Whatever Gets You Through the Night...

The Girl has had a cough, off-and-on, for a few days now. It's much worse at night. Last night she had a particularly bad coughing fit, during which The Wife went to her room and gave her some Mucinex. A half-hour later, she was up coughing again, yelling “Me want medicine!”

She thinks that medicine works immediately. If only it were so...

Since you aren't supposed to give more than one dose every four hours, but she wouldn't stop chanting “Me want medicine!” and we all needed the sleep, I decided that drastic measures were in order.

I took the dosing spoon (aside: love them dosing spoons! They're hollow tubes, with spoon-scoops at th end. The tube has calibrations on it, so you can pour a teaspoon or two of medicine into it as needed and give it to the kid directly. Genius, I tells ya.) downstairs and put in a teaspoon of orange juice. When I got back upstairs I gave it to her, letting her believe it was her medicine. The room was dark, and she wanted to believe it, so she did. She actually went back to sleep, and eventually, so did we. In an odd way, I'm actually proud of this.

Placebos: they're not just for breakfast anymore!

Early New Year

The Halloween posse came over this morning for a pre-New Year's celebration, with noon standing in as midnight, and today standing in as the 31st. (One of the families is going out of town for the next few days, so it had to be today.)

If you've ever been in a house with six kids from three families, you have a sense of the decibel level. The kids were – quite literally – running circles around each other, throwing paper airplanes and screaming at pitches that operatic sopranos can't hit.

The Wife organized a round of holiday Bingo (“B-doggie” “Bingo!”), which kept the kids contained in one room for a little while. Sugary snacks were in abundance, so the level of kid-energy ramped up steadily as the party continued.

At one point, The Boy and his Evil Sidekick ran into the room brandishing a whoopee cushion. Evil Sidekick declared, “you blow it up and I'll fart it!” That sentence may be entirely new to the English language.

TB lost his first tooth during the party. It could be anywhere. I shudder to think of the possibilities.

Since we had to commemorate the occasion properly, The Wife handed out kazoos, bowler hats, and tiaras to all of the kids at the appointed time. The bowler hats were a good idea, but in retrospect, the kazoos were questionable. You've heard of power chords? Like that, but with kazoos. Scary.

TB's girlfriend was the stately one, conducting herself as quite the little lady in the midst of the chaos surrounding her. She's sort of the Sigourney Weaver to The Boy's Bill Murray and Evil Sidekick's, uh, Other Guy. I hope she can hold onto that.

When the posse left, my ears were ringing and the living room was a shadow of its former self. But it's good. Per usual, The Boy is ahead of us – he thinks it's already 2007. The Girl had a blast with the other two-year-olds, even if she had no idea what the occasion was supposed to be. I suspect that our actual New Year's celebration will pale by comparison, even if the food is better.

Still no sign of the tooth...

Milestone on a Quiet Wednesday Afternoon

The Boy: Do we have any chocolate milk?

DD: No, but I can make some.

TB (incredulous): You can make some?

DD: Sure. Watch.

I get the milk and the chocolate syrup out of the fridge. I pour the milk into a tall glass, then measure out three tablespoons of syrup and dump them in. I stir, and the milk changes color.

TB (slowly): Whoa!

Yeah.

Catching Up on my Reading

If I hadn't made a point of checking the Weekly World News the other day – still the best source for Bigfoot, Elvis, and Bat-boy information – I wouldn't have noticed this story.

According to the WWN, a university in India is offering graduate degrees to reincarnated people.

As a dean, a few thoughts:

• Recruiting the reincarnated is really the ultimate retention initiative.

• We could skip those tiresome 'new student orientations,' since they already know the drill.

• In business, they say you make most of your money off repeat customers. These are truly repeat customers, in the fullest sense of the term.

But no good idea is without its complications.

• The rules for athletic eligibility are murky, at best, on the question of past lives. (Does it count as “redshirting” if we recruit a former NFL player?)

• Transcript evaluations would be a bitch.

• What if tenured faculty got reincarnated? Right now, tenure expires only at death. What if death were no barrier?

• What about degrees based on expired knowledge? “I wrote my dissertation on how voting would make women sterile and insane.” “I was a leading-edge DOS programmer.” “Surely you're familiar with my seminal book, Television: Just Another Fad?”

I'm also not sure how to market to the multiply-lived. “Never Build Another Pyramid – Come Back to School!” (Our previous effort at target marketing was to Presbyterians -- “You're Predestined to Come Here” -- but it met with only mixed success.)

I love Christmas break...

Tooth Fairy Query

This is about to become very relevant.

What's the going rate for lost teeth these days?

Holiday Plans

Eat too much. Sleep late. Play with the kids. Go out to dinner with my wife. See old friends. See family. Eagerly await the birth of my niece. Celebrate the birth of my niece. Reflect with gratitude on the ways in which my life is so much fuller and happier than it was ten years ago. Reflect with gratitude on how happy, sweet, healthy, cute, and caring The Boy and The Girl are. Give thanks, in my way, that we're all healthy.

Worry about my Dad. Call my Dad. Read Captain Underpants books with The Boy. Help The Girl negotiate the mysteries of the potty. Give the fireplace a good workout. Make halfhearted attempt to straighten up parts of the basement. Realize that there are more important things.

Watch Little Miss Sunshine. Read a serious book. Polish off and send a few job applications. See my Mom. Hope it doesn't snow much. Sing silly songs at the dinner table. Take lots of pictures of the kids. Make lutefisk jokes. Avoid lutefisk. Find passable substitute for lutefisk. Eat passable substitute.

Wrap presents. Give presents. Receive presents. Angst over choosing, affording, and finding room for presents. Have great fun with The Boy's hot wheels racetrack, which he doesn't know about yet (and don't tell him!). Have picnic on living room floor with The Girl. Read all the new books to The Boy and The Girl. Pay attention as The Boy reads books to us.

Attend party at The Wife's parents' house. Make it home without hitting any deer this time. Find excuses to let The Girl dance. Dance with The Girl. Take the kids to the park.

Find time for The Wife. Let her feel how loved she is. Let her escape the house without children. Let her commune with mocha swirl latte and chick lit. Skip watching football to make this happen.

Meet grad school friend's new girlfriend. Reintroduce grad school friend to glories of East Coast restaurants. Catch high school friend on East Coast tour. Make New Year's resolution to actually try to catch a Kristin Hersh show. Make New Year's resolution to fix upstairs toilet in a meaningful way. Make New Year's resolution to get my pet project completed this Spring.

That's not too ambitious, is it?

Best wishes,

DD

Intrusive Advisement

I'm not a huge fan of 'intrusive advisement,' 'counseling,' 'mandatory advisement,' or any of the various number of 'for your own good' hoops that colleges increasingly make students jump through in the name of retention.

That's not because they always fail. They don't. In some cases, they can be surprisingly successful on their own terms. It's just that they grate against my sense of what college is supposed to be.

There's a story in IHE about colleges beefing up their counseling staffs to help students choose majors early, on the theory that students who know what they want are likelier to get it. Students who change majors multiple times, or who flop around aimlessly, are likelier to take longer to graduate, or to drop out. There's an obvious correlation/causation issue here – do students finish earlier because they know what they want, or are the types of students who can commit to a major also the types of students who can commit to finishing a program – but it's also true that students who change majors routinely set themselves back relative to graduation, since courses that counted in the first program might not count in the second. I've seen that directly, as students who started in, say, Nursing, are annoyed to find that some of the credits don't carry over to, say, Early Childhood Education. And it's certainly true that the right clue, given at the right moment, can save a student all manner of hassle.

One of the frustrations of administration is the constant reminder of the gap between what things are and what they could or should be. In my personal vision of college, students are responsible for their own academic decisions, including decisions about class attendance, course selection, scheduling, and majors. If a student chooses a class that doesn't count towards her major, that's a life lesson for her. (This position is predicated on the assumption that policies and requirements are written down, relatively consistent over time, and easily accessible. It's only fair to provide every student access to the college catalog, for example. Even drop-in advisement should be available, free of charge, for those students who choose on their own to avail themselves of it. Whether the student bothers to take advantage of these resources should be up to the student.)

The intrusive advisement model and its offshoots take the goal of college as graduation, and take a 'whatever works' approach to helping students achieve that goal. Sometimes, these methods actually do improve graduation rates. I just wonder what 'graduation' means when it requires so much help.

This is a cold-hearted position, in some ways, and anybody who wants to can find worthy counterexamples to show the value of handholding in specific cases. I don't advocate this position on campus, since there are other fish to fry and I don't want to get into a battle-of-poignant-stories. Compromises with reality are part of the cost of doing business, so I let this one slide and try to focus on areas in which real progress is likelier. I don't choose this battle. That said, I've never really been convinced that a student who got through only with tremendous help has achieved the same thing as a student who got through pretty much on her own.

(There are real financial arguments on both sides. The pro-intrusion side can cite, correctly, the taxpayer subsidy to tuition for students who hang around longer than they should, as well as the taxpayer subsidy to financial aid. The skeptics can cite, correctly, the cost to taxpayers of paying the salaries of the counselors and advisors. I've never seen a rigorous empirical cost-benefit study of this, to see which outweighs the other, and I honestly don't know what it would show.)

