Of all the things I’ve done with this blog, I have to admit, the most amazingly fun thing has been this Furlough Tour. I’ve got to meet all sorts of educators, talk to a ton of students I never otherwise would have met and burned a boatload of baseball bats.

When I pitched this idea, I jokingly said that if we sold out 11 days, I’d have tour T-shirts. Well, we ended up with almost three times that many stops (and good seats are still available if you want me to just randomly show up on one of my own days to do something fun for your class or newsroom).

The T-shirts were simply a promise kept, which is what I always try to do. When two really cool design folk got involved, they became my pride and joy. I don’t make money off these, but I’ve got to tell you, they make me smile every time I see them.

The order form closes tonight, so this is your last chance to buy a Filak Furlough Tour T-shirt.

Thanks for playing along with my lunacy. More tour posts will be coming up this week.

QUICK UPDATE: The “Filak Furlough T-shirts” are live and have a little more than a week left on their ordering clock. If you want to order one, here’s the link and here are the shirts:

Again, no proceeds go to me, but it does make me feel awesome to know people are actually out there wearing them.

Speaking of things that make me feel awesome, I got the chance to meet with two of Amy Smelser’s classes at Indiana Wesleyan University.

I realized very quickly that their college experience was different from what I’ve dealt with, in that Amy told me we had to cut off some discussion at the end of the first class because the students couldn’t be late for chapel. The only times I can recall my students praying are before the midterm and after Pub Crawl.

Indiana Wesleyan University –  Marion, IN

TOPIC: Mass com theory and how to write a big honkin’ paper with it.

THE BASICS: I’ve always kind of thought of theory in the way I think about most other things I teach: It’s a tool that can do a lot of great things, or it can be pathologically misused. People can find practical value in applying and advancing it, or they can just ponder it like the Integrated Liberal Studies professor I had one year who stared at an acorn for 45 minute in a pit class, before asking, “What is this acorn’s arate… or purpose…. ?”

Theories help us gather concepts through observation and then test those concepts to determine how robust they are, if they apply to specific groups/topics and if they can help us predict future actions, thoughts or outcomes. In the field of mass com, we don’t really have one giant, overarching theory. Instead we have a lot of “medium-sized theories” that cover specific elements of communication, each of which seeks to answer a certain type of question or examine a particular problem.

The first true attempt at making a big theory was the magic-bullet theory, also known as the hypodermic needle theory. It essentially said that senders of mass com messages could inject their messages into the minds of the audience and compel these people to do as the senders saw fit. Clearly, that didn’t work, because if it did, I’d have a lot more kids at my 8 a.m. classes. After that kind of fell apart, a number of other theories emerged with varying levels of success/support. Here’s a quick look at  a “greatest hits album” of these things:

 

THEORY	BASIC EXPLANATION	EXAMPLE
Magic Bullet/”Hypodermic Needle” Model	Media messages are simple and direct, penetrating the mind of consumers and creating specified actions.	You see an ad for Diet Coke and you go out and buy one.
Gatekeeping	Media messages pass through a series of decision points that determine if they get to the audience.	A newspaper editor decides there isn’t enough room to run a story on a high school basketball game, so no one in the community knows who won.
Agenda Setting	Media establishes the key topics in our day-to-day lives. However, it doesn’t necessarily change our opinions about those events.	The media’s coverage of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan keeps that story on your mind, but it doesn’t change whether you support or oppose the withdrawal.
Framing	Media practitioners place emphases on specific aspects of a topic, thus coloring the way in which consumers view it.	The construction of a new apartment complex is framed as “bad for the environment,” focusing our attention on ecological issues.
Spiral of Silence	The more a person’s opinion is in the majority, the more likely that person is to speak out. The less a person’s opinion is in the majority, the quieter they remain about the issue.	A group of your friends support Bill Smith for homecoming court. You don’t like Bill, but you keep that to yourself.
Third-person Effect	People drastically overestimate the influence messages have on other people while underestimating the impact the messages have on themselves.	Your roommate says the violent videogames he plays online never bother him, but he worries about “all those weirdos I play against.”

One theory that kind of stands out is that of uses and gratifications, in that it focuses less on what the media does to people and looks more at what people do with the media as well as what benefits we receive from using it.

