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April 29

Voltaire Wasn’t Cut Out to Be an Iowa State TA

A screen shot from the Iowa State video

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At the best of all possible universities, teaching assistants feel appreciated by their superiors and cherish all of their students, and everyone works in harmony. Not, apparently, at Iowa State University.

There, the English department has been debating two satirical videos by teaching assistants — posted on YouTube and now removed, but available on Facebook — that portray TA duties teaching composition. (The videos may be found here and here.) In a series of faux interviews, TA’s talk about their working conditions, their students and the curriculum. Some of the talk is crude and mocking, although in the era of Harold and Kumar, the videos hardly push the envelope in that category.

What has set off more debate is that the chair of the English department called the director of the videos to a meeting with other senior faculty members and asked for the videos to be removed from YouTube. While the chair stresses that this action was voluntary, others believe that for a graduate student to be asked in a private meeting facing a who’s who of the department leadership to take down a video is tantamount to an order — and tantamount to censorship.

The videos feature real Iowa State TA’s — all in good academic standing — in a pseudo-interview format answering various questions. The answers are frequently silly. Asked if “attendance has been a problem,” one TA answers, “I’ve had a really hard time showing up.”

A general theme is that the TA’s have so many students that they hope some students will drop out, that TA’s must devote minimal time to grading papers because they have too many to evaluate (one TA says he spends 30-45 seconds on a paper, another describes an apparently random system for grading). Asked about his greatest challenges as a TA, one answers that it is “trying not to headbutt or maim” his students. For contrast, one of the TA’s mouths platitudes, turning most questions into an opportunity to talk about her worries about students’ feelings, about the need to grade in ways that won’t discourage students, and about how her biggest disappointment is having so many students that she can’t take them all to dinner. (She compensates by trying to learn students’ food likes and dislikes, especially their “cake preferences.")

Iowa State’s required writing curriculum also takes some hits. Asked about WOVE — an acronym for the university’s emphasis on “written, oral, visual and electronic” communication — the students joke about what the letters really stand for. One TA describes WOVE as a spiritual experience. Another says: “If we couldn’t weave, what would we wear?”

In a few clips, the grad students pass the bounds of what some would consider good taste, with one scene showing a TA lifting an old typewriter as if to smash it down on a student, or another in which a TA says that his goal when evaluating a paper is to ask: “What can I write that will drive this kid to suicide?”

Many who have seen a grad student review at a departmental holiday party have probably seen the equivalent of what was in the videos, but when they appeared on YouTube, Iowa State officials took notice. The arts and sciences dean said he was alerted by a marketing official, and that he in turn alerted the department chair.

Over the last week, the videos were removed at least twice — once by the grad student who posted them — and that’s where things get controversial.

Charles Kostelnick, the chair, acknowledged in an interview Monday that he asked to have the videos removed, but said that this was not censorship and did not reflect any lack of appreciation for satire.

“The video denigrated students who the TA’s are entrusted to teach,” he said. “These attempts at satire are not funny or instructive,” he said, adding that they were “offensive” and “undermine the credibility of instruction.”

Further, he added that the references to violence were cause for concern. “In a post-Virginia Tech world, in my minds that’s very disturbing.” He also noted the line about suicide.

Asked if — regardless of taste — he didn’t think people would recognize the videos as satire, Kostelnick said that “it doesn’t make much difference what you think. Why don’t you talk to people in Iowa?” He said that “a parent or student from Sioux City might not find it amusing,” especially “without any context whatsoever.”

Kostelnick said that some students and teaching assistants were upset by the videos, but he repeatedly said that urging their removal wasn’t censorship because the graduate student involved wasn’t ordered to do anything. He also stressed that he didn’t intervene because of the criticism of the university, only out of concern for students. “If they satirize the administration of the program, that’s fair game,” he said, but by criticizing students “they crossed the line.”

Andrew Judge, the graduate student identified as director of the videos, did not respond to requests for an interview. But one of his professors — Neal Bowers — offered an impassioned defense of the grad students, and said that the university had seriously erred in asking students to remove them. Bowers, a distinguished professor of English at Iowa State, also posted the e-mail exchanges about the controversy on Facebook.

First Bowers said that it was inaccurate and unfair for the university to say that it had just requested that Judge remove the videos. He said that when a department chair, accompanied by other senior members of the department, asks a grad student to do something, “it’s more than a hint” that the grad student would be well advised to comply. “It’s a very loaded situation,” he said.

As to the university wanting the videos down, Bowers said that Iowa State is reacting not out of concern for students, but because the TA’s pointed to flaws in the department — namely that graduate students are overworked to the point that they can’t devote enough time to the undergraduates. By making jokes, Bowers said, the graduate students who made the videos were simply poking the university and trying to get the department to notice.

University leaders need a sense of humor, Bowers said. He said that when he first received a link, he showed it to his wife and they both found it funny and joked about what life was like when they were teaching assistants. “I laughed,” he said. “I really enjoyed them.”

As for concerns that the videos might somehow be too violent or offensive to students in the wake of Virginia Tech, Bowers said this argument amounts to “bringing the Patriot Act mentality to Iowa State” and he joked — noting that he was engaged in satire — that the university probably wanted to ship the offending graduate students to Guantanamo.

On a more serious note, he said that Iowa State was sending a terrible message. Whether university officials like a video (or article) or not, or find it funny or not, it’s not the role of a public university to try to keep people from seeing a satire, he said. Bowers is currently teaching a course on postmodern American poetry, including Allen Ginsberg’s work — which had to survive obscenity challenges to be read.

“That this is happening among faculty who are responsible for overseeing students to teach the communicative arts ... is going to have a long-term damaging effect on our graduate students, who are going to be afraid to speak up,” said Bowers. “I’m teaching poets who were pretty out there and I’m saying that they have the right to do the things that they do, and my dean and department chair have contradicted me by saying my own students don’t have free speech.”

To judge from student reactions on the Web site of the Iowa State Daily, the student newspaper that broke the story Monday, there wasn’t much evidence of students being seriously offended or taking the videos literally. Even those defending the university for wanting the video down suggested that they believed that Iowa State was doing so to avoid embarrassment.

Wrote one student, in the minority in defending the university: “ISU is not seeking the suppression of free speech, they are seeking the suppression of material that paints their organization in an unflattering light. If you worked for private sector company and joked about your job youtube in the way these TA’s did you would probably get fired. Suck it up and deal with it. Speaking out against one’s employer, especially in a public forum, is generally frowned upon. Welcome to the real world...”

More typical was this response: “I actually saw the video when one of my teachers told me about it. It’s hysterical but clearly a joke. I think the administration needs to give the students more credit. We can tell the difference between a joke and something serious and I’d like to think that parents of prospective students can as well. It is an issue of free speech and the video should never have been taken down.” Another comment said: “Of all the people and organizations seeking to suppress free speech, I never figured on an English professor.”

As of Monday night, the videos were alive and well on Facebook (and Iowa State students were passing around the links, apparently not taking the videos personally). Of course there’s no telling what might have happened had the TA’s suggested dealing with overcrowded classrooms by having tenured professors eat some of the students.

— Scott Jaschik

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Comments

Hello, George Orwell

In a world where large numbers of incoming freshmen do not graduate within six years, where graduates leave with a mean-average $20,000 in debt, where TT faculty are not seen until junior year, where a TT position in English can draw 50 well-qualified applicants from lower-ranked colleges, where TT faculty focus on everything BUT teaching — this kind of malarky is supposed to be out-of-the-ordinary?

Sure. And Ski Iowa, too.

Calls for higher standards of performance and conduct would be appropriate, at this point.

But OMG! This is an election year! So we have to wait .. and wait .. and wait .. until this latest academic kerfuffle dies down.

“Moo” — the great comedic novel on Morrill Act mega-universities — was written by Jane Smiley, PhD, as she retired from the English Department of Iowa State.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/0...?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=login

Isn’t it amusing, how few things actually change?

L.L., at 6:25 am EDT on April 29, 2008

The generation that knows no boundaries is growing up to teach the next generation how to do it well.

dick lambert, at 7:40 am EDT on April 29, 2008

The Iowa TA videos on YouTube are pretty funny. And I recognize that humor, even some of that same material, from my own TA experience at an Ivy. I wonder how the Iowa State marketing department feels now...

Humanities Grad Student, at 7:50 am EDT on April 29, 2008

If only they were art students.

Laura(southernxyl), at 7:50 am EDT on April 29, 2008

Modest Proposal

I feel sorry for the departmental sticks at Iowa State and I am envious of the talent in their TA’s.

“If we couldn’t weave, what would we wear?” ??? Offensive? Are you kidding? I laughed out loud in my cube!

