Craig Stroupe | Associate Professor | Department of Writing Studies| 1201 Ordean Court # 420 | University of Minnesota Duluth | Duluth, MN 55812 | 218-726-6249 | fax 218-726-8228 | cstroupe@d.umn.edu
As a kid, I wanted to become a writer and move north, away from the sticky heat of Titusville, Florida.
I still remember, one muggy Christmas evening, seeing a Florida palmetto bug--imagine a cockroach on steroids--crawling across a plywood snowman's chest in a neighbor's front yard. In the floodlight shining up from the dense grass, the bug cast a shadow big as a fist. "Someday," I told myself, "I'll be long gone from here and I'll write about that."
Now, I teach Web design and visual rhetoric at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where I write about New Media and often get up from my computer to make sure that it's still snowing outside.
Most of us can still remember the sounds of drills grinding and rattling through cinderblock walls when crews first installed Ethernet cables in faculty office buildings.
Did that racket signal the first breaching of what Gerald Graff has called the "systematic non-relation" among disciplines, which keeps the university from realizing its social and intellectual mission, or were we hearing only stop-gap dental work near the end of the century to keep the old university from losing its teeth altogether?"
— from "Technologizing the Conflicts: Graff and the Web" in Pedagogy. See more on my scholarship on my Writing page.