If it were up to me, given an infusion of money, I'd rather hire full-time faculty than full-time counselors. The counterargument might be that more counselors would lead to greater retention, and, over time, to more faculty. The higher ed employment trends of the last thirty years would suggest that the counterargument is mostly wrong, but it's tough to isolate variables like that. Did the explosion of student support services siphon off resources from faculty, thereby driving the trend towards adjuncts, or are the two disconnected? Hell, it may even be the case that, absent those services, the financial issues driving the adjunct trend would have been even worse. I just haven't seen a good study of that.

One of the life skills I'd like college to help impart – at least to traditional-aged students, since older students have usually picked this up already – is the ability to figure out what to do when nobody tells you directly. Since we don't measure that directly, students can graduate without really developing much of that. I'm concerned that the 'intrusive advisement' model makes it easier for students who are already weak in this area to stay weak. That's not to deny for a minute that they can pick up these skills elsewhere, and many do, but I can't help but think that college should play a role.

Color Me Irked

"Migrate to the new Blogger," they said. It will only take "a few minutes," they said.

Ten hours later, the blog was finally back up.

600 minutes is not "a few."

Grrr.

Ownership

In one of the comments to yesterday's post, somebody mentioned that part of the challenge in selling the concept of 'outcomes assessment' to faculty comes from a feeling that it violates their sense of 'ownership.'

I couldn't agree more. In fact, the sense of ownership distorts the very organization.

The HR director at my current college once defined tenure as the professor owning the job. The very concept of 'owning' a job struck me as risible – do you write your own paycheck? -- but it certainly fits much of the behavior I've seen.

There's a basic contradiction at the heart of many professors' sense of what their job is. On the one hand, they are the owners of the college, lords-and-high-masters of all that is academic. On the other hand, they are not to be bothered with organizational minutae, nuts-and-bolts issues, or (heaven forbid!) any discussion of finances beyond their own raises.

It's one or the other. If you really own the college, then you own the entire college and you attend to all of it. That includes mundane stuff like figuring out how to cover a much-higher-than-expected HVAC or snow-removal bill this year, what percentage of adjuncts to employ, and who to fire if revenues fall short. If you don't want to be bothered with any of that, then you're not an owner; you're an employee. (I've noticed that most of the folks who bray the loudest about faculty sovereignty also run the fastest to the union when they're asked to produce. Owners don't have unions.) There's no shame in that – I'm an employee, as are most people – but implicit in the concept of 'employee' is 'accountability to the employer.' That means answering the call – not mindlessly or endlessly, but answering nonetheless – when the employer needs outcomes assessment, or classes on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, or a course adapted for online delivery.

(Conceivably, one could object that faculty are neither owners nor employees, but independent contractors, on loan from their disciplines. This is even sillier. 'Contractor' implies the existence of a 'contract,' which implies finite duration. Contractors don't have tenure, nor do they have unions. For that matter, they usually pay for their own health insurance, if they have any at all. Contractors don't own their jobs.)

I've found that some department chairs honestly regard their departments as their own personal property. As they see it, they cannot have their personal property removed from them (be removed from a chair position) unless they've committed a crime. This is insane, but common.

I've run into variations on this roadblock repeatedly. In trying to bring something resembling organizational rationality to what had been largely a 'courtier' system, I keep banging into the former nobles' sense of ownership. They're willing to do courtesy consultations with the administration, but as far as they're concerned, the job of the administration is to find them money and sing their praises. Anything beyond that is overstepping, which calls for the ritual “shocked and offended” proclamations.

They just don't get it.

Colleges didn't spring from the mind of Zeus, or drop from the sky fully formed. They're organizations, like any other. They require revenue and budgeting and real effort to generate and maintain the growth that allows the faculty not to get their hands dirty. Colleges don't exist to provide employment to tenured faculty. (The folks over at Curriculum Committee sometimes forget that.) Faculty are employees, and professorships are, among other things, jobs. If the college gets to the point where some of those jobs no longer need doing, then they shouldn't be done.

As near as I can figure, some fairly naïve administrations in the past played along with the sense of ownership as a way to motivate productivity in the absence of actual material accountability. Since raises are contractual and across-the-board, and tenure expires only at death, it can be tough to get some folks to step up. If they feel ownership of their area, they will step up in certain ways.

The catch is that once they've been in the driver's seat for a while, they forget that it was ever otherwise. When organizational needs change – and they do – they take any suggestion of change as an affront. Who are you to tell me to measure outcomes? I built this department! No iceberg could possibly sink my mighty ship!

Tenure isn't ownership, but it can enable the illusion of ownership. Illusions can be fun. But reality has a way of intruding, and no amount of “shocked and offended” will change that.

Offense and Defense

From the good-news-and-bad-news department: a student who alleged grading bias (in a humanities class) had her complaint dismissed when we discovered that all of the tests in the class were multiple-choice and graded by scantron. Since a scantron doesn't know one student from another, bias (in the sense alleged) was simply impossible.

(That's not to address larger issues of learning styles, etc.)

From a liability standpoint, this was a clean win. But I was disturbed and annoyed to hear that all of the exams were multiple-choice. The best strategy for avoiding a lawsuit was not the best strategy for actually tracking (or motivating, or provoking) student performance.

The logics behind lawsuit-avoidance and good teaching are different. Good teaching challenges students, including challenging their deeply-held beliefs, and it frequently treats different students differently. (Some students need to be encouraged to come out of their shells; others need to settle down and focus. Some respond to praise, some to challenge, and some to butt-kicking. Calibrating the right approach to each student is part of the challenge of teaching.) Lawsuit avoidance is about treating everyone identically, avoiding ambiguity and/or subjective judgment, and following set procedures. I like to think of the basics of lawsuit avoidance as the minima of good teaching – be fair to everybody, base grades on valid considerations, etc. -- but there's no denying that it's easier to defend a scantron grade than, say, an essay grade, even though an essay is often a better gauge of student performance than a multiple-choice test.

It's the difference between trying to win and trying not to lose, between offense and defense.

The stereotype of administrators is that we're always playing defense, and thereby always giving offense. There's a lot of truth to that – more than I'd care to admit, actually – but it's not like there's always another option at hand. The world at large doesn't defer to professional opinion in all things, and getting huffy and offended about it won't change that. Part of my job is to mediate between the academic aspirations of faculty and the actual legal and political climates of the outside world. That's why I press for things like very specific syllabi and actual use of due process for accused cheaters, which both strike many faculty as absurd. To them, I'm focusing on the wrong things, and I don't mind that they think so; I want them to play offense, not defense. If they indulge me a few obsessions, like including their grading policy for late work on their syllabi, then I can leave alone the real meat of what they're doing, confident that I can defend it if need be.

This issue has come up again in the context of outcomes assessment. Some departments are taking umbrage to the very idea of quantifying student performance independent of grades, making the argument that this is just one step towards expanding No Child Left Behind to higher education. My view, which isn't original to me, is that if we don't do something internally, something will be done to us externally; better that we come up with measures that actually make sense. If we can show that we're taking care of business, we have a shot at being left alone to do exactly that.

A centrally-defined test will look to the minimum. I don't want to focus on the minimum. I want to push students as far as they can go. If we can cover our bases enough that we can avoid national exams, then by all means, let's do it. The counterargument – that once the camel's nose is in the tent, all is lost – strikes me as a nonstarter. With college tuitions rising and the credential of a degree necessary even for jobs where you might not expect it, the public is less inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt than it once was. In the absence of internally-generated measures or procedures, we even have a hard time responding to ignorant wingnuts like David Horowitz, who claim that the scandal of higher education is too many Democrats in it. (In six years of deaning, I've never heard a student complain about political bias. I've heard a lot of student complaints, but never that. David Horowitz's total years of deaning are...let's see, carry the three...zero.) If we respond to popular discontent with “trust us,” we lose. We earn trust by marshalling facts, based on actual processes and records, and by actually addressing problems when we find them. We can't just assume trust anymore, if we ever could.

The danger, of course, is in conveying the message too well, and getting faculty thinking too much about defense. If they aren't challenging students, nothing I do matters anyway. They need to feel safe to push students, knowing I've got their back. We're getting there – trust has to be earned here, too – but it's a matter of fits and starts, rather than a smooth progression. To me, there's a world of difference between spelling out a grading policy in a syllabus and basing an entire grade on scantron tests. It's the difference between 'wearing a seatbelt' and 'never leaving the house.' Indulge me the seatbelt, and take the students as far as they will go.

Christmas in Suburbia

The Boy's school put on its kindergarten holiday concert last Friday.

All six kindergarten classes performed together in the cafetorium, with folding chairs for the parents. TW's parents showed up, too, so all five of us watched TB and his classmates do their thing. Five year olds being five year olds, every song involved at least some choreography. (Inevitably, some of the kids improvised their own choreography. My favorite was the kid who ended every song with 'jazz hands.') I was glad to see that The Dreidle Song was part of the repertoire, as an inclusionary gesture.

I've never seen so much digital technology in one place before. Apparently, when you get the birth certificate, you're also issued a digital camcorder. The front row was wall-to-wall parents holding little gray boxes in front of their faces. I'll have to put in a requisition.

After the concert, the classes (and parents) adjourned to their regular classrooms. We had a brief juice-and-cookies moment before most of the other parents left. Through TW's pull as Room Mom, I was asked to read two stories to the class, which I did.

