The DeVry Reunion Picnic

For the past few years, some former employees of the North Brunswick (NJ) campus of DeVry have organized a reunion picnic at a local park each June.  I went again last week.

It’s a strictly unofficial function, which is to say, it’s not sponsored or sanctioned by the company.  It’s just a bunch of former colleagues getting together socially. A few current employees show up, but it’s mostly folks who either left (hi!), retired, or were pushed out through the various waves of downsizing.  

It’s great fun to see old friends again.  While I had no love for the organization, some of the people who worked there were great.  We caught up on family news, career news, comparative aging, and the things that people usually catch up on when they haven’t seen each other in more than a decade.  (As far as the “aging” point goes, it’s one of the last places in which I’m one of the youngest people there. That used to be common…) Teaching 45 credits per year as a regular load led to a certain battlefield camaraderie.  I took it as a personal victory that even my foray into administration wasn’t held against me.

Sociologically, though, it’s fascinating.  These are folks who rode the first tech boom up, and then down.  For the ‘general education’ faculty, as we were called, DeVry served as a port in a storm.  It’s mostly forgotten now, but for a while in the late 90’s, for-profits were on a full-time hiring spree.  Public colleges weren’t, except for adjuncts, so the place was able to build up a surprisingly strong faculty for a while by virtue of being the only game in town.  

At the picnic, I heard a slew of stories about people trying (or having tried) to guess when was the best time to take a retirement incentive.  It reminded me of the way that airlines bid up offers for passengers to get bumped, except that the bids went in reverse. The first round of buyouts offered 18 months of salary.  Then, 12. Then, 6. Some folks were planning to retire anyway; they chortled at being offered a large check to leave shortly before they would have left for free. But most would have preferred to hang on longer.  They didn’t have the option.

Among the ones younger than retirement age, there was plenty of job seeking.  I had to bear the bad news that most of the local community colleges aren’t doing much hiring these days, either.  There’s a little, but plenty of competition for the jobs that exist. Last month I wrote a glowing -- and truthful -- recommendation for a former colleague who was applying to another community college; she didn’t get it.  It’s their loss -- she’s outstanding -- but also hers. The same enrollment decline that hit the for-profits first is hitting the community colleges now. And as with the for-profits, the internal denial is so strong that I’m concerned that some folks will be left stranded.  I feel like I’ve seen this movie.

To return to the nautical metaphor, I jumped ship in 2003, when I got the offer to work at CCM as the liberal arts dean.  Several other folks of my generation left around the same time, usually for a parallel job at a community or state college.  The ones who did are mostly doing well. The ones who hung on much longer, and aren’t yet at retirement age, are mostly in tougher spots.  That includes some folks who were terrific at their jobs, and likeable on top of that. Some of them were highly respected on campus, and considered leaders, in their way.  But when the ship takes on water, it doesn’t really matter which seat you’re in.

When I reflect on the demographic time bomb that Nathan Grawe has identified in the Northeast and Midwest -- 2008 plus 18 equals 2026 -- I wonder if DeVry is less of an outlier and more of a canary in the coal mine.  When I moved to CCM, I commented that it felt like going back in time. In some ways, DeVry was about ten years ahead. It moved into online coursework faster. It targeted working adults in a serious way earlier. It boomed around 1998-2000, as opposed to the 2008-10 boom for community colleges.  Now it’s a shell of its former self, and I wouldn’t bet on its continued existence in five years. Community colleges in the area have sustained significant enrollment declines for several years now, and most have had at least one RIF, if not several. One has even folded. The trend lines aren’t subtle.

The picnic was a lovely blast from the past.  If it’s not also going to be a glimpse into the near future, we’ll need to learn some lessons from it.  It was hard to see good people stranded. I’d hate to see more good people meet the same fate.

Purges

Admittedly coming from a different context, I was fascinated by the article in IHE on Thursday about new presidents starting with purges of senior staff.  The article takes the position that purges are always bad. I’d replace ‘always’ with ‘almost always,’ and would expand the scope to include continuing leaders as well as new ones.

Having walked into a college as a vp a few years go that had a long history, and a history of hiring almost exclusively from within, I was quickly faced with having to suss out which direct reports had which strengths, whom I could trust, and who needed to move on to the next phase of their career.  It’s difficult, not least because when you join a college already in progress, it doesn’t stop and wait for you. You have to get up to speed while everything is moving.

The most difficult part, especially in the early going, is figuring out where the unspoken land mines are.  They’re different at every college. Sometimes it’s a long-simmering feud based on reasons nobody can quite remember.  Sometimes it’s status anxiety around “only” being a community college. Sometimes it’s a pervasive nostalgia. Worse, people often don’t know where their own buttons are until they’re pushed, at which point you find out abruptly and gracelessly.  Some level of that is probably inevitable, but it’s a challenge.

