Calling Visionary Philanthropists

I follow a fair number of academics on Twitter, and I’m consistently amazed at the travel schedules of those who don’t work at community colleges.  They go to far more conferences than their community college colleagues do, even when the conferences are focused on teaching.  That tends to lead to a certain insularity at conference discussions; when the only people there are people with the travel budgets to be there, a certain frame of reference goes uncontested.  This explains a lot.

That’s unfortunate on several levels.  Obviously, it’s unfair to the community college faculty, who are denied opportunities to see what others are doing.  If conferences are of any value at all, then over time, that has to lead to missed opportunities, missed improvements, and the like.  It’s also unfair to their colleagues, who lose valuable perspectives.  It stunts the discussions at many conferences, which means that certain questions don’t even get asked.  

The major reason for the lack of travel, of course, is money.  Earlier this week I had a conversation with a student from Amherst College.  He mentioned that Amherst spends something like $100,000 per year per student.  We spend approximately one tenth of that.  It’s true that we don’t have dorms or football, but even allowing for those, we can’t come close to the kind of professional development budgets that other places can.  It’s mathematically impossible, given the dollars we have to work with.

Which is where philanthropists could come in.

Here’s what I’m thinking.  A philanthropist who wanted to help community college faculty join the larger discussions around teaching innovations, student success, the completion agenda, and the rest of it could sponsor a travel fund specifically for community college faculty.  To have maximum impact -- and I know this is counter to the major trends in philanthropy, but a guy can dream -- it should not be competitive or program-specific.  It could, and probably should, have rules about a maximum per person per year, disallowed expenses (i.e. alcohol), and the usual safeguards.  But beyond that, it should be open to folks who aren’t used to competing for travel funding.  

The beauty of a program like this is that it’s almost infinitely malleable.  If the Big Muckety Muck Memorial Travel Program only wants to run for, say, five years, then it can.  If it wants to include adjuncts, it can.  If it wants to focus first on a few key disciplines, it can.  Unlike publicly funded programs, it has a great deal of freedom in how it defines its mission.

But wait, I hear you thinking, that wouldn’t be transformative!  It wouldn’t be disruptive!

I respectfully disagree.

It’s much easier to get innovations to stick when faculty are involved.  They’re the folks on the front lines, and they’re the ones who dominate curriculum committees.  With them on your side, you can accomplish quite a bit.  With them indifferent or hostile, you have much more of an uphill battle.  And they have a vantage point that can inform many proposals in useful ways.

At this point, waiting for community colleges to fund them directly is a fool’s errand.  With budgets as tight as they are, significant increases in travel funding simply aren’t going to happen.  But a philanthropist with a vision could move mountains by moving professors.

Philanthropists, what say you?  Is anyone up to the challenge?  If you are, I’d be happy to discuss it offline in more detail...

BAristas

Employer partnerships aren’t new in higher education.  For a long time, through the 1990’s, they were fairly widespread.  The usual arrangement held that employees who worked at a given company during the day could take night classes someplace local, and get their tuition (or a set portion thereof) reimbursed.  Many of those programs got cut in the 2001 recession, shortly before online education took off.

Starbucks is apparently making an old idea new again.  It’s planning to announce that any of its employees who work for the company for at least 20 hours a week will be eligible for full or partial tuition reimbursement for online classes at Arizona State University.  (Employees with at least half of the credits towards a four-year degree will get full reimbursement; those with fewer credits will get less.)  There’s no apparent requirement for a particular major, and there’s no “indentured servitude” period during which they have to stick around after using the benefit.  Starbucks seems to be aware that some people will take the degree and run, and is okay with that.

Color me intrigued.

As an employee recruitment and retention initiative, it could be quite powerful.  The hourly pay might not impress, but with both health insurance and tuition support, the effective compensation could be significantly higher.  The prospect of a bachelor’s degree without any student debt holds real appeal. Given that turnover and training costs tend to be high at that level of retail, somebody may have done some math and determined that the potential savings in those areas would make this affordable.  And it’s beautiful p.r.

Since the classes supported are online, rather than at night, more students could take advantage of them.  The variable hours that often go with retail jobs can be hell on class schedules, but shouldn’t be deal-breakers online.  

I see a lot of value here.  I was surprised that Starbucks is partnering with ASU all the way through, given that ASU charges about $500 a credit; I would have expected a community college partnership for the first two years as a way to keep the costs down.  But it may be easier logistically to work only with one partner.  I was surprised, too, that the Times piece chose to focus on a music major; how, exactly, you would do that online is not clear to me.  But that’s true whether you’re working through Starbucks or not.

