The question above, posed slangily, is the kind of thing you might hear during the "informal" part of a tenure-track job interview. What timeline do you imagine for revising your thesis as a monograph? At what point in the near future do you plan to publish a book?

But I am interested here in the question in the sense of where a book fits within a larger research program. I am always reading something, always annotating and taking notes. I seem frequently to be proposing or preparing conference presentations. I work on articles, solicited and speculative. Over the course of ten or fifteen years, a scholar in the humanities can be working on many threads of a related subject.

At what point, though, does this activity constitute writing a book?

It is not a question posed lightly or answered easily. Once one admits to writing a book, the clock is ticking. I have a colleague who no longer publishes papers or attends conferences; he works only in long form. He is always writing a book, but he is also always asked how his book is coming, how much longer before his book comes out. That amounts to considerable pressure.

After my study leave -- I have had only one -- a study leave granted in order to write a book, I had many threads, and there was considerable pressure to tie them together in book form. Every chapter of the eventual monograph had been presented as a conference paper; some chapters ended up containing material from more than one presentation. But there was great discipline needed to recast that material so that it worked as a monograph. My memories of Writing the Lost Generation are ones of editing: there was so much rewriting that I have forgotten what it was like to face blank paper with an idea in my mind.

Recently, I have been confronting that very thing.

I have been studying American little magazines for almost twenty years. In that time, a field has grown up around me -- periodical studies -- from which I have benefited professionally. But a book about the magazines I study would be huge, unwieldy to write and unprofitable for any academic publisher. Over the past twelve months, I have been able to imagine a monograph of reasonable length, something in the area of 80,000 to 100,000 words, a monograph that addresses the historical range I think necessary but has a provable thesis. I have been putting together notes and have begun writing a draft of a chapter.

I think that, finally, I am writing another book.

My opinion piece for the upcoming number of University Affairs on the importance of faculty service has appeared online at its website.  Have a look at http://www.universityaffairs.ca/we-are-the-pros.aspx.

On Friday morning, I heard Kim Campbell on CBC Radio, where her suggestion for an alternate lyric to replace "in all thy sons command" in our national anthem seemed a remarkably sensible one.

Why not sing "in all of us command"?

It turns out that Ms Campbell had first made that suggestion twenty years ago. It is far less radical than reverting to the original words penned by Robert Stanley Weir: "thou dost in us command."

I found myself nodding my head. "From far and wide, O Canada" has been added to the version I learned as a child, so it is not as if our national anthem cannot be altered. And "sons" does feel anachronistic to me, while "us" is nowhere near as bend-over-backwards earnest as "he or she," "s/he" or "sons and daughters." So, even as the government was backtracking from an idea surely rooted in watching dozens of women olympians singing, it seemed as though Ms Campbell had the solution.

But she could not stop talking.

Why not take this opportunity to purge O Canada of all religious references, she wondered. And, while we are at it, let us change "our home and native land" to "our home on native land." No controversy there!

Ms Campbell's ideas, according to the speaker who followed her, demonstrate only that no amount of tinkering would satisfy everyone; while that is true, that is not what I found most objectionable about Ms Campbell's wider plans. What bothered me was how they demonstrated so clearly that people are never satisfied with incremental change, people are never satisfied with small, obvious fixes. If we are going to go to the bother of a fight, after all, we had really better make it worth that bother.

Small, meaningful change is hardly worth the effort. But other things are so dramatic, they scare us back to inaction. From health care to climate change, can we not see this is true?

I am an international student who skipped out of Canada after running up a large debt. Okay, I am not, but a number of collection agencies believe me to be.

When, last autumn, I got my iPhone, Rogers assigned me a recycled phone number. I should have known it was recycled because it was too good to be true. The last four digits, "2215," are wonderfully conventional, and the first three digits are part of a familiar exchange. (There you go, telemarketers: I have narrowed down my private phone number to under a thousand combinations. Fill your boots -- and your long distance bills.) So, it was not the kind of odd combination of numerals one usually gets for new cellphones. I could almost remember the number. And, honestly, is that not the struggle? How often does one call oneself, anyway?

Within days, I started to get calls from unfamiliar people, strange voicemails. When I decided to return one, I learned the extent of the ugly truth: the fellow who used to have my number owed a lot of people a lot of money.