When they're in the mood, five-year-olds can be the best audience ever. TG joined them in her unofficial role as Class Mascot, sitting front-and-center. She stood up every few seconds, so eventually TW had to restrain her with the old sit-on-Mommy's-lap method. The kids in the class, though, were great – rapt, polite, enthusiastic, and willing to see me off with a spirited “THANK YOU MR. (myname)!” I'm accustomed to the dodge-and-parry of faculty meetings; this was refreshingly different. I'm thinking the juice and cookies had something to do with it. Note to self: order plenty of juice and cookies for next faculty meeting. Also, deliver information in rhyme.

Friday night featured the horse-drawn carriage ride downtown, complete with the halloween posse, TB's girlfriend among them. (TB: “When she kisses me, my face gets all red.” I didn't know she kissed him!) The highlight of the ride, as far as TB was concerned, was when the horse pooped on the road. (“It's steaming!” he observed, delighted and correct.) Post-ride, we all did a stroll down Main Street, during which the kids favored us with their unique dance moves anytime something catchy was piped in. I also may or may not have done my impression of a gorilla to induce smiles at a photo op. I'm not saying I did, and I'm not saying I didn't.

On Saturday, my Mom made the trek from (neighboring state) and we went to see Santa at a pizza brunch. It's the same Santa we've been going to for several years now. He's a sweet man, with a real beard, a deep voice, and a very gentle manner. He and TW say 'hello' when they see each other – he lives nearby – and he remembered TB and TG by name. TG actually spoke to him, which is huge for a two-year-old. (Warming Daddy's heart, she asked for books.) My Mom got her picture taken with Santa by the photographer for the local weekly paper, so I'll be keeping an eye out for that. (Santa afterwards: “I hope Mrs. Claus doesn't see that!”) TG wolfed an astonishing amount of pizza, and we left fed and happy. We passed the local high school choir out caroling, so we stopped and listened, clapping after each song. When the choir moved on, TG yelled plaintively “again?”

The tree is up and decorated, the furnace room is chockablock with holiday booty, TB is acutely attuned to the schedule of Christmas specials on tv, and we've seen Santa. All we need now is a little snow.

Very little. A fast-melting inch would do...

Proof

The Wife: Do you believe in Santa?

(pause, as The Boy fixes her with a gaze that says 'duh')

The Boy: I met him, remember?

So there.

Prodigies, Policies, and Policing

My college was built on the assumption that the students would be at least 18 (or 17 with a late birthday). My college is not unique in this. We've bent the rule from time to time to allow some particularly strong high school students to take a class here and there, with generally positive results. We're even moving in the direction, with some of the school districts, of regularizing a flow of high school seniors to take afternoon classes with us, in hopes of fending off 'senioritis.' We've also started working with local homeschoolers of high school age, offering courses like Spanish or chemistry, again with generally positive results.

Now we're starting to get calls about 8-year-olds. Literally. For regular courses, not special summer programs for kids or swim lessons.

This worries me.

Subject matter, oddly enough, is the least of my concerns. The prepubescent applicants tend to cluster in math, science, and music, where the subject matter generally isn't R-rated. If a kid is capable of making differential equations do handstands, bully for him. It's all the other stuff that worries me.

Most of our internal policies and procedures are based on the assumption that we're dealing with students directly, rather than through their parents. With the 18-and-up crowd, this makes sense. With 8-year-olds, it really doesn't.

We don't have a “dropoff and pickup area.” We don't allow parents in classes with their kids, unless the parents have also registered (and paid for) the class. Our counselors are not trained in pediatric disorders. Our medical staff does not include a pediatrician. We don't act in loco parentis. Our professors, with some exceptions, have not been trained in child or adolescent psychology, or in the learning styles characteristic of children. We don't have the security measures in place that elementary schools do to protect children against predators. We have an open campus – if they don't have to park, anybody can come to campus and just wander around. We don't have separate restrooms for children. We don't have the staff to provide bodyguards. We are not physically capable of 'lockdown mode.' We simply have not organized ourselves for the physical protection of young children, because that was not who we were designed to serve.

Add to that the general coarseness of much informal student conversation, much of which I would not advise anybody to let a young child hear. And we absolutely cannot go around policing private conversations among students, other than the usual prohibitions against threats of violence.

I've suggested that we offer access to online courses, where the subject matter makes sense, so the child could still be under the physical supervision of his parents while getting the intellectual stimulation of college-level work. There are times when that can work, but certain subjects just don't lend themselves easily (certain upper-level math, where notation is the issue) or at all (music performance, some lab sciences).

We've received legal advice to the effect that we can't do anything that smacks of 'age discrimination,' whether on the high end (mandatory retirement) or the low end (a minimum age to take classes). This strikes me as absolute madness. Young children are not just shorter adults. They have different needs, and require different kinds of support, than we can offer.

Normally, I'm in favor of offering talented students all the academic challenge they can handle. I'm just not convinced that throwing the child prodigy into an institution built entirely for adults is the way to do that. God forbid, one kid gets abducted, and the whole thing comes crashing down. I say set a minimum age of, say, 16, and take our chances in the courts. I don't want to be the one on the stand explaining to the nice judge why we don't have hidden cameras in the study carrels or bathrooms, or why nobody stopped the sex offender from enrolling in the same class as the 9 year old.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Tuition

(with apologies to Raymond Carver)

There was a bit of a dustup in webland this week in the wake of an unsurprising New York Times article that showed that many consumers take the sticker price of a college as a gauge of its quality. Apparently, some of the midlevel-but-aspiring colleges have figured out that they can raise their applicant yield by raising their tuition. It's a variation on what used to be called the “Chivas Regal” effect, in which one brand of liquor found that it could improve sales by raising its price, since consumers assumed that anything expensive must be good.

Community colleges have known this for years, since we're on the bad end of it. We keep our tuition artificially low and our amenities relatively spare, so we can be accessible to folks without much money. One perverse result is that many of the more affluent high school grads look down their noses at us. Groucho Marx' line about never joining a club that would accept him as a member applies to us.

It's annoying on many levels. Most obviously, low tuition leads to chronic shortages of operating funds, which lead inevitably to making choices about staffing, programs, outreach, and the like that we'd rather not make. It's also demoralizing when cc's are the punchline of jokes, when students make cracks about getting out to go to a “real college,” or when I see some of the choices that more affluent institutions are able to make and still survive. (A margin for error! What a concept! Must be nice!)

It's also, at bottom, false.

Although we have a few students for whom the Harvards of the world were real options, and I'm always happy to get those students, the fact of it is that most of our students – if they would have gone elsewhere at all – would have gone to nothing-special four-year colleges. They would have paid a great deal more for the privilege, but it's not clear to me that an average student with middling motivation and a fuzzy sense of direction is better off spending 10k for an adjunct at Midtier State (or 40k for an adjunct at St. So-So) than spending 3k for a full professor at a cc. I just don't see it.

When I got my doctorate at Flagship State, I couldn't help but notice how dreary and mediocre the undergraduate experience there was. Intro classes were 300 students a pop, with 'recitation' sections staffed by 23 year old grad students who were only beginning to think of themselves as teachers, and who made all manner of rookie mistakes on their not-much-younger charges. Professors advised us, as grad students, to put as little energy as possible into teaching, since anything above the bare minimum was effort that should have gone into research. For this, the undergrads were charged roughly quadruple what they would have been charged at the local cc, where intro classes top out at 30-35 and tenured professors teach intro sections.

Why would the undergrads accept such a lousy deal?

I'm guessing it's a combination of snob appeal, the lure of dorm life (par-tay!), the siren call of what economists call 'assortative mating,' and a sense that that's just what you do. I can remember my friends and I in high school regarding the local cc as a place to take driver's ed and not much else. “Winding up” at a cc was taken as a sign of failure. From what I've seen, that attitude is still pretty prevalent. It's entirely independent of what actually happens in the classroom.

A thought experiment for my wise and generous readers: assuming no demagogic behavior from local and/or state politicians, what do you suppose would happen if cc's moved from an 'everyday low prices' strategy to a 'high price, high aid' strategy?

Scenes from This Week

The Girl has established a complex bedtime ritual, one step of which involves bouncing on The Boy's bed while “Life is a Highway” plays on the boombox and I hold her hands.

On Sunday, as she bounced, she stopped, bent down, picked up TB's baseball cap, and put it on her head. She announced proudly:

“Me a boy!”

You can read all the gender theory you want; that moment will still throw you.

----

At dinner yesterday:

The Boy: When you have another baby, he can have the crib, and The Girl and I can get bunk beds! I'll be on top, and she'll be on the bottom.

The Wife: I don't think we're going to have any more babies.

TB: But you're a Mommy. That's what Mommies do. Mommies lay babies.

TW: We don't lay babies. We have babies.

TB: So you'll have a baby?

TW: No, we're done with that. But someday you could have a baby.

TB: I'm not a girl!

TW: No, I mean you could be a Daddy.

TB: Daddies don't lay babies!

TW: Well, no, but someday you could be a Daddy. Don't you want to be a Daddy?

TB: Yeah.

TW: When your wife has a baby, you'll be the Daddy.

TB: She'd lay the baby?

TW: She'd have the baby.

