Welcome to my interview series on writing, teaching writing, and using writing in different careers. This time, I interviewed Lane Kenworthy, Yankelovich Endowed Chair Professor of Sociology at University of California, San Diego. Lane teaches undergraduates and graduates, conducts research on topics such as poverty, and writes books on social inequality.
I first met Lane during my second quarter of working as a UCSD graduate teaching assistant (TA). I was a TA for Lane’s class, which was one of the more unique experiences I’d had as a TA. For one, Lane was one of the more prepared professors I’d seen, because he actually had all the readings, exams, and assignment prompts prepped and published online before class started. The most interesting part was that Lane taught primarily from an online text published like a massive but well-organized blog series on his WordPress website.
I had never seen any other professor self-publish their own textbook on their website. Lane’s website is also home to lots of “life tips,” advice for grad students, recipes, a blog, all his course syllabi (in which you can still find me listed as his course TA), and more. If you have seen as many faculty webpages as I have, you would know that rarely does any faculty maintain such a complex, updated, and developed website. Anyway, when I was planning out an interview series for my blog about writing, I knew I wanted to talk with Lane about his process.
In this first half of our interview, I talk with Lane about topics like managing everything from research to teaching to writing, difficulties in writing, and writing his own online book for his courses.
Introductions
Lane: So, I’m Lane Kenworthy. I’m a professor at UC San Diego in Sociology. Although I think of myself mainly as a social scientist, since a lot of the research and teaching that I do spans across politics and economics, and sociology encompasses all those things. It’s sort of uber social science. But nevertheless, my interests, I think of as fairly interdisciplinary. Right now, I’m working on two books, mainly. Actually, three, I guess.
One is an online book called The Good Society that’ll probably never be published in the usual sense. Because I like keeping it online and completely un-gated and free to anyone and everyone. Partly because I use it a lot in the courses I teach. Another one is a book on cities, and how more and more people are moving into cities. And a third book, as I’ve made the case in some of my publications, is about how the Nordic countries have gotten as close to, or closer to, optimal institutions and policies in society. But that book’s in its early stages.
Doreen: So you’re working on three books. What are your other responsibilities that are lining up for this quarter or ahead?
Lane: That’s really it. I mean, I do normal professional-type work. So, I review journal articles and book submissions for publishers, and increasingly, as you get older, you end up being asked to review professors who are up for tenure or some other promotion. So, these things take up some time.
The nice thing is, for the most part, not always, but for the most part, they’re also interesting and can even contribute to my understanding of the world and specific problems. It allows you to read new stuff by people who you may be somewhat familiar with or totally unfamiliar with, or very familiar with, but haven’t read all of their books or articles. So, I do that. And then also working with PhD students. And I’ll teach four classes during the year, which is the norm among UC San Diego professors. I’ll teach two in the winter quarter, and then two in the spring.
Doing research, teaching, writing, and mentoring all together
Doreen: So how do you manage these projects? You have books on different content, you’re teaching, and you’re working with different students. How do you do all of it together?
Lane: Well, to me, one of the best things about being a college professor is the flexibility you have with your time. And that’s really helpful to me, because I’ve found there’s some people who are happiest and work most effectively when they structure their time very carefully.
I’ve never, for better or worse, I’ve never been that way. Just kind of letting things go and not trying to tightly or carefully structure my day. Ever since laptop computers were invented, let’s say 30 years ago, I’ve sort of slowly but steadily worked more and more out of my university office. I can basically work anytime I want, and that includes if I wake up at two in the morning, and I can’t get back to sleep within 20 minutes, occasionally I’ll just give up and start working. It’s probably not a super healthy strategy in the long run, but I think it works for me.
Doreen: Yeah. So over time, it’s become easy for you to snap into your writing work mode.
Lane: Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it, although I’m not sure I ever struggled so much with that.
Difficulties (and fun) in writing
Doreen: What do you struggle with when writing your projects?
Lane: It’s the starting. I mean, like almost everyone, staring at that blank screen when you’re just starting to write something, whether it’s a 200-word blog post or a 300-page book. It’s intimidating and not fun. But nonetheless, I don’t feel like that particular part of getting into writing mode has ever been all that hard for me.
But for me, I really enjoy editing, so that motivates me. And I think this might be part of the reason why I really like writing books. I didn’t know that I liked writing books until I was almost finished with my second book. So anyway, ever since then, I’ve done almost entirely books. I’ve written enough articles and edited volume chapters, but books to me are the real joy, and I think that’s partly because I enjoy the editing process so much.
What’s fun is getting something down on paper that I think is more or less right, and then tweaking it, revising it, going back and figuring out what’s the evidence. Is the evidence that I think I have strong enough? What’s missing here? What else can I add?
And I just do a lot of that, and to the extent that my writing is clear, I’m very certain that it’s because I spend so much time editing, rather than because I’m a good first draft writer.
