a thaumaturgical compendium

Another one to add to the list of things to recommend grad students to read: Naomi Chana’s experience on the other end of the interview. It’s really hard to get this across to students hoping to break into academia: everyone who gets an interview is drenched in credentials, to a greater or lesser degree. It’s the intangibles that make or break that interview.

Naomi does a good job at making those intangibles a bit more tangible here, and her observations mesh well with my experience on a hiring committee last year. Most of all, you are trying to figure out who will make the best colleague. You would think, given how hard it is to specify this, that a committee would disagree on who this person is. While there are disagreements, most have an intuitive feel for who will fit well within the department.

There’s no trick to succeeding in this process, unless it is this: act like a faculty member when you are a graduate student. Don’t put off “until you have a job” things you want to do. Except for a reversal of cash flow to the university, the conditions are very similar. But if you see grad school and academic career as somehow discontinuous, they probably will be.

I’m not much of a hard cider drinker. I’ve had draft ciders on occasion, and although they were an enjoyable change of pace, I was never overly taken by them. On the advice of friends, Jamie recently had a Woodchuck Amber, and thought it was pretty darn good. But, you know, you never really know if something like that is a fluke: that you have conflated having fun with friends with the taste of the beverage.

So, we were at Wegmans, buying last minute bits and pieces for Thanksgiving, and remembered that (due to very silly New York laws) we couldn’t pick up any wine. Now, it turned out that we had two very serviceable bottles of chardonnay at home, but we didn’t know that, and so we decided to pick up a six pack of Woodchuck. My family sometimes had Martinelli’s sparkling cider at Thanksgiving dinner when I was a kid, and I was a particular fan, so I figured this would be a suitable replacement.

Buy was I right. This stuff is absolutely wonderful. I can’t say enough good about it. Unlike some ciders, it is still very appley, it’s not too bubbly, and the alcohol adds to the taste rather than overwhelming it. Go and pick up a six pack, and see what I mean. (No, not all at once. That’s not what I was saying.)

(As always, this is an unpaid endorsement. But I would never turn down a free case, if it showed up at my door.)

The number one post-graduation employment in our major, retail. That’s something we don’t advertise much. It’s not entirely our fault. Communication has traditionally been a catch-all for business and computer science drop-outs, as well as the sustaining academic wing of the football team on some campuses. On the other hand, I am perhaps the worst defender of our undergraduate program. I would never want my own kid to go through our program, and if you look at where our faculty send their own children, you’ll find I’m not alone. We don’t do professional preparation—because we’re a “research” institution—but we also have students who have never had to write a full paper in their undergraduate careers.

Oops, got a little off track there. A solid minority of our undergraduates end up in graduate school, many of them in law schools. I just ran into this Advice for Getting Into Law School, and I’m linking it here as a reference for undergrads who read my blog and may be thinking of law. I’m not sure I agree completely with it (for example, if you are admitted to Harvard Law, you borrow the tuition, because you know you will earn it back), and it lacks a criticism of the LSAT, but it does give some pretty solid advice for students coming from large, public universities who are interested in getting into a good law school.

I should note that especially in today’s market, a good law school is important. Our local school has dropped precipitously in national rankings lately. Those rankings may have nothing to do with the quality of the program, but they do have something to do with potential employers’ perceptions. While most law graduates still find jobs, it is not always the kind of work they had hoped they would be doing, and it is not always law. Right now, there are more law graduates than there are new positions, so you should consider law only if you think you’ll like doing it (that sounds obvious, but it doesn’t seem to be) and if you think you will be a very successful law student at a decently ranked school.

In dealing with states that are outright criminal, the United States may at times need to take unilateral action to protect its citizens, its interestes, its integrity. This need not take as dramatic a form as our invasion of Panama and arrest of General Manuel Noriega, though it would be unwise in dealing with criminal states to rule out that option a priori.

– Senator John Kerry, The New War, 1997

If the title isn’t enough of a notice, I’ll state again, that this is a section in a chapter where multilateralism is noted as an important way to go. But if you are wondering why it was so easy for so many in the senate to vote in favor of an Iraq invasion, it’s worth considering that many of them were on the same page before 9/11. That is, it wasn’t just an irrational hyper-nationalism brought on by the attacks.

