Hey everybody,

Just thought I’d let you know that some of our grad students are putting together a reading group for the summer to go over some foundational texts in anarchist theory.  Here is the tentative schedule of readings:

·        May 15: Kropotkin

o   Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings

·        May 29: Chomsky & Emma Goldman

o   Chomsky on Anarchism

o   Red Emma Speaks: Emma Goldman Reader or Anarchism and Other Essays

·        June 13: Edward Abbey

o   The Monkey Wrench Gang

·        June 27: Bookchin & Vaneigem

o   Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: Bookchin

o   The Revolution of Everyday Life: Vaneigem

·        July 11: Bakunin

o   God and the State

·        July 25: Proudhon & Graeber

o   The Confessions of a Revolutionary:

o   Articles:

§  “Anarchism in the 21st Century” an article by David Graeber and Andrej Grubacic: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=4796

§  “Army of Altruists”: http://www.sleepykid.org/blog/2007/01/13/army-of-altruists/

Interested?  Talk to me or Amy and we’ll put you in touch with the group.

CMB

Hi everybody,

 If you haven’t gotten an e-mail from Amy or Andrea yet, or even if you have, let me remind you to respond to the survey they put together to gather data on grad student sentiment in our department.  They are going to use these data to help the incoming chair, Steve Vallas, to make changes that will make our lives better.  He and the faculty won’t know what changes to make if they don’t hear from you, though.  Questions range from items about your status and activities in the program and the discipline to items about your satisfaction with advisors, funding, etc., and there is space for your own comments.  They say they will also set up an online forum for discussion.  Once the data have been compiled, they will pass them on to the faculty and the new chair, and we can hopefully get down to business improving the grad experience.  Here’s the link:

 http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=_2bYP8bU_2fH_2fouo23W_2biYK3Zg_3d_3d

Thanks!  If you have any questions, complaints, or rants, come find Andrea or Amy or myself, or send one of us an e-mail.

 Chase

Hi everyone,

 Sorry this took so long to get up online.  Here’s what happened at the first COGS meeting, September 26.

1. We welcomed a new faculty member, Alisa Lincoln, to the committee.

2. I reported graduate student concerns.  The only concern I received was related to the yearly problem of grad student dental insurance.  As you may have noticed, we don’t have any.  It was recommended that we approach GPSA about this problem, as we have been successful this past year in getting improvements in our health insurance plan.  I have since been told that this will be brought up by a grad student before the GPSA finance board.

3. Matt Hunt updated us on the goings-on of the CAS Graduate Coordinators.  Graduate department open houses and recruitment for the School of Social Science, Urban Affairs, and Public Policy will take place beginning in February.  Some programs want to increase admission (presumably, to more master’s students) to bring in more money that might be redistribuited as dissertation fellowships.  This would probably take place next year or beyond.
     A New World Languages Center has been proposed for grad student language instruction, since there is no language requirement anymore to get a Ph.D.  Lessons could be worked out on a flexible schedule to accommodate students.  If anyone is excited about this idea, contact one of your COGS reps and let us know what language you might be interested in learning, and how much time you would be able to commit.
    The grad application system has been overhauled, so that all pieces of applications can be submitted online, and reviewed by more than one faculty member at a time.  This should ease the admissions process for COGS faculty members this spring.

4.  Matt Hunt also gave an update from a recent CAS meeting that proposed creating “University Graduate Groups” (UGGs).  These would be interdepartmental alliances where faculty would be listed in several departments at a time — it seems that this is just a scheme to make it look like we have more faculty members than we already do and boost NU’s ranking in U.S. News and other such publications.  Instituting UGGs would also probably involve differentiating between graduate and undergraduate faculty (only grad faculty would participate in UGGs).  This would create a more rigid hierarchy of faculty members within departments.  The UGGs proposal got a rather cool reception from COGS, for the reasons listed above, and because we already have at NU “Interdisciplinary Graduate Groups” (IGGs), and no one really knows what the difference would be between IGGs and UGGs.  Ugh. 

 That’s all.  Please e-mail us with any comments, complaints, or suggestions.

CMB

You never know what kind of shit your students will pull.

     CMB

Student takes his C to federal court

Judge dismisses suit against UMass

In his lawsuit, Brian Marquis contended the university violated his civil rights and contractual rights. (STEPHEN ROSE FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff  |  October 4, 2007

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff  |  October 4, 2007

Plenty of college students grumble when they get a mediocre grade and feel that they deserved better. When Brian Marquis got a C instead of an A-minus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he made a federal case of it.

Literally.

Marquis, a 51-year-old paralegal seeking bachelor’s degrees in legal studies and sociology, filed a 15-count lawsuit in US District Court in Springfield in January after a teaching assistant graded a political philosophy class on a curve and turned Marquis’s A-minus into a C. Marquis contends that the university violated his civil rights and contractual rights and intentionally inflicted “emotional distress.”

Last week, after a brief hearing with Marquis and a university lawyer, District Court Judge Michael A. Ponsor dismissed the suit. But Marquis said this week he is considering appealing to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

“This is not something I relish,” he said from the W.E.B. Du Bois Library on campus. “This is not an issue of me walking into court and saying, ‘I don’t like the way this professor grades this paper,’ which is purely their academic prerogative. This is an issue where the empirical data was quite clear and convincing to any reasonable mind that my performance was well within a higher range.”

Phillip Bricker, chairman of the philosophy department and one of eight defendants in the suit, said it had already caused enough damage. “I think suing over a grade is somewhat absurd,” he said. “It ended up just wasting a lot of people’s time and money.”

In an era when the courts are asked to decide who owns a record-setting home run ball and who is to blame when a cup of hot coffee from a fast-food restaurant scalds a person, it seems perhaps only modestly surprising that a grade dispute leads to litigation.

But Catharine Porter, the UMass-Amherst ombudsman and a defendant in the suit, said that Marquis’s complaint was the only one she was aware of over a disputed grade in 30 years at the university. He got the C in a class called “Problems in Social Thought,” which explored the works of theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Karl Marx.

“If every student that didn’t like his or her grade started to do this, we’d have to hire, I don’t know, 25,000 attorneys,” Porter said.

Ada Meloy - general counsel for the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 college and university presidents - said such suits are rare and almost never successful. Generally, the complaints reflect an unrealistic fear that a single grade can torpedo academic or professional goals, she said.

Marquis - who salts his comments with “strike that” - acknowledged he was alarmed the C might lower his grade point average and make him less attractive to a law school.

The C has rendered his transcript a “dismal record of non-achievement,” his suit said. Marquis, who enrolled at UMass-Amherst in spring 2006, said he has roughly a B-plus average.

His chief adversary in the suit was Jeremy Cushing, a graduate student in philosophy and teaching assistant who is about half his age. He did not respond to interview requests.

At the start of the semester last fall, Marquis said, Cushing told the class that students would take three tests, each worth 25 percent of the final grade, for a total of 75 percent. Four papers, each worth 5 percent, would comprise 20 percent of the grade. Class participation would decide the rest.

Based on that formula, Marquis figured he scored a 92.5 percent, or an A-minus. But when the Lanesborough resident checked his grade online in early January, he saw a C and e-mailed Cushing to complain.

Cushing wrote back that he graded the students more stringently on the third exam because they had had a full semester to learn how to write for a philosophy class. As a result, Cushing wrote, Marquis got an 84 for the class. But the students’ numerical scores struck Cushing as too high, so he graded everyone on a curve before assigning letter grades. Marquis ended up with a C.

“As I am entering grades, I consider whether or not they seem fair,” he wrote Marquis. “. . . I thought your grade was a good reflection of your work.”

Marquis e-mailed Porter, the ombudsman. But she said faculty have their own grading scales and that one professor might view an 84 as an A-minus, while another might view it as a C.

“I urge you to accept this grade and continue on with your course work, as there are no grounds for an academic grievance,” she wrote.

Less than three weeks later, Marquis filed suit.

Peter Michelson, a lawyer for the university, urged Judge Ponsor to dismiss it, saying Marquis had failed to present a single legitimate legal claim.

He also focused on public policy, asking, “Does the court really want to put itself in the business of reviewing, under some constitutional or federal statutory doctrine, the propriety of the grades which a student has received?”

Ponsor gave his answer last Wednesday from the bench: No.

ways to stretch your printing quota:

1. use both your faculty logon (like t.koenig) and your student logon (like koenig. t) - you should get 400 pages per logon

2.  you can print double-sided from infocommons. This definitely works for PDF’s and should also work for WORD docs.

- Click File, then Print.

- there is a box called “Properties” near the top of the print box. Click that.

- on the right hand side, click “2 sided print” and “flip on long edge” (unless you want the 2nd page upside down)

3. print 2 pages on each page that comes off the printer.

-Click File, then Print.

- there should be something like “pages per sheet” - change from 1 to 2. enjoy!

As the department begins to receive applications for the graduate
program, the committee has to decide how to review those applications
fairly and efficiently.  The admissions process at NU is centralized,
and the department doesn’t receive the applications until they are
complete.  It was suggested that 3 faculty members should read each
application, and that grad director Matt Hunt should read them all.
One faculty member suggested creating two review committees, each with
representatives of each of the department’s 4 specialty areas (gender,
urban, conflict, and globalization).  Applicants would be given scores
based upon the quality of their applications by each reviewer.  No
matter how good an applicant is, he or she must also be a good fit for
the department.

A German Ph.D. student has requested to come to our department to work
for 3 months as a visitor.  She has funding from her home institution.

