NEW TOPIC: Academia and Industry

[Jimmie Killingsworth]

Hello, all.  Sorry to add to the pile on this, but Deb's response
moves me to say that what we're dealing with here might be a deeper
division between academics and practitioners than we're perhaps
willing to acknowledge.  Indeed some of the flaming in this stream of
emails reminds me of what I think of as attitudes embedded in the
division.  Once I was running a little late to a session at STC
because I had been stuck in a meeting in which I was trying to get a
publication series initiated but was being put off by the Society
management.  I hurried in and tried to jump into my presentation,
unfortunately without wasting time on apologies and explanations.
The evaluations of the session flamed me for being an "arrogant
academic" who didn't care enough about the session to make it on
time.  Somebody also said something about my casual clothes.  I WAS
arrogant enough (I guess) to be put off by these comments.  I've also
been told in workshops I was leading at the convention that an
academic like me couldn't possibly understand some of the issues I
was presenting even though most of the stuff I was talking about came
directly from experience in the field.  Finally, I think it's
important to acknowledge that we DO sometimes think differently,
partly because we have to generalize at a fairly high level if we
hope to teach students with a variety of interests in applying our
teachings, whereas most practitioners work with applications that are
so particular to their situations that they have very limited
relevance to our work.  Exploring the dimensions of the differences
between academic and practitioner attitudes and discourses in tech
comm--and exploring with open-eyed honesty--could make a very useful
project for those of us in STC and for our students.  Jimmie

At 9:23 AM -0500 12/6/06, Bosley, Deborah wrote:
>Bonni, I think you've covered the territory
>well. STC used to have faculty internships
>and they'd help place faculty in corporate environments
>for a brief time (I hope I'm remembering that correctly).
>
>All of the items you've listed are very do-able. These problems
>have existed for as long as I've been a member of STC (20
>years).  I'm not sure why we never make any headway.
>
>Deborah
>
>Dr. Deborah S. Bosley, Director
-- 
M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Ph.D.
Professor and Director of Writing Programs
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX  77843
(979) 847-8550
(979) 862-2292 (fax)
killingsworth at tamu.edu