(pause)

TB: EEEEWWW! Gross!!!!!

Bless his short attention span, he didn't ask the next question...

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The Boy: “They call it Christmas because Santa's real name is Kris, and you don't want to miss it!”

------

Last night, as TB wrote his letter to Santa:

TW: What else do you want to ask for?

(pause)

TB: Mittens.

TW: Really?

TB: Yeah, because mine aren't very good, and I don't want you to have to go shopping for new ones. You do too much around here now. I don't want you to have to do everything, so Santa can get me those.

That one got a hug from Mommy.

I think he'll get his mittens.

In Which I Try to Practice What I Preach

Yesterday's post suggested that employers should try to build jobs around three-dimensional human beings, with their various needs. I should be careful what I wish for.

At both of my colleges, I've had to deal with extended faculty absences driven by medical issues. (Given the steadily-advancing median age of the full-time faculty, I expect this to become more common over time.) From an administrative perspective, these situations can get remarkably complicated and vexing.

Some medical issues are relatively well-defined, in terms of absence from work. Somebody taking a day or two for a stomach bug, or a week for the flu, is not a big deal. Somebody taking some time for childbirth, or for a relatively discrete procedure, requires more planning, but still isn't that hard, since you can be pretty confident about duration, date of return, and ability to work upon return. The tricky ones are the medical issues that involve long duration, episodic and extended absences, and uncertain prognoses.

Under those conditions, it's incredibly hard to get the rules right. I've had multiple cases in which expected return dates are set, then pushed back a week or two, then pushed back two weeks, then pushed back a week or two again. Given that semesters have relatively fixed starting and ending dates, it's difficult to extend the kind of flexibility to a professor that a given medical condition might demand. Say the semester starts in September and ends in December. Professor Doe notifies you in August that he'll be out for the first two weeks of September to deal with a medical condition. Okay, you work with the department chair to find subs to cover the classes. Two weeks into September, the leave is extended for a week. More subs. Now it's extended again, this time for two weeks.

Now you have to be the bad guy.

Given advances in medical treatments, people can be in ambiguous health for years at a time. Given the ADA, union rules, and medical privacy rules, it can be very, very difficult to get someone in that situation to make a decision, or even to get a clear sense of whether a decision needs to be made. At any given point, the seemingly prudent and emotionally-easy thing to do is to wait. But waiting is a decision, too.

Now it's Thanksgiving, and Professor Doe is happy to report that he's ready for work. Putting him back in him Fall classes at this point would be silly, so your job is to find other work for him to do until the end of the semester. Now you're paying him for makework, and paying his replacement(s) to cover his classes. (The replacement(s) are almost certainly making less than he does.) Meanwhile, you short other parts of the budget to make up the difference.

Repeat this cycle a few times, and it's hard to avoid resentment on both sides. Professor Doe is fighting some serious medical issues, and doesn't need some paper-pusher to generate static. From my side of the desk, classes need to run when they need to run, and the professor is either there or not there. (The students usually feel bad for the professor at first, but over time, start to get justifiably cranky if there isn't a reliable presence.) Our medical leave policies are written on the assumption that medical conditions are like pregnancy – clearly defined, and of finite duration, so the returning worker returns good as new. When the condition fits those criteria, the rules are pretty clean. (Paid vs. unpaid leave is another issue. In this, as in so many things, I think the Swedes have it right.)

But some conditions – especially those that more commonly hit later in life – just aren't like that. Sometimes the employee returns not-entirely-better, or functional-but-not-the-same, or almost-functional, or mostly-functional-but-delicate. Sometimes there's an element of denial by the employee about just how sick s/he actually is – those conversations are no fun at all. It's nobody's fault, really, but when the cycle repeats a few times, that can be hard to remember. From the employer's standpoint, predictability of staffing – the single greatest benefit of paying full-time salaries – goes down the drain. From the employee's standpoint, a career is at stake, as are salary and benefits, a sense of belonging, and the ability not to admit defeat.

Going on disability is an option in some cases, but it's not easy, and it doesn't lend itself to certain conditions. I'm glad the program exists, but it's far from a full solution to these dilemmas. And even there, broaching the subject in the wrong way and/or at the wrong time is very dicey, legally.

I really don't have a great answer to this. It would be lovely if prognoses were always clear-cut, people were always honest, and illnesses only struck during semester breaks, but that's just not reality. I'm neither a physician nor a soothsayer, but semesters run when they run. Flexibility has its limits.

Respect Mah Diversitah!

One of my favorite people from my grad school days sent me a heads-up about the T.H. Benton piece in the Chronicle about diversity. It's an annoying piece, encapsulating much of the whininess that sends us more thoughtful white guys away from the topic altogether. (Bitch, Ph.D. Asked a while back why there isn't more thoughtful male-authored sex writing. While my style doesn't really lend itself -- “boinking ensued” doesn't quite cut it – I'd venture a guess that the reason is similar. The dominant discourses – conservatism and porn, respectively – are so entrenched that it's hard not to either replicate them or spend all your time differentiating yourself from them, which just comes off as narcissistic and, well, whiny.)

I did a piece on diversity back when I was a wet-behind-the-ears blogger, which at least wasn't as whiny as Benton's. I wouldn't write it that way now, but there it is.

Benton makes some valid points: yes, the costs of diversity initiatives are often borne by people other than those pushing for them. Yes, some very privileged sorts use 'race, class, and gender' to avoid actual thought, and yes, sometimes the theoretical moves are stale and predictable. It's even true that race is not a simple proxy for class, and that chambers of commerce issue routine calls for greater diversity in the business community. (Although I've never, not once, heard one “talking about changing the paradigm of white hegemonic domination.” Has Benton ever been to a chamber of commerce meeting? I've been to lots, and they don't talk that way. They talk about 'inclusion,' and 'changing demographics,' and 'reflecting the community.' 'Hegemonic domination,' not so much.)

I'll take it farther. I'm a little creeped out by the concept of a “diversity officer,” and I have been on job interviews on which I've been asked about my “commitment to diversity.” The former strikes me as self-evident refutation of diversity as oppositional, and the latter as a loyalty oath. Not a big fan of loyalty oaths, even if I'm already loyal. My loyalty is by choice, thank you very much.

All of that said, I'd hate to see us lose sight of the real benefits of diversity.

Proprietary U, for all of its flaws, achieved a real diversity in its faculty and administration almost entirely without even trying. In my deaning days there, I don't think there were any two managers there of the same religion. The faculty was tremendously diverse (except for an unusually high concentration of Unitarians, for whatever reason), whether you looked at race, gender, age, politics, style of dress, teaching philosophy, or just personality.

Looking back, I think the critical variable there was turnover. The place did a great deal of hiring in the late 1990's, so the new hires tended to reflect the folks on the market at that time. People also left or got fired fairly frequently. The net result of all that turnover was that no one group was able to entrench itself for very long. Since you couldn't take for granted that everybody shared the same cultural background, work conversations, more often than not, were actually about work.

I suspect that one of the reasons that hiring for diversity in traditional higher ed is as contentious as it is is that the turnover rate is so low. When there isn't much hiring generally, every hire 'earmarked' for a diversity line is a line lost to someone else. Worse, when new hires happen once a decade or more in a given department, it's nearly impossible for the newbies to effect meaningful change in the departments. That's a real loss. When a newbie is appended to a department that has been together for decades, most commonly one of two things happens: either the newbie doesn't 'fit' and gets flak for it, or the newbie learns to keep her head down. Neither is good.

In my stint guest-blogging for Bitch a while back, I did a post called “Spot the Glass Ceiling” in which I simply listed my work hours for the previous two weeks. A disturbing number of commenters missed the point completely, and some actually took me to task for using words in unusual ways. (Heaven forbid we should try to say something new!) The point was to show that something ostensibly neutral – work hours – can reflect expectations about the life situation of the employee. A single parent could not do this job. This job is not unique that way. Therefore, over time, we should expect this job and jobs like it to be filled be certain kinds of people and not others. It will look like self-selection, and there will be some truth in that. But the self-selection will reflect jobs constructed on the assumption that the worker has a wife to watch the kids.

A really productive approach to diversity, I'd hope, would take as a starting point the idea that we shouldn't just find different-colored pegs for pre-existing holes; we should re-shape the holes. Jobs are becoming more time- and effort- consuming. The theory, back in the day, was that they'd have to become less so as more women entered the workforce. Jobs used to be built on the 'primary breadwinner' model. Now they're built on the 'isolated monad' model. There's a sense in which this is progress, but there's a very real sense in which it's madness. If diversified hiring pushes us to reshape jobs to fit actual human beings, that would be a contribution worth any amount of annoying literary criticism.

Diversity is best when it happens without a diversity officer making it happen. That requires both a consistent stream of opportunities, and jobs shaped around the realities of how people actually live. Most of higher ed now features neither. I suspect that if we take care of those, over time, we'll be able to have some much less whiny conversations about the problems that remain.

Pulling Up the Drawbridge

As my regular readers know, my college and state are facing some fiscal issues. (In the same sense in which, say, Homer Simpson has some decorum issues.) Any number of proposals are floating around for cutting costs, some with merit, some ambiguous, and some plainly stupid.

I'm seeing a consistent pattern emerge: the proposals that get the most support, almost uniformly, are those that call for cutting benefits for future employees. That's the one cut on which everyone at the table can agree.

