Warning: Extreme Heresy Alert.
Although my politics are strongly and unapologetically social-democratic, there’s an issue simmering in higher ed on which the people I agree with tend to be conservatives. For the life of me, I don’t know why the battle lines have been drawn where they have. It’s merit scholarships.
Simply put, I embrace them. I think they make tremendous amounts of sense. Let’s give the kids who busted their butts in high school a reward for it. Let’s say, with money and institutional backing, that taking challenging courses and devoting energy to academics is just as valuable as working on a good three-point shot.
For reasons that utterly elude me, the ‘left’ in higher ed is deeply suspicious of (if not simply hostile to) merit scholarships, and the ‘right’ embraces them. This offends me as an educator, and it offends me as a supporter of the left.
The standard ‘left’ argument against merit scholarships runs something like this: they siphon money away from need-based programs, they mostly benefit the well-off, they’re based on biased criteria (such as standardized tests), they go to people who would have attended college anyway, and they’re elitist.
My responses, in order, are: that’s another issue, who cares, hogwash, who cares, and give me a break, respectively.
To argue that they ‘siphon’ resources away from need-based aid (that’s aid awarded based on poverty, independent of academic ability) is to misunderstand the politics of financial aid. Need-based aid is packaged as a kind of altruism, laced with a pretty basic appeal to a few interest groups. Merit-based aid is packaged as a strategic move to enhance either a single institution’s ‘academic profile’ (meaning its place in the prestige pecking order), or as an economic development initiative. The two kinds of aid are not mutually exclusive, and historically haven’t been. While I can understand that the public at large should be unmoved by the prestige motive, the economic development motive strikes me as transparently correct. To suggest that economic development initiatives siphon money away from welfare is simply to get the history, and the politics, wrong.
(It also opens up the politically-fatal identification of financial aid with welfare. American political history has shown abundantly that programs identified strongly with the poor will be grossly underfunded over time, while programs the middle class feels it owns will survive, even if they also benefit the poor. For the left to willingly swallow a poison pill like this just defies belief.)
This objection is also painfully elitist, in that it simply assumes that lower-income kids won’t measure up if merit is the criterion. I can understand a 19th century European conservative holding this view – the peasants are revolting, the lower orders are so unclean, etc. – but for a contemporary egalitarian, no. The history of programs in which third-grade classes are promised free college tuition suggests that, given the right incentives, the ‘lower orders’ are quite capable, thank you. If the incentives are missing at the early ages, then let’s address that. Merit scholarships, especially generous ones, address that quite nicely.
“They mostly benefit the well-off.” Decoded, this means that kids from wealthier families are likelier to be college-ready than kids from less wealthy families. That’s true, and regrettable, but beyond what a college can control. If the public schools in poorer areas are frequently struggling, and they are, then by all means, let’s have at them. Let’s not pretend that it isn’t happening, and then simply wring our hands when the poor kids flunk out of college, which is the current ‘left’ approach. (The logical conclusion of this approach is the new ‘A for effort’ policy recently adopted by a small college in one of the Carolinas. Area employers are already shying away from that school’s grads. What is being achieved, exactly?)
“Biased criteria.” This chestnut should simply be retired. The analogies section of the SAT has been retired, along with such terms as ‘cotillion’ and ‘regatta.’ More to the point, the math section is, well, about math. If a kid can’t solve “2x + 4 = 10,” I don’t want to hear about bias. If more poor kids struggle on this section than they should, then the problem is in math instruction in the junior-high and high schools, or in what the kids care about, or both. (Interestingly, the score gaps that the ‘left’ takes as evidence of bias are actually higher on the math section. How this proves bias is entirely beyond me.)
“They go to people who would have attended college anyway.” This is probably true, and it may suggest limits from the point of view of a single institution. On a macro level, though, this is simply obtuse. It’s like objecting that Nobel Prizes go mostly to people who achieve a lot anyway. Well, yeah, they do. Scholarships are both incentives and statements of priorities. They tell the public what colleges value so much that they’re willing to pay for it. If it were up to me, I’d much rather tell the public about the access we’re granting the hard-working, smart child of a single mother than the free ride we’re giving some hockey player.