I have a modest proposal — The department heads should be required to read not only Voltaire but Swift as well this summer.

Daily Show Fan, at 9:35 am EDT on April 29, 2008

Fight the power!

Fight the power, man! Way to go, grad students. Union, union, union...!

I support the grad students and denounce the actions of the department chair. Their attempt at supression has only garnered more attention and made them look even more ridiculous—welcome to the Internet age!Information wants to be free!!

Now I have to go jump on Facebook before they take those down as well...copy and send on, go viral, people!!

JJR, at 9:35 am EDT on April 29, 2008

In addition to financial reasons, two critical experiences helped me decide to leave grad school: 1) grad student instructor/adjunct as indentured servant (1500.00 per class/per semester—paid in two checks) and, perhaps most discouraging, being told by tenured faculty (who professed and claimed to practice critical pedagogy and subversive discourse as a means to end the perpetuation of the status quo) to keep my mouth shut about graduate student instructor pay and to “reconsider” my pro-active efforts to create a graduate student senate. Perhaps I was naive, but I became extremely disillusioned to find out that all of these tenured scholars encouraged me (behind closed doors) to do exactly what they asked me to critique in the classroom and in my scholarship: challenging and questioning and deconstructing hegemonic, oppressive, and panopticon-like practices. In my opinion, the TAs’ satire was quite restrained and perhaps could be qualified as conservative considering what I experienced in the trenches. Also, speaking of Ginsberg, it was perfectly okay for me to write a thesis on Howl, and to read and explore other texts once judged as “obscene,” but apparently it was not okay to respectfully disagree, conservatively and/or creatively, or to practice not only what I was taught, but also what I was teaching students. The publicly critiqued yet privately practiced censorship in academia was perhaps the most disheartening lesson I experienced in grad school. I admire the TAs for their successful satire; when it makes people nervous, it must be pretty good and, thus, uncomfortably close to the truth.

Former PhD Candidate in English, at 9:35 am EDT on April 29, 2008

The videos appear to be more of a parody of different kinds of TAs than anything else — the satire is not aimed at undergrads ... I am not quite sure I see the problem.

Kate, Graduate Student, at 9:35 am EDT on April 29, 2008

Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You!

I have written the following blurb in response to other articles in InsideHigherEd, but it bears repeating. Obviously the young Iowa State TAs did not read or heed my earlier warning; to wit ...

“In any event, I’m leading up to my advice to young faculty members. You young folks in graduate school and in your first positions as assistant professors, however you structure your careers, do not, under any circumstances, write parody or satire. Eschew irony! Take my word for it, you will be writing in an environment in which sarcasm, biting wit, and paradox will confuse your colleagues, anger your chair and dean, and infuriate your president. And the legislators who vote on bills providing financial support for your university ... well, du-uuh. Were Jonathan Swift your colleague, ‘A Modest Proposal’ and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ would forever block his progress toward promotion and tenure.”

“It’s not that these academics and legislators object to satire and irony, per se; it’s simply that they don’t understand it ... they are forced to take it at face value ... the curse of the intellectually challenged. We live in a time in which many of the works of Voltaire, Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Lewis Black, and Dave Chappelle will blow right past your Provost.”

“Perhaps I’m overstating the case, but I’d wager that the best most of your colleagues and all of your administrators can manage will be the works of someone along the lines of Jeff Foxworthy or Bill Cosby. They probably love the poetry of Edgar A Guest. Some will think the Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket series are subversive.”

“The Language Police have been patrolling outside academe for years. Now they’re firmly entrenched inside. I implore you ... DON’T WRITE SATIRE!”

http://www.blackpeopleloveus.com/index.html

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

P.S. I especially liked the comment by Chairman Charles Kostelnick who acknowledged in an interview Monday that “[I] asked to have the videos removed, but this was not censorship and did not reflect any lack of appreciation for satire.”

“The video denigrated students who the TA’s are entrusted to teach,” he said. “These attempts at satire are not funny or instructive,” he said, adding that they were “offensive” and “undermine the credibility of instruction.”

Further, he added that “the references to violence were cause for concern.”

Omigod, Jonathan Swift encouraged the Irish to cook and eat their children ... even recommending that 28-pounders were the best of the lot ... culinarily speaking, of course.

P.P.S. I also liked Chairman Kostelnick’s response when asked if — regardless of taste — he didn’t think people would recognize the videos as satire, He said that “it doesn’t make much difference what you think. Why don’t you talk to people in Iowa?”

