any ideas?

Really finally, Kate has posted some open thread type entries on this blog about the first year of grad school. If you have the time to scroll down and check them out and add to the comments, that would be great.

Thanks so much to everyone who made it to this crazy meeting and to people who emailed--I'm so sorry it ended up being weird in time and location! See everyone at the potluck! And in the comments section... :)

--Layne

I just came across these pointers by Gerald Graff and I wish I had seen them when I started grad school. This is exactly the type of professionalization information that needs to be provided to grad students but is usually left unsaid (at least in my experience). He talks about this problem in another article, "Two Cheers for Professionalizing Graduate Students" in the same issue of PMLA. I hope this helps other people!

Do's and Don'ts for academic writers

from Gerald Graff, "Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty." PMLA 115: 5 (October 2000), 1050-1.

1. Be dialogical. Begin your text by directly identifying the prior conversation or debate that you are entering. What you are saying probably won't make sense unless readers know the conversation in which you say it.

2. Make a claim, the sooner the better, and flag it for the reader by a phrase like "My claim here is that [. . .]." You don't have to use such a phrase, but if you can't do so you're in trouble.

3. Remind readers of your claim periodically, especially the more you complicate it. If you're writing about a disputed topic (and if you aren't, why write?), you'll also have to stop and tell readers what you are not saying, what you don't want to be taken as saying. Some of them will take you as saying that anyway, but you don't have to make it easy for them.

4. Summarize the objections that you anticipate can be made (or that have been made) against your claim. Remember that objectors, even when mean and nasty, are your friends--they help you clarify your claim, and they indicate why it is of interest to others besides yourself. If the objectors weren't out there, you wouldn't need to say what you are saying.

5. Say explicitly—or at least imply—why your ideas are important, what difference it makes to the world if you are right or wrong, and so forth. Imagine a reader over your shoulder who asks, "So what?" Or, "Who cares about any of this?" Again, you don't have to write in such questions, but if you were to write them in and couldn't answer them, you're in trouble.

6. (This one is already implicit in several of the above points.) Generate a metatext that stands apart from your main text and puts it in perspective. Any essay really consists of two texts, one in which you make your argument and a second in which you tell readers how (and how not) to read it. This second text is usually signaled by reflexive phrases like "I do not mean to suggest that [. . .]," "Here you will probably object that [. . .]," "To put the point another way [...]," "But why am I so emphatic on this point?," and "What I've been trying to say here, then, is [. . .]." When writing is unclear or lame (as beginning student writing often is), the reason usually has less to do with jargon or verbal obscurity than with the absence of such metacommentary, which may be needed to explain why it was necessary to write the essay.

7. Remember that readers can process only one claim at a time, so there's no use trying to squeeze in secondary and tertiary claims that are better left for another book, essay, or paragraph or at least for another part of your book or essay, where they can be clearly marked off from your main claim. If you're an academic, you are probably so eager to prove that you've left no thought unconsidered that you find it hard to resist the temptation to say everything at once, and consequently you say nothing that is understood while producing horribly overloaded paragraphs and sentences like this sentence, monster-sized discursive footnotes, and readers who fling your text aside and turn on the TV.

8. Be bilingual. It is not necessary to avoid academese—you sometimes need the stuff. But whenever you have to say something in academese, try to say it in the vernacular as well. You'll be surprised to find that when you restate an academic point in your nonacademic voice,the point is enriched (or else you see how vacuous it is), and you're led to new perceptions.

9. Don't kid yourself. If you could not explain it to your parents or your most mediocre student, the chances are you don't understand it yourself.

None of what I have said in this essay should be mistaken for the claim that all academic scholarship can or should be addressed to a nonacademic audience. The ability to do advanced research and the ability to explain that research to nonprofessional audiences do not always appear in the same person. To adapt a concept from the philosopher Hilary Putnam, there is a linguistic division of labor in which the work of research and that of popularization are divided among different people, as Friedrich Engels was rewrite man for Karl Marx. Yet even Marx's most difficult and uncompromising texts have their Engels moments—Engels could not have summarized Marx's doctrine if they did not. In short, it is time to rethink the view that the university is not in the gist business.

Spring 2007 Planning meeting – 21 January 2007

• At the meeting today, the current planning committee (Layne, Marcee, Erin, Lydia, Kate, Stephanie, Emily, Jessica) mostly went back over the items we had talked about back in December, and signed up for different committees/activities. Here’s what we came up with:
• Send out email to Broken Eggs about FSG (Did someone sign up for this? If not, want to?)
• Send out a short email about the group, activities/projects, and listserv/blog information
• Mentor committee (contact Marcee Monroe)
• Getting feedback from mentors/mentees (Stephanie)
• Talk to Kevin about making the mentor program a permanent part of the orientation, and sending out information/survey/blog address in the initial new student packets (Erin)
• Panel at the ALG symposium
• First weekend in March
• A panel of speakers will present at the symposium, with the goal of presenting an overview of how we started the group, what kinds of panels/activities we have done, and the opportunity to have a roundtable about what other kinds of issues/activities the UT English Grad community would like to see
• Write up proposal (Layne)
• Potluck (contact Emily Bloom)
• Tentatively scheduled for April
• Liaise with WGL faculty
• Informal Mentor roundtable/happy hour (Stephanie/Erin)
• The point of this would be to gather the mentors (and mentees?) to talk about our experiences as mentors, and how we could improve the program (what worked? Didn’t work? New ideas?)