“They’re elitist.” As opposed to...? Academia is elitist, by definition. American society is elitist too, although along economic lines instead of intellectual ones. To pretend that higher ed doesn’t serve a sorting function for future employers is to live in a dream world. The sorting function is based on the (largely correct) assumption that not everybody can do this. What makes me more a lefty than a conservative is my conviction that academic talent exists independently of income. Poor kids can be smart, and rich kids can be dumb. (The same applies to adults, btw.) What makes academia worth preserving is that it deals in a separate currency, which is something like cognitive talent, or even truth. To wish that away in the name of egalitarianism is, in fact, to surrender completely to the economic hierarchy of the rest of American society. In academia, the smart blue-collar kid can beat the rich son-of-a-President. In the rest of our society, that’s not true.
I’m not arguing that standardized tests or GPA’s are perfect measures of academic ability, and I’m certainly not arguing for getting rid of need-based aid. (Actually, I’d increase it.) I’m just saying that anyone who truly cares about equality shouldn’t be bothered by incentives for honest achievement. One of my proudest moments as an educator was when a former student wrote me to express his gratitude for exposing a “poor blue-collar kid” to the classics. He developed a taste for them, and has become quite the intellectual, on his own terms. Nothing is too good for the proletariat, as one of my old profs liked to say. You can find brains in the dreariest places. Let’s give those brains access to higher education. Let’s tell the kid in junior high or tenth grade that doing his homework will benefit him just as much as going to practice. If I didn’t believe that, I’d have to go into another line of work.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Making Change, without money
My current school is trying to roll out a new program for the Fall. Without giving too much away, let’s just say it involves scheduling some classes for some timeslots we haven’t used before.
The etiquette of scheduling is that the department chairs are responsible for it, with input from the dean. I don’t micromanage, since I really don’t want to own that process. I owned it at my previous school, and juggling the needs of students, the logistics of classrooms, the preferences of full-timers, and the (largely speculative) availability of adjuncts was a real pain.
When I approached a couple of my better department chairs to warn them about the new format, their reaction was amazing. Hmm, they said. None of my reliables immediately jumped, so let’s just wait a year or two and see what happens. Unstated, but strongly implied, was ‘this too shall pass.’
Luckily for me, these are intelligent and reasonable people, for whom the argument “and next year will be different...how?” actually worked. Still, I was amazed at the speed with which they went from ‘this isn’t immediately easy’ to ‘let’s not.’
It would be easy to rail at the complacency of the tenured, and I won’t deny that that’s there, but I think there’s a more fundamental problem. If the program fails, they’ll get at least some of the blame. If it succeeds, there’s nothing in it for them except more sections to schedule. They have every reason to foot-drag. It isn’t a personality flaw or an irrational habit; it’s actually a very reasonable response to being confronted with what is, to them, a lose-lose initiative.
I suspect that some variant of this problem haunts the public sector generally. If a service provider gets really good at providing a service, the demand for that service will increase. High performance gets punished. (Something similar happens with popular teachers – their classes always fill or overfill, so they wind up doing more advising and more grading than their less popular colleagues. That’s not to say that popularity and quality are the same thing – easy graders can be popular despite being crushingly dull – but there’s usually some correlation, at least in my experience.)
Alas. Until we come up with some sort of well-funded, clearly defined merit system, we’ll have to rely on the kindness of colleagues. I’m not holding my breath...
The etiquette of scheduling is that the department chairs are responsible for it, with input from the dean. I don’t micromanage, since I really don’t want to own that process. I owned it at my previous school, and juggling the needs of students, the logistics of classrooms, the preferences of full-timers, and the (largely speculative) availability of adjuncts was a real pain.
When I approached a couple of my better department chairs to warn them about the new format, their reaction was amazing. Hmm, they said. None of my reliables immediately jumped, so let’s just wait a year or two and see what happens. Unstated, but strongly implied, was ‘this too shall pass.’
