My Elevator Speech

For me it’s finding a way to reconcile those binaries and think more about the world we live in now. It’s thinking not about who to replace (where we’ve been) but who to bring in (where are we going). We don’t have a forward vision. Our vision is rooted in the past. We spend all our time coming to terms with the past. Part of the problem is that because so few of us participate in larger disciplinary discussions or have a sense of where things are moving, we defer to Maureen and her accounting is not without bias. First new person we should hire is a technical writing specialist. That needs to become a more prevelent part of our major and our colleagues in other departments are interested in this area and in collaborating with us there. Second is a multi-media/digital writing specialist--our students are interested in this area--smart students, too. Karen Rubino’s daughter, who took a few courses with me but was a COMM major, just got into grad school at BU for digital stuff. COMM is going to own that part of literacy work if we don’t grab it and then we’ll be left out. These are the places language and literacy are going in the broader culture, we need to think about how we respond to these shifts and changes and not impose our needs and agendas all the time.

The problem is, we are all tenured in and we’re not going anywhere. It’s like 2008 and Obama has to help GM completely rebuild itself, but GM says--you have to do it with the existing workforce and their skills cause we can’t fire them (and they’re not willing to go in for retraining). What a challenge!