I don’t think I’m a good first draft writer at all, and that’s not any kind of false modesty. I know from lots of experience that most of what I put in as the first draft, whether it’s a short blog post or a whole book, it’s messy. But I just try to get something down. Organize my thoughts and see what’s there, and then I just keep working at it. I think that’s also why I like this online book.
Writing your own online book
Doreen: Yeah, I was gonna say that! Because you have that ability to consistently revise and always keep it up to date. So how did you get into writing your online book (The Good Society)?
Lane: It was accidental. I kind of became aware that blogs were a thing in 2007. I got my PhD in 1993, so, you know, it was past tenure, and I might have even been a full professor by then. I increasingly had been reading blogs and found them engaging, and by that time, thought that I might want to engage more directly in public discourse. And so Kieran Healy, who was a colleague at the time, he was already involved in the blogosphere, and kind of clued me into the right software and a few other things that were really helpful in convincing me that this is something I want to try.
I was never a super frequent blogger, but by the time I was really into it, I might be writing two posts a month. So I was kind of familiar with that. And by that time, I also had lots of slide sets for my teaching that I thought were really useful, but also limited because they were slides. At some point in around 2012, 2013, or 2014, I think I finally stopped blogging regularly by 2014, I felt like I was responding too much to current events and discussions. I wanted to decide on my own what I wanted to write about.
This is almost inevitable for bloggers, or today’s Substack writers, or whatever, is that you feel obligated to weigh in on whatever is out there, and sometimes that’s the controversy of the month, sometimes it’s the week, sometimes it’s the day, sometimes it’s the hour or the minute. And I just didn’t like that. Long story short, I decided to switch over from blog posts to pages. I use WordPress as the platform and just put things up that were intended to stay there and could be read as easily as three years later as when I posted it. But also that I could revise.
Teaching from your own online book
Lane: I pretty quickly decided that, hey, I could take a bunch of my slides that I use for teaching and add some text or some prose. I can write these things out online and assign them to students to read, rather than just show them as I lecture and force students to furiously scribble notes. And increasingly by then, they all had cameras on their phones, so they’re just taking photos.
Once I started doing that, I really liked it. This is not only enjoyable to me, again, in part because I can keep revising, but also just more effective for students. Instead of assigning a bunch of readings, and then also forcing them to study all the slide content that I had, I can just combine the readings and the slides into one thing, and make life a little easier for students.
And now there’s this other component which reinforces that inclination. The danger of getting distracted with a screen in front of you. Since about 2019, when a few studies about screentime had come out, I’ve not let students have any sort of screens in my lecture courses. So not only phones, but no tablets or laptops. So, being able to, again, reduce the content that I’m forcing them to try to look over or devour, I feel like is a benefit.
What I’ve done for about 10 years now, so instead of having normal slides where you’re switching from one to the next, and each has a different figure or set of bullet points, or whatever, mostly what I put up on the screen in class now is just the reading.
I’ll basically scroll through it, and get to a particular graph or figure or a set of bullet points, or a paragraph. And I’m talking. I have no data to know whether this is more or less effective than doing it the other way. But I do like that there’s less for students to have to focus on. They don’t have to both do the reading and also study the slides. They could just do one thing.
Doreen: Yeah, and it’s easier for them to access because everything is free and online.
Lane: It’s very easy.
Few good textbooks for students?
Doreen: One of the reasons why I really wanted to talk with you is because your work with The Good Society really struck me as really unique. At least when I was teaching in UCSD, you were the only professor who had this kind of project and this method of teaching.
I remember I asked you a question like: why do you have this kind of reading for your students? And you said something like, you hadn’t encountered a text that was accessible and easy to understand for students. Are there other faculty who do something similar, like have their own online book that they’ve written and published?
Lane: Not that I’m aware of. I mean, I suspect there are some, but I haven’t come across any, and I haven’t looked particularly hard.
But I will say, the point you make is a good one that I do remember. I have almost always, ever since I started teaching, which is now 30 plus years ago, I’ve almost never used a textbook. Not because I’m in any way opposed to textbooks. But simply because I never, as you said, found one that I thought was good enough, that I could assign enough content from to justify forcing students to pay a huge sum of money for. And so, in many respects, The Good Society project is really just my version of a textbook.
I should also emphasize that by the time that I really decided to do this, I was already a full professor. And in academia, you can’t typically get promoted too much higher than that. I had tenure, I had had tenure for a while. So I didn’t have any super strong incentive to continue publishing either journal articles or regularly published books in order to improve my salary or status, or I had comparatively little incentive.
I was as free as one could be to feel like, if I’m gonna spend a lot of time working on this project, that’s not going to yield any kind of material rewards, then that’s not a big deal. I’m not putting tenure at risk.
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