Below the president’s level, there’s the ever-present issue of folks’ already established relationships with the president.  More than once, in more than one setting, I’ve stumbled across moves that would have made perfect sense if not for somebody’s abiding loyalty to someone else.  In a more perfect world, people would be self-aware enough to give you a heads-up about that sort of thing. But often, they aren’t even aware it’s there until it’s threatened.  Self-awareness is not evenly distributed.

Ego is, of course, an ever-present threat.  Some presidents like to make impulsive decisions just to show that they can.  That makes life difficult for the folks who report directly to them. It’s hard to build trust when the folks above you have a habit of turning on a dime.  I’ll just say I’ve seen it personally (“keep them on their toes!”) and leave it at that.

Over time, even without purges, teams evolve.  The ideal is a relatively steady pace, so at any given moment, the team has a good mix of newer and more established.  Too much change brings obvious issues; too little brings issues less obvious, but just as real. The outside world is changing at an accelerating rate; if you have too many people who are too content with “that’s how we’ve always done it,” you’ll lose ground.  It can also lead to folks tuning out, as they perceive a lack of opportunity to try anything new. Stability can become stagnation before anyone realizes it.

Sometimes your hand is forced.  Someone falls ill, or dies, or takes a long-planned retirement.  In those cases, the need for change is obvious, and there’s really nobody to blame for it..  Sometimes there’s misconduct or incompetence; those are the hardest cases. You’d be surprised how hard, or dirty, some people will fight to keep jobs they have no idea how to do.  The fight gives them a distraction from their self-doubt. Their friends will rally to their aid; many others, who agree with you, will sit on their hands to avoid getting dirty. It’s frustrating, but if you think of it from the perspective of individual incentives, it makes some sense.  It’s one of those things nobody tells you before going into administration.

The other side of the “purge” is the “mass exodus.”  That’s when folks voluntarily abandon ship at an alarming pace.  That should be a red flag, but I’ve seen places tolerate it at levels I consider mystifying.  It’s usually a sign of toxic leadership, finances circling the drain, or both. Some leaders actually take pride in it, congratulating themselves on creating a new day.  Color me skeptical. One or two people leaving when a new leader comes in is normal; an entire cohort leaving is a sign that something is wrong. Multiple exoduses (exodae?  Exodi?) are even brighter red flags.

I don’t recommend that new leaders start with purges.  I didn’t with my direct reports, either at Holyoke or at Brookdale.  That’s not because change is always bad, though; it’s more a matter of pacing.  It takes a while to learn who’s who, and they’ll do the same back at you. Over time, good leaders will find the right people.  Bad ones will purge, and purge, and purge.

 

Inheritances

The Girl is wrapping up her freshman year of high school this month.  She’s a “band kid,” happily playing trumpet in the marching and concert bands even though her first musical love is the piano.  She was able to play piano in the pit orchestra for the high school production of “Hello Dolly,” but otherwise, school playing means the trumpet.  (Pianos are heavy and clunky, as far as marching goes.) My own musical talents go only so far as listening, so it’s great fun watching her develop her own playing styles.  

For her, the draw of band is mostly the social element of it.  Each instrument section does some bonding, and each has its own personality.  The trumpet section -- more girls than boys -- has a sort of goofy charm; this is the group that, thirty-odd years earlier, would have giddily quoted Monty Python to each other.  Band Camp, in August, is the highlight of her year; it’s the reason she won’t be heading to Charlottesville when it’s time to drop off TB at UVA. (Still need a new pseudonym for TB…)  As she put it, when Camp was over last year, “we all got emo about it.” We don’t have the heart to deprive her of that for a twelve-hour round trip that involved a lot of packing. The grandparents will hold down the fort.

I bring this up as context for explaining why she cares so much about being the section leader for the trumpets next year.  Section Leader status is only partially about playing ability. It’s also about working well with other kids, coordinating/hosting practices over the summer, and setting the cultural tone for the section.  It’s a chance to define her clique. She has locked her sights on it.

The band director requires any students who want to be considered for section leader to write a 1 ½ page essay explaining why.  The requirements for the essay are fairly specific: the students have to include future academic and career goals, among other things, and connect them to leading their peers.  

This is where she shows some family inheritance.

She drafted the piece herself, spending a few days on it.  Before hitting “print,” she asked to me proofread for typos.  That seemed reasonable, so I did. And reader, I saw the family resemblance.  I bet you can spot it, too After several 5-8 sentence paragraphs laying out her argument -- she wants to be a writer, which means she needs to hone her communication skills -- she went with this:

I intend to write.

And to write well.