Over the years, a number of uses, or specific things that drive our media  use, have emerged, including some of these:

NEED	EXPLANATION	EXAMPLE
Surveillance	People feel a need to be aware of what is happening around them.	Checking a traffic app to see if any accidents have occurred that might make your daily commute longer.
Education	People have a need to become more informed on topics that matter to them.	Reading a blog post to learn how to keep your plants from dying.
Entertainment	People want to content to amuse them and make them feel good.	Watching a YouTube video of cats that can play the piano.
Social Utility	People need to feel connected to other people in society.	Reading a “Book of the Month” to discuss it at an upcoming book club meeting.
Personal Identity	People enjoy seeing content from people to whom they can relate.	Listening to a podcast from a fellow college student who talks about how bad the food is on campus.
Escape	People want to mentally free themselves from the problems they experience in their daily lives.	Playing a videogame in which the main character flies through space and saves the universe.

Now, true theoreticians will likely decry the idea that this whole “tools in the toolbox” approach as cheapening the importance of higher-level work. I’d argue that in most cases, theories are only as good as their applicability, especially when it comes to mass communication. In short, if I can’t use it for something worthwhile, I’m probably not going to value it.

If you’re the kind of big thinker academic who wants to smoke three joints and argue with a squirrel if a chestnut has a soul, go for it. I’ve got work to do.

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: I can understand what I’m reading about the theories, but I don’t know what they do or mean. How do you figure out how a theory works?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: When I can’t figure out how something works, I look at journal articles and conference papers that used the theory in furtherance of trying to test some hypotheses or answer some research questions. This helped me see how the authors saw what the theory  could do and then tried to see  if it worked in relation to what they wanted to test.

I boiled it down like this: When I’m working on a pinball machine, usually some part of the machine isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing. The nice thing about these machines is that they usually have several basic systems that all work in the same way on a single machine. That lets me see a working version of the part that needs repair.

So let’s say I have a really weak flipper and I don’t know what’s wrong. Fortunately for me, most of these things have two or more flippers, so I can look at how the strong, working flipper is behaving and then compare it to how the weak, non-working one is behaving and see what’s different. Maybe it’s missing a screw. Maybe a switch isn’t touching right. Maybe a coil is burnt out. In figuring this out, I can probably fix the problem.

The same thing is true about theories and those other papers. Let’s say I came across a theory called X-O Myopia Theory (totally made up, I’m pretty sure). Let’s say the theory states that the definitive nature of self-selecting exculpating choices yields a negative reaction to all constructs that would otherwise undermine that choice and thus leads to a narrowing of overall viewpoints related to choices that could follow outside the realm of the original choice.

I don’t understand what the heck that means by reading the theory stuff so I go and pull five or six articles on it and see how it behaves. In each article, the author is trying to figure out how people react to a close-ended question. In two-thirds of the studies, the question touched on a controversial topic. In all of the studies, the question was meant to eliminate personal guilt. In half the studies, the researchers found people stuck to their original choice, even when other better choices came along. In two-thirds of the studies, people continued to support their choice, even when proven wrong.

Well, from all that I can gather that this has to do  with answering questions that are true/false, right/wrong, yes/no etc. I can also figure out that the question is somehow irksome or worrisome to the person answering it and that they have a strong attachment to an answer they feel makes them look the best or avoid looking shady. I can then figure out that the theory posits that people tend to hold tight to that answer, for fear of a bunch of stuff, even if other options might be better.

This approach helps break down they mystique of theories in that “toolbox” kind of way.

ONE LAST THING: When it comes to big papers, theses, dissertations and so forth, I go back to two things I learned from two really smart people.

In my first year of the doctoral program, Charles Davis (now the dean at Georgia) was a professor at Mizzou who spoke to my class in a seminar setting. He told us that when it comes to the dissertation, we should take this approach: “Your dissertation is not, nor is it supposed to be, the best thing you ever write. It’s just meant to prove that you can write it, so knuckle down and get it done.”

In my first journalism class, Steve Lorenzo (the first teacher I ever desperately wanted to impress), was on my case about finishing an assignment on deadline. When I told him it wasn’t done yet, he told me, “Journalism is never done. It’s just due.”

I spent a lot of time with college parents this summer as part of my kid’s orientation and as part of our recruiting efforts on campus. What I learned is that I’m apparently more parent than professor, as I cared greatly about how much the college experience cost, what majors were available, what services could help my kid succeed and what jobs were at the end of this extremely expensive rainbow.