It would be easy enough to get cynical and look for the cloud around the silver lining.  “Aha!  It’s a way to enforce employee discipline!”  Well, yes; all compensation is.  “Aha!  They’re expecting financial aid to cover some of the benefit for them!”  They’d be stupid not to.  Besides, to the student, the precise mix of Pell and Starbucks doesn’t really matter, as long as the bill is paid.  From a taxpayer’s perspective, I’d rather see students succeed than not; if private industry is willing to pick up a significant chunk of the tab to help students finish, I’m for it.  

In a sense, it reminds me of the way that kids in my high school looked at working at Wegman’s.  Wegman’s is an extraordinary supermarket chain in the Northeast -- though not yet the Pioneer Valley, cough, cough -- that started in Rochester.  Back in the 80’s, it let it be known that high school kids in its employ were eligible for non-trivial college scholarships.  (I don’t know if it still does that.) The hourly pay wasn’t any better than anywhere else, but the scholarships were a real draw.  Getting a job there was considered a real win.  As a result, Wegman’s had its choice of employees, and the people who worked there were unusually loyal to it.

I’m sure it’s possible to find some dark, sinister underbelly to the Starbucks/ASU deal, and I won’t rule out the possibility that there’s some awful catch that hasn’t surfaced yet.  But from where I’m sitting, it strikes me as a welcome flashback with an online twist.  Well done, Starbucks.  I hope you start yet another trend.

Frozen

The Girl more or less ordered me to watch Frozen with her.  She had seen it when it was released, and loved it, and decided that it was important that I see it, too.  

When a nine-year-old who rarely asks much insists that you watch a movie that means a lot to her, you do.  Those are the rules.

I don’t usually care about musicals, and the first twenty minutes or so didn’t inspire confidence.  I have been known, on occasion, to fall asleep during boring movies.  (I missed a good chunk of The Lorax.)  It was touch-and-go for a little while there.  But TG was counting on me, so I powered through.

I’m glad I did.  

“Let it Go” was a legitimate showstopper; I finally saw what the fuss was about.  But the movie as a whole won me over, too.  The combination of strong female leads, relative indifference to romantic subplots, Olaf’s comic relief, and TG’s obvious enthusiasm for it all was hard to resist.  It was refreshing to see a really well-made children’s movie in which the female characters were central and romance was not.  (The heroine wins the cute boy in the end, but it’s very much an afterthought.  He’s just there to ratify the happy ending.)  TG got caught up in the adventure, and enjoyed watching the princess save the day.

Raising a daughter thoughtfully in this culture is hard.  I want her to keep her confidence as she grows, and to not get sucked into the whole disney princess/cheerleader/lookist trap.  But I also want her to be in the world, and to be able to have common ground with her friends.  Finding the momentarily right balance between protection and letting go requires constant adjusting.  And she’s watching her parents for cues.  That means being very aware of not making offhand comments that send unhelpful messages.  

Luckily for me, TG makes it easy.  She has a remarkable sense of who she is, for her age, and an ability to tune out anything discordant.  

Her peers notice that about her, too.

Last week, TG invited me to talk to her class on Career Day.  I went a couple of years ago and tried to explain the day job; I didn’t get very far before yielding to the next speaker.  This time I focused on writing, on the theory that it would be a little easier to picture.

If you haven’t spoken to a roomful of fourth graders lately, it’s worth trying.  Actual moment:

Me: You know how you have to write sloppy copies before you turn something in?  I do that, too, but I call them rough drafts.

(Girl raises hand)

Me: Yes?

Girl: TG is smart!

If you’re willing to embrace a certain non-linearity, the conversations can be great fun.  One kid related everything we discussed to llamas; TG later explained that he has been obsessed with llamas for the past week.  Another suggested that my next book should be about zombies.  A girl who is friends with TG informed me that she’s writing a book of her own.  I told her I’d be happy to read it when she’s done.  TG just beamed.

Father’s Day is a chance to think about what it means to be a father.  For me, it’s about enabling two smart, sweet kids to grow into strong, smart, sweet adults.  If that means staying awake through a few musicals, then that’s what it means.  Thanks, TG.

Ask the Administrator: Pro-Rating for Small Classes

A new correspondent writes:

Our community college has a procedure that allows classes that would otherwise be subject to cancellation due to low enrollment run under certain circumstances and gives a formula for calculating a prorated salary.  The deans have the discretion of choosing to allow a course to run at full-pay or to follow the prorated pay formula, depending on the circumstances. Often these decisions involve trying to strike a balance of ensuring course availability for students with fiscal responsibility.

The prorated salary calculation is updated annually to reflect increases to our tuition rates and to account for cost of living adjustments to salaries. The other factors in the formula have not been reviewed in years and we’ve decided it is time to take a look at how this low-enrollment pay should be determined.  We also have been wrestling with how to increase consistency and we are reviewing the practices that guide decision-making for when we choose to apply the low-pay formula and when we let a section run at full pay.