At first, the collection agents did not seem to believe me. I was not a young student from Asia? Was I sure I was not? Okay, but did I know him? Did I live on Columbia Boulevard? Was I certain I did not? Eventually, they all agreed to flag "my" file with this information, and the calls stopped. But as the debts get passed from agency to agency, the calls begin again, and so does the cycle of explanations.

There are two things that have interested me through this process. Number one, these collection agents have been nicer than I expected they would be. Of course, they should be apologetic when they learn about their "mistake," but -- even as I have had to convince them of my real identity -- they have been polite, for the most part. They do, it must be said, answer their extensions rather abruptly, however: "What? Yeah?"

Number two, these collection agents take no care with this fellow's personal information. In an attempt to determine whether I am telling the truth, whether I might actually be his acquaintance, they tell me all kinds of things about him.

Still, I have never been able to bring myself to ask them exactly how much money he was given.  Oh, easy credit.  You really are a gift, are you not?  I believe that credit card companies and other similar businesses have pulled back from the big campus pushes that we saw in recent years.  I used to think that giving students access to all kinds of credit hurt students; it now seems clear that it hurt some creditors, too.

If you have been reading this blog over any period of time, you must acknowledge that I have gone out of my way not to embarrass my employers. The opinions expressed are my own; I never speak here for the university. The experiences I relate are things that have happened to me as a teacher and an administrator. But, over the past two weeks, there have been letters released publicly and meetings held throughout campus to spread the word. Like every postsecondary institution in the province of Alberta, we find ourselves short of money.

The recent budget instituted a funding freeze we had been told to expect. Unfortunately, this "frozen" amount brought with it the elimination of a number of other revenue streams upon which we had come to rely. Say, for example, that you held a salaried position but had the opportunity to work extra overtime on weekends. If, after years with this arrangement, your employers maintained your base pay but eliminated overtime, they could claim that there was no change to your salary, but your household would still have less money coming in. In this way, coupled with increases in costs, we here find ourselves looking to save $9 million within an overall budget of approximately $150 million.

Now, membership in any university community is a tremendous privilege, and I do not for a moment intend to suggest, with so many people suffering so much, that our struggles represent a tragedy to be compared with other hardships. But, as the old song used to lament, "They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead." Yet, for the first time since I moved to Alberta nearly fifteen years ago, I must question genuinely my province's commitment to postsecondary education. I think if universities had been cut as part of an austere budget, that would be one thing. But, in fact, the budget had a lot of red ink, drew heavily on one-time "rainy day" money, and included a big funding increase to health care. Should our overall situation not improve and more "across the board" cutting become essential, what more could post-secondary education endure?

I have been criticized for discussing the business of running a university in "corporate" terms. (And, in fact, I hope to write more about this in the weeks ahead.) But the fact of the matter is that when you manage $150 million, and much of that money is public money, you can be sure that you will be held to account. What is clear to me is that universities are tremendously responsible stewards of those funds. What none of us are skilled at doing is responding nimbly to varied and changing demands. For example, as students have come over time to expect more flexibility -- more courses at different times in different semesters taught through different modes of delivery -- we have all had to spread out and carry a fair bit of extra capacity for the sake of choice. It is unfair to ask students, as you might expect "customers," to pay for all of that.  (If you must fly at 2pm on a Friday, you will pay more than someone willing to fly at 6am.  No such differential exists in education.) Insofar as some of those demands also represent government priorities -- think, for example, about small class sizes or more electronic delivery -- access to additional public funds is opportune. But the nature of university structures makes it difficult to contract, quickly, when those funds are then cut off.

Moving forward, it is possible to scale back contracts for sessional instructors and not hire replacements for people who depart, though these measures, themselves, cause great personal suffering. But those "savings" are always distributed unevenly. It might be, for example, that most of the retirements one sees come from two or three units. Should they suffer while others do not? A highly specialized work force necessary for a university -- there I go: that "corporate speak" again -- cannot be moved from department to department. So, in hard times, we reduce choice, sometimes disproportionally, increase class sizes, and make the kinds of tertiary cuts other "businesses" could never consider. When, at another university at which I taught, we experienced a budget shortfall, all contract instructors lost the use of the telephone! Imagine, if you will, giving a syllabus to students with a phone number that, suddenly, went out of service.

The elephants in the room here are, of course, tuition fees and faculty salaries.