Despite what so many academics around here believe, not once did I, nor anyone else in these groups, ask, “But wait, what about the broadening of their horizons through general education courses that will offer my child a transformative life experience?”

I’ve thought about that a lot lately as my institution of higher learning is undergoing some fundamental changes, to put it mildly, even as a core group of academics attempt to obstruct changes necessitated by the unfortunate presence of reality.

Also, I got an alert the other day to tell me that while my institution is cutting hundreds of jobs, the system that oversees us and the other 12 schools that are mostly in trouble is spending a half-million dollars to rebrand itself. It also doesn’t help  that calling our system the “Universities of Wisconsin” is likely to really piss off at least a dozen other institutions of higher learning in this state that aren’t part of our system.

Over the years, I’ve attempted to make sense of things like this that make no sense to anyone who has common sense, only to realize that while I work in academia, I’m in no way an academic. With that in mind, here are even more confessions of an unpretentious, anti-academia professor.

(If you missed the first round, here you go…)

• I find myself actively wincing when someone “outs” me to the general public as a professor. The people who are doing it don’t do it to make me feel uncomfortable, but when someone says, “Oh, he’s a professor of journalism!” to some random person I don’t know, I almost feel the need to jump in with, “But I’m not like most of them.” As I’ve even told my provost, when people ask me what I do for a career, I tell them “I work at the U,” with the hope they think I’m a janitor or groundskeeper. What the world sees as the stereotypical professor is not what I want these people thinking of me.

 

• I care what my students think of me, but more in the “I want to make sure I’m not boring the hell out of you” way, as opposed to what they think of me personally. That’s why I’m not spending any time on “Rate My Professor” or sites like it. If you want to tell me I’m a terrible human being, I’m fine with that. Whatever you think about me can’t be nearly as bad as what I’m currently thinking about myself.

 

• A corollary to the above point: If you spend more than five minutes at the front end of any class, reading aloud from your “Rate My Professor” rating to complain about what students say about you, chances are you’re exactly the dingleberry the kids say you are. And yes, more than one student told me this happens…

 

• Whenever I try to ask an academic what value they provide to students, I find myself essentially having this conversation:

 

• Just because I like something, I don’t necessarily believe that other people need to like it as well. This is particularly true when it comes to class topics. I had a student tell me he took a class that was absolutely painful and pointless. The final project for that class required him to write an 18-page paper on the Cambodian genocide. When I asked why he picked that topic, he explained it was better than writing on the Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the Bosnian genocide… I then asked why the hell was he taking a class on genocide, only to find that he hadn’t. It was a general education writing class requirement that the professor focused on genocide because he was a scholar on the topic. If ever there was a clear example of why students hate professors, I think this is it.

 

• I feel bad for my students because my teaching examples are formed through my work experiences. If they had a professor who spent time covering the education beat, they’d get stories about school board meetings and first-graders making hand-print turkeys for Thanksgiving. If they had a professor who worked the government beat, they’d hear about political wrangling and and how they did deep-dive stories on campaign finance spreadsheets they got via open records requests. Since I spent my whole career on the night desk or the crime beat, most of my stories start off like, “This one time, a drug dealer got shot to death on his porch, so I go out there…”

 

• We recently got a memo from the dean’s office that I think captures what’s wrong with academia. In explaining how classes should be selected for teaching, the dean noted: “Curriculum offerings should support mission critical array and should be built to meet student demand and need. Curriculum offerings should not be built around faculty preference and specialties.”  In reading that I thought, “Do we NEED a memo that says that? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?” And then I realized, “Well, yes, we need a memo that spells that out because kids are being forced to take writing courses about genocide and  18th Century response poetry.”

 

• Many of the faculty members who claim that untenured adjuncts are “vital members” of the university system are adorable little hypocrites. It’s not that I disagree that adjuncts have value, but the reason these tenured folk value the adjuncts is because adjuncts teach the classes that those tenured folk don’t deign to teach. The next time I see a tenured faculty member teaching a 500-person freshman pit class so that an adjunct can teach a “passion project” course of 15 people, I’ll buy this argument. Until then, it’s just window dressing.

 

• When I deal with academics, I go back to something my dad told me a long time ago: “The only thing a vacuum cleaner salesman knows is that you definitely need a new vacuum cleaner.” In watching how people justify their existence around here, I’ve come to realize that we’ve got a lot of vacuum salespeople around here.