Presumably, that's because future employees, by definition, aren't at the table.

'Grandfathering' is a popular maneuver because it postpones issues until they're somebody else's problem. It allows current employees to congratulate themselves on their tough-minded fiscal discipline without actually giving up anything themselves. It's almost irresistible, given the realities of tenure and unions, but that doesn't make it right.

It's doubly frustrating when you account for a few basic external realities:

- Housing costs much more, in real terms, than it did a generation ago, even with the slight declines of the last year or so.
- New Ph.D.'s generally are carrying much more debt, in real terms, than they ever have.
- The early-career years are often the raising-young-children years, with all of the attendant expenses those bring in terms of clothes, bedrooms, restricted choice of neighborhood, daycare, etc.
- New hires come in with higher qualifications, in every respect, than the previous generation, whose salaries and benefits they will never match.

Popular discussions of higher ed are so narrowly focused on the extremely elite institutions and superstar salaries that they completely miss the (fairly basic, very common) objective realities at the vast majority of colleges in America. Yes, Cornel West is extraordinarily well-paid. But a new professor here in the humanities would start somewhere in the 40's. A three-bedroom house in a non-slum neighborhood in this county goes for about $400-500k. Cornel West has nothing to do with it.

I don't recall ever having a real debate over these changes. They just happened. Now, those who got tenure back when it wasn't very hard are pulling up the drawbridge behind them. Even the lucky folk who land tenure-track jobs struggle to get by, and that's not even discussing adjuncts.

Were it up to me, I'd propose a much flatter salary structure. Instead of newbies starting in the 40's and folks in their seventies making six figures, I'd set the bottom higher and the top lower. (I'm thinking instead of stretching from 40 to 110k, the range should look something like 60 to 90.) Not perfectly flat – that would be incredibly demoralizing, I know – but it's hard to argue that the very senior professor is two-and-a-half-times as productive as the new kid, who is teaching just as much, has higher credentials, and is picking up the committee assignments that tenured folk can dodge. But good luck getting the ones at the top of the scale to agree to that. And without mandatory retirement, they can go on until they drop.

(Even worse: here, as at many places, the unionized folk – which includes faculty – get 'longevity bonuses,' which are rewards for breathing. We pay for these by giving smaller raises to the entry-level people, who need the money much more. Utterly maddening.)

Although the fight for tenure-track positions is structured as winner-take-all, the 'all' is looking smaller and smaller. There's something fundamentally wrong with that. You'd think, given how hard people fight for these positions, that they'd pay better.

The institutional logic behind my argument – which may seem counterintuitive for someone in my position to make, since raising starting salaries would impose an immediate hit on the budget – has to do with recruitment. Most of the recent full-time hires my college has made over the last few years, which is admittedly a distressingly small sample size, have been people who already lived in the area in homes they bought before the boom. We've lost some absolutely wonderful young candidates on the basis of the mismatch of salaries to housing costs. For now, we're okay, since there is a backlog of good people in the area looking for these jobs. But over the long run, we need to recruit from more than just adjacent counties. Instead, not only are we granting longevity bonuses to people whose mortgages have long been paid off, but we're talking about cutting benefits to new hires, so as not to cause discomfort to those on top.

I care about this year's budget, but I care more about long-term sustainability. This isn't sustainable.

Somebody coined a 'law' to the effect that trends that aren't sustainable aren't sustained. I hope that turns out to be true.

Stats

Although I was never a hardcore stat-head, I had to endure the requisite statistical methods courses in both college and grad school as part of my social science training. (The ugliest course requirements repeat themselves, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.) Although they were billed as the 'empirical' part of the discipline, I regarded them as the purest mysticism, and, with the benefit of hindsight, still do.

The graduate course was particularly absurd. It was a disciplinary requirement, so we hated it. The professor was working out some psychological issues before us in real time, which made for some amusing moments but little real education. My defense mechanism of choice was ironic distance; my final paper, an examination of the relationship between two variables (I don't even remember which ones) controlling for sex, found nothing, so I titled it “But Sex Always Affects a Relationship!” Not much of a paper, but a damn fine title, if I do say so myself.

The true highlight of the course, though, occurred when one student – either batshit crazy or a comic genius, history will decide – strolled in about ten minutes late one day brandishing a box of Crunch Berry cereal, offering the nutrition information on the side as a real-world example of statistics. (He was also the one who brought his guitar to a feminist theory seminar to favor the group with – I'm not kidding, and neither was he -- “I'm a lesbian, too.” Andy Kaufman had nothing on this guy.)

I think of him sometimes when we use stats on campus to try to make decisions.

Anybody with even the faintest whiff of mathematical training, or intuition, or common sense, can spot flaws in most of the statistics used to make decisions. That's not a shot at the folks generating the statistics – they/we know perfectly well that most of the information is partial, somewhat corrupted by flawed collection methods, and extremely hard to isolate from other variables. (“We changed the course requirements last year, and this year the enrollments went up 5%. Clearly, the new curriculum is responsible.” Um, not really...) The problem, other than the fatal combination of small samples and sheer complexity, is that most of what we want to know derives from problems we didn't anticipate, so we didn't think to collect the data at the time that would address the question we hadn't thought of yet.

Faculty tend to be pretty bright people, as a group, so any data-driven argument for a policy change they don't like immediately brings out the “your methods are flawed” crowd. Well, duh. Of course they're flawed – even a relative non-data-head like me can see that. They're flawed in any direction, but the flaws only seem to draw attention when the policies themselves are unpopular.

(Exception: sometimes, statistics can disprove certain things. That's real, but it's limited. It's hard to sustain the “my program is thriving” illusion when its enrollments are down twenty percent in two years. That said, the statistic doesn't tell you what to do about it.)

In the rare cases when it's possible to get good information, I'm a fan of evidence-based management. The catch is that really solid evidence is remarkably hard to come by, especially in the brief moments when decisions are actually possible. Scholars of higher ed can do national studies on foundation dimes and issue reports that say things like “student engagement in campus activities leads to higher graduation rates,” but even they can't really disentangle causation; do campus activities spark the less-driven students to step up, or do type A personalities naturally gravitate to organized activities?

Most of the decisions, though, are much more mundane than that. I once asked one of my chairs to add a weekend section of a popular intro course, since we're trying to reach out to adult students. He didn't want to, so he suggested that we do a study to see if this would work before actually committing resources to it. The academic in me is so used to seeing this line of argument as reasonable that I almost didn't catch what he was doing. The only way to see if it would work is to try it. We could ask a random sample of residents, but what people say and what they do are only vaguely correlated. The only way to do the study is just to run the damn class and see what happens. (We did, and it worked.) Calling for more data is much more respectable than just saying “I don't wanna,” but it often carries the same meaning.

One of the real shocks of moving from the classroom into administration was growing comfortable with making decisions based on far, far less (and less clear) information. Numbers bounce around, depending on when and how they're gathered, and the possible number of intervening variables in determining why program X is down this year is infinite. I can concede all of that, but still need to make a decision. Standards of evidence that even Andy Kaufman Guy would have found laughable sometimes carry the day in administration, simply by default. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, but I don't have that long. Semesters start when they start, and we need to make decisions on the fly to make that happen. If you wait for the statistical dust to settle, you'll miss the moment. In faculty ranks, that would be called 'reductionist,' and it is. It has to be. Part of being in administration is being okay with that, and developing the intuition to focus on the two or three facts that actually tell you something. The rest is mysticism.

Meetings

In one of those wonderful moments of bloggy synchronicity, a fascinating thread has developed (see profgrrrrl, Maggie May, kfluff, and Culture Cat) on the relative burden on faculty of meetings.

As the thread has developed, it has become clear that local culture, rank, discipline, and various other variables all play roles in determining how many hours a month a given professor will spend in meetings. (From what I've heard, I'd also add minority status. In colleges with relatively low numbers of minority faculty, minority faculty often carry extra committee and student advisement burdens, relative to other faculty, since minority students seek them out for mentoring and committees seek them out for diversity. Given how little college service usually counts towards tenure, this is a real burden.)

As a veteran of meetings, I'll add that far too many people (faculty, chairs, and yes, deans) have absolutely no idea how to run an effective meeting. So the meetings run longer than they should and accomplish less than they should, thereby feeding the simmering resentment towards meetings generally. I've certainly endured my share of meetings in which the living envied the dead, but I've also been to some that actually energized me. In running my own, I try to steal from the most effective I've seen, to the extent that it fits my personality.

My personal hints for running effective faculty meetings:

- For the love of all that is holy and good, never, never, never have a faculty meeting without a printed agenda.

- Don't be afraid to move the agenda along. I never have a meeting with fewer than six items on the agenda, and I'm much more comfortable with ten or more. When all else fails, you can always cut short a digression with “let's continue this discussion off-line,” which is much more polite than just saying “put a sock in it” but still lets you move forward.

- Put 'informational' items before 'action' items on the agenda. You can blast through four or five information items in ten minutes or less. It sets a pace, feels like progress, and gives a common fact base for discussion.

- Include specific, quick items for praise whenever possible. “Congratulations to Diane for spearheading a successful symposium last month.” Again, it sets a tone, and it shows respect.

- Beware the open-ended question. Never ask “what do you think about...?” Instead, put a concrete proposal on the table and ask for specific objections. When they're voiced, ask for specific alternatives.

- Beware the temptation to blame everything on absent third parties. Why is enrollment down in program x? Because those lazy bastards in Admissions aren't marketing it right! That's easy when nobody from Admissions is in the room, since it lets everybody in the room off the hook. It's a variation on the old saw about the perfect being the enemy of the good. In the real world, resources are (and will always be) finite; agendas are (and will always be) conflicting and overlapping; and content matters. Get your own house in order before finding fault with others'.

- Gentle humor is your friend. Selective self-deprecation can also work, if you're adept.

- As with classroom discussions, quick summaries of windy comments can go a long way. “So what you're saying is...?” Don't be afraid to parse comments into the immediately-relevant and the for-another-time.

- FOLLOW UP. I always take questions at meetings, and usually some of them require an “I'll get back to you.” At the following meeting, answer the question – that is, get back to them -- in public. (I usually have an agenda item titled “items from last meeting” in which I answer each in sequence.) After seeing that cycle repeat a few times, some usually-discontented sorts figured out that they're actually being heard, which seemed to reduce their felt need to shout.

- Admit mistakes. I've done this a few times, and found that a moment's blow to my ego pays off handsomely over time in increased credibility. Besides, unacknowledged mistakes get interpreted as cover-ups, which are much worse. Better to just admit when you've dropped the ball.

- Set a civil-but-focused tone. A faculty meeting is not a group therapy session.

Meetings among administrators are different, since they're usually smaller, and usually more connected to our core job functions. Again, I've seen great and terrible and everything in between, but given smaller numbers and narrower focus, these can potentially be somewhat looser and still work. The key here is to make sure that problem-solving takes place in groups, and blame-assessing, if any, happens privately. If people around the table start trading blame, even implicitly, the meeting is already circling the drain.

Since there's a weird cultural taboo in academia against cutting anything short ever, blowhards get far too much slack to air their pet grievances. A good chair isn't afraid to cut off discussion. It's part of the role. Do it diplomatically, don't be arbitrary, but do it. Oddly, even some of the blowhards will respect you for it. A moment's awkwardness will spare hours of agony.

What tricks have you found for making meetings, well, not suck?

Called It!

A few months ago, the Chronicle reported on a controversy at the U of Florida. The administration had announced plans to cut budgets for certain programs and increase them for others. I wrote at the time:

A fearless prediction (and all predictions guaranteed or your money back!): the faculty will claim to have been shut out of the decision-making process, the usual accusations about autocratic administrators will fly, compromises will be made, a few deans will be replaced, and the university won't look in 2010 the way this plan says it will.

A story in IHE yesterday shows that I was right on every count (and it only took three months!). There's a new interim dean (check), who is signaling intent to cave (check), and citing insufficient process (check). Affected departments are still claiming a lack of shared governance (check), and the university is proposing to mollify all and sundry by...wait for it...a tuition increase by another name! Make the strategic failure go away by throwing money at it.

From looking at my prediction, you'd almost think I knew what I was doing.

Honestly.

It's almost as if a single community college dean, blogging pseudonymously from his outpost in another region of the country, could see the train coming down the tracks before the leadership of a major research university could.

Makes ya wonder.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Silly Season

In politics, 'silly season' stretches from Labor Day to Election Day. In higher ed, it stretches from Thanksgiving to Christmas. (There's another, even worse silly season from mid-April to late May.)

The faculty are frazzled, since they're frantically trying to squeeze in everything that needs to be covered, the grading load is the heaviest of the semester, and student excuses and oddball behavior are at their worst. The students are frazzled, since grade pressure is finally becoming real, final exams are looming, deadlines are hitting, and grandparents are dropping at an alarming rate. Administrators are frazzled, since we give up most of our evenings for a few weeks for the various end-of-semester functions, each of which is individually worthy but the concatenation of which gets a bit draining. This is also when student-faculty conflicts are most numerous and electric, since this is when the stakes are highest, and we have the no-win task of mediating.

Add to that the pressures of Christmas shopping, unpredictable and/or intemperate weather, the ambiguous rules of workplace holiday gatherings and gift-giving, and increased time pressures from and on families, and things get a little nutty.

(In my neck of the woods, add too that this is deer mating season. Deer are uniquely stupid animals, but they get even dumber in the season of the rising sap. Night driving to and from all those end-of-semester events, especially in the rain/snow/sleet/slush, is even more exciting when you have 200 pound rats dashing out at random intervals, looking to get laid.)

Due to the contractual quirks of my college, I had to find time for 30 class observations this semester. Per usual, I tried to get most of them done in October and early November, but schedule conflicts inevitably arise, so there's always a crush at the end. I've done 25, which I think is pretty good by any rational standard, but I'm not done yet. Writeups for class observations are delicate, since they have bearing on tenure and promotion, so I can't just dash them off; they actually require thought, drafting, and redrafting. Which is as it should be, but it takes time and energy. Given the number of evening events, time and energy are at premiums.

Students asking for special dispensations to drop classes after the normal deadline are especially disheartening. Since our rules require 'extenuating circumstances' to withdraw from a class after the deadline, I am visited by a virtual parade of the damned, explaining with varying levels of credibility and/or documentation why the universe can conspired to frustrate their best attempts at, say, sociology. (It's always tempting to try to delineate some sort of hard-and-fast documentation rule – no funeral notice, no 'W' – but the circumstances they present are way too varied for that. I had one woman break down in tears in my office, explaining that she and her husband are in the process of divorcing. What kind of documentation should I get for that? There's no way to capture everything relevant.)

Most of these – outside of deer mating season, which has no upside whatsoever – are the side effects of basically good things. I'm glad that the college presents enough valuable options to enough people that there's a full roster of evening events to complain about. I'm glad that I have a family to holiday-shop for; that students and faculty take their roles seriously enough that they actually worry about doing their jobs well; and that the college has enough of a sense of mercy to recognize the epistemological limits of the dean's office. (“Can you prove that your marriage is falling apart?” Yikes!) These are all good things, on balance, even if the scheduling implications of each overlap in maddening ways.

Must maintain...must maintain...

A Response to the AFT

According to IHE, the American Federation of Teachers is putting together a major state-by-state initiative to lobby state legislatures to achieve the following:

- A full-time/adjunct ratio of 3:1 in public colleges.
- Hiring preferences for adjuncts in applying for full-time positions
- Pay and benefit parity for adjuncts, relative to full-timers, presumably on a pro-rata basis

To which I say, respectively:

- Great, show me the money.
- No *#%)@#%ing way.
- Great, show me the money.

In this political climate, it's fantasy to suggest that state legislatures are going to commit to showering public higher ed with substantially increased appropriations for operating costs on a permanent basis. Not. Going. To. Happen. In the absence of dramatically (and sustainably) increased appropriations, a 3:1 quota would be nothing more than a budget-busting unfunded mandate. (The alternative, of course, would be backbreaking tuition increases, but we catch so much political heat for the current level of tuition increases that, again, we're talking fantasyland.)

Assume that a legislature passed a 3:1 quota and/or a parity mandate, and didn't pass a correspondingly sufficient appropriation increase to pay for it. Likely consequences:

- Elimination of programs altogether
- Accelerated rates of tuition increase
- New definitions of positions that violate current common sense
- Workarounds beyond belief
- Outright non-compliance until a court overturns the mandate(s), which it would

Variation: the state passes a sufficient appropriation for the first year or two, then starts chipping away at it until the next recession, when it takes a cleaver to it, expecting the colleges to somehow make up the difference out of, I don't know, toner and paper clips.

Given that state budgets include services that don't have other revenue sources and aren't culturally considered 'private goods' – K-12 education, the corrections system, infrastructure, etc. -- higher ed will always be easier to cut than other things. Every time a recession hits, higher ed gives more than its pound of flesh. I see no reason to think this will change.

The suggestion for hiring preferences for existing adjuncts strikes me as the likeliest to actually pass, but also the most objectionable. Here in the real world, the existing adjunct pool has been chosen primarily for geographic propinquity, time-slot availability, and the personal taste of department chairs. These are not the criteria to use when looking for people to fill tenure-eligible roles. (This is not to deny that many adjuncts are excellent teachers. It's just to say that, in the real world, adjunct staffing typically is as much or more a function of availability as it is of excellence.)

In a very white, very affluent area like mine, the existing adjunct pool is mostly white people who bought homes here many years ago when it was still affordable, or spouses of wealthy people. Giving these folks preference in hiring is affirmative action for older, wealthier white people. I'll pass, thanks. (To forestall the inevitable flaming, I know this is atypical. My point is that geography is a powerful determinant of who fills adjunct positions, and we'd be ratifying existing provincialism.)

Establishing preference for adjuncts also creates a de facto extension of grad school, during which new Ph.D.'s, awash in student loan debt, will be consigned to adjunct ranks regardless of talent, until they've built up enough chits to break through. By that point, their research will have aged significantly, and more like tuna salad than a fine wine. Grad school is long enough now. (Yes, I know that the sciences have a system of 'post-docs' that constitute another hoop, but those pay considerably better than adjunct gigs, and usually come with at least basic benefits. They also involve further work on the research, which adjuncting does not.)

