Caveat Lector

Honest to Pete, you’d think a remedial-Java programming assignment was the end of the world, the way some of my classmates treat it.

Do I need to manage my buffer size to avoid the input file overflowing memory, asked somebody. Yeah, like the professor has time to sit there cackling at the carnage while twenty-odd student programs bring the JVM crashing down one after another. Puh-leeze. (And what is a guy who worries about buffer overflows doing in remedial Java, anyway?)

Then later they jawboned her into letting punctuation as well as whitespace be word delimiters. By that time I’d already turned my assignment in. Did I redo it? Did I hell. Sure, I could have. I have better things to do with my time, thanks.

Yesterday’s pop quiz was an exercise in how often we could be tripped up by sneaky little “features” of Java. I got all but one; not too shabby. We discussed Big-O algorithm analysis, which is conceptually rather nifty, but whose details (ugh, sigma notation, shoot me now) lead me to believe that a lot of “rigorous” software analysis boils down to not much more than the traditional Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.

There’s a guy in the class who will not stop staring at me. It’s not that I’m the only one with girl-cooties, either; there’s six other women in the room, not including the professor. Nor is it my stunning animal magnetism. I don’t have any. I’m the oldest and fattest woman in the room, and the homeliest to boot.

He just stares. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s that I don’t keep my mouth shut? Now that I think about it, mine is the only female voice I’ve heard in class (aside, again, from the professor’s). Eh, well, whatever. I just wish he’d cut it out.

A few months ago I had a shot at an invited speech, with attached honorarium. It fell through, which didn’t surprise or perturb me; the event in question is a high-stakes, high-visibility thing, so why would they take a chance on a newbie librarian with nothing to recommend her but some disreputable blog?

Dance, Ivan Tribble, dance while you can, laddie. I haven’t been pretending that CavLec is my ticket to fame and fortune. I’ve got two conference presentations, a professional-trade magazine article plus sidebar conference review (forthcoming), and at least one book review (book is on its way) to my credit for this calendar year, plus a book chapter (already written) and half a reference-book contract (argh, must get going on that!) to tally for next year. One of my conference presentations is getting a translation into Portuguese (and no, I’m not doing it; my Portuguese is far too rudimentary and rusty for that). I been busy.

Last week, it so happens, lightning struck. Twice. I now have two invited speeches on my calendar, and one of ’em’s even international! And both the folks who invited me, not to mention the person who asked me to write the trade-mag piece, said that they were long-time CavLec readers and that CavLec had had an influence on the decision to approach me.

Let’s be clear once again, I do not intentionally use CavLec as a professional tool. You won’t find it on my CV, not now and not ever. I never ever bring it up with professional acquaintances who don’t already know about it. If somebody comes to my door on account of CavLec, it’s not because I set it up as a red carpet.

And yet it is one, for a few people, all in spite of its style, content, and frankness. That’s something. Still dancing, Ivan boy?

I mean, if CavLec is all you know of me, why on earth would you think I can write something professional? I left an offer out of my tally above, a “wanna write a book?” offer that came about because my book chapter found favor. That’s the way things are supposed to go. I prove I can write right, I get asked to write more. CavLec is, shall we say, not exactly proof I can write right. (Oh, and I declined the offer, with sincere thanks and a “keep me in mind.” What I have to write about right now doesn’t quite fit with the book model of publication. In five years, things may well be different.)

I got a book out of the library the other day that was written in a style not too dissimilar from CavLec’s: Pip Coburn’s The Change Function. I dumped it on my return stack without making it through the introduction; the style was frankly grating, graceless and condescending self-puffery. I expect a little gracelessness in a blog; it even adds spice. In a book? No, thank you.

I can write professionally, even though it’s not my native or my favorite register, and I think the stuff coming out soon will adequately demonstrate that. Those of you who have been paying close and careful attention to CavLec (all three of you) may even have noticed that I have retuned my posts on open access to a much more professional and less, well, CavLeccy pitch. That was a conscious decision, made because I know how often my open-access posts are getting cited on Open Access News, outside those posts’ context of standard CavLec snark, and I feel I have a certain duty to represent the side with a little more than my usual grace.

Still and all, even before most of the professional writing I’ve been doing saw the light of day, CavLec picked me a couple of ripe, juicy plums. Maybe Ivan Tribble’s right, and a blog is a death-sentence for an academic career, but Tribble could never prove that off me.

Somewhere there’s a tattoo artist who does “Perpetual Student” with all the appropriate flourishes. I won’t say I don’t deserve it, because come Tuesday I’m starting courses again.

Nobody panic, it’s just nondegree info-systems stuff (and likely pass-fail to save the lecturer some grading), because I’m tired of not having all the clues I ought to. Besides, this clue-gathering is free-as-in-beer because it’s a job perq, so I’d be silly not to let MPOW buy me a clue.