 

• When I see the various departments proclaiming how students can get jobs with their majors, I think we need to be more honest about how the college-to-career path works. There are basically three levels of this:
  • Majors that lead to careers: Nursing and teaching come to mind here. You take the classes that are career-specific, you do “clinicals” or internships in the field while in school, you get the degree and you enter that field.
  • Majors that tangentially relate to careers: Areas like English and communications come to mind. You take the classes and learn skills and those skills help you find a job in a field in which those skills are valued.
  • Majors you get a career in spite of you majoring in it: Philosophy, world religions, sociology and so forth come to mind. My best friend has a job that pays him about twice what I make and he has a poli sci degree. The job is working on coding and tech development for Google. He didn’t learn that in his Comparative Political Systems class.

 

• Whenever I get an expansive email about the importance of liberal arts as the foundation of all knowledge and societal advancement that must remain in all students’ lives no matter what, I figure out who sent it and then look that person up on LinkedIn. In most cases, these people turn out to be life-long academics who have never spent a day in the professional world, where things like layoffs, rule changes and corporate restructuring occur on the regular. Only someone of this ilk could think such things are an unjustified attack on scholastic pulchritude and not just part of life.

 

• When I hear people bemoaning how terrible it is that their teaching load has been increased by one extra class per semester, I want to scream about perspective:
  • The first job I had where they took taxes out of a paycheck was as a grounds crew member at the “Summerfest” grounds in Milwaukee. My job was to pick up litter, clean up after drunks in bathrooms, sweep up vomit and haul bags of trash that were hot to the touch. I also had to climb into trash compactors to sweep out “liquid run off” and clear the maggots that had infested the place.
  • My second job was as a garage mechanic, a job that nearly became a career path at one point. Aside from occasionally being burned by exhaust pipes, coated in grease and having oil poured into my eyes, I worked in a garage with no ventilation and limited concerns about occupational safety. After work, before I was allowed in the house, I had to wash up in the yard. Then, I had to strip off my work clothes in the basement and wash them by themselves so they wouldn’t mess up any good laundry.
  • I can’t tell you how damned lucky I feel every day that I have a job like the one I have and that I don’t have to come home in a broken and disheveled heap every day. Unless your job leads to you becoming dirty, bloody or nauseated, I’m not buying the “woe is me” act regarding having to do more of it.

 

• When the usual suspects in academia complain about how we’re “shifting into a tech-school mindset,” I want to say a) “If you mean we’re actually trying to get students ready for a career in something that they enjoy and will support them, it’s about damned time,” and b) “It’s not my fault you picked a shitty academic field that lacks any semblance of realistic value.”

 

• I believe in treating students like actual people, up to and including my desire to get them to understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. In every class I teach, if a student asks, “Why do I need to know this?” or “Why is this class required?” I can give them a detailed, logical answer that attaches to their degree program and what they plan to do with their life after graduation. This apparently makes me an outlier and a nutjob among tenured professors.

 

• When people have the time to write a four-screen email, complete with rhetorical questions and at least 11 self-referential boasts, they probably aren’t the kind of people I want to spend time with.

 

• I can’t help but laugh hysterically when I get emails from faculty members who are part of my “representative governance group.” Why? First,  reread the item above. Then, look at the list below. Of the 28 people across four colleges in this institution, 19 of them come from ONE COLLEGE. Here is the breakdown of home departments of these 19 people:
  • History   3
  • Philosophy  3
  • English 2
  • Biology  2
  • Math 2
  • Chemistry 1
  • Social Work   1
  • Music  1
  • Art  1
  • Theater  1
  • Poli Sci 1
  • Engineering  1

Nearly half of these people come from three major areas, none of which would lead my dad to say, “Great choice of a major, son! With that major, I’m sure you’ll have a financially and emotionally fulfilling career and never have to live in our basement after graduation!” Speaking of career paths, of the major areas listed here, I can only realistically count TWO that could make a solid case for a “college to career” path, something I emphasize in every class I teach. So, “representative governance,” my ass…

• And finally, I understand that nobody likes to go through changes that are forced upon them, especially when they involve unpleasant situations. However, for all the complaining academics do about students lacking critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, you’d think they themselves would be more willing to engage in these types of behaviors themselves when their place of employment is going down the dumper. Or, to put it another way: