LAHC Dean's Blog – Page 2 – dispatches from the dean

Degrees of Freedom

Degree plans appear to be innocent administrative devices; let’s talk about subtexts.

I served as department chair for many years, and in that time, I advised and mentored my share of students, many of whom were philosophy majors. Listening to students talk about their aspirations and experiences, I picked up on what they picked up on in their degree plans, namely, the way plans impose a certain reading of time. Students wouldn’t express this in terms like “phenomenology of time consciousness”; rather, a great many of them said things like, “I have to take X next semester — I’m already behind.”

There’s a lot to unpack in this sense of behindness, and I won’t aim for comprehensiveness in one little post. But I will draw attention to several issues I consider determinative of students success. Let’s start with a hidden injury of degree plans: By making a specific temporal framework normative, we imply that deviation is abnormal.

Chasing the AI Bogeyman

I’m seeing more and more instances of individual responses to student AI use, and as the numbers rise, so does the incoherence of our collective messaging. I decided to chase this bogeyman primarily to provoke some conversations about what our messaging should be, and perhaps even to reveal something about the bogeyman itself.

We all know that students use the internet to complete assignments, and it’s a natural progression for students to use AI. But let’s also face some unpleasant realities: There are plenty of people in community and business leadership — and academia, even in our own institution — who freely admit to using AI to support their work. In fact, one of my colleague deans in another institution is establishing an entire course on writing AI prompts, on the premise that knowing how to leverage the resources of ChatGPT is a “marketable skill.” I would argue that it may soon be more of a survival skill.

Sabbaticals

Ysella Fulton-Slavin, Outreach Coordinator for the LAHC’s Dean’s office and Adjunct Professor of Composition and Literary Studies and Creative Writing, reflects on the meaning of “Sabbatical” in higher education and celebrates LAHC’s sabbatical recipients!

Vision+Voice Literary Festival – A Retrospective

Juniper Maldonado, a LAHC MOP team member (Marketing, Outreach, and Promotion), shares their retrospective on the Vision+Voice Literary Festival!

Sabbatical Dispatch, #1

It’s been about one month since I landed, so I thought it would be nice to send a dispatch from my exile in France. The question is, what can I do from here that would seem genuine but wouldn’t involve getting any work from there?

I was sitting at my favorite dive, Le Progrès, contemplating this conundrum, and it hit me: Why not join the deans’ meeting to say hello? After all, the one thing I can still do that will be immediately recognizable by everyone who knows me and won’t land me any work is to be disruptive. So, I thought, Why not disrupt Gaye Lynn’s meeting?

Unfortunately, my clever plan to be recognizably disruptive while avoiding any work was thwarted — I’m assuming by the weather, but it could be that Gaye Lynn took me off the invitation as an act of mercy (or alternately, knowing me as she does and anticipating this train of thought, as an act of sabotage). Either way, I didn’t have the link.

My first month here has been lovely; restful, but also productive — in a variety of ways. I don’t know how much you’re following EU news, but we’re having nation-wide protests against Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age to 64. Now, there are two interesting things about this proposal and the ensuing unrest. First, by current French standards — not Macron’s new plan — I am already past retirement age. That’s something to think about.

The next day after the protests, in fact, I was chatting with one person in the bar (which I try to visit daily), and I mentioned that, in the US, people born after 1960 don’t get their full social security benefit until 67. I thought she was going to have a stroke. She was barely able to shake her head in dismay and force out, “Métro, travaille, tombe” (“Subway, work, grave”), which was the protesters’ chant du jour. She obviously got it wrong: We hardly have any subways.

Second, it’s invigorating to be in a country in which people are still pretty serious about democracy, a seriousness that extends to striking and marching as a civic duty alongside voting. As an aside, I have long thought that the real French motto shouldn’t be Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité but the much more accurate Liberté, Egalité, Faire-Grevité. I haven’t offered this opinion too publicly here, but I’m confident that, after a certain amount of protesting, it would catch on. Which appears to be Macron’s strategy, incidentally.

It’s even more invigorating to be personally involved. On the day of the first retirement reform protest, I had planned to drop off my recycling and have a café allongé at my favorite coffee shop, Mokka (not to be confused with my favorite bar, Le Progrès). Rennes had basically shut down — and I don’t mean by the protesters; I mean for the protesters. It was like Mardi Gras: People were either marching and chanting and waving signs and colorful banners, or watching — and mostly cheering — the marching and chanting and banner-waving. Many businesses had closed to give employees time to march or watch. Yes, sadly there was a good bit of random, senseless violence — mostly breaking the windows of important symbols of malignant capitalist hegemony, like banks, police stations, and Starbucks — but for the most part, the protesters booed the vandals and generally policed themselves.

As I was walking to the recycling center, more or less in the middle of the protest, someone in the crowd set a Tesla on fire directly across the street. The crowd generally expressed disapproval, but someone — possibly the police, it wasn’t clear — set off several tear gas canisters. So there I was, dutifully sorting my glass and paper recycling in a cloud of tear gas, like a misplaced German soul. How exhilarating! The coffee and croissant were even better that morning.

Obviously, I’m doing fine. I love just about everything about France, and especially the people. One of my very few complaints is that, for some unfathomable reason, Rennes has not seen fit to import Hippeas Chick Pea Puffs, which, following the lead of Eric “Respect My Authoritah” Cartman, I call “cheesy poofs.”

On a possibly related front, I’m making great progress on my sabbatical projects (and reading Aristotle in German).