Applying for admission, even for nondegree student status, is as much of a stupid bureaucratic farce as ever, I must say. Why hasn’t anyone come up with a secure electronic transcript request/fulfillment system yet? I’m tired of filling out stupid forms and paying ridiculous amounts of money for something that should be as simple as I web-form a request to OldSkool, OldSkool crypto-signs and sends the transcript to my school, my school decrypts with OldSkool’s public key, end of story. Bah, silly systems. Relying on paper in this day and age.

I happened by Timothy Burke’s place and found this post with which I wholeheartedly agree. Go read it. I’ll wait.

As is widely known, I’m an irritable sort, but very little irritates me more than watching people go mindlessly off to graduate school and end up no more fitted for the job market than when they entered, no matter whether they graduate or wash out. I’m not even all that concerned about skills; it’s the sense of entitlement and the cluelessness that make me climb walls. This is the trap New Librarian was in. I wish Dr. Burke had written that post years ago, I do.

Personally, I’ve used Routes 1, 2, and 4. Route 3 isn’t quite my style (and Dr. Burke is right that if it’s not your style, don’t try to fake it), and nothing I’ve ever done has been bad enough to even approach Route 5.

I got yet another email about the grad-school story from a matriculating graduate student who said jubilantly, “Now I don’t feel stupid for having a backup plan!” Seems her adviser had pooh-poohed the effort of creating one.

If I could get to that adviser and fire him or her out on his/her unethical butt, I would so very, very do that. It is not cool to tell impressionable youngsters that Grad School Is All You Need, because that is a flat lie. It is cool to be realistic, as Dr. Burke and some other recent email correspondents from faculty ranks have been.

I’m in the middle of another sprinkle of grad-school–related email. (I suppose what must happen is that other sites add a link to mine and I get a brief surge of readership, whence the bunched-up email.)

Honestly, it’s gotten to where I almost have stock responses. Not sure what you’ll do outside grad school? Go find out. Not sure if you should go? Don’t. (That simple. It really is. If you’re not absolutely dead certain you should be in graduate school, it is to your considerable advantage not to go.)

And then I get people who are in graduate school, want to leave, but are afraid to. The story I got the other day in email (which I won’t detail) was a real heartwrencher.

If you ask me, this paralysis is the worst stage of the decision to leave academia. Sleepwalking zombiefied through life is—well, it’s closer to undeath than life.

I’m starting to have stock answers for this situation too, though. “But I’ll have wasted all that time!” Yep. Sunk costs. Move on. “But I won’t be able to afford it!” So racking up more grad-school debt is going to help? Move on. “But I don’t have any job skills!” And grad school isn’t giving you any. Move. The hell. On.

They’re like cats in doorways, these people who email me. Not much I can offer, sympathetic though I am, besides a swift boot to the butt.

When I crawled into the campus counselor’s office at last, a mind-fried wreck of a thing after four years of the Department from Hell, even then I had to repeat several times that I needed to leave graduate school before the counselor would believe me. It was the decision his skillful handling led me to make; it just wasn’t the decision he wanted out of me.

Apparently I’m just that much everyone’s notion of an academic. I don’t find this flattering any more. Or funny. I just want academia to give me up for saved.

I will enter classrooms again. No doubt about it. Too much to learn, not enough time to teach myself. I will never darken the door of another degree program. It just won’t happen. Academia’s eaten over a quarter of my life as it is, and let’s just not even talk money and opportunity cost, hm? I have other and better things to do now.

(Yeah. Over one-quarter. Three and a half years of undergrad, four and a half years in the Department from Hell, two years in library school. I’m 33. Do the math. If you’re not appalled, you should be. I am.)

And I’m certainly not going to do it merely because other people think I belong. That way lies madness. I know; I went that way once, and duly went mad.

So it’s time to attack this pernicious idea from the other direction. Time to figure out just what it is that makes people slot me into their mental “academic” slot, and change it.

I’m starting to think it’s my eccentric, sometimes stodgy, sometimes ’70s-boho fashion sense. That’s not changing, because I like what I like—but I might be able to cross it.

David suggested hot-pink hair. Hot pink isn’t quite my thing, I fear—but I’m strongly considering streaks of Kool-Aid blue. Eat that, academia.

“We’re getting a Ph.D program in linguistics,” a colleague said to me at lunch the other day.

“Oh, are we?” I said mildly. “That’s nice.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d be interested.”

“Me? Uh, I’m not, not so much, no. If I’d wanted a Ph.D, I’d have stayed in Madison and gotten one in LIS.”

“Oh.” He sounded vaguely disappointed. “Well, you can’t go and get another master’s. Three looks suspicious.”