One faculty member expressed concerns about grad students meeting
deadlines on their dissertations.  It was proposed that students and
their dissertation committee directors sign a contract specifying when
each aspect of the project will be completed.  What do you all think
about this proposal?  Do you think it will help you complete your
degree efficiently, or does it just add to the pressure you already
have on you?

One faculty member suggested that, in the future, professional seminars
could be cross-disciplinary, organized by the School of Social Science,
Urban Affairs, and Public Policy (of which, if you didn’t know yet, the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology is now a part).  Do you like
this idea, or would you like to see pro seminars tailored to the
specific needs of soc and anthro students?

here’s a very quick and easy GPA calculator. check it out! (PS, your current GPA can be found on myNEU, self-service, my transcript)

http://www.image-ination.com/test_maker/gpa.html

COGS Meeting - November 29

There were no new major concerns from graduate students brought to the committee, but we did talk more specifically about the pro-seminars we’d like to set up for the spring semester. A staff member suggested that grad students approach GPSA to get funding for these events. As your COGS reps, we are looking into this and will work on the funding application over Christmas break. COGS is interested in implementing these pro seminars in a more formal way in the future (i.e. for credit), but this is the best we will be able to accomplish for next semester.

Here is a list of topics around which we would like to hold seminars:
how to write a dissertation
how to write a curriculum vitae (CV)
how to submit to a journal
how to write a syllabus
how to grade effectively
how to engage your students
how to do a conference presentation
issues around co-authoring
how to give a job talk
how to do grant-writing, get external funding
how to submit to IRB

And here are some suggestions of faculty members who could potentially
be persuaded to lead various seminars:

Mike Handel
Kathrina Zippel
Sam Friedman
Heather Hindman
Matt Hunt
Barry Bluestone
Judy Perrolle
Gordana Rabrenovic
Silvia Dominguez
Danny Faber
Tom Koenig

Please examine this list and let us know which topics (or faculty members) would be most appealing to you, or suggest other topics and potential faculty presenters.  Specifically, we’d like for students to RANK them in order of importance. Perhaps let us know which 4 you’d like first, as we will not be able to get to all of these in the Spring semester alone. If there are any graduate students who would like to give a presentation (how to do a comp, pitfalls of the proposal process, etc.), please contact us and we will set it up.

For help with teaching, faculty and grad students debated whether it would be more valuable to hold a seminar in the department or to send grad students to CEUT for help. A student COGS rep pointed out that CEUT classes are often not directed at the social sciences, and may therefore not be helpful. In other news, some undergraduate students have approached the Undergraduate Committee about the quality of instruction from SGAs. Faculty debated over whether we should bring back formal teacher training for grad students. Again, it was suggested that graduate student instructors seek help at CEUT.

Soc G213 will be a very hands-on class.  The focus will be more on doing than on reading.  The reading will be designed mostly to support student projects.

The course will be centered around translating each student’s substantive interests into an original research paper.  I hope to hold the class in a computer lab.  On the first day students contribute their research interests to the group and we go to the online data repository known as ICPSR and search for data sets that can speak to the students’ different interests.  Everyone downloads a data set that is relvant for their interest in class.  In class, we open up the codebooks and collectively try to makes sense of them and look for variables that might be useful for analysis.  We read the data sets from ascii format into a stats package’s system file format for analysis and run frequencies on the variables that look promising.

The following several classes we do a condensed review of statistics and of how to use the stats package (Stata), as well as covering some research principles and methods that perhaps were not in your methods course. Weekly assignments will be to apply the statistical and methodological principles learned to your data set and to gradually develop a research plan for the final paper.  Then the course will move to more of a seminar format in which students discuss their progress and solicit ideas and feedback from the group.

The goal will be to move from general ideas you may have about a topic to testable propositions, which the final paper will test.  Students will do literature searches to help derive hypotheses, but this will also be done as through short class presentations and open discussions.  If people need help or even ideas for research topics, I’ll act as a backup and facilitator.  I have a backlog of research that students can work on for the class and we can collaborate on making them joint publications afterward, but this is not the aim of the class.  The goal is to equip you with the tools to conduct your own research on topics that interest you.

I’d like to demystify the research process and ideally even give people a head start on dissertation projects or at least a paper that can be presented at a conference or even submitted for publication.  At the end of the class, everyone should feel comfortable doing quantitative research on their own from start to finish: finding the data, putting it in usable form, exploring it for its potential, discovering the ways it can be used to answer interesting questions, conducting quantitative analyses, and communicating findings in a professional research paper.

The Stanford Center on Adolescence is pleased to announce that it will be awarding up to $10,000 to graduate students and post doctoral researchers conducting empirical research on a broad range of topics that shed light on purpose in life among young people.  Researchers from all disciplines are encouraged to apply for the awards, and applications are due on January 17, 2007.  Applicants must be affiliated with an accredited college or university and should be U.S citizens or permanent residents. Postdoctoral applicants  must have received their Ph.D. within the past five years. More information and application materials can be found at http://coagrants.stanford.edu