The short paragraphs!  She syncopated her paragraph rhythm, just like her Dad.

She writes like she talks, and talking involves changing speeds.  The trick is maintaining a human voice while also sticking to a subject longer than you might in conversation.  Not yet fifteen, and she already has it.

Some Dads pass along money or property.  Some pass along athletic talent, artistic talent, or political connections.  I pass along a taste for using simple sentences as a form of punctuation.

I’ll take it.  

We don’t know the result yet, but I feel like I’ve already won.

Comparison Ads

I had a conversation on Monday with someone on campus about reaching out to some of the populations that for-profit schools tend to target.  I made the obligatory reference to Lower Ed, then noted how much lower our tuition is -- even for online courses -- than the major for-profits with whom we compete.

My interlocutor, who shares my concerns, didn’t know that.  As she put it, she assumed the for-profit must be fairly cheap because so many people from her church go there.  In fact, its tuition is more than double what ours is.

Which is when it hit me.  For all of the rhetoric about competition and following the marketplace, colleges don’t really act like competitors when it comes to advertising.  Readers of a certain age -- hi everybody! -- may remember the Pepsi Challenge, in which civilians were given “blind” samples of Coke and Pepsi, and asked which they preferred.  I sort of liked the Pepsi Challenge, because it made its point effectively without actually bashing the competitor. (The point was made so effectively that Coke introduced New Coke, one of those 80’s moments that’s hard to explain in retrospect.)  But I haven’t seen a version of the Pepsi Challenge for higher education, at least from the non-profit side.

There are admirable reasons for that, of course, but it tends to leave the door open for for-profits to fill the information void.  And they do.

Obviously, it’s harder to judge the quality of a college from a ten-second taste test.  But relying on people to “just know” that nonprofits are better only works when they just know it.  The ones who just know it tend to be the ones who already come here. We can’t rely on tacit knowledge and expect to reach new populations.  That means, at some level, working on making that knowledge explicit.

I’m not looking to unleash a Hobbesian war of each against all.  Transfer is a core function of a community college, and transfer, by necessity, involves cooperation between institutions.  And the idea of the same taxpayers paying for public institutions to bash each other is just silly. But drawing accurate, valid, verifiable contrasts with for-profit competitors doesn’t strike me that way at all.  As McMillan Cottom’s book notes, for-profits specifically target African-American women and load them down with debt. We offer a more affordable and respected alternative. The trick is getting the word out. From a taxpayer’s perspective, a little bit of advertising upfront is a lot cheaper than subsequent loan bailouts.  

My background isn’t in marketing, so I’m not sure how a campaign like that would work.  Some of it probably has to be by word of mouth with trusted ambassadors, which is great when you can do it.  But some of it may need to be more systematic than that.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen cases in which community or state colleges have gone after for-profits directly?  If so, what worked? I’m thinking that we’ve hit the limits of the payoff from the “the difference speaks for itself” strategy.  What would our version of the Pepsi Challenge look like?

Entry Level Pay

This weekend Will Simpkins, from Metropolitan State University - Denver, posted a great question on Twitter:

Been thinking about salary lately - and how (particularly underfunded) institutions can raise the bar for entry level pay. Without new $, seems like only choice is not filling vacancies and apportioning that money…which just leads to overwhelmed staff. Any other ideas out there?

To which I say, it’s complicated.

I’ll start with some context.  I’m writing from a community college with tenure and unions, in a state that hasn’t increased its aid since the Clinton administration.  Private institutions with enrollment increases have options that we don’t have.

Low entry-level salaries make recruitment harder.  That’s especially true in fields where people have options within industry, such as computer science or Nursing.  The local hospitals don’t care about our internal salary scales; they pay what they need to pay to get staff. If that means we have trouble competing, then that’s what it means.  When salaries are collectively bargained, any deviation from the standard salary schedule becomes dangerous.

So, one might reasonably ask, why not direct what resources you do have to entry-level salaries?

The first and most basic issue with raising entry-level pay is salary compression.  If newbies make more than people who have been here for a few years, the latter group can be expected -- reasonably -- to ask for a compensatory bump.  Which, in turn, creates pressure for a bump for the group above them. In essence, raising entry-level pay requires raising pay all the way up the scale.  What looks at first like a relatively small amount (“what’s a few thousand dollars out of a budget of 81 million?”) into a much larger one, and one that compounds over time.