Luckily for me, these are intelligent and reasonable people, for whom the argument “and next year will be different...how?” actually worked. Still, I was amazed at the speed with which they went from ‘this isn’t immediately easy’ to ‘let’s not.’
It would be easy to rail at the complacency of the tenured, and I won’t deny that that’s there, but I think there’s a more fundamental problem. If the program fails, they’ll get at least some of the blame. If it succeeds, there’s nothing in it for them except more sections to schedule. They have every reason to foot-drag. It isn’t a personality flaw or an irrational habit; it’s actually a very reasonable response to being confronted with what is, to them, a lose-lose initiative.
I suspect that some variant of this problem haunts the public sector generally. If a service provider gets really good at providing a service, the demand for that service will increase. High performance gets punished. (Something similar happens with popular teachers – their classes always fill or overfill, so they wind up doing more advising and more grading than their less popular colleagues. That’s not to say that popularity and quality are the same thing – easy graders can be popular despite being crushingly dull – but there’s usually some correlation, at least in my experience.)
Alas. Until we come up with some sort of well-funded, clearly defined merit system, we’ll have to rely on the kindness of colleagues. I’m not holding my breath...
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Mere Money and Prestige Money
Based on a recent communiqué from the Midwest, I now have two friends at research universities, thirtysomething doctorates with insane talent, whose tenure bids are in trouble because the money they’ve brought in with grants isn’t prestige money.
Apparently, money comes in two flavors: mere money and prestige money.
Mere money is handy for relatively profane purposes, like paying expenses or salaries, or buying stuff. Prestige money can do that, and more.
What more is left unsaid.
Both of these are public universities, meaning taxpayer-supported (one in the Midwest, one in the Northeast). I wonder if the taxpayers would take comfort in knowing that talented young researchers are getting no credit for bringing in mere money. Surely, better to suckle at the public teat than to bring in mere money. Let’s steer faculty away from, say, finding ways to pay for themselves – that’s what the taxpayers are for! Shun the drearily ordinary concerns of lesser folk, like paying bills.
Ugh. Thought processes like these are what create room for the for-profits. They may be vulgar, but at least they can count.
Apparently, money comes in two flavors: mere money and prestige money.
Mere money is handy for relatively profane purposes, like paying expenses or salaries, or buying stuff. Prestige money can do that, and more.
What more is left unsaid.
Both of these are public universities, meaning taxpayer-supported (one in the Midwest, one in the Northeast). I wonder if the taxpayers would take comfort in knowing that talented young researchers are getting no credit for bringing in mere money. Surely, better to suckle at the public teat than to bring in mere money. Let’s steer faculty away from, say, finding ways to pay for themselves – that’s what the taxpayers are for! Shun the drearily ordinary concerns of lesser folk, like paying bills.
Ugh. Thought processes like these are what create room for the for-profits. They may be vulgar, but at least they can count.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
From Faculty to Administration
It’s been a relatively slow week, so I’ve had the chance to reflect on the most bracing change when I moved from faculty to administration. It’s the definition of ‘smart.’ On faculty, esp. coming out of the theory-drenched 90’s, the definition of smart was the ability to see hopeless complexity where others saw only the obvious. The obvious answer was, by definition, ‘complicit’ with some other set of assumptions that vitiated the good done by the obvious answer. Paying attention to what Foucault called the “capillaries of power” involved tracing ever-more-esoteric relationships between phenomena. Specifying a responsible party for just about anything was hopelessly reductionist; ‘agency’ as a concept was embedded in logocentrism, itself an imperialistic paradigm.
In administration, the exact opposite is true. After a problem is identified and a little group brainstorming has been done, the major task is to narrow down the possible courses of action. Reductionism is not a flaw; it’s a necessity. Pare down the possibilities to a few do-able “action items,” with responsible parties, measurable outcomes, and budgetary needs specified in advance. A good manager can move from problem to solution relatively quickly, and can summarize that solution clearly.
After years in pomo theory seminars, just getting used to the concept of ‘action items’ took some time. You mean we’re supposed to just pick something and do it? Now? Based largely on hunches? With crappy data? Or no data at all?