Bwah? What is it with people telling me I need to pile stuff higher and deeper? I like my job. I like my profession. I like my life. Why would I go ruin all that in a Ph.D program? Why?

I’d sooner take up bungee jumping, and I don’t like heights.

For the record, I should say that I was wrong that in the library world, a Ph.D fits one only for teaching in library schools. The other thing it fits one for, it seems, is running large academic libraries. If you’re going to run with the big boys, you need their union card.

Yes, all right, so perhaps some of my colleagues have a notion of grooming me for management. Go me; since I took this job, I have been working hard on my project-management and people skills, knowing those to be weaknesses of mine, and apparently I’m getting somewhere.

But with all due respect to the Big Boss at MPOW, he doesn’t make his job look like a whole lot of fun; the layer underneath him doesn’t seem so bad, but it also doesn’t require a Ph.D. So if I have to give in to the sirens in order to rise to a job I don’t fancy, then the glass ceiling (and librarianship does have one) is going to have to be broken by some other broad. Include me out.

I got a request yesterday to write another recommendation, er, “evaluation of teaching” for tenure at SLIS. I’m working on it; this one’s a little trickier than the last.

The process illustrates the give-and-take between student and teacher. The two professors I’ve been asked to recommend (and both have been mentioned by name on CavLec, though that’s all the hint I’m giving) are the two I was most impressed with at SLIS. No surprise that they trust me, even despite my well-known ire at academia, not to stab them in the back.

Which I didn’t last time, and won’t this time. I still haven’t heard about the results of the last go-round; how the heck long does the tenure-review process take, anyway? If I were the prof undergoing it, I’d feel more than half-dead by now.

Got another email today from a soon-to-be ex-grad-student. She sounds like she’s going to be okay, and I do not just say that because I like it when people tell me that reading my story helped them. Some of the people I hear from, I worry about—not that there’s a whole lot I can do for them. Her, I am not so much with the worrying.

Last week at work, a colleague stopped by my cube and was kind enough to examine the Wall O’ Diplomas (for which I thoughtfully designated the wall that someone coming into my cube is least likely to look at). He asked me about my history, and I used one of my usual terms for my first try at grad school: “crapping out.” When my colleague looked dubious, I amplified to “crashed and burned.”

“So there wasn’t any problem with the department?” he asked.

“Oh, the department was hell,” I said.

“Then it wasn’t you just crashing and burning,” he said, in the tone of one who is settling the question.

Gotta love that. There isn’t enough of it.

I find myself re-evaluating what stance toward academia I can take that would be most helpful for the people I care about—and to be perfectly clear for those who aren’t already trying to straighten out ears I’ve bent on the subject, that’s people who are trying to disentangle themselves from graduate school struggling with feelings of failure and hopelessness. I don’t give the tiniest wraith of an echo of a damn for the institution of graduate school. I want to limit the damage done to attriters, is all.

(I have been mistaken for a reformer. I’m not one. I actually despair of reform.)

Pretending nothing happened to me is pointless. No, harmful; the email I get announces with force and clarity that people in those straits value a story that feels like theirs. And even as the damage is healed and the worst of the memories recede, it would be foolish of me to rewrite my life story to minimize or obscure those four and a half years and their aftermath. Everything changed about me because of them, so much that I have trouble imagining what I might have been otherwise.

I like to jostle people out of their notions about attriters. I use the terms I do about my experience partly because they’re the bare truth, but also because I can say them with a great big cognitive-dissonance-causing grin. This is good for people in the middle of the maelstrom who can’t imagine ever smiling about it. It’s also good for people who sneer at everyone who’s been battered by the rapids. It’s a lot harder to sneer at someone who refuses to look appropriately shamefaced.

But dangers lurk on the other side of the equation, too. As I start settling into my new career, getting comfortable, picking up a few successes (and I landed a conference proposal and a book chapter last week, so I’m doing okay here), I can imagine being slotted into the “rule-proving exception” cubby. You know. The person who succeeds despite not playing by the advancement rules. The one they whisper about… “well, you know, she didn’t finish grad school; isn’t it great she got so far?”

At its worst, this constructs me as the baby with the caul, the charmed life. Either I’d be thought of as too good to fail (unlike your ordinary schmo, who’d better hustle through that dissertation), or it’d only be a lucky accident that I am where I am.

I don’t hold with either of those constructions of my story, because they’re flatly untrue, and they’re just not useful. Nothing charmed about me (and certainly nothing charming), and I’m nobody’s notion of genius aflower, either. And the people I want to reach don’t need a fairy-godparented orphan girl or a pedestaled hero; they need a scabby-kneed urchin with a gap-toothed grin to look them in the eye and invite them into the street to play.

It’s a weird road to walk sometimes. I don’t always do it with grace, which should surprise no one, as I can’t achieve grace consistently, or often at all. I do find that it helps to know why I construct it the way I do, though.

