Welcome to my blog–past2present. My name is Jill Watts and I am a professor of History at California State University San Marcos. My areas of specialization are United States Social and Cultural History, African American History, and Film History. Here’s my university homepage: http://www2.csusm.edu/jwatts/
I started this blog last spring because I teach a graduate course on new media technology and history and I wanted to experiment with blogging. The problem was I just didn’t feel like I had anything much to blog about. I don’t read many blogs and I didn’t want to just contribute more “stuff” to the internet.
But in the past few weeks, as our campus has been struggling with the unprecedented budget cuts here in California, I’ve been thinking about chronicling my experiences during the upcoming academic year. All employees of the CSU have been furloughed two days a month and managing that kind of work situation has been a puzzle in a university workplace. I thought keeping a journal of the next year, which will be unusual for certain, might somehow be useful.
So in my blog linked to this page–True Confessions of a Furloughed Professor–I will write about the next year of furloughs and how they impact the university and my own experiences in teaching, researching, and service to the university. I’m especially concerned about how the furloughs impact our students. I’ll confess this first: I am a biographer and I don’t believe that my own life or my ideas have some grand significance that everyone on the internet needs to hear about. But I think that all of us who are furloughed over the next year are a part of something that somehow will be important as time passes and as universities think about how to handle budget cuts in weak economies.