In the last faculty collective bargaining agreement, we agreed to take the pool for raises and distribute it as a dollar figure, rather than a percentage.  That way, the folks on the bottom got bigger increases than they otherwise would have, and the folks on the top got smaller ones to compensate. It didn’t create any compression issues, since the entire union went up by the same amount.  It was like a flat tax in reverse. (In essence, instead of everybody getting 2%, the folks on the top took 1% so the folks on the bottom could get 3%.) Given that health insurance premiums don’t vary by salary, it seemed only fair to direct more help to the lower end.  I was glad that we did that, and I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to do it again. The folks on the top of the scale are doing fine, but the ones on the bottom have a legitimate beef; dollar-figure raises offered a politically acceptable way to do something about that.

Still, that’s just a different distribution method.  It doesn’t solve the problem of the pool of money being too shallow.

Sometimes it’s possible to get by with fewer people, and to use some of the savings to address salaries.  But at this point, most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Besides, there are limits to what you can ask the remaining people to do, and to do well.  Technology occasionally helps, but it brings costs of its own, and some tasks still require human beings. (See the Baumol’s Cost Disease post from last week for details.)

Grantsmanship can help fill in gaps, in some cases, but it has limits.  Grant funding for positions tends to be temporary, although it often comes with “sustainability” or “matching” requirements that commit the institution to using its own dollars beyond the grant.  That limits the usefulness of grants, and tends to favor institutions that don’t need them as much. (Despite having by far the best arguments for philanthropy, community colleges are badly underrepresented in the higher ed philanthropy world.)  

Public/Private Partnerships (“P3”) are fashionable now, and sometimes they can help.  But remember Coase’s theory of the firm. Firms exist to reduce transaction costs. As you go outside a single firm, the transaction costs increase dramatically.  Direct funding is far more efficient, but it’s out of fashion politically.

Traditional private philanthropy is valuable, but folks on campus often misunderstand how.  You don’t want to pay ongoing salaries with soft money. Well-endowed private institutions can make such high returns on endowments that they can fund operations out of those returns, but we can’t.  Instead, philanthropic dollars tend to go to scholarships, buildings, or programs. All of those are useful and valuable, but none of them funds regular salary lines. For those, we need operating dollars.

Honestly, the two most powerful moves we could make to fund salaries at a more realistic level both exist beyond the campus level.  The first is increased operating funding from states and/or localities. The longer we let that leg of the stool decay, the more tilted we’ll be.  The other is some sort of major structural change to health care. The rate of cost increase for health insurance is catastrophic, and it’s squeezing out everything else.  Single-payer health care would be an excellent boost to higher education funding. People don’t usually connect those dots, but they’re connected. As long as we’re paying twice-inflation increases for health insurance on zero-increase subsidies, we’ll be squeezed.

The bottom line is that it’s hard to pay more money when you don’t have it.  There’s no non-political solution to that.

Agreement from an Unlikely Source

I’ve followed political debates in the US long enough to have a pretty reliable sense of who will line up on which side of a given issue.  That’s why I was surprised to see this blog post at The Grumpy Economist, drawing on the new book “Why Are the Prices So D*amn High?,” by by Erik Helland and Alex Tabarrok.  It’s published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which identifies itself as “advanc[ing] knowledge of how markets work to improve people’s lives.”

Working from a basically libertarian perspective, the book tackles the question of college tuition increases.  Given the source, I would have expected the usual villains in the libertarian narrative: “rent-seeking” liberal academics who use their sinecures isolated from the market to feather their own nests, or some variation on the theme.

But no.  To their credit, they specifically exonerate three of the usual villains.  It’s not administrative bloat, the regulatory state, or even unions. (Reader, I have lived long enough to see libertarians exonerate unions.  I am older than I thought.) Looking at the relative increase in the cost of goods over the last several decades as compared to the cost of services, and then breaking out different sorts of services based on the degree to which they can be automated, Helland and Tabarrok land on the real culprit:

Drum roll, please…

Longtime readers can see this one coming…

Baumol’s Cost Disease!

I’m particularly enamored of figure 24 on page 42.  It’s just about as plain as they make ‘em.

The “solutions” section of the book looks like it was written in 2012 and left on a shelf for a while, but the “diagnosis” part holds up.  (I say that having written about BCD in 2012 myself - see here. Check out the “Occupy” reference! It was a more innocent time…) When the productivity of some sectors -- say, manufacturing -- goes up much faster than others -- say, teaching -- then the latter will become more expensive relative to the former.  The trend is inexorable, insidious, and mostly inscrutable in the moment.

Baumol’s disease, named after economist William Baumol, wasn’t even originally postulated to explain tuition.  It was originally applied to live music. It takes just as many musicians just as long to play a string quartet piece as it did 200 years ago, but they get paid much more than they did 200 years ago.  Meanwhile, over the last 200 years, farming has gone from the majority occupation in the country to a percentage in the low single digits, and food has gotten cheaper, even as the population has exploded.  Different rates of productivity increase explain the divergence. The cost disease explains why health care, education, live theatre, and law enforcement have grown more expensive over time, but televisions, cars, and clothes have gotten cheaper.  Lazy rivers and climbing walls have nothing to do with it.