I’m wondering if your wise and worldly readers can share experiences about how their institutions calculate prorated pay as well as any guidelines that are used to determine when an instructor is paid the full amount for a low-enrolled course vs. when pro-rated pay is paid.

By the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, we have a choice.  If we choose to pro-rate, the contract sets the terms by which to do it.  Or, we can choose to go with an all-or-nothing approach; if the class runs, we pay full freight.  If it’s too small, we just don’t run it.

We’ve gone with the latter, on the theory that the preparation that goes into a class doesn’t really vary with the number of students.  Pro-rating is consistent with the lighter grading load of a smaller class, but the time in class is still the same, and the preparation is mostly the same.  It just didn’t seem fair to run very small classes at small fractions of pay while the preparation time and time in class remain unchanged.

In some classes, there’s a pedagogical problem at small enough sizes.  A public speaking class with three people isn’t really a public speaking class.  If you start with a very small group, and have normal attrition, you can have some painfully quiet discussions.  

Institutionally, there’s also an issue of opportunity cost.  Devoting a classroom to a class of five means you don’t have that classroom to devote to a class of twenty.  (Put differently, in catering to five students, you’re disappointing twenty.)  Yes, the first time you cut the small section, it may seem like a pointless loss.  But when departments get the message that they can’t just run whatever they want, enrollments be damned, they start to pay attention to enrollments.  Over time, incentives matter.  We’ve forced ourselves to get much better at matching our offerings to student demand.  That’s always a moving target, to some degree, but at least we’re tracking the movement.

Of course, those are “macro” considerations.  On the “micro” level, there’s almost always an argument for any given class.  

Wise and worldly readers, you’ve been summoned by name.  Have you seen reasonably successful versions of pro-rating?  If so, how did they work?  Or are colleges better off just going with all-or-nothing?

Have a question?  Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Listening for the Silences

Purposely vague excerpt from actual conversation this week:

“What did you think?”

“It was…(long pause)...”

The pause mattered far more than the words that followed it.  Followup questions revealed that the pause did, in fact, portend.

I know that some people believe that the way to show leadership is to chew the scenery, and to fill any dead air with the sound of one’s own voice.  Some otherwise intelligent people follow that script.  But I just don’t know how you could hear the silences that way.

Silences have their limits, of course.  They’re hard to quote -- see above -- and therefore hard to put too much weight on if you’re making a factual claim.  If you don’t have context, they can be easy to misread; mistaking a seething silence for a contented silence doesn’t lead anywhere good.  If you don’t have an ear for them, they’re easy to get wrong.  In some settings, even if you’re willing to hear the silences, others aren’t, and they’ll drown it out themselves.  

But ignore them at your peril.  

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen that kind of listening taught well?  If so, how?

Ask the Administrator: Avoiding the Death March

An occasional correspondent writes

Gaining admission to elite colleges is hard, and seems to be getting harder.

Applicants who are not flat-out brilliant compete against a large pool of very very well-prepared youngsters. The standard expectations of academics, sports, and (now) community service are demanding, and keep getting more so.

But suppose one wanted to do an end-run around all that, and get a high-quality education that has real credibility without the Ivy League death march. What would you recommend?

My own thinking is that it might make sense to go off and do something else after high school, so that when you do apply to college, you are not in the same "bucket" as all the prepped-to-the-hilt highschoolers. Military service, perhaps.

I’d start by asking what the goal is.  Phrases like “high-quality education” and “real credibility” can mean a lot of different things.  And I’d focus less on making the student unusual than on finding the right fit for the student.

It’s true that some high schools have developed high-pressure cultures in which students are put through paces that most of us would find ridiculous, all to avoid the shame of being relegated to a “safety school.”  Most of the New York Times articles about the competition to “get into college” take those schools as the frame of reference.  They have to; the entire conceit wouldn’t make sense if it were about getting into an open-admissions institution.

To oversimplify, I’ll read “high-quality education” to refer to student learning, and “real credibility” to refer to market value.  (In this case, “market value” refers to graduate and professional schools, as well as employers.)  The two don’t always go together, which is a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing, in that you can find “bargains” and unusual fits that make sense for a particular student.  It’s a curse, in that the student may subsequently still need to prove more, and may have a harder time with the first hurdle. After the first hurdle, though, the exchange value of the high-toned undergraduate degree wanes pretty quickly.  

For the intelligent high school student who isn’t quite as good at application-padding as the rest, honors programs at state or community colleges can be excellent options.  Honors programs usually provide talented and driven peers, dedicated faculty, small classes, and some level of cachet, and they do it all at public tuition levels.  Many of them have strong “feeder” relationships with schools at the next level up, so you can pay less upfront and still finish with the high-toned degree.