He’s right of course. I suppose most of us simply overlooked the fact that those poor Iowans are a baser lot, barely evolved beyond stone-age man, and certainly not capable of understanding the subtleties of satire in the manner of the great intellects in Ames and Iowa City.

Frizbane Manley, at 10:20 am EDT on April 29, 2008

Living in America..........

Charles Kostelnick, the English Department chairman, absolutely must have been the basis for several of Jane Smiley’s characters in her obviously true account of the academic degradation at Iowa State.

This appallingly absurd attempt at censorship confirms just how difficult it is to be a satirist in the contemporary American academy.

Thank goodness there are still a few clear-thinking profs around like Neal Bowers ready to expose feeble anti-intellectuals like Kostelnick.

Totally amazing and hilarious!

Chuck, at 10:40 am EDT on April 29, 2008

Who Runs The Modern University?

“The arts and sciences dean said he was alerted by a marketing official, and that he in turn alerted the department chair.”

It’s pretty clear that at Iowa State, as at most other big universities, the marketing department is calling the shots.

veblen, Gadfly at Penn State, at 11:15 am EDT on April 29, 2008

Art and Voltaire

It seems strange that the first two articles juxtaposed both demonstrate the p.c. mentalities of universities. (Incidentally, isn’t p.c. an oxymoron?) At Yale we don’t want to offend with some type of “performance art,” and at Iowa State, “satire” takes the hit. I thought the performance art was dumb and not very enlightening, but what do I know? There is a lot of “artistic” stuff I find weird—which is probably why I chose math. On the other hand, I like satire, and enjoy most of it. Heck, Alice in Wonderland was written by a mathematician. Tom Lerher was one of the funniest satirical song writers of the 60’s, and he too, was a mathematician. Because I am a grown-up and can pick my likes and dislikes, please Yale and ISU, I honestly don’t need your maternal protection.

Fred Flener, Retired, at 11:40 am EDT on April 29, 2008

He’s No Goodtime Charlie (Kostelnick))

Their wit was a sharp as a knife,

But their YouTube created some strife.

Alas Chairman Charlie

Got high on the barley

And banned satire as too much like life.

Frizbane Manley, at 12:35 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

Too-o-o-o-o darned accurate

I kept wondering as I watched “Is that someone I dated in grad school. . . maybe HIM?” It’s been 15 years, but I swear my old boyfriend is still an English TA!

Aside from finding nearly every minute of the videos and nearly every comment to be an exact reflection of what I saw, heard, and lived through at Kent State University, I felt sad. These ‘youngins’ are every bit as smart and alive as we all were back in the 90s, and it is a darned shame that so little has changed.

(P.S.idefinitely did recognize the metal desk in one scene. I was wondering who had inherited that panty hose killing desk.)

Kate, Associate VP academic affairs, at 12:40 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

The comment attributed to an Iowa State Student: “ISU is not seeking the suppression of free speech, they are seeking the suppression of material that paints their organization in an unflattering light. If you worked for private sector company and joked about your job youtube in the way these TA’s did you would probably get fired. Suck it up and deal with it....Welcome to the real world...” should be a bigger embarrassment to that University than the videos.

When a government agency tries to intimidate the vulnerable into silence, it is called “censorship” in the “real world.” In case the student and that English Department Chair hadn’t noticed, Iowa STATE is a government institution and enjoys tax-free privileges. It is also an institution charged with supporting academic freedom that private corporations are not charged with doing. If a chair doesn’t have the courage to support upholding that responsibility, he/she should not be a chair.

Prof Ed, at 12:45 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

Not Aimed at Students

Right, folks. The satire is aimed not at the students but the structure of things described by Former PhD Student. That structure pits the tenured and tenure-track against TAs, other part-timers, and non-tenure track teachers “in the trenches.” The enabling conditions for the tenured and tenurable are created, in fact, “in the trenches.” They’re showing how the class structure hurts the most important people of all—the students.

Walker Park Thatcher, at 12:55 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

Funny, but sad

The videos are a riot, but what struck me is that the situation they describe is identical to that of the professors in the two years college where I teach. Too many students, too little time, and an administration which does not give a damn as long as they get more money. I’d refer them to the videos, but the subject matter would go whooshing over their pointy little heads.

Mac, Professor of English, at 1:25 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

Good for them!