Baumol’s is a tough case to solve, but getting the diagnosis right is the first step.  Seeing folks from a very different political orientation land in the same place gives me hope.  Let’s dissolve the circular firing squads and address what’s actually happening while we still can.

The Start of a Necessary Conversation

Every year at the AACC, I make a point of attending the Community College Research Center reception.  The CCRC folks are terrific people doing crucial work; I’ve been a fan of theirs, publicly, for years.  They’ve always been gracious enough to let me in.

And every year I nudge them about the same topic.  “What about ESL?” Whether I had anything to do with it or not, I’m happy to report that they’ve taken up the topic with a new report that I hope is the first of many.

Developmental education reform, guided pathways, and ASAP-style programs have been the (deserving) subjects of study for years.  But when it comes to ESL, many of us who aren’t specialists in that field have been flying blind for a long time.

That’s because it’s “sorta” like many things, but not really.  It’s sorta like remedial or developmental English, except that some of the students are much more fluent in another language than they are in English, and that those other languages may differ from each other in significant ways.  (For example, Russian doesn’t have “articles” in the way that English does. There’s no equivalent of “the.” Try to explain why we go to college, but we go to the university. Why the article in the latter case but not the former?  It’s harder than you’d think.) It’s sorta like American students taking French classes, except that there’s more urgency to it, given the location, and it’s much less likely to count for degree credit or to transfer.

It comes in different flavors, too.  There’s basic life English, which is often taught by local NGO’s.  There’s contextualized occupational English, such as what might be taught in a CNA program.  (In three years of high school French, I don’t think I was ever taught the word for “gauze.” But a CNA probably needs to know that right away.)  And then there’s academic English, taught with the goal of enabling a student to get an academic degree here. That tends to mirror the remedial model most closely, though sometimes with more emphasis on American culture and idioms.  

ESL students aren’t all the same.  As the report notes, some are illiterate in two languages, some (“Generation 1.5”) are fluent in spoken English but shaky in written, and some are college-educated in other languages, but weak in English.  Some may have grown up here and even graduated high school here; others may be new arrivals to America. That mix presents both a teaching challenge and a management challenge. Interventions that work for one student profile may not work for another.

The report notes, too, that there’s no broadly accepted placement tool for ESL.  Some tools exist, but there’s no consensus around one or two. That can make large-scale comparisons difficult.  It also may explain why there’s such variation in the number of levels of ESL offered at various colleges. In my observation, the range is much broader than it is with remediation.

The report doesn’t cover financial aid, but I hope its sequel will.  Financial aid and ESL are a tricky fit. That trickiness forced many colleges to move the lowest levels of ESL to the non-credit side, and to pay for them differently.  Anecdotally, financial aid has had more direct impact on ESL than on remediation. When the current wave of xenophobia passes, I’d like to see some policy clarity on it.  But given where we are, for the moment, ambiguity may not be the worst thing.

I commend the report to your reading.  It’s complicated, and it doesn’t offer any quick fixes, but it does some much-needed groundwork to start an intelligent conversation that we desperately need to have.  My thanks to Julia Raufman, Jessica Brathwaite, and Hoori Santikian Kalamkarian, the authors of the report, whom I hope to meet at the next conference, and to the CCRC generally for stepping up.  This is exactly the sort of thing community colleges need to get right.

Who Should Control Faculty Lines?

“departments are best positioned to understand their particular needs, and yet the vast majority of a department’s budget is controlled by those above them. Rather than lines, imagine instead a structure where departments are given full control of the budget, including salaries – recognizing that some of those salaries are controlled by rank – but which still leaves a chair room to move funds towards immediate needs while also planning for those equally necessary enduring tenured positions.” - John Warner, “Harvard is Bad at Management”

John Warner published a think piece in IHE this week in which he argued that part of the reason that most academic management is terrible is that the structures of academia are set up to defeat them.  As part of a potential alternative, he suggested no longer allocating full-time faculty positions centrally, but having each department manage its own salary budgets. That way, at least in theory, dollars would go where the needs are, based on the assessments of people on the scene.

To which this longtime academic manager says, no.  

I’ll start with a couple of stipulations.  The first is that I usually agree with John Warner, and I have a high opinion of his work generally.  The second is that I fully assume that he means well. The third is that I’m writing from a community college, which is a very different environment from Harvard.  I’d argue it’s actually much more representative of American higher education than Harvard is, but it’s certainly different.

All of that said, this is a terrible idea.