In other cases, the issue is finding the school with the right specialization.  We usually apply that kind of analysis to graduate institutions, but it’s not out of place for undergrads, either.  For a student with a specific curricular interest, the right school may not be the one that’s generally considered more impressive.  Middlebury is generally considered a notch below Swarthmore, for instance, but if you want to focus on languages, Middlebury is the better choice.  (That was true decades ago, anyway.  I don’t know if it still is.)  

Treating military service as a form of application padding strikes me as risky.  If you want to serve in the military for its own sake, by all means, do.  But if you’re using it instrumentally, I’d advise thinking hard about what it actually entails.  Tours of duty are simply not comparable to serving as secretary of the Spanish club.  Using the former to avoid the latter suggests a certain lack of perspective.  It’s possible to treat extracurriculars lightly in a way that it just isn’t with military service.  And the way we treat our veterans casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of military service as a means of upward mobility.  I wouldn’t treat it as an “end-run.”  It’s much too serious for that.

The question of the exchange-value of the degree is tougher.  Here, there’s no substitute for homework.  If your ultimate goal involves a graduate or professional degree, what is the college’s track record as a feeder?  (If you’re starting at a community college, what’s its record as a feeder to desirable four-year colleges?)  If your goal is to work in a particular field, what’s the college’s track record placing graduates in that field?  

The good news is that choosing a college is more like choosing a car than choosing a mate.  Some cars will suit your needs better than others, but many different ones will get you where you want to go.  

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is there a better strategy?

Have a question?  Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Baffled

I’ve been a fan of Tom Frank since the 90’s.  I actually had a subscription to The Baffler in grad school, and I kept it for a while after until the issues started arriving progressively farther apart.  (Somewhere in the basement, I still have a copy of Commodify Your Dissent, a wonderful collection of early Baffler pieces.) The Baffler struck me as a rare voice of sanity at the time.  I still remember reading Steve Albini’s piece in The Baffler on the economics of the music industry circa 1995 and thinking that the piece was striking and the industry unsustainable.  I stand by both.

Frank continued his hot streak into the oughts, striking with What’s the Matter with Kansas?.  As with his best stuff at The Baffler, it wasn’t so much the original reportage as the connecting of dots that did it.  

Which is why I was so disappointed in Frank’s piece in Salon this week.  Modestly titled “Colleges are Full of It,” it looks at first like a patented Tom Frank takedown.  But it’s sloppy in ways that he typically isn’t.  In an effort to recapture the thrill of youthful vitriol, he recaptured the embarrassment of callow reporting.  It’s a disappointing misfire, because it could have been great.

The material is certainly there.  Tuition increases for higher education as a sector have outpaced inflation in the US for several decades now.  The collapse of the blue-collar aristocracy has made higher education feel almost mandatory for young people who want to make middle-class salaries when they grow up.  Higher education’s characteristic hand-wringing cultural liberalism offers plenty of opportunity for the modern-day Veblen to ply his trade.  Combine all that with some easy shots at tone-deaf journalism -- not difficult to find -- and you should really have something.

But the piece fails for some reasons so basic that I have to wonder what happened.  

Start with the antecedent.  Which institutions, exactly, is Frank talking about?

At times, he seems to be talking about “higher education.”  But then he refers to “universities” and “university administrators,” as if those are the same thing as “higher education.”  I read in vain for a single, passing mention of community colleges; in Frank’s piece, they simply don’t exist.  He makes a single, parenthetical mention of state universities, only to concede that the real story there is of state disinvestment, rather than administrative bloat.  His piece is fixated firmly on the elite of the elite; plenty of Stanford, a good chunk of New York Times, a name-check of Gaston Caperton.  From that, it wouldn’t occur to you that nearly half of American undergraduates attend community colleges.  You’d think they all piled into the Ivy League.

It’s a common journalistic mistake, and one that the New York Times, among others, makes with dispiriting frequency.  I expect that from the Times, but not from Frank.  He’s supposed to be the boots-on-the-ground guy.  Apparently not.

And that’s a shame, because it would change the story he’s trying to tell in some interesting ways.  In my world, for example, per-student spending has been flat for over a decade.  The number of administrators has actually shrunk.  But until last year, tuition/fees went up anyway, mostly to make up for a combination of Baumol’s cost disease -- entirely unmentioned in the Frank piece -- and state disinvestment, which warrants only a parenthetical.  His focus is really on elite, private universities, which he excoriates for -- wait for it -- being self-interested.