On this side of the desk, one of the real shocks has been to discover how many decisions are made on hunches. I don’t mean that as a criticism – an educated hunch is not entirely arbitrary – but just as a discovery. The tools of empirical social science, I’ve found, are useful almost exclusively after the fact, when they’re useful at all. As Hegel put it, the owl of Minerva spreads her wings at dusk.
In a way, the discovery is liberating. Decisions that some on the outside take to be indicators of sinister underlying motives are often completely unconnected. In fact, when confronted with accusations of sinister underlying motives, a manager’s response of ‘huh?’ is frequently both honest and accurate.
That’s not to deny larger political realities, but instead to suggest that actions may, in fact, be more intelligible than sometimes thought. To my mind, this is cause for optimism. Extrapolate this lesson to, say, the government: if we assume that (say) Bush has a few core convictions, a few empirical assumptions, and very little patience, we can explain a remarkable proportion of his actions. I’d argue that his core convictions and assumptions are largely wrong, but they’re intelligible. (That’s probably at the core of his popular appeal – people who don’t follow politics all that closely or understand it all that deeply can understand Bush. That wasn’t true of his opponent, sadly.)
This Fall we’re rolling out an entirely new program, based pretty much on a shared hunch that it might work. I know that I’ve settled in as a manager because I’m okay with that.
In administration, the exact opposite is true. After a problem is identified and a little group brainstorming has been done, the major task is to narrow down the possible courses of action. Reductionism is not a flaw; it’s a necessity. Pare down the possibilities to a few do-able “action items,” with responsible parties, measurable outcomes, and budgetary needs specified in advance. A good manager can move from problem to solution relatively quickly, and can summarize that solution clearly.
After years in pomo theory seminars, just getting used to the concept of ‘action items’ took some time. You mean we’re supposed to just pick something and do it? Now? Based largely on hunches? With crappy data? Or no data at all?
On this side of the desk, one of the real shocks has been to discover how many decisions are made on hunches. I don’t mean that as a criticism – an educated hunch is not entirely arbitrary – but just as a discovery. The tools of empirical social science, I’ve found, are useful almost exclusively after the fact, when they’re useful at all. As Hegel put it, the owl of Minerva spreads her wings at dusk.
In a way, the discovery is liberating. Decisions that some on the outside take to be indicators of sinister underlying motives are often completely unconnected. In fact, when confronted with accusations of sinister underlying motives, a manager’s response of ‘huh?’ is frequently both honest and accurate.
That’s not to deny larger political realities, but instead to suggest that actions may, in fact, be more intelligible than sometimes thought. To my mind, this is cause for optimism. Extrapolate this lesson to, say, the government: if we assume that (say) Bush has a few core convictions, a few empirical assumptions, and very little patience, we can explain a remarkable proportion of his actions. I’d argue that his core convictions and assumptions are largely wrong, but they’re intelligible. (That’s probably at the core of his popular appeal – people who don’t follow politics all that closely or understand it all that deeply can understand Bush. That wasn’t true of his opponent, sadly.)
This Fall we’re rolling out an entirely new program, based pretty much on a shared hunch that it might work. I know that I’ve settled in as a manager because I’m okay with that.
Perils of Shopping with The Boy
To give The Wife a break, I took The Boy with me when I went Valentine’s shopping this weekend. Among the places we went was a local chocolates store, since The Wife believes, correctly, that chocolate is the food of the gods.
The Boy ratted me out! On Monday, while I was at work, she took him there to get something for me. As they walked in, he declared loudly “Hey! I was here yesterday with Daddy!”
I won’t be confiding any launch codes any time soon...
The Boy ratted me out! On Monday, while I was at work, she took him there to get something for me. As they walked in, he declared loudly “Hey! I was here yesterday with Daddy!”
I won’t be confiding any launch codes any time soon...