Just as well I enjoy proto-librarians, because I ran into yet another one at this week’s chorus rehearsal. Nice woman, as overeducated as I am, looking at going into academic librarianship.

So we got to comparing our programs (seeing as how I’m a recent grad and all), and it turns out that several of her courses have been abysmally taught. This is no great surprise to me; so were a number of mine. And another no-brainer: the worst-taught courses are the so-called “core” courses.

I really hate to say it, but this appears to be a library-school universal. I’ve never heard anyone express unequivocal satisfaction with the core courses in their librarian education. And before anyone asks, yes, we understand that pedagogical quality is going to vary, and that we’re going to like some subjects more than others. I’m not talking about ordinary vagaries of teaching here; I’m talking about library schools falling down on the job. Classes that suck, rather than merely not rocking.

Which class gets the most complaints? Well, in my school it was “Organization of Information,” and my interlocutor at rehearsal agreed about her school’s variant. The person who taught me this course was pleasant—and completely clueless. Why, after all, should she have a solid understanding of the subject matter? She does statistical research into software usability and design. Frankly, except for the MARC bits, I could almost have taught that course better at the time I was taking it.

Some schools (such as my interlocutor’s, apparently) have revamped this course to toss a bunch of IT concepts in, and that is helping not at all, given the average tech-savvy of your average LIS faculty member… so much is it not helping, in fact, that my interlocutor said of her course, “It makes me really scared of taking a course in databases or web design.”

Insert horrified shriek here. I hope I changed her mind, but I’m not sanguine.

No bloody wonder librarians can’t, don’t, and won’t code. The precise course that ought to give them confidence in handling digitized information (be it in MARC, XML, an RDBMS, some combination of the above, or something else entirely) is driving them away from it in droves because of heinously poor teaching.

Oh, and before M-ch–l G-rm-n or his pet bullyboys get all up in my face, let me just point out that this same course is typically the prerequisite for cataloguing, so if it’s taught poorly, the librarian world ends up with fewer cataloguers. (And judging from the job postings I have been monitoring for New Librarian, that doesn’t seem to be so far off from the truth.)

In library schools’ defense, these Info Org courses are viciously hard to teach. It’s a lot of material, some of which is banal memorization (yes, I can recite the main Dewey and LCC divisions from memory, how about you?), and much of which exercises modes of thinking that are new for most non-geeks. Scary bad combination.

Moreover, if the teacher doesn’t understand the technologies to be taught (hush; MARC is a technology too, folks) well enough to get across why they exist, what problems they solve, how they think about their problem domain, and how we need to think about and use them in order to get our work done—well, how can we expect proto-librarians to?

And library schools are also fighting against the research-faculty grain to get coverage for these courses at all. Or they’re turning to guest lecturers who are practitioners, which sounds like a fine idea but has the bad habit of crashing headlong into a busy practitioner’s Real Job. I heard a hair-raising story about this at rehearsal: a course with no assignments, no papers, no projects, no tests, no evaluation whatsoever because the guest lecturer was too busy with the Real Job to grade anything.

There’s no easy answer. Honestly, though, my reaction now is the same as it was when I was taking the courses: get the core stuff taught and taught well or stop pretending to be a library OR info-sci school. All of this poseur nonsense helps nobody.

This is not to say that I disagree with Andrew Dillon and April Norris’s conclusion that the G-rm-nesque “library education crisis” is a trumped-up pile of baleful bile, because Dillon and Norris are quite right about that. By and large, library schools are at least interested in teaching the right stuff.

They’re just not interested enough to get it taught right, that’s all; and buried at the end of their article, Dillon and Norris say in a pianissimo whisper that they agree with that assessment.

Speaking of Andrew Dillon (who has a new blog, by-the-bye), I’ve been reading and enjoying the second edition of Designing Usable Electronic Text and wondering why I’d never seen the book before.

The conclusion I came to is that the book makes a lot of people uncomfortable. (So it’s only natural that I’m loving it, eh?) It makes researchers uncomfortable because it isn’t afraid to point out that the emperor of digital text usability research is naked as a jaybird. It makes practicing text artisans uncomfortable because hell’s bells, we aren’t even paying attention to the little research that there is. It makes librarians uncomfortable because… well, librarians are always uncomfortable.

And it makes M-ch–l G-rm-n uncomfortable because of its spirited, drily funny defense of human-computer interaction as a worthy—indeed, necessary—topic of inquiry. G-rm-n, you see, would prefer not to admit that humans interact with computers at all… never mind actually programming the beasts.

Which brings me neatly back to my post title. Librarians can’t code because too many librarians and library schools have their noses so far up in the air about computers that they are neither recruiting coders (which is purest, sheerest madness—why are we not using the exodus of women from comp sci to our advantage?) nor creating them.