Sara Goldrick-Rab recently made some waves with a proposal to stop sending Federal financial aid to private colleges and universities.  That way, she argued, we’d direct public money to the public good; private colleges and universities could compete, or not, in the open marketplace.  It’s not a perfect proposal, but it has the considerable virtue of recognizing that different sectors are meaningfully different.  The crisis in American higher education affordability is not actually happening at the institutions that most students attend.  It’s happening where the most conspicuous students attend.  That’s the kind of mistake that I wouldn’t expect Tom Frank, of all people, to make.

Meanwhile, we’re still the best bargain in higher education, if you bother to notice.

Friday Fragments

Waubonsee Community College, in Illinois, has one of the more arresting images on its homepage that I’ve seen in a while.  (If you go to the homepage, it’s one of four pictures on a rotation in the featured spot.)  It’s advertising a workshop designed to “teach women how to better communicate with men.”  But the picture shows an angry man pointing and shouting, and a woman looking confused and helpless.

Um…

So if a man is shouting and pointing aggressively at a woman, it’s her fault?  She’s the problem?

Waubonsee,colleague to colleague, I’m not sure you’re sending the message you want to send.  Framing the subject as “how to communicate with men” is bad enough; adding misogyny through the imagery doesn’t help matters.  You might want to rethink that one.  

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Rebecca Townsend sent me this one.  Apparently, Generation X is America’s forgotten middle child.

That sounds about right.  We’re America’s Jan Brady.  (“Boomers, Boomers, Boomers!”)

As a smaller generation sandwiched between larger ones, Gen X didn’t get much of a cultural moment in the sun.  (If I remember correctly, it lasted about ten minutes in 1993.)  At this point, we’re in our “shut up and raise your kids” years, which doesn’t help.  

To my mind, the defining characteristic of Gen X is that it was the first generation in which middle-class parental divorce was normal.  Divorce now is more class-stratified than it was in the 1970’s and 1980’s; back then, it was ubiquitous.  I suspect that the relative lack of attachment to institutions in this cohort stems partly from that, as does its unapologetic focus on family life now.  

We’re at the age now where we need to step up.  Here’s hoping we get the chance...

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This week, I had the chance to talk to a graduate class in community college administration.  (I won’t mention the location, for reasons that will become obvious.)  The students were mostly around my age or older, and many of them already held positions in community colleges; they’re looking to move up.

We discussed my book, and common issues, and differences among various state systems.  The moment that really struck me, though, was the response when I made a point about cultural change on campus, and the need to provide enough internal stability that people can focus on the tasks at hand.  (My Gen X roots may be showing there…)  Several students responded that yes, that would be nice, but they’ve undergone so many reorganizations that a sense of panic has become the sort of background noise on campus.  

It reminded me of my DeVry days.  For a while, the pace of change was so frantic that people actually lost track of which curriculum was running at a given time.  (That’s not an exaggeration.  At one point, three different versions of College Algebra were running simultaneously.)  When approaches, rules, and people change at random but close intervals, it’s hard to focus on the task at hand.  Basic self-preservation comes first.

In that context, talk of “leadership competencies” strikes me as beside the point.  If the leader changes too frequently, or external shocks come fast and furious, then the capabilities of this leader or that one don’t matter much.  Context matters.  To the extent that you can shape context, you enable the underlying capabilities to emerge.  But if you just can’t, I’m not sure what to tell you.

--

Wise and wordly readers, I need your help.  The Boy just turned 13, and he’s desperately looking for good fiction to read.  I’m thinking something sophisticated enough to hold his interest, but nothing too sexualized or dark.  Any suggestions?

Notes on “Shared Governance Reconsidered”

Susan Resneck Pierce’s new book, “Shared Governance Reconsidered,” offers a useful outline of many of the dilemmas facing shared governance in American higher education, and I’m not just saying that because it’s part of the same series as my book.  

Pierce is the former president of the University of Puget Sound, in Washington state, and much of her perspective reflects that.  Although shared governance is found throughout higher education, her focus is mostly on four-year colleges and universities, and especially on private ones.  Reading the book from the two-year public perspective was a bit vertiginous at times, but I don’t think too much got lost in translation.

Although understandings vary, “shared governance” is usually taken to mean that college faculty have jurisdiction over the academic program of a college, while the trustees and administration have jursidictionion over the finances, physical plant, and operational details.  The idea is that faculty have to be free to pursue truth as they see it, and they can only do that when they have control over the academic program.  Similarly, they need to be able to give the grades that students have earned, rather than giving the grades that the market rewards.  Otherwise, the entire enterprise loses its reason to exist.  On the administrative side, someone has to be in charge of making sure the lights stay on, the students get registered, and the paychecks don’t bounce.  

Pierce writes mostly about boundary disputes.  Is the decision to close a low-enrolled program for financial reasons properly academic or administrative?  In other words, when programs have to be cut, should the faculty have a veto?  