As I said, students do not -- and cannot -- pay the full price of their education. Society benefits from the investment it makes in post-secondary education, and if you need evidence of the fact that governments and universities in this country will always be inextricably entwined, consider the fact that the former controls both main revenue streams for the latter: governments grant us taxpayers' money and decide what students are charged. That said, I believe student groups are preparing to fight back against demands that they pay more. They should fight back, especially in the absence of a system of loan repayment tied to income.

One gets the sense that governments, and perhaps you, too, dear reader, believe professors overpaid. I do important work, in preparation for which I attended university for nine years. Compared with other professionals, my salary is but competitive, I believe. When I was at school in England, the impression was that people who wanted to "get ahead" went to work in London. People with a commitment to education, first and foremost, stayed at university. I think something similar was true in Canada, too, and it is still the case that no one gets into this business for the money. What is clear is that faculty salaries are negotiated in a marketplace, and no ready mechanism exists for rolling back competitive salaries in an international industry. There are many examples, even in tough times, of universities losing good people to other institutions over salary disparities.

Still, when I visit other schools or attend conferences, there is the sense from the people I meet that money flows throughout Alberta, flows to everyone and everything. This was never the case, but since the widespread cuts throughout the province under Ralph Klein in the early 1990s, there has certainly been the sense that universities had become a priority for the people and its government, even if -- at times -- we have not done enough to explain to them fully the importance of what we do. There is reason to fear that this might no longer be the case. I have experienced post-secondary education as an afterthought, elsewhere, and I hope not to experience that here.

Well, not exactly. Bear with me.

Returning to Lethbridge from Ottawa last year, I got caught in a weather delay in Toronto. Realizing that I would miss my connecting flight in Calgary, I worked my way to the front of a long queue at the gate. Air Canada had only one later flight scheduled to Lethbridge, and I did not want to leave to chance that I would, over the course of the next six hours, get automatically re-booked to it. Passengers beginning their journeys in Toronto were concerned about missing their own connections, their own bus journeys to Banff, their live events in Calgary that night. Some were abandoning their trips, resigned to simply take cabs back home.

With about a half-dozen people queued behind me with their own questions, I heard paged to our gate Catriona LeMay Doan, the Olympian. I suspect she was awaiting an upgrade, and so I was not surprised to see a tall, strikingly athletic woman materialize immediately at my side, and she quickly walked forward to approach the agent.

"Hey! There's a line here!" one woman yelled. "Wait your turn!" snapped another man. Ms Doan stopped in her tracks.

Now, I believe that I was, at that moment, in the midst of a genuine Canadian incident, one way or another. Were the angry individuals behind me not ready to make a concession to social hierarchy? I actually think that, as stressed as they were, they did not recognize Ms Doan, had not heard Air Canada summon her. Was Ms Doan, a legend in Canadian sports, deferring to the angry mob in a way that, say, an American celebrity might never do?

Ever the Canadian gentleman, of course, I stepped in. "Folks," I said. "She's been paged." We made eye contact for a moment -- I wish she'd thanked me, I must admit -- and the multiple gold medalist passed on without further comment.

Now, without that simple courtesy, itself a profoundly Canadian gesture, might Ms Doan have been overtaken by an angry mob? Unlikely. But during that interminable wait for the hydraulic cauldron to assemble itself in Vancouver on Friday night, I liked to imagine that I helped contribute to the health and good fortune she has experienced, the series of events that brought her, over the period of the past eighteen months, to stand again in front of a world-wide audience. Happy to have been of assistance, ma'am.

The announcers for NBC coverage of the Opening Ceremonies at the Winter Olympics marveled at the participation of prominent Canadians from different walks of life. And I wondered, of course, that, if one had heard Sarah McLachlan, would one know Romeo Dallaire? Would one who remembered Betty Fox have ever seen Steve Nash play? Do people have albums from both Measha Brueggergosman and k.d. lang? I too often hear the cultural snobbery (or reverse cultural snobbery) of people who claim to be ignorant of certain elements of our culture, popular or otherwise. My brush with Ms Doan in Toronto was made possible because someone who spent his formative years locked away in a library still places great importance on maintaining his cultural literacy. While it might be to some a badge of honor to not know who is Britney Spears, that is, to me, as puzzling as being proud never to have spent money to watch a subtitled film in a theater. What I took from Friday night is a reminder that our citizenship is rooted in an awareness of all elements of our culture.