Good for the Iowa Grad Students! Kostelnick may be a good professor and someone who cares deeply about students, but I think anyone who fosters a system in which TAs can spend so little time helping undergraduates with their writing should be encouraged to reflect on how undergraduates are treated. That is the irony in his comments, it isn’t the video that shows a lack of care for undergraduates, it is faculty culture and promotion structures that neglects undergraduates.

As a recovering graduate student myself, I have to say that faculty are often rewarded for behaving badly in terms of the treatment of undergraduate and graduate students. Relatively few colleges and universities (maybe just the research institutions?) recognize and reward faculty time with spent truly teaching. That is certainly part of the reason these graduate students may be overworked to begin with.

Boston, at 2:00 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

Don Smith, we need you now (previous century)

Don Smith (elected president of the student body over administration objections during the Viet Nam era) wanted to drag ISU “kicking and screaming” into the 20th century. Alas, we have not got there,even yet, much less the 21st century. I guess no one in the English Dept. has heard of sarcasm, irony, satire, or just having a go at the system. We had a dart board in our grad office, and our professors considered it an honor to be the target (in caricature). NOT in the English Dept.

Iowa State alum-PhD, at 2:45 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

As a former graduate in the ISU English Department, I certainly understand the frustrations that current graduate students in that department feel. And I congratulate this crop on their wonderful satire that comments upon the horrible working conditions for both MA and Ph.D. students.

Asking Ph.D. students, for instance, to teach a 2/2, with each class capped at 25 students, is ridiculous and certainly not mentioned in the department’s recruitment literature. And the pay is not reflective of the 2/2 either. I knew plenty of students in similar programs at other schools who made more teaching a 1/1 or 2/1. Oh, and did I mention that you also have to pay 1/2 of your own tuition most of the time that you are enrolled there. (Sometimes the administration comes up with a semester or two during which you only have to pay 0-1/4 of the tuition—generous, eh.)

And let’s not even start with the way that most of the professors treat their own education of graduate students. Time and time again, the graduate faculty, some of whom lack intellectual acumen, have been asked by graduate students to improve the curriculum and make it more challenging and current. (Kostelnick’s understanding of power and censorship in the article above points to revealing deficiencies.) Over the years, those repeated requests have been, at best, ignored, at worst, dismissed by most of the professors as “whining” or “insubordination.”

The ISU English Department would certainly counter that a number of its Ph.D. students have won top awards with their dissertations. But don’t let that fool you. Those awards were because of the work of those students, work that often had to happen in spite of, not because of, their conditions of labor and “education” at ISU.

The chickens are coming home to roost.

Former ISU Grad. Student, at 2:45 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

Iowa TA’s videos

Shame on the administration at Iowa State. While we probably shouldn’t argue that YouTube videos are “Art” in the purest sense, we still must admit that they are artistic expression, and sometimes art says things we (or certain people) don’t want to hear.

Rusty, Stop bullying your students, at 3:50 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

Satire

The satire is almost entirely in the gender politics!

drabauer, at 5:20 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

The account in the Iowa State Daily makes a clear case for censorship, based on interviews with the graduate students involved.http://www.iowastatedaily.com/hom...b18cdc11-b123-4fc8-955d-da17b1b1dc6d

Those English Department administrators/bullies—Charlie Kostelnick, Barbara Blakely, Constance Post, and Dave Roberts—should be ashamed of themselves. Is this the kind of work they wanted to do when they made the decision to enter the Humanities?

Iowa State Alum, Certainly Censorship, at 8:25 pm EDT on April 29, 2008

Voltaire Wasn’t Cut OUt to Be an Iowa State TA

No one, least of all me, objected to the TAs’ satirizing administrators or the multi-modal pedagogy of the writing program. Good grief—we’re not that thin-skinned or humorless around here!

But should a department chair express NO opinion about a video—posted by an instructor in a public forum without any context—that jokes about beating, bludgeoning, and breaking the bones of students and driving them to suicide?

When the TA video director was asked to remove the video from public viewing, no consequences to the TA were discussed. The TA temporarily removed it from public viewing, then decided to post it again.

One of the TA participants in the video requested that the TA director not post the video for public viewing. Doesn’t that TA have any rights?

Charlie Kostelnick Chair, English DepartmentIowa State University

Charlie Kostelnick, Iowa State University, at 7:55 pm EDT on May 1, 2008

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