Most disturbingly, the entire concept of preference for adjuncts gets the priorities wrong. Full-time faculty positions, whether in a tenure system or a renewable-contract system, aren't entitlements or rewards. They're jobs, like other jobs. They should go to whomever seems best able to do the work. Yes, that will involve some subjective judgments, and yes, some of those judgments will be wrong. But to give up the national market for faculty in favor of “I got here first” is to enshrine an incestuous spoils-based system and to ensure provincialism for decades to come. Terrible, terrible idea.

I fully agree with the AFT that the way adjuncts, as a group, are treated is exploitative and disgusting. (Regular readers know my stand on that.) But the AFT's proposals, however well-intentioned, are disasters waiting to happen. If you really want to solve the problem, you have to attack it at its root: graduate admissions. Until the labor surplus goes away, exploitation will continue.

A Brainstopper

This is absolutely true.

As I walked to a meeting yesterday afternoon, I passed two students in the hallway, sitting against the wall, talking to each other. They were both female, and I'd guess 18 or 19. What I overheard:

Student 1: I could convert you. I could make you a smoker.

Student 2: I'd love to be a smoker, but I'm donating my eggs.

It was all I could do not to stop in my tracks, turn to them, and say 'Huh?'

For the rest of the day, anytime I reflected on that conversation fragment, I could feel my brain actually stop. It has an oddly clarifying effect, like a palate cleanser. Almost a koan, really.

It would make a good short story assignment. Construct a narrative in which this conversation actually makes sense.

The best I could come up with is that the first student was basically teasing, and the second student is tempted by smoking as a weight-loss strategy but needs money more, which she could then use, presumably, to buy cigarettes. Or something.

I could write dialogue for a thousand years and not come up with Student 2's response.

What's the weirdest thing you've heard in the hallway lately?

Evergreens

A professor at another college once told me that he was tired of the administration giving all the fertilizer to the seasonals, and neglecting the evergreens. It's an easy trap to fall into.

Evergreens are those disciplines that have to get taught, no matter what. They also get called 'general education,' which always struck me as just a cut above 'miscellaneous' as a label. The usual suspects include English, math, history, science, and psychology, among others. What distinguishes these from most other departments is that the intro courses are required or highly popular among people who don't major in the disciplines themselves, so the teaching load is bottom-heavy. In a given semester, we might run 30 sections of General Psych or 50 of Composition 1, but only one each of Psych of Personality or Women in Literature. That's because Nursing and engineering and criminal justice majors take Composition and General Psych to fulfill 'gen ed' requirements, but only English majors go on to the literature classes.

In departments that are more self-contained, the teaching is distributed more evenly over the spectrum from intro to upper-level courses.

As a general rule, the 'gen ed' disciplines tend to accumulate higher proportions of adjuncts than the more self-contained disciplines. The adjuncts are usually clustered in the intro courses, since the full-time faculty (who usually have first dibs) generally prefer to stick to the upper levels, to the extent possible. (At a cc, it isn't really possible, so even full professors in psych and English teach plenty of intro sections.) Evergreen disciplines usually have pretty reliable labor surpluses, in terms of faculty, and they always have plenty of intro sections, so they carry staggering quantities of adjuncts.

The contrast to 'boutique' programs is striking. Any given program has a minimum of full-time staff it needs to run at all. If the program is small, that full-time staff will cover most of the sections. A new program carries with it the prospect of growth (which is usually why it got introduced in the first place), so administrators are more willing to put in additional resources, since there's a prospect of it paying back. If you grow the full-time cohort in, say, English, the payback is harder to measure.

Over time, the perverse outcome is that the central, core teaching areas are the likeliest to be outsourced to high-turnover, part-time instructors, while the smaller and more peripheral areas are likelier to get the full-time lines. I can't think of another industry in which this pattern would hold.

In most industries, off the top of my head, one of two patterns holds: either you have a full-time core and add temps for seasonal fluctuations (like retail at Christmas), or you have a full-time core and add 'consultants' (who are temps who get paid more than the full-time staff) for individual projects with sunset clauses. In the first case, low-paid temps help with peak demand. In the second, high-paid temps give you flexibility, albeit at a serious financial cost. In academia, we have highly-trained but low-paid temps who help with the core function. There's something deeply weird about that.

(The disparity is even more annoying when you contrast faculty and office staff. Office temps cost more than do full-timers, even while adjuncts cost less than full-timers. In my first year at my cc, I lost four professors and a secretary to retirement, and was only able to replace the secretary.)

My suspicion is that the uniquely awful situation of adjuncts in academia is a direct result of the unique institution of tenure. Tenure isn't the solution; it's part of the problem. The incredible lack of fiscal and personnel flexibility that tenure in the boutique programs imposes on the institution has to be made up somewhere. If a boutique program's enrollments slide, but its faculty still has tenure, there isn't much the college can do. But there will always be composition, and there will be retirements that can be adjuncted-out.

Worse, when a college struggles financially, one of the time-honored moves it will make to try to recover is to start some new programs that it thinks will sell. Any new program has to start with a full-time core. Any new program will lose money initially. That has to be made up somewhere, too.

I still haven't seen a systematic effort to address the causal connection between tenure and adjuncting. Richard Chait published a book a few years ago, The Questions of Tenure, in which he examined a few isolated, marginal colleges that had moved away from tenure systems to see what happened. The research design there was so basically flawed that the book really doesn't help. I don't much care what happens when Life Support College in East Briarpatch abolishes tenure for its fifteen faculty. That doesn't answer the question. (For the record, Chait found that abolishing tenure didn't matter much either way.) The real issue is systemic.

I'll take it farther. The dream of tenure motivates people to pile into overcrowded fields, thereby replenishing the reserve army of adjuncts made necessary by tenure's costs. (According to Freakonomics, drug dealing works by the same principle. Most dealers make below the minimum wage, all told, but they stick with it on the off-chance of becoming one of the conspicuous winners in a winner-take-all, tournament-style system. This strikes me as an undesirable parallel.)

A friend of mine applied for a position teaching history at NYU. NYU has a program, apparently, in which full-time faculty are hired on non-renewable three-year contracts to teach the gen ed evergreens. He complained that it was exploitative. I thought it was innovative, and actually admirable. The real alternative wouldn't be dream positions; it would be ever more adjuncts. I'm not wild about the 'non-renewable' part, but I would guess it's a way to get around the AAUP guidelines about the tenure clock. My preferred model would be full-time multi-year renewable contracts, with renewal premised on both performance and enrollments. Am I right to prefer it? I haven't yet seen a rigorous analysis that would convince me either way. It's a guess, and it could well be wrong.

But I'm tired of apologizing for a failing status quo. The existing system is broken; any serious conversation about it has to start from that premise. There's an inexorable pull to starve the evergreens to feed the seasonals. Do that long enough, and you're in for a nasty winter.

Faculty Websites

My college is considering hosting individual faculty webpages off our main webpage faculty directory. The idea is that anyone interested in finding out more about Professor Doe could click on her name, and the link would direct the viewer to Professor Doe's specific page.

Technically, this is no great shakes. Politically, it's a nightmare.

Some professors refuse to participate altogether, claiming that anything other than name, rank, and serial number violates their privacy. I find the position hard to fathom – a mailing of our master course schedule, with names attached to sections, goes out to every house in the county – but as with so many things, the reasonableness of a position is in inverse proportion to the fervency with which it's held.

To my mind, listing recent publications, areas of research interest, and, in certain disciplines or where it makes sense (like art), samples of professors' work should be no-brainers. The point of the exercise is to show off the high caliber of faculty we have, to entice students (and parents) who might not take us seriously otherwise (due to the cc stigma) to check us out. We have a strong faculty, so we might as well market that.

The complications ensue when we start moving from 'thin' to 'thick' content. Listing academic degrees and courses taught is pretty objective. Listing research interests is trickier, though presumably a word limit could prevent anybody from going too far off the deep end. Allowing broader open-ended statements, or links to external content, could bring some very ugly and sticky questions of endorsement.

Say a professor has a blog. (Unthinkable, I know, but bear with me.) If the professor's page on the college site includes a link to the blog, is the college implicitly endorsing the content of the blog? If so, does the college have the right to vet the content? If it is endorsing but has no right to vet content, then the college has no choice but to ban links altogether; the alternative is equivalent to giving professors blank checks on the college account. (This is one of the great many reasons that my blog is pseudonymous, and even has a disclaimer in the prefatory paragraph on top. I want to make absolutely certain that nobody mistakes my musings here for the official positions of my college.)

In a discussion with my department chairs, one kind-hearted soul suggested that we should go with the most open-ended format possible, subject to approval based on 'reasonableness.' I can't even imagine the legal questions that would raise. If my idea of 'reasonable' differs from somebody else's, which it would any time the content came into question, I'd be pushed quickly into an untenable first amendment corner. Since a cc is a public institution, we have to walk some fine lines with freedom of expression. Suppose a professor links to a page sponsored by and in praise of a fundamentalist religious group, or a political candidate, or radical environmentalists, or pick your poison – do we have the right to say no to that? If not, do we at least have the right to distance ourselves from it?

Ironically enough, the legally clean way around the free expression issues is to greatly restrict the venue in the first place. Once you allow some political speech, you have to allow pretty much all of it, and there are some folks who would push the limits just to make a point. Since we can't go around alienating our taxpayers, we have to prevent that kind of stuff from coming up altogether.

