If your favorite college football team were a cultural figure . . .

Today marks the long awaited start of the college football season. I have been anticipated this day since the last note of doom sounded for Ohio State in New Orleans back in January. I can't wait to see the Cowboys and Razorbacks take their respected fields. Vanderbilt, being a degree holder, of course I have an interest in you as well. But hope doesn't spring as eternal with you as it does with the Cowboys and Razorbacks. With that said, I would like to take a break from the seriousness to play who would they be if said college football team were a cultural figure.

1.) Ohio State - Sisyphus, for the Buckeyes push the rock up to the top of the hill (National Championship game) and some SEC team is always there to push it back down.

2.) Ole Miss - William Faulkner, of course. He didn't get a degree from Ole Miss, but if you live next to the university and win a Nobel Prize in literature, don't be surprised if you get claimed by the university as one of its greatest achievements. I believe Faulkner failed freshmen composition at Ole Miss.

3.) USC Trojans - I would say a Greek, actually! Achilles. They are a powerful bunch that wins game after game, but for the last few seasons some team (Stanford last year) that like Paris should have no business beating them finds a way to plant that arrow right in their achilles heel.

4.) Vanderbilt - It is obvious, Charlie Brown. This team hasn't had a winning season since the early years of the first Reagan administration. Yet, like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football that Lucy always snatches away from him, Vanderbilt keeps suiting up year after year to try to kick their way into a winning season and a trip to a bowl game.

5.) LSU - James Bond 007. Throughout the 07 season you thought LSU was done for. How many times did they go for it on 4th down? But each time they found a way to escape, just like Bond always does. And at the end of the season when it looked like LSU was done for in terms of winning a national championship, they still managed an escape, accomplished their mission, and got to go home with a girl named Sears Crystal Trophy in the end.

6.) Arkansas - The plays of Shakespeare. Shakespeare covered the whole span of human drama, and there has been enough drama on The Hill in the last few years to supply Shakespeare with material for several more plays. You have young Mitch Mustain playing Hamlet. To go to Arkansas or not to go to Arkansas? To stay or not to stay? There's a Lady Macbeth in Houston Nutt's wife who wished she could have delivered a 2x4 beating to Hamlet's mother. An old king saw his last days in power, King Lear, Henry IV, or call him Frank Broyles. The Prospero of the team, Gus Malazhan, known for creating magic on offense is runned off to the island of Tulsa in the sea of Oklahoma. And Richard III or is it Iago is now coaching at Ole Miss!

7.) Oklahoma State - Ernest Hemingway. Here is a team led by a coach that felt like he had to tell the world that "I am a man!" Hemingway has always been accused of over-compensating. Is the same true for Gundy? I don't know. But both have been parodied fairly well!

8.) Alabama - Any literary figure that is stuck in the past and can't cope with the present. There's a slew of them! The past is Paul Bear Bryant. The present is six defeats in a row to Auburn. If you are an Alabama fan or player, the past is certainly a better place right now to spend your time in. This would apply to Notre Dame as well.

9.) University of Texas - Narcissus. This is certainly a program that thinks very highly of itself in a state that thinks very highly of itself. And they have a lot to think highly of, but after-a-while you just want to drown them!


10.) Texas Tech - Auguste Renoir. Yeah, they are pretty canvases and pretty aerobatic displays of the foward pass, but in the end you feel that there is not much substance there in the painting and no championships in the trophy case.

This was enjoyable, and I would like to continue this thought experiment, but I need to go get in front of a television set! IT is about to start.

What besides a degree?

Students come to colleges and universities to get a degree so that they may put themselves in competition for a good paying and satisfying job. That is something everybody knows. But what I think is not stressed enough are the skills and traits students need to have to keep a professional job. I have a short list of what I think are important traits that students will want to show employers early on, i.e. show them that they are more than just a recently stamped college graduate who did well in the interview:

1.) Humility - Nobody wants a know-it-all working for them or over them, especially one just out of college! Accept that there are things you don't know and show that you are more than willing to learn how things are done.

2.) Tact - I think we in academia would do our students a service if we offered Tact 101. Knowing when not to say what you are thinking is a great skill to have in all walks of life, but especially the professional workplace. You don't want to be known as the person who starts cubicle or office wars between co-workers.

3.) Self-awareness - How does this make my company or boss look is a good question to ask before you send that angry email. Being able to step out of your own ego and see how others might view what you are saying and doing can keep you out of a lot of trouble before it begins.

4.) Honesty - If you make the mistake and confess to the error, your employer is likely to be more forgiving than if you try to carry off a cover-up. This is linked back to humility.

5.) Perserverance - A transcript with loads of W's doesn't tell a future employer that you have much ability to see something through when things get difficult. People want to hire people who have the self-confidence to work through the tough patches and see something through to the end.