First, and at a basic level, it assumes that the existing distribution of positions among departments is optimal.  That’s rarely true, and even when it is, it’s temporary. People leave, die, or get sick. Enrollments fluctuate unevenly across departments.  Some require subspecialities (such as languages), while others don’t. (Here’s a sentence I never want to hear the chair of Languages say while staffing: “Ah, Spanish, Japanese, same thing…”)  Some have an easy time finding excellent adjuncts, and some don’t.

Given those parameters, and finite resources, freezing the existing distribution would be like a sailor never adjusting the sail, no matter what happens with the wind.  It’s unlikely to end well.

Having the ability to move lines from one department to another as things change is necessary to keep the ship afloat.  If departments “own” their lines, I can’t imagine them giving them up. (“I’ll give you one this year in exchange for a first-round draft pick next year.”  It doesn’t work like that.) The figure in the middle who reallocates may be resented for doing it, but it’s far better than the alternative.

Second, it assumes that most funding is fungible.  It isn’t. Moving the salaries of tenured faculty from a central account to a departmental account does literally nothing to increase the authority of the department chair.  Those salaries aren’t discretionary. (In a collective bargaining environment, chairs wouldn’t even have control over raises. I don’t.) To the extent that departments try to take control of the “breakage” that happens when a high-salaried senior professor retires and gets replaced by a newbie, you’re locking cost increases into the model.  I’ve heard plenty of critiques of higher ed administration, but “you aren’t raising costs fast enough” isn’t one of them. Reabsorbing that breakage into the general budget helps moderate tuition increases and prevent layoffs.

Third, it assumes plenty of resources.  Um, no.

Fourth, it assumes that the ability to manage people is either universal or evenly distributed.  It’s neither. In the course of my travels at multiple colleges, I’ve seen enough instances of the chair-by-default (“nobody else wanted it!”) to be wary of assuming that devolution is always good.  There have been times in my career -- the plural is accurate -- in which I had to defend innocent but unpopular faculty against malicious chairs or colleagues. Take out that option, and every department becomes susceptible to petty tyranny.

Fifth, it assumes either overall stability or overall growth (“anticipated needs”).  What about overall shrinkage? That’s the situation most colleges in the US, and especially in the Northeast and Midwest, are facing.  If you want internal politics to get really ugly, tell individual departments that they have to vote someone off the island. We’d hit “Lord of the Flies” territory pretty quick.  Designating a central administration as the necessary evil allows everyone else to continue to feel like they’re the good guys. As any political scientist knows, nothing fosters cohesion quite like a common enemy.

Yes, being the designated bad guy can get frustrating. That’s especially true when you know that the decisions you make, and get attacked for making, are the only reasons some of your angriest critics still have jobs.  But that’s the gig. If HR would let me, I’d put a phrase about “must have a healthy sense of the absurd” into every managerial job description.

Finally, it assumes that every academic manager is bad.  I simply don’t believe that. Some are, of course, but all?  Every single one? I’ve worked with some pretty terrific people over the years, some of whom would have been described as terrible by folks who took issue with this decision or that one.  Belief in the “dark side” may be politically or culturally useful, but let’s not jump from that to assuming that it’s actually true.

One of my tests, when confronted with someone doing the “Administration Sucks!” litany, is to go back through a list of predecessors.  If you don’t like your current dean, okay. But you didn’t like the previous one, either? And the one before that, and the one before that?  In the words of despair.com, the one common denominator of all of your failed relationships is you.

Warner is clearly correct that part of the challenge of academic management is the shocking lack of tools that other managers take for granted.  But that would be true of chairs, too. And their incentives -- necessarily local -- would be far more damaging to the institution as a whole.

As unpopular as it is to say, institutions have needs beyond those of any given department.  They need folks who are empowered to say to a heavily staffed department that the line for its recent retiree is moving over to a badly understaffed area someplace else, or even going unfilled to manage enrollment decline.  The people who make those decisions will make some folks unhappy, but the alternative would make everyone unhappy.

The Boy Turns 18

The Boy got his first sample ballot in the mail last week.  It’s for an uncontested primary, but a ballot is a ballot. He has mentioned that he’s paying more attention to politics now that he’ll have a say in it.  Coming back from Massachusetts last week, we took the “Mario Cuomo Bridge” (the new Tappan Zee). I mentioned that the first time I voted was for Mario Cuomo’s second term.  He asked me if Mario was related to Andrew Cuomo.

Sometimes you forget that what counts as common knowledge shifts over time.

I remember when he was born.  He was our first, so we were scared out of our minds.  I was watching Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN when TW stood at the edge of the room and announced unambiguously that it was time to go.  The next day, Memorial Day, he was born in the middle of the afternoon.

