Primrose Road

Earlier this week, I passed the final qualifying exam and achieved candidacy (woohoo, now I get to write a dissertation?), but I can't hibernate yet: I have to wake up in approximately four-and-a-half hours and leave my apartment by 5:30AM in order to get on a train to Washington DC, where I'll be attending a weekend seminar for the rest of the term. So right now, students eat my weekdays and Shakespeare eats my weekends. Hibernation will have to take place in late May and early June. Then in the fall, apparently, I'm supposed to try to go on the job market or something. Hmm.

While I'm experiencing the joys of Amtrak, please rejoice in the following search terms that brought people to Primrose Road this month:

1. "providence devinity Hamlet"

~ Dear undergrads: try JSTOR instead of Google.

2. "Ophelia and Hamlet romance fanfiction"

~ cf. Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film.

3. "Shakespeare in Love fanfiction"

~ "Shakespeare in Love" is fanfiction. Hilarious fanfiction. Poor Marlowe. ::sniffle::

4. "mscae spiritual"

~ Obviously either a New Age agricultural engineer or a Lindsey Buckingham fan.

5. "what is a primrose"

~ And you thought clicking on a link to this blog would answer your question why?

Next week, I'm giving my Writing from Lit students their first "Library Assignment." In this class, they're supposed to learn how to (1) write about literature and (2) write research papers, so I want them actually in the li-berry from time to time instead of on teh intarwebs, picking-and-citing from not-always-up-to-snuff literature databases that are often merely encyclopedias rather than collections of critical articles. For this Library Assignment, students will work in groups of four or five and find TEN reliable print sources on the semi-ridiculous topic that their group has been assigned.

This week (Wednesday, actually), I am taking my final comp exam, which is a capstone oral exam via conference call (very convenient when you live 1200 miles away from your university). So while I prepare to answer questions posed by the disembodied voices of my advisor and dissertation committee, I leave the "semi-ridiculous" topics to you, kind reader(s?).

Post in the comments a semi-ridiculous topic (hilarity preferred) -- or more than one -- on which students could find ten print sources (books or journal articles). Those selected will receive (1) a million dollars, payable in chips from the Atlantic City casino of your choice, (2) my enduring love and affection, (3) my students' eternal wrath, and (4) meaning, at last.

This semester I will be teaching three classes, traveling to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC for a seminar every weekend, presenting a paper at the Renaissance Society of America conference, and working on two articles/dissertation chapters. Thus, blog posts will likely be infrequent and make less sense as the days go by. '
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Proof of my already-faltering state of mind: yesterday, I read a review of a performance that used the text of Brecht on Theatre. This sounds interesting, I thought, and immediately wrote down the theater's name and phone number and checked my calendar for a convenient weeknight on which to see the play. As I picked up the phone, I realized that the phone number in the review did not contain an area code. Since at least 2003, Manhattan has had three area codes: 212, 917, and 646, and no listing would ever omit the area code.

The reason for the omitted area code was that the performance took place in the early spring of 1988. I was off by about twenty years.

I am off to tropical Lincoln, Nebraska tomorrow morning to take the first part of my qualifying exams. I'm spending the weekend there, since I had to do a Saturday stayover to use frequent flyer miles (thank you, Eight Planes In Five Days Week back in March); thus, faithful reader(s?), don't expect updates 'till I get back.

Thirteen days until my first comprehensive exam. Three hours of writing about Renaissance drama, including New Historicist, psychoanalytic, and reader-/audience-response understandings of Will S. & Friends.



I'll be in Atlantic City this weekend.

A Ministry of Education-approved trade college for astrologers has opened in the Ukraine. But before you dismiss this as residual Eastern Bloc wackiness, note that we have a fully functional, non diploma mill college of astrology right here in the United States. Though unaccredited, Kepler seems to offer its A.A. and B.A. students a relatively rigorous liberal arts curriculum, requiring courses in classical languages (Latin and Ancient Greek), literature, history, and psychology comparable to those offered at the country's better community colleges. Students are required to do two years of coursework for the associate's and four years for the bachelor's. Since 2001, when the school was approved to issue degrees (but still not accredited), there have been debates as to whether the school should be accredited.

I'd like to go with the "well, at least it's not a diploma mill" argument, but it's difficult to get past the fact that the school is offering degrees in a pseudoscience. The majority of students in my 200-level poetry class this term are earning bachelors' degrees in biology, mechanical engineering, or architecture; what does it mean for them that in two years, the "B.A." or "B.S." on their resumes could be, accreditation-wise, the same "B.A." or "B.S." on a Kepler graduate's resume?

Employers and passers-by aren't always going to be able to recognize the difference. I have in the last year spoken to a number of people who, perhaps or perhaps not surprisingly, believed that unaccredited online institutions were a godsend for people lacking the time and money to invest in an advanced degree. They claimed that there was no fundamental distinction between my Ph.D. (which, when I earn it in 2009, will have four-and-a-half years of coursework, a master's thesis, six months of studying for comprehensive exams, articles, conference presentations, and a dissertation behind it) and a Ph.D. obtained from an unaccredited institution with $5000, 6 months of classes, and a fifty-page research paper.

In fact, there seem to be two levels to the diploma mill problem: (1) government workers and educators who have knowingly used diploma mill degrees to "earn" promotions, and pop-psychology authors who knowingly pad their credentials with false doctorates; and (2) those learners who honestly don't know that six months of classes and a fifty-page research paper does not a dissertation make.

So I wonder, in light of the diploma-mill issues that don't quite apply to the US's very own astrology college but nonetheless affect decisions regarding accreditation, is it reasonable or ethical to confer accreditation on a liberal arts college of pseudoscience?

Apply Corner allows you to rate grad school applicants' chances of getting into various programs. Applicants post their degree information and GRE scores, and you select from a scale of "reach" to "safety."

It's a nice way to inject a dose of realism into the "I like to read, I'm gonna go to grad school!" process, but it doesn't go far enough. First, there's no such thing as a 'safety' school when it comes to a Ph.D. program; it's not like undergrad. They're going to accept a lot fewer applicants, and they're not looking for the "well-rounded" student who's in every club and volunteers in the community - they're looking for people who can do the work. So unless you're applying to Bob's Online College of Diploma Mill Studies, there's no 'sure thing' or 'safety school' for the Ph.D.

And looking at some of the GPAs and undergrad majors on the site, the top of the scale should not be "reach." NYU and Columbia were big reaches for me. If your GPA is below 3.3 and you're just going to grad school because you like books, those schools would be in the "impossible" category.

(I tried to get into the Yale School of Drama once, but the door was locked.)

Educational psychologists often remind us that the philosophy of "you can do whatever you put your mind to" has negative effects on young people because you can't do whatever you put your mind to. (I should probably cite something here, but my ed psych notes remain in a not-yet-unpacked abyss.)

The ed psych grad student who taught the Cognitive class I took last summer said that one of the worst things you can say to a kid is, "JUST TRY HARDER," because a lot of kids will try harder and will still not succeed. Just try harder, you can do whatever you put your mind to, it's all very Puritan-work-ethic.

So I call for "impossible" and "there are many other things you can do, just not this" categories on the site.