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Wednesday, April 14, 2004
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SUMMER'S LEASE HATH ALL TOO LONG A DATE
Your bloggeure will now ask you to believe that her summer vacation has almost begun. There's only a week or so of class to go until the end of the semester. Final exams and papers remain, to be sure, but teaching is about over, and instructors at UD's university are preparing book orders for September courses. Professors who, like me, don't teach during the summer, have many months of freedom ahead. Like most of my colleagues, I'll spend these months working on manuscripts, preparing for fall semester courses, talking to scholars who share my interests (I had lunch yesterday with a Fulbright researcher from Russia who's writing the first book in Russian devoted to the American novelist Don DeLillo), and reading. But I'll also take long pleasant trips, linger over the brewing of the perfect pot of "Creme Brulee" tea (a flavor I just discovered, available at Tealuxe.com, the online shop of a tearoom in Cambridge Massachusetts whose dim interior is indistinguishable from the interior of the fabled Mariage Freres tearooms in Paris), stare into space, etc. It amazes me every year, this remarkable freedom. I do not take it for granted. The president of UD's university testified before the US Senate last month (it's less impressive than it sounds -- one senator showed up) to argue for a revolutionary change in the academic calendar. He pointed out, reasonably enough, that university facilities sit idle, costing money and generating little revenue, for long stretches each year; and he proposed that UD's university be a kind of pioneer for the nation's higher education institutions in forging a new academic calendar in which classes would pretty much be in session all year. Professors would still have time off from teaching, but all of them would, for instance, have to teach summers on a pretty regular basis. The president's effort to entice my university's faculty into trying this schedule has already failed. Although I said on the questionaire we were all given that I was willing to accept a change of this sort, most professors totally rejected the idea. So I suppose our president at that point decided to go national. He's also done something less radical in the short term: we now have as many Wednesday/Friday classes as Tuesday/Thursday. This annoys the faculty as well, since professors want two day (or one day) a week classes, and they want them to be on Tu/Th ideally, since that frees up weekends on either side. I know of plenty of professors who show up on their campuses only one day a week. I often show up only two days a week. A M/W/F schedule is felt as an ultimate punishment, like being banished to the isle of Elba. [A joke currently circulating among academics: "What's wrong with Wednesday classes? They spoil two perfectly good weekends."] All of this is one reason why the evil on-line people are having so much success with their plot to abolish the physical university altogether. On-line courses generate revenue anywhere, anytime. You don't have to coax a computer to come in and teach a course on a Monday or a Friday. Professor Online can drink tequila, play with himself under a palapa, and teach Pascal all at once. |