Thursday, February 10, 2005
An Exception
A few months ago, I swore off openly political blog entries, on the grounds that I didn’t have anything to offer there that wasn’t easily available elsewhere. I’ve stuck to that rule, and plan to continue to, but I have to make an exception for something that will absolutely eviscerate community colleges.
Bush's proposal to increase the Pell grant maximum by a whopping 2.4% a year got the headlines; what got ignored was, if you read the fine print, he’ll pay for it by ELIMINATING Perkins funding for equipment for community colleges. Right now, and for many years now, community colleges (are/have been) able to pay for equipment for ‘career-oriented’ programs through federal Perkins grants. At my college, we spend several million a year on equipment for programs that equip students for employment (as opposed to transfer to a four-year school). Programs like hospitality management, graphic design, photography, and nursing (!) rely heavily on Perkins funding. We couldn’t afford to run them without it, barring some huge infusion of cash from the county or state (ha!).
In the State of the Union address, he quickly mentioned community colleges, praising our workforce development contributions. Leaving aside that we do more than that, the fact that he wants to eliminate the funding that makes it possible for us to DO workforce development is simply appalling. In the short term, we’ll have to make up the difference by raising tuition, which is probably fine by him – conservatives like to fund public goods with ‘user fees,’ which completely defeats the purpose of public goods. It’s like charging you every time you call the police. It’s objectively insane, but you gotta pay for all those tax cuts and wars somehow.
(As it stands, our annual tuition is far enough below the existing Pell cap that raising the cap won’t net us a dime. Anybody who bothered to investigate the community college sector would know that’s true nationally.)
Bush is a fraud, a fool, and a knave. That he would have the gall to kill us as he praises us is both shocking and, somehow, not. Shame on him, and shame on everyone who voted for him.
Enough politics for today. I have to start revising equipment budgets downward.
Bush's proposal to increase the Pell grant maximum by a whopping 2.4% a year got the headlines; what got ignored was, if you read the fine print, he’ll pay for it by ELIMINATING Perkins funding for equipment for community colleges. Right now, and for many years now, community colleges (are/have been) able to pay for equipment for ‘career-oriented’ programs through federal Perkins grants. At my college, we spend several million a year on equipment for programs that equip students for employment (as opposed to transfer to a four-year school). Programs like hospitality management, graphic design, photography, and nursing (!) rely heavily on Perkins funding. We couldn’t afford to run them without it, barring some huge infusion of cash from the county or state (ha!).
In the State of the Union address, he quickly mentioned community colleges, praising our workforce development contributions. Leaving aside that we do more than that, the fact that he wants to eliminate the funding that makes it possible for us to DO workforce development is simply appalling. In the short term, we’ll have to make up the difference by raising tuition, which is probably fine by him – conservatives like to fund public goods with ‘user fees,’ which completely defeats the purpose of public goods. It’s like charging you every time you call the police. It’s objectively insane, but you gotta pay for all those tax cuts and wars somehow.
(As it stands, our annual tuition is far enough below the existing Pell cap that raising the cap won’t net us a dime. Anybody who bothered to investigate the community college sector would know that’s true nationally.)
Bush is a fraud, a fool, and a knave. That he would have the gall to kill us as he praises us is both shocking and, somehow, not. Shame on him, and shame on everyone who voted for him.
Enough politics for today. I have to start revising equipment budgets downward.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Lula Saves the History Department?
In this, as in so many things, a Brazilian Socialist shall lead us…
I heard recently that the President of Brazil has decided to junk Microsoft as the software provider for all of the government computers, in favor of Linux and open-source applications. Lula, as he’s known, would apparently rather spend money on food and education programs for the poor than on licensing fees.
Hmmm.
What if…we took all the money we’re funneling to Gates and company, and used it instead to, oh, I don’t know, hire faculty? Use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, OpenOffice (www.OpenOffice.org) instead of Microsoft Office, Linux instead of Windows, Picasa instead of Photoshop, etc. It’s sort of like switching prescriptions to generics. It’s not a perfect solution – assume some pushback from beleagured IT departments, to start – but it beats the hell out of adjuncting-out the History department.