Pictured to the left is the Kirtas APT Bookscan 1200. The “1200” refers to the number of pages it can scan in an hour. Automatic page turners and book scanners have been a longheld interest of mine. Check out their site and watch the demo video. The process itself seems like one that is simple to create, but very difficult to master. Elsewhere, it has been suggested that such a machine costs in the range of $150,000. That’s a lot of mastery.

It also inspires a certain Erector Set-perspective. A sucker and a fluffer could be put together with some tubing and a few case fans; the turner could be jury-rigged with some stepper motors and a track; all that is left is a mirror and a 3-4 megapixel camera. 1200 pages an hour is probably over-ambitious, but a tenth of that might not be. Besides, building it would be half the fun!

My mother’s dissertation was published as one of the first ebooks from Columbia University Press. It is called Like Wheat to the Miller: Community, Convivencia, and the Construction of Morisco Identity in Sixteenth-Century Aragon. A recent review in the American Historical Review has this to say:

The title of Mary Halavais’s impressive first book refers to a protest that the city of Teruel made to the Inquisition in 1484. Deciding that they would not submit to inquisitors who had just arrived with plans to begin an investigation of their citizens, the town council sought to explain their opposition. “The Holy Father and the King Our Lord are millers,” the council stated, “and their ministers are those who bring the wheat to the mill, and the city is the grain to be milled, and there is good reason for the grain to know whether it will be milled, or threshed, or what will be done with it” (ch. 1, epigraph)....

Halavais skillfully organizes ten well-written chapters to support this argument… Challenging common assumptions about diversity and community, Halavais provides an important piece of the larger puzzle of how diverse people lived together and what changed their relationships in the early modern period. She and the Gutenberg-e project of Columbia University Press deserve congratulations for publishing such a fine contribution to historical scholarship.

Nice going, Mom! I’m going to have to get cracking if I want to keep up :).

Academic libraries are the walking dead. I just got booted out of ours at six, and it won’t be open tomorrow. They close early on Saturdays, too. Our library seems closed, of course, whenever I seem to need it. They even seem to turn off their servers many nights, for reasons that are entirely beyond me.

This is in contrast to my undergraduate days, when the library was often open 24 hours. You could (and I and others did) count on the library as a place of last resort if you couldn’t find a place to stay. And when, at 3 am, you needed to find a book, you could find your way to the brightly lit building on campus, trudge in wearing your sweats, and become enlightened.

I used to get a little thrill when I could find an article online. Now I get dejected when I can’t.

Students cannot find things in the library. Even when they go through the mandatory classes, they still draw almost all of their sources from the Web. I used to have a problem with this, but recently I don’t. (I do have a problem with their ability to identify good sources, but that’s another animal that is increasingly divorced from the physical library.)

Libraries cost too much. While the rest of the university’s funding is getting cut, libraries continue to require more funding to collect less. Moreover, space remains one of the dearest resources on a university campus and open stacks take up gobs of space.

In the long run, libraries are dust. I know that seems far-fetched, especially as Alexandria is being rebuilt. I also know that the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated. But I see little chance of their survival—at least in current form.

In the medium term, what replaces the library?

a) Print on demand. We are one of the minority (I believe) large state universities that still offer free, unlimited, printing. This mostly occurs within the libraries. The vast majority of people who are “going to the library” are headed there to print something. Often, these are articles put on electronic reserve for them. The step from this to high-speed printing and binding services that also provide books, is for now one that is only hindered by the publishers’ ability to maintain the current system at a profit.

b) Kozmo libraries. The model of closed stacks is hardly new. What happens when you can deliver books within minutes or hours to a patron. If a book is in the closed stacks, it is retrieved by a robotic system (much like a tape robot) and delivered to the patron read to be read and returned or already-checked-out. If it does not happen to be in the local collection, it is loaned from a partner library and automatically put on a truck for next-day delivery. Those who do not need the book immediately place the order online and have it delivered to their office door or mailbox later that day. Sound expensive? It is; but far less expensive than other solutions. Moreover, it builds upon existing delivery networks.

Of course, closing the stacks means that it is more difficult to browse the shelf; but as Amazon has recently shown us, there are alternatives.