He was tall for his age from birth; he was the longest baby in the nursery.  When the nurse put him on the scale to weigh him, I was right next to him and said something like “hey, big guy.”  He turned towards me. It may have been reflex or coincidence, but I prefer to think it wasn’t.

We still have a photo of me holding him in the hospital the day after he was born, reading him a board book of The Runaway Bunny.  At the time, the prevailing theory was that children as young as three could benefit from being read to. We considered that silly; they can benefit from shortly after birth.  They might not know what’s going on at first, but gentle lap time and a soothing voice can only be positive. By the time he was two, he had a stack of board books that he kept in the living room; he’d swipe through the stack, scattering books everywhere, until he found the one he wanted one of us to read to him.  It got so repetitive that sometimes we’d hide a favorite under the couch, just to break the monotony. He especially loved the picture books about construction vehicles. To this day, whenever I see or hear a reference to a backhoe loader, I hear his little voice calling it a “backhoe Yoda.”

We discovered, too, that stories worked well as discipline.  The bedtime routine involved three stories. But if he did something that day that he wasn’t supposed to, he’d only get two stories that night.  “You’ll lose a story…” became an effective threat, because he knew we weren’t bluffing. I figured that if someone called Family Services on us to report that our kid was only getting two stories that night instead of three, we’d be okay.  It also drove home that reading is a reward.

He was a live wire.  We had an “exersaucer,” which is a sort of suspended seat held up by springs in the hole of a donut the size of a hula hoop.  He bounced in that so loudly that you couldn’t have a conversation. There were nights that we unplugged the baby monitor because he was loud enough that it was little more than an amplifier.  He hated going to bed -- the FOMO was strong, even then -- and would cry for nearly an hour many nights. I lost track of the number of nights I spent lying on my back by the crib, my hand holding his through the slats, until he’d finally fall asleep.  

We were lucky that he was always good to his sister.  She’s three years younger. She used to treat him as a sort of traveling circus, watching him and laughing at his antics.  He was gentle with her, which may be why we’ve been spared much sibling rivalry.

Even as a little guy, he was great with smaller kids.  When he was five, the two-year-olds flocked to him. He hasn’t lost that.  He recently got an award from the local running club for helping with their family fun runs -- he’d be the “rabbit,” setting a pace for the little kids to follow.  His youngest cousin adores him. I think it’s the “gentle giant” thing he has going. He wants to be a surgeon, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he found his way to pediatrics.  Kids just love him. When the time comes -- and there is noooooooo rush -- he’ll be a great Dad.

One of the best parts of parenthood is having a front-row seat to watching children grow into themselves.  He’s a young man now, and a good one. He’s as prepared for leaving for college as he can be: he knows what he wants to do, and he’s smart, hardworking, confident, funny, charismatic, tall, handsome, and considerate.  Admittedly, my sense of the dating market stems from the previous century, but that combination can’t be a bad thing. When he hit junior high, I advised him not to try to compete with the “bad boys” on their turf; that’s just not who he is.  Instead, be a gentleman. There’s less competition, and it suits him. I’m glad to report that he did, and it does.

He knows where he’s going this Fall, and he can’t wait.  Our theory of parenting was always that it was our job to get them to the point that they could leave the nest and thrive.  He’s eager to spread his wings. That’s what’s supposed to happen.

The house will be weirdly quieter without him.  But that’s supposed to happen, too. In the meantime, I’ll need a new pseudonym for him...

The Most Useful Observation Feedback You Ever Got

Part of my job involves reading the evaluations of full-time faculty as they come in.  (Admittedly, between graduation, the gas leak, and this week’s OER conference at UMass, I’m a bit behind.  But still.) I don’t actually write the evaluations or do the observations; the deans do that. But I read them and, when everything seems in order, sign off on them before they get filed.

In my teaching days, I got observed by deans.  In my deaning days, I did observations. Now I read hundreds of them.  But I’m still not completely sure what kinds of feedback faculty find most useful.

To be clear, usefulness to the professor isn’t the only function of observations.  If someone is going badly off the rails, they can provide documentation to support some sort of intervention.  On the flip side, if someone’s fitness has been called into question, an observation can help exonerate. They’re written in the third person for a reason.

That said, though, most are only read by the professor, the dean, and me.  Presumably, they’re usually read most closely by the professor; that’s who has the most at stake, and they only have to read one.  

So, this one is particularly for the faculty out there.  What’s the most useful observation feedback you ever got?

“Useful” doesn’t necessarily mean “positive,” although it could.  I mean it in the sense of “helping you improve.” What helped you get better?

Thinking back to the feedback I got as a teacher, the most useful stuff usually came from students.  The evaluative ones from deans were sort of...fine...but not terribly useful. Given how much time these take, and how many of them we do, I’d like them to be better than just fine.