I’d like to say that I miss ACC, but I would have to lie, and I generally avoid lying where there’s a viable alternative (like telling the truth). I can say without resorting to pseudo-lying or related forms of deception that I miss you, my colleagues. You make rolling ACC’s boulders up the mountain tolerable — at least I have interesting company.

Take care and have a great spring!

Matthew,
Dean In Exile

Source: Auto Draft

What’s wrong with life-long learning?

A tale of two grannies

We like to talk about lifelong learning, and a lot of what we say — aspirational though it may be — leaves out the important part, which also happens to be the hard part. My two grannies illustrate this tendency: They were both “lifelong learners,” but what their love of learning actually involved tells the story of the missing piece.

Plan D

In life as in my various administrative roles in academia, I have earned a well-deserved reputation for always having a Plan B (and Plan C). I hate surprises, so I plan for contingencies. After all, if you’ve done your homework, you can go to class and relax. But there’s one “contingency” in life that may well be contingent in terms of timing, but not inevitability: Sooner or later, no matter how well we do in the course, we will all take the Final Exam. I’ve thought a lot about my Final Exam, and I’d like to take a moment to share my Plan D.

Let me introduce you to My Sewer Grate.

Capirotada Newsletter!

The Dean’s office has been thinking about how to create a forum that highlights our various department events, projects, students, faculty, and staff. This fall, our amazing MOP team (Marketing, Outreach, and Promotions) hired several talented new interns, in which they played a crucial role, through their writing and design skills, in creating a new newsletter, Capirotada! We hope you enjoy the first of many newsletters like this one!

To view the larger PDF version of the newsletter, go here.

ACC’s Chosen Name Process – a Student Testimonial

Austin Community College recognizes that faculty, staff, and students may use names other than their legal name to identify themselves. The ACC chosen name process allows students to request use of a chosen first name where possible.

Juniper Maldonado, a student intern on the LAHC MOP team (Marketing, Outreach, and Promotion), shares their positive reflections on the ACC chosen name process.

Hello, My Name is Juniper

I can really only speak to my own experience, my own name. Earlier this year, I came to terms with my identity: I am non-binary. I feel no particular animosity toward any other gendered expression of self, but if the question is multiple choice then I am none of the above.

It is dreadfully inconvenient to be honest in one’s feelings, regardless of how long they’ve taken brewing and bubbling to the surface. My bubble happened to burst when the spring semester had just gotten underway.

Whether or not I should have felt anxious, or deceitful, or unsafe going into classes where no one knew about my existential shift is not a matter for debate, because I did. Being referred to as someone I was not was a soul-grinding stress that so many of us have been conditioned to ignore. It’s an unfair and unfortunate belief to be considered somehow at fault for one’s own feelings and conception of self. At the very least I felt at fault for being so caught between wanting to stand firmly in my identity, be the next piece of pride, and being eaten up by doubt and uncertainty.

But I cannot express to you how much I needed the softness of my transition, the solitude of my own council; I had to find a path on my own, in my own way, or else it would not have been mine. Finding any path at all is difficult enough when there is a wall of separation between the self and the culture, the self and conversation, the self and the name.

I chose Juniper because it held no obvious masculine or feminine conventions, yet was still reminiscent of the name I was born with, because after all, I had not actually changed. I was merely shifting the perspective of my life to one that would give me agency over misery.

Nowhere have I ever been more fortunate than at ACC. I have had so many experiences that I will always remember with a sense of gratitude, though few more than the Academic Cooperative I participated in this past spring. It was taught by Charlotte Gullick, a professor I was already familiar with as a creative writing major, and the classmates I had were nothing if not amicable. This was the first occasion I attempted to go by my chosen name; in my other classes I did not speak, I did not want to be known.

Even in the Cooperative class, it was not easy. My email, Blackboard account, and listing on the attendance sheet all referred to the wrong person. For as valiant the effort was to respect my identity within that class, it was still confusing and frustrating to simply be labeled wrong in the systems by which courses are run. Guilty time was taken to reintroduce and explain as I started to feel more and more resigned to the idea that this was just the price I would have to pay if I wanted to identity as myself, and that it might be better to just let myself recede, namelessly, to the back.

Thankfully, one of my classmates was also an ACC employee and was sympathetic to what I was going through. As soon as he heard about the new chosen name process, he told me. It was so simple, but it meant everything. I could sign my name without fear of question or lost assignments. I could answer honestly to the roll call. I became unafraid and unresigned in all of my classes.

Without the constant betrayal of my name I was able to give myself the room to grow into the person and self I’ve always wanted to be; alongside my goals for education, not apart from or instead of. As this year has gone on, I’ve gotten better at knowing when and where to have more exploratory conversations. I’ve been allowed a graceful time to turn all of my feelings to just the right angle to know them and express them.

ACC’s chosen name process allowed me that simple and fundamental dignity. They allowed me my name.

nonConvocation

My very late Fall email to the faculty, admins, staff, and hourlies of LAHC

(By which I mean my Fall email, which is very late. Not my very late Fall email, which isn’t here yet.)

(The antecedent of which in the previous parenthetical comment is “very late Fall,” not “email,” which I sent about ten minutes ago.)

(And when I say “ten minutes ago,” I don’t mean ten minutes ago from now, whenever that is for you, because I’m assuming that the now you are experiencing as you read this is going to be in my future from my now, now.)

Hello, everyone!

I have sat in front of this email to you for more than two weeks, and I simply have not had a chance to finish writing it. One of my friends outside academia asked me what being dean was like. I responded: A rushing stream of interruptions punctuated occasionally by dean work. The beginning of this fall was more interruption than back at work.

But this isn’t about me, it’s about you. Ok, well, it’s about us.