6.) Dependability - If you say you are going to pick up the job candidate at 6:30 in the morning at the airport, your boss shouldn't be up at night wondering if you'll really do what you said you would do. To be known as a person of your word is a great honor and makes you someone they'll want to keep around the office.

Those are the six that come easily to mind. And you certainly don't have to start practicing them when you get your first job. You can work on these six right now in your dealings with your professors, advisors, fellow students, and your current employer if you have one. You might be able to fool them in the interview and with the resume that you have these traits, but the truth will work itself out if you don't really possess them. And that might just work yourself out of a job no matter the college degree you have on your wall.

What we talk about when we talk about academia

I had planned on posting something during the week itself, but I was just too tired from daily student traffic to make a post that would have made much sense. The weekend brings coherence! What I would like to recommend to everyone is something OSU gives you access to daily. And that is the website for The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://www.chronicle.com on OSU computers is free for you and me. You can find the paper version over in the Edmond Low library. The Chronicle covers the academia beat and can give you a better idea of the issues colleges and universities are dealing with. Why should you care? Well, OSU is dealing with many of those same issues and concerns. Plus, if you think you would want to work in academia, especially as a professor, then The Chronicle will be very useful to you as you will learn more about how academia functions, what various hurdles have to be jumped, and generally what life is like on the other side of the lectern. More immediately, I recommend that if you want to be a professor you start talking to your professors about what that life is like. It is easy to get the idea that they just come to class and teach and then have the rest of the week off. Actually, a lot more goes on behind the scenes. A skill that an academic has to have is the ability to do work when there is not a set 8-5 schedule with a boss watching over his or her shoulders. In other words, they have to be their own best task-masters who define for themselves when they are truly off the job.
One other website I think worth recommending is http://www.adjunctnation.com/ . This website takes a look at academia through the lens of adjunct faculty, i.e. faculty who are not on the tenure track and are just paid per course taught. As there are more Ph.D's in most disciplines than there are full-time positions, colleges and universities often rely upon paying a surplus of adjunct instructors to teach their courses for a much reduced wage. I guess you could say this is more of an anti-establishment website than The Chronicle. But if you are thinking about working in academia, you should make yourself aware of the status of adjuncts in academia, for you could be one yourself someday. Guys, it is a buyer's market out there when it comes to Ph.D's, especially in the humanities and social sciences. The reality is that people have jumped all the hurdles to get a Ph.D. and then find themselves teaching at a salary rate not too much better than what a fast food worker makes. I don't mention that in order to try to scare you away from wanting to be a college professor if that is what you want to be. But I do think you should go into it with your eyes open as wide as possible.

It is raining syllabi on the first day of classes

I woke up a bit earlier this morning in order to see to it that I got a parking space somewhere within the orbit of OSU. I am happy to report that I was successful. I hope you were successful at not only parking, but having a good first day back or first day here period. I also hope that you are reading your syllabi right now and making careful calculations about your load for this semester. I think I would see fewer of you later in the semester wanting a drop card signature if more weighing of what a semester is going to ask of you is done during the first week when you can easily make changes to your schedule. Don't get me wrong, however. I am not saying toss every course that looks like you might have to write more than one paper. I am saying take a good look at your outside of classroom commitments and make sure that you aren't entering a haste makes waste situation where you are attempting more hours than you can reasonably handle. The "W" is really not your friend when you do another calculation - the cost of tuition and fees. Every course that you take a "W" in is a course that you are essentially paying for twice. College courses already are expensive enough when you are paying for them just for the first time.
I would write more, but it is has been a long day for me as well. I am going home to recharge the batteries and to get ready to go parking spot hunting again tomorrow morning. The early bird gets the worm and the OSU parking space!

The Ribbon Cutting Post

Hello, and welcome to The Consuasor Report. This is going to be a blog for the fall semester of 2008 (and maybe beyond?) where I plan to write on higher education, life-long learning, life at OSU, things I think might help psychology, economics, American Studies, and liberal studies majors in particular, and will just generally raise the over-all discourse of the blogosphere with erudite opinions and reflections, haha. As you can see, I've already raised the vocabulary of the blogosphere by being the one and only blog that uses the Latin word for "advisor" in its title. A little secret, I had to look that up myself as I am not as familiar with the language of the Romans as I would like to be. I think I will close this post with a quote from a man who wouldn't have needed to look "consuasor" up - Thomas Jefferson. I think it says rather well how important learning, the over-arching theme of this blog, is for our country or any country for that matter: " If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Let that sink in and then give it the needed twist when you reflect upon the fact that the man who wrote that owned people he purposely kept ignorant.