I hate writing proposals. It’s not much fun at all. The thing is, I like the planning that goes into getting a new course ready to teach, or the planning that goes into revising an existing course. It’s just that writing a proposal for a paper or a talk stresses me out.

I sure as hell hope it gets easier.

Oh, that reminds me–I received a form email advising me that my course proposal had been rejected. Damn. Come to find out, only one proposal could be accepted. It’s not surprising to me that the one proposal accepted was a professor’s proposal. I understand that kind of thing completely.

However, the last two sentences of the rejection email have me pondering issues of collaboration, especially because of the bolded “and” in the second sentence below.

To make the minimal enrollments, we will have to offer courses that look more attractive to students than others. For English, this usually means familiar authors and/or texts, and [my emphasis] relatively simple, approachable themes and topics.

Texts that are familiar to whom? To faculty doing the selecting or to students who are trying to decide what courses to take? I would suspect that “Both” is the best answer. In Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff recommends that professors do more collaborating to help students connect different academic disciplines and more easily enter the intellectual conversation of ideas and argumentation. It would also be a good idea for instructors to collaborate more so they are familiar with what their colleagues are doing because I suspect that is not necessarily so. I would also guess that most rhetoric, composition, or new media authors are by nature less familiar to students than literature authors.

Simple and approachable — yes, I can make my language more so. However, I think any New Media topic is still, unfortunately, perceived as less “approachable” by many English departments. I hate that too. It makes me wonder if I’m in the right area. Except, in what other field could I potentially research and teach classes in professional, technical, and web writing, visual rhetoric, and the rhetorics of affect in social networks?