She doesn’t actually answer that question, which I’d suggest is to her credit.  It’s complicated.  In many cases, the core of the conflict is that both sides have a partially valid claim to jurisdiction.  A curriculum decided solely on finances may lack integrity.  Conversely,  a curriculum designed with no attention to finances will bankrupt the institution.  Whether that comes across as contradiction, tension, or balance depends on context.

In my world, I’ve found that taking ideas to open venues when the ideas are still in the formative stage tends to work much better than bringing fully formed proposals and asking for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.  If the only way to demonstrate independence is to be contrary, then contrary some people shall be.  But if they can make discernible and credited contributions while things are taking shape, both the climate and the actual proposals tend to improve.

Pierce makes reference, rightly, to the increased meddling by state legislatures in academic decisions since the Great Recession started.  She also devotes a chapter to the issues around the inclusion (or not) of adjunct faculty in shared governance, which is particularly resonant in a community college context.  She barely mentioned unions, which probably reflects her focus on private universities; in the public setting, any discussion of shared governance has to make note of where, say, curriculum stops and faculty workload starts.  Anyone who thinks the demarcation is always clear has never worked in academic administration.

I wish she had devoted more detailed attention to the flawed premise behind many conflicts around shared governance.  The premise is that a college is a self-contained institution -- what, in the sixties, they used to call a “total” institution -- and that all conflict is contained within it.  Nobody comes out and says that, of course, because it’s facially absurd.  But they assume it, and act as if it were true.  That’s becoming increasingly untenable.  Faculty owe allegiances to academic disciplines.  Administrators and Boards are increasingly subject to levels of rulemaking from state and federal authorities -- as well as financial pressures -- that greatly restrict their freedom to decide.  Faculty who don’t know that, or don’t believe it, sometimes shoot the messenger and claim the moral high ground of shared governance in doing it.  They make the mistake of using “the administration” as a synecdoche for everything external to their own world, and then they direct all of their objections and frustrations at what is, in many important ways, a stand-in.   As Pierce rightly notes, that kind of culturally sanctioned abuse drives good people out of administration, and thereby becomes self-fulfilling.

It’s easy (and proper) to call out, say, the legislature of South Carolina for scolding a college for teaching a book about lesbianism.  But that’s an easy case.  The more common case of legislative troublemaking isn’t even around rulemaking.  It’s around uncertainty.  Hiring decisions, for example, rely on the availability of money to pay the new hire.  When we don’t know if that money will be available until very late in the fiscal year, we hold off on hiring.  That has direct programmatic impact, especially when small programs lose full-time people and we don’t have the money to replace until it’s too late for the following year.  

Midyear cuts (“rescissions”) are even worse.  Most of our costs are “fixed,” for all intents and purposes.  A cut announced in January hits the Spring hard, since we’ve already been through the Fall and spent what we spent.  At that point, the time required for meaningful consultation simply does not exist.  Pierce correctly notes that people who want greater participation need to attend to speeding it up, but to my reading, she understated the degree of speeding up needed.  Yes, in a perfect world, we’d get our budgets well in advance and we could plan accordingly.  But in this world, things don’t work like that.  Abrupt external shocks are sometimes processed on campuses as failures of the administration to consult with faculty; just as often, though, they’re dictated by external circumstances and deadlines.  In other words, a 21st century theory of shared governance has to reach outside the boundaries of the campus if it’s going to get the issue right.  Otherwise, we’ll keep responding to external shocks with internal bickering.  This is not likely to succeed over the long term.

Still, PIerce does a nice job of outlining the history and common understandings of shared governance, and her anecdotes are well worth the read.  I look forward to the followup volume that extends the “sharing” to external constituencies, and grounds their jurisdictional boundaries in a sustainable theory.

Quick! Describe an Online Student

What does an online student look like?

The question may seem silly or trivial, but a lot rides on it.  Colleges make choices about how to organize classes, which registration protocols to follow, how to structure semesters, and how to deliver advising -- among other things -- based on what they think the online student wants.  

In the community college world, it’s easy to guess a few characteristics.  The online student is usually female.  That isn’t surprising; the typical community college student is female.  (For that matter, the typical American undergraduate student is female.  But that’s another post.)  She’s usually over 25, and often a parent.  Again, that’s not terribly different from the typical community college student.

If you believe that the typical online student is very much like the traditional campus student, then you’d make certain choices.  You’d probably keep the semester schedule, just because you’ve already built your various systems around it.  You’d move toward relatively structured pathways to graduation, restricting student choice in order to prevent poor choices, wasted credits, and unnecessary debt.  