• Several of the items we talked about relate to ongoing projects, and different people volunteered to keep those going:
• Lydia: send out an email to Broken Eggs asking for tips for students on the blog
• Family Matters Panel follow-up (contact Erin)
• Melanie as liaison between students and faculty
• Changing tables
• The future goals are at the end of the notes
• A day in the life project
• Send out specific emails to gather examples
• Email Broken Eggs
• Put on blog?
  

• Projects for the Fall:
• Mentor panel (with faculty and mentors)
• Another panel about feminism in the classroom/what to do when you have trouble in the classroom?
  

FAMILY MATTERS PANEL – Friday, November 10, 2006

Panel members: Dr. Lisa Moore, Dr. Elizabeth Scala, Sara Sliter-Hays, Melanie Haupt, Dr. Beth Hedrick

The panel began with Professor Lisa Moore, who has two young children. Her advice is:
- Don’t plan too much
- She was glad that she waited; postponed until tenure
- Mentioned the Teaching Continuity Rule (A Texas law that no Tx state employee can take maternity leave)
- Recommended using the institution as much as you can, take advantage of all the resources available, don’t expect less for yourself because you have children
- She emphasized that you won’t be exempt from the pressure to feel like a “bad mother” or a “bad academic”
- Don’t be afraid to shamelessly enjoy being a mother, being an academic, or to shamelessly enjoy being both
o Sexism is responsible for our feelings of guilt for occupying these multiple positions
- Take advantage of the control you have over your schedule as an academic
- Don’t get talked out of that → feel lucky!!

Liz Scala spoke next. She also has two young children:
- She spoke about having children before tenure, and thinking you know everything you want and realizing you know nothing”
- A consideration when looking for jobs if you are thinking about having children pre-tenure
o A big department (like UT) = more flexibility
- You can plan things all you want, but it doesn’t always work out, “expect the unexpected”

Sara Sliter-Hays, a graduate student in the English Department, spoke next. She focused on the financial aspect of having children as a grad student:
- Comparison of the benefits found at other universities and at UT:
o University of Wisconsin: 9 daycares (all different kinds, such as drop-in, sick care, scheduled care, etc.), childcare stipends, funding for families
o University of Michigan: $2000 stipend for one child, $3500 stipend for two children
o UT daycare is more expensive and offers less services
o A&M’s daycare is less expensive than UT’s, which shows that UT fails to measure up even within the Texas State university system
- She emphasized that in asking for better benefits, graduate students are not asking for more than they deserve
- Other universities realize that this is a problem, and have put a lot of money and effort into these issues

Melanie Haupt, another English Department grad student, spoke next. She focused on her experiences here at UT:
- There is no place to pump or to change diapers
- Meetings, events, lectures, and potlucks all take place that span of time in which parents are picking up children from childcare, eating dinner, bath time, and bedtime
o It is hard for mothers to be collegial because of this scheduling; they miss out on opportunities to be collegial and to network
- She found helpful professors and a supportive graduate community indispensable

Professor Beth Hedrick spoke last. She focused on how to work efficiently with young children:
- Take advantage of the flexibility an academic schedule offers
- Faculty can apply for sick leave, but the attitudes within departments vary (some are supportive of one taking sick leave, while other departments look down upon t as unprofessional – example: some departments believe that sick leave is for when you are actually sick)
- When to have kids? You can wait, but infertility is also very real
- To get your work done, you must become more efficient
- Time management:
o Things you never thought you could do with a 2 yr. old – a lot of things!!
o Things you thought you could do with a two year old but can’t
•Mostly thinking and writing
o You get really good at using little scraps of time here and there
o Advice: Big projects take longer chunks of time at the beginning, when you are getting started. So, either start a big project, get it going, and then start a family OR Start a family, get used to it, then start a family

QUESTIONS:
- How to reconcile disapproving families with ambition/teaching/having children?
o (Lisa) It’s important for your children to see you disproving and working against this
o (Liz) “Contribution to community, state, and nation” – a part of the tenure application – you can think of yourself as fulfilling this by having children
• This is your personal choice, and having children can affect your career in POSITIVE ways
- (NY Times article) What about the opt-out revolution?
o (Lisa) The Mother Dance is a book that discusses getting husbands to do housework and childcare
o (Beth) Sharing childcare and household duties becomes a game of chicken: Who can stand it the longest? It requires an unbelievable amount of self-monitoring to be shared equally.
o (Melanie) Every time you come up with a system that works for you and your partner, the pattern changes and the routines have to change, and you have to create a new system
o(Sara) I decided to take a short leave. Sometimes leave can be detrimental.
- Is this something to bring up when on the job market?
o Don’t bring it up at MLA
o Things ARE changing, though.
o It is illegal for a hiring committee to ask you if you have children.
o Wait until the job has been offered, then negotiate.

To hear from others on this issue, check out a link recommended by Professor Diane Davis:

FUTURE PLANS AND GOALS
- Within the department:
o Install baby changing tables in restrooms
o Making the locked room available to students who need to pump or breastfeed
o Creating a grad student liaison between student parents and the department to let new parents know about these kinds of resources (Melanie expressed interest in this)
o ask Martin Kevorkian, Dan Birkholz and some grad student dads to 
organize a panel for men
- Within the greater student body:
o Contact the Graduate Student Welfare Committee:
o UT can do more about childcare, but there needs to be more pressure
o Getting involved in creating room in the new Grad Student Activity Center
o Contacting Tom Dison, who runs Rec Sports, about creating/providing room for mothers who need to pump
- Contact (or start?) some kind of larger UT parent association (across departments, for faculty, grad students, and undergrads)?
o Collection of statistics: How many women are currently breastfeeding? how many people at UT have young kids? Need daycare?