Even relatively simple things, like photographs, raise all manner of questions. Should the photos all be in the same format? If so, should the college hire a professional photographer? If we allow people to submit their own pictures, what do we do with silly and/or inappropriate ones? How do we define inappropriate in the first place? I get a headache just thinking about it.

If we could count on a general understanding that external links are exactly that – external – and reflect nothing other than the individual professor's taste, I wouldn't have a problem with them. But in this political climate, that's simply not a realistic assumption. Somebody is going to link to something that sets somebody else off, and it's off to the races. Given that netiquette is still evolving, and that my college and county have relatively high average ages and very conservative politics, I just can't be confident that everybody would read things in the spirit in which they're intended.

Does your college have individual faculty webpages? If so, how does it handle these issues?

Parent-Teacher Conference

Last Week, The Wife and I went to a parent-teacher conference with The Boy's kindergarten teacher.

TW and I actually high-fived as we left.

His teacher commented that he loves to read, and that his vocabulary is much richer and more expressive than most of his peers'. She asked how old he was when we started reading to him; TW commented that we have a photo of me reading The Runaway Bunny to him in the hospital the day after he was born (which is true). Our theory was that it doesn't really matter that infants don't understand what's being read to them; what matters is that they get lap time, they hear your voice and words, and they get used to being read to. By the time they're old enough to get something cognitive out of it, the emotional link is already there. We've done the same with The Girl, and she's already wild about books at age 2 ½. (She actually finishes sentences when we're reading books she knows. It's kind of unnerving. “George was...” “Curious!” Her attempts to pronounce “binoculars” (from Curious George Goes to the Beach) absolutely melt my heart.)

The teacher also commented that he's very considerate, liked by all, and very happy there.

I know TB is a great kid, and I know we've worked hard to prepare him and caught any number of lucky breaks, but it's still incredibly gratifying to hear praise like that from his teacher. He's really thriving at school, and he loves it there.

He's had plenty of preparation. Since TW worked until TG was born, TB was in daycare full-time from age four months to about age three. At three, we downshifted to a few days a week, mostly to save money. At four he went to our town's public four-year-old preschool program five half-days a week. By the time he got to kindergarten, school was old hat. I'm a little worried about TG in that respect – since TW has been home with her since birth, she hasn't had the same exposure to preschool. We'll start dipping a toe in the water next year, but those first few separations will be hard.

(The director of the daycare TB went to was wise beyond her years. She suggested to TW dropping him off about 15 minutes early on the first day, so she'd have time to cry in the car before driving off. Turned out to be a good call.)

I worry a little about his school. Property taxes in our town are levied on the “squeal like a pig” theory, and the town is fully built-out, so school funding pretty much is what it is. The district eliminated buses a few years ago, and the classes are a little bigger than I'd like. (TB's kindergarten has 24, with one teacher, a part-time aide, and two room Moms, one of whom is TW.) State aid is flat or declining, so, as with my cc, the school is doing the best it can with what it has. It's still in decent shape, but the future looks tough. The voters are (justifiably) cranky about continued tax increases, the school-age population is climbing, unfunded mandates drop from the sky like anvils, and we can't realistically expect a shopping mall to come along and generate new revenue.

I'm not asking the school to work miracles. I fully expect that TW and I will be TB's primary teachers for a while, and that the habits we try to inculcate at home will have a major bearing on how he does. That said, though, I want his school to be worthy of him. He's a smart, sweet, earnest kid who honestly wants to know all kinds of stuff. I want him to have that chance.

As Turkey Day Ended...

(actual conversation)

TW: What are you grateful for, Daddy?

DD: I'm grateful for Mommy, and TB, and TG. What are you grateful for, Mommy?

TW: I'm grateful for Daddy, and TB, and TG. What are you grateful for, TB?

TB: I'm grateful for Daddy, and Mommy, and TG, and...

(drops trou, moons me)

this!

-------

That's my boy!

Happy Thanksgiving

The Girl's first word this morning: "Turkey!"

Exactly.

Best wishes,

DD

Buried Treasure

Sometimes you win one.

Once at my previous college, and once again here, I've found someone who had been out of favor with a previous regime (or two) who actually had something positive left to contribute. In both cases, once I made an effort to pull them back in, they started making notable contributions to the institution.

It takes a few years to suss out who these folks are. It takes some intelligence-gathering, but also a good gut instinct, since much of what passes for information is, in fact, slanted. And more often than not, folks who've been exiled to Siberia have been exiled for a reason.

But there's something especially satisfying about finding buried treasure. It's a much milder version of proving an inmate innocent. Sometimes, folks have been exiled for personality conflicts, or because of long-forgotten political alignments, or for really unsavory reasons – race, sexual orientation, etc. After years of being dumped on, people with tenure but without political clout often just decide to keep their heads down, teach their classes, and nothing more. They don't lose their jobs, but they don't contribute as much as they could, either, since they've received messages to the effect that their contributions aren't welcome.

At Proprietary U, there was a wonderful professor who had been cast out to the academic hinterlands by succeeding administrations. She was one of the most senior people there, a lovely person, and a talented teacher, but she didn't fit the mold that a few deans had in mind as they built the program. They treated her like the red-headed stepchild of the program, to the point that most of the newer hires had never seen her any other way. When I moved into administration, I started trying to figure out why she had been cast out; I never did find a reason that made sense. Over the course of a few conversations with her, I made clear to her that, as far as I was concerned, her period of exile was over, and that I'd need her help if we were going to have a successful program.

It was one of my best moments as a manager. She blossomed, stepping up in parts of the program that really needed help and sharing the benefit of her experience with the rest of us. As she showed her real strengths, you could see the attitudes of some of the newer hires shift a bit; they simply didn't know she had it in her.

Recently, I've been able to replicate that success here. A professor who has been here for a very long time has been on the outs for the last ten years or so, for reasons lost to the sands of time. Again, I've sniffed around, trying to figure out if there's a rational reason for his exile, and I haven't found any. To the contrary; from all that I've seen, I've been impressed. Whatever drove the political winds back in the day just doesn't strike me as relevant (or even discernible) now.

Once I felt confident that his exile was unjustified, I started looking for the right role for him to step into to redeem his standing here. When one came along, I had to risk some serious capital with the VP to take a flyer on this guy, since the VP had also picked up on the lingering stigma. To the VP's credit, he let me try it, and the guy has really impressed. Even the VP has recently conceded that this was the right call, since the guy has been consistently and conspicuously hitting it out of the park in his new role.

Bringing someone good in from the cold is almost like making a new hire, only without the hit to the budget. The programs are stronger, morale is higher, and the not-too-subtle message goes out to other faculty that historical gossip (or favoritism) counts for a hell of a lot less than current performance. It's incredibly satisfying from a dean's perspective, since everybody wins. It's relatively rare, since it takes a special kind of stupid to waste a valuable resource for an extended period, but then, managerial stupidity is endlessly renewable. It's one of those really gratifying times when the morally right thing and the pragmatically right thing are the same thing. It isn't quite as good as actual hiring, but in this budget climate, I'll take it.

The Tap on the Shoulder

This week I have to do one of my absolute least favorite parts of my job, which is to recruit a tenured faculty member to serve on a committee. Given that this is not a popular committee, and that the bylaws of this one require that the faculty member be tenured and of relatively long standing at the college, there is really no graceful way to do this.

We have any number of formal standing committees on campus, most of which are constituted by a dumbed-down version of John C. Calhoun's theory of concurrent majorities. Each committee has to have 'representation' from all kinds of campus stakeholders, with the proportions varying only somewhat according to the subject matter jurisdiction of the committee (so, for example, we have department secretaries on the curriculum committee).

I've tried asking a few folks directly, only to receive the 'hollow yes' followed by backing-out-by-email.

There's an episode of “Sex and the City” in which Carrie gets dumped via a post-it note; that's roughly how I feel about folks who back out by email.

I've tried asking department chairs for suggestions, but they react as if I'd asked them to sacrifice one of their children. Which, in a way, I have.

I could lurk in the hallways, rubbing my hands with glee and cackling maniacally, waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting denizen of the tenured warrens, but I'm pretty sure HR has regs about that sort of thing.

It's getting to the point where I'm starting to consider the kinds of measures typically used in The Boy's kindergarten class. Musical chairs is looking pretty good. “Everybody who thinks they're not on this committee, take a step forward. Not so fast, Johnson!” The cheese stands alone.

For all of the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about administrative overreach, it's incredibly hard to get tenured professors to serve on committees. Oscar Wilde once said of socialism that he would be a socialist, but he likes to keep his evenings free. The spirit of Wilde lives on, albeit frumpier and less witty.

Given just how senior the faculty is, most have long since developed immunity to appeals to civic virtue or the better angels of our nature. Administrative overreach strikes many as exactly the kind of problem that other people should get to work on immediately. By default, the 'good soldiers,' of whom there are several, are already overbooked, so I can't just go to them. I could always use scare tactics, threatening them with the consequence of having to live with decisions made by those who bothered to show up, but they seem to prefer waiting for bad decisions to happen and then filing grievances. I don't know why.

Grumble.

Any ideas out there?