If you believe that the typical online student is more purely a creature of the web and its culture, though, you’d make very different choices.  You’d want short courses, multiple points of entry, maximum choice, and minimal structure.  You would accept student “swirl” as a fact of life, and pride yourself on accommodating it.  If students today want to take online classes from multiple providers and assemble them later into a degree -- or not -- then your job is to give them that.  To paraphrase Mencken, give the customers what they want, and give it to them good and hard.

Both models are internally consistent.  Each makes sense on its own terms.  Each relies on its own distinct vision of what “the online student” is, and how she behaves.

And they’re both sort of wrong.

At a basic level, the typical online student at a community college isn’t only an online student.  She’s also taking classes on campus at the same time.  Most “online” students are, in fact, hybrid students.  They might take classes two or three days a week, and use online classes to fill out their schedules while leaving room for work and family obligations.  

That’s counterintuitive in some ways.  Part of the point of online teaching is breaking the link to geography.  But community colleges are intensely local institutions.  Their reputations are usually strong within, say, an hour’s drive of campus; most are relatively unknown beyond that.  In states in which community colleges are defined by “districts” or counties, with differential tuition reflecting the presence of local government funding, the place-less nature of online teaching raises some difficult theoretical questions.  At this point, though, they’re still mostly theoretical; even the purely online students usually pick a college within an hour of where they live.  

That fact, by iself, would seem to argue for the “like the traditional campus student” model.  Certainly it suggests that running different semesters (or quarters, or whatever) alongside each other in parallel would be likely to lead to confusion and vastly increased errors on the back-office operational side.  

But it’s also true that people have different expectations online.  Part of the appeal of online classes for students is precisely that they’re different.  And to the extent that a given college’s online offerings include both the hybrid and the “purely” online student, tying down online options to mimicry of what happens on campus seems unnecessarily crimped.  

Institutions with outsize resources can solve the dilemma by simply doing both.  Southern New Hampshire runs campus-based classes, but also has a separate online division with its own staff.  Students can mix and match, but each area only does one thing.  That’s a nifty model if you can afford to pay for parallel staffs.  If you can’t -- and most community colleges can’t -- then buying your way out of the dilemma isn’t an option.

In my perfect world, we’d take the presence of the hybrid student as a cue to develop a hybrid model.  I’ve heard students wax rhapsodic about great classroom courses they’ve taken, but I’ve never heard them enthuse about waiting in line at the Bursar’s office.  To the extent that functions like those can move online, every kind of student stands to benefit.   

Pedagogically, hybrid or blended courses have shown the best results, but students tend not to take them if they have any other options.  If we cleave online from onsite, that will remain true.  

I’m thinking that the future belongs not to either model alone, but to the folks who best figure out how to harness the best of each.  Students are already doing that.  Maybe we should, too.

Ask the Administrator: Recovering from a Layoff

An occasional correspondent whose administrative job was recently eliminated writes:

When an administrator loses her job, does she do a resume or a CV or some combination of both? I had been faculty, not administration, for over 10 years when I applied for the admin position in another state. Having been an administrator for several years, how do I best show my work when applying for my next position, whether that be administration or faculty? I'd bet I should use a CV for faculty positions [would need to include the admin work to explain a multi-year gap?] but am not sure how to proceed for the admin work.

First, my condolences.  It really sucks when good people get tossed for reasons having nothing to do with performance.  

That said, I think you’re right to position administrative applications differently from faculty applications.  The key is to remember that people hire to solve their problems, not yours, so you need to show them how you solve their problem.

For a faculty position, a focus on teaching and/or research -- depending on where you’re applying -- makes sense.  (For cc’s, obviously, it’s about the teaching.)  It would make sense to acknowledge the administrative work, of course; depending on where you’re applying, it could even come across as an asset.  I’ve seen plenty of departments over the years in which absolutely nobody wants to be the chair, and people reluctantly endure their turns in the role in the same way they endure dentist visits.  If you show up with the skill set to step up if/when needed, you could solve a real problem for some departments.  

Be aware, though, that you may have to overcome the suspicion that you’re not “really” interested in the faculty role for which you’re interviewing.  Only you will know whether that’s true, but some may wonder.

For deanships and similar roles, it’s important to have that faculty background, but the first and most important credential to highlight would be managerial experience.  Plenty of absolutely wonderful faculty fall on their face in administration because they’re too used to being independent operators.  They have trouble adjusting from “I’ll just do it myself” to a more indirect and collaborative role.  (Others have trouble adjusting from receiving the benefit of the doubt to being under constant scrutiny.  It’s disorienting at first.)  If you can show some specific achievements in your administrative role, and come prepared to speak thoughtfully about lessons learned, you should come off well.