So, wise and worldly readers, I (and the deans) look to you for guidance.  What’s the most useful feedback you’ve received on an observation? Alternately, what would be useful to receive?

The Best Laid Plans...

On Friday morning, a construction crew that was installing a backup generator on campus hit a gas main, forcing an evacuation.

As dramatic as that was, at least it happened on Friday.  We had both of our graduation ceremonies on Thursday. An evacuation then would have been much worse.  Friday was a relatively light day, as far as people on campus go. It was “Scholars’ Day,” which is an annual professional development day on which faculty and staff present to each other some research or projects they’ve been working on.  It’s a relaxed, collegial day between graduation and the start of the first (and highest enrolled) summer session the following Monday.

That means there weren’t any students on campus, and even the staff was light.  That made both the evacuation and the subsequent communications easier.

The problem with a gas leak is that the danger is mostly theoretical until it very much isn’t, at which point the damage is done.  I saw that as folks gathered in the parking lots on the opposite side of campus. They (we) were discussing when and whether to actually leave.  People were still showing up, so there was some redirecting to do. The president was off campus, so I was the ranking person on campus, and I noticed people looking to me for cues.  When I told them to get off campus, they stayed put because I did. When I figured that out, I set the example by driving across the street to the parking lot of a neighboring church; that seemed to open the floodgates.  Folks arrived quickly at the church.

The most frustrating part of the enterprise was the partial information and spotty communication.  I was in touch with the president, who was being briefed by county officials and, presumably, campus police.  For a while, it wasn’t clear how quickly the leak would be plugged. Had we known immediately that it would take as long as it did, we could have made the call to close for the day much more quickly than we did.  But at first, it seemed like it could be a relatively quick fix.

Worse, there wasn’t really a single designated area.  We were advised to go to the church; a subsequent RAVE alert directed everyone to a nearby park.  Others set up base camp at nearby Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s. I was with the group at the church, which included a few dozen people.  Happily, the folks working in the church were welcoming, and allowed us to use the facilities as needed. And the weather was perfect, which made hanging out much more pleasant than it could have been.

Initially, I had hoped that some of the discussions could happen outside.  (Fellow Williams grads know the old line about Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.)  But most of them required PowerPoint or similar tech, which wasn’t really an option. And with the prospective audience scattered among multiple sites, there wasn’t really critical mass in any one place.  

As phone calls bounced back and forth, it eventually became clear that even after the leak was fixed -- and nothing exploded -- there would still be an odor of gas lingering in various parts of campus.  Aside from the obvious aesthetic issue, it was a safety issue in itself; if there’s an ambient odor of gas anyway, nobody might notice a new leak. We closed for the day.

We postponed the presentations until the day after Convocation in the fall, which is usually devoted to meetings.  Because staff from the various branch campuses and offsite locations had previously been directed to close for the day and come to the main campus for Scholars’ Day, we just wound up sending everybody home.  

In moments like those, you discover certain things that you might not know otherwise.  For example, while it’s easy to send a “broadcast” email from my desktop, it’s impossible from my phone.  The communications team struggled a bit with notifications. And while people want immediate answers, sometimes those answers aren’t immediately available.  I’ve also never been quite as grateful that we have a non-smoking campus. One idiot with a lighter could have ruined the whole day.

The good news, aside from the fact that the leak was fixed without anything blowing up, is that people were generally on their best behavior.  “Disasterologists” -- people who study the responses to disasters, a field that I totally would have studied if I had known it existed -- like to point out that the stereotype of people immediately devolving into a Hobbesian war of each against all isn’t true; in fact, disasters tend to bring out the best in people.  (Rebecca Solnit’s book “A Paradise Built in Hell” details that.) That’s what I saw. Everybody wanted to be helpful, and even the complaining was mostly in the spirit of offering solutions.

I had been slated to be the opening speaker for Scholars’ Day.  When I got the call that we were officially closing for the day, I stepped up on a curb and announced “we’re closing for the day.”  As soon as I stepped down, someone walked up and told me it was the best speech she’d ever seen me give. And entirely without a script!

Shortly after getting home, of course, the detail-y messages started coming in.  “Could this still count as a day on the annual faculty professional development report?”  Yes. “Some people couldn’t get to their offices. Could we have another day to turn in the grades?”  Yes. There’s always a loose end somewhere. I expect to discover a few more over the next few days.

Still, while there’s no such thing as a good gas leak, this was probably one of the least-bad kinds we could have had.  Nothing blew up. No students were around. It was the day after graduation, rather than the day of. The weather made waiting outside reasonably pleasant.  The neighbors were kind. Everybody was on their best behavior.

This week will bring the “what happened?” discussions.  I’m thinking step one will be figuring out how to do mass emails from my phone...