October 2, 2012

Driving dark rain.

Joe Biden throwing the campus into turmoil with his appearance later today. Classes canceled, uncertainty about parking. I suppose it’s an honor. I would go see him if it were easier.

In contact with my director for Night Music, though he not with me just yet.

Daniel calls the Prius “the vaginamobile.”

Made magnificent chili from my homegrown tomatoes, onions, peppers. Did not grow the beef. There’s a sharpness to homegrown tomatoes in a recipe (I noticed this when I made tomato soup) that’s not in canned versions. A greenness, one might say. They probably purge it with sugar, though I rather like it.

One remembers the famous announcement from our Provost that the university was turning to a “culture of evidence.” That was the opening slip of the assessment debacle. Though there’s nothing to criticize in the first few seconds after the words are uttered– of course we are and always have been a culture of evidence– another moment’s reflection reveals a central difficulty. To whom is this evidence presented, and with what methods of evaluation? Nobody minds being held accountable, but the question is, to whom? It makes perfect sense for the each department to hold itself up constantly to the scrutiny of its own best practices, and, so far as I can tell, that’s what had been happening since I came to teach. But for the French department and the Chemistry department and Lit and Art to be held up to the general scrutiny of the administration– or any heterogeneous body assembled for that purpose–is not only insulting but absurd. The administration which insists on reviewing the practices of the individual departments lacks the expertise to do so. One should not be evaluated by those whose understanding of one’s practice is less than one’s own. And yet, this is precisely the demand that was made, with much grumbling from the faculty but, oddly, no serious resistance. Recognition of their own incompetence to evaluate properly has led the administration to insist on new criteria of assessment, a Procrustean bed whereupon the most disparate things are reduced and made to conform to some pattern the assessors think they can recognize. All is in the service of the limitations of the assessors, while the actual achievements, practices, and ambitions of the individual disciplines are rendered irrelevant. It is not merely destructive, it is risible. Someone standing outside of us would be writing a comic operetta.

My sister’s birthday. Hanging with her this weekend in Georgia, I had this thought: she is the most successful person I know.