The layoff presents a complicating variable.  Some of us -- cough Gen X cough -- understand that austerity is the new normal, and has been for some time, so we tend not to hold a single instance like that against a candidate.  Others still believe in the older idea that downsizings are nothing more than excuses to clean house, so anyone who got cleaned out must have deserved it.  It isn’t fair, but it is what it is.  I’d suggest coming prepared to disarm any suspicion along those lines, to the extent that you can.  If your downsizing was part of a systemwide change, for instance, highlight that.  I agree that it sucks that people still think that way, but many do.  Better to know that upfront.

Good luck!  It’s rough out there.

Wise and worldly readers, any suggestions?  Have you seen someone successfully get around the “if you’re so good, why are you available?” issue?

Have a question?  Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Thoughts on “Positive Academic Leadership”

Most management books are completely useless in the context of higher education.  They’re written from a corporate perspective, so they assume things like the presence of carrots and sticks, the possibility of directed turnover, and considerable decision-making autonomy.  Within a parsimoniously-funded, tenure-based, unionized, public sector institution, things simply do not work like that.  

Positive Academic Leadership, by Jeffrey Buller, starts with a much more familiar context, and offers some useful ideas on how to get the best results from within the world in which I actually work.  (Hat-tip to Lee Skallerup Bessette for calling attention to it.)  I can’t say it’s groundbreaking, but it’s clarifying, and that counts for something.

Buller’s book is more of a portrayal than an argument.  That’s not necessarily a flaw; sometimes an indirect approach gets around the knee-jerk defenses that a direct attack would provoke.  The core of the book is a portrait of The Positive Academic Leader, with some pretty strongly implied contrasts to what is usually seen on the ground.  

In Buller’s telling, a positive academic leader is one who is open to the possibility of good things happening. That means treating failures and setbacks as learning opportunities; rejecting witch-hunt and “pin the blame on the loser” rituals when things go wrong; and being relatively circumspect about trying to control either people (through micromanagement) or events (through the fetish of strategic planning).  Instead, the positive leader spends time and energy on trying to create a workplace climate in which people are engaged in constructive experiments.  Buller even draws on Csikszentaihalyi’s notion of “flow” as a deliberate goal: when things are going really well, people are so wrapped up in what they’re doing that they actually lose track of time.

I found myself nodding along repeatedly.  “Negativity is never overcome by more negativity” (p. 97). Yup.  “The very insistence on always being right is itself a weakness.”  (p. 156).  Yes, yes, yes.  “Negative leaders cause people to give up and stop trying.” (p. 27).  Been there.  And my personal favorite, “uncertainty means possibility” (p. 198)  I know educated adults who haven’t figured that out.

To his credit, Buller admits that a positive style is a conscious choice that has to be ratified over and over again.  It’s a deliberate decision to play the long game, and to sacrifice the big splash in the short term for a hard-to-define, but real, payoff over time.  To that end, he notes that one of the key skills of positive leaders is _not_ always going with gut reactions.  As Annie Dillard once put it, the inner life is frequently stupid. One of the keys to maintaining a perspective that’s open to the emergence of positive change is deliberately slowing down in the face of provocation, and taking the time to reflect on it.  Okay, Professor Doe is screaming at me over what seems like nothing.  Instead of either screaming back, or writing him off as disturbed, it would be more productive to try to figure out why he’s doing it.  Where is it coming from?  Why would a sane, intelligent person fly off the handle over nothing?  What is this really about?  Can I do something about what it’s really about?  Reading the personal attack as a solvable problem, rather than as a threat to be squashed, is a conscious choice that takes real emotional strength.

Buller correctly notes that to people with a more command-and-control orientation, a positive style can look like weakness.  It’s actually a difficult, rare, and admirable combination of self-control, resolve, and conscientiousness, but from the outside it can be subtle.  If you measure passion only by the volume at which someone shouts, the positive leader may look disengaged or passive.  But if you measure passion by the discipline over time that leads steadily to better results, positive leaders come out looking good. And the people who report to them thrive.

Buller mentions that there are times when the positive style has to give way to something more directive, such as in catastrophic circumstances.  But he leaves out the more common case, which is the need to follow progressive discipline on sustained poor performers.  Maintaining a positive climate while ratcheting up progressive discipline is the management equivalent of landing a triple axel while holding a baby.  I don’t blame Buller for leaving it out, but I wish he hadn’t.  Quick bursts of emergency command are one thing; gradual raising of pressure is another.  Maybe the next book.

In a sense, the people who most need to read Buller’s book aren’t the ones who already mostly practice it.  They’re the ones who wonder how it is that the relatively soft-spoken person who rarely barks commands somehow keeps getting good results.  To those folks, I recommend Buller’s book highly.  Read it, reflect on it, and reflect on it some more.  It may explain a few things.