For that matter, what if a consortium of universities were to develop an open-source student-management software platform? (That’s the set of programs used in registrar’s and financial aid offices – track tuition payments, financial aid disbursements and eligibility, grades, etc.) Right now, every college I know spends megabucks on proprietary systems that never quite work right. If they aren’t going to work anyway, what are we paying for?
In fact, if memory serves, the entire freakin’ internet was developed by the nonprofit sector, for the nonprofit sector. What if we used it to go back to its roots, and save a HUGE chunk of change that could be devoted, instead, to closing our budget gaps?
Hmmm…
I heard recently that the President of Brazil has decided to junk Microsoft as the software provider for all of the government computers, in favor of Linux and open-source applications. Lula, as he’s known, would apparently rather spend money on food and education programs for the poor than on licensing fees.
Hmmm.
What if…we took all the money we’re funneling to Gates and company, and used it instead to, oh, I don’t know, hire faculty? Use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, OpenOffice (www.OpenOffice.org) instead of Microsoft Office, Linux instead of Windows, Picasa instead of Photoshop, etc. It’s sort of like switching prescriptions to generics. It’s not a perfect solution – assume some pushback from beleagured IT departments, to start – but it beats the hell out of adjuncting-out the History department.
For that matter, what if a consortium of universities were to develop an open-source student-management software platform? (That’s the set of programs used in registrar’s and financial aid offices – track tuition payments, financial aid disbursements and eligibility, grades, etc.) Right now, every college I know spends megabucks on proprietary systems that never quite work right. If they aren’t going to work anyway, what are we paying for?
In fact, if memory serves, the entire freakin’ internet was developed by the nonprofit sector, for the nonprofit sector. What if we used it to go back to its roots, and save a HUGE chunk of change that could be devoted, instead, to closing our budget gaps?
Hmmm…
Monday, February 07, 2005
Teeth! And, How to Pick Up Girls in Church
Big weekend on the home front.
The Girl has teeth! Two little ones in front, on the bottom. And, bless her, she hasn’t even fussed. The only change we’ve noticed has been more chewing of her toys, but that’s pretty standard six-month-old behavior anyway. It’s kind of sad to think that we’ll never see her toothless smile again, but part of the definition of parenthood is actually feeling pride at little things like new teeth.
The Boy had his first kiss, in church, of all places. The Wife took him to Mass (as the resident non-Catholic, I stayed home with The Girl). He brought some toy cars to keep himself occupied during the sermon, and he played with them on top of the pew in front of them. Sitting in said pew was another family with a girl about his age. The girl watched TB intently as he played with his cars, then leaned over and, without warning, gave him a kiss on the forehead. As The Wife tells it, he recoiled, as if from a bad smell, but then smiled shyly.
The Wife thinks it’s because TB is so cute. I suspect the car – “Chicks Dig Hot Cars” is one of those rules that, apparently, starts early.
When they got home, The Wife kept talking about the kiss, but The Boy kept talking about his car. There’s something reassuring about that…
The Girl has teeth! Two little ones in front, on the bottom. And, bless her, she hasn’t even fussed. The only change we’ve noticed has been more chewing of her toys, but that’s pretty standard six-month-old behavior anyway. It’s kind of sad to think that we’ll never see her toothless smile again, but part of the definition of parenthood is actually feeling pride at little things like new teeth.
The Boy had his first kiss, in church, of all places. The Wife took him to Mass (as the resident non-Catholic, I stayed home with The Girl). He brought some toy cars to keep himself occupied during the sermon, and he played with them on top of the pew in front of them. Sitting in said pew was another family with a girl about his age. The girl watched TB intently as he played with his cars, then leaned over and, without warning, gave him a kiss on the forehead. As The Wife tells it, he recoiled, as if from a bad smell, but then smiled shyly.
The Wife thinks it’s because TB is so cute. I suspect the car – “Chicks Dig Hot Cars” is one of those rules that, apparently, starts early.
When they got home, The Wife kept talking about the kiss, but The Boy kept talking about his car. There’s something reassuring about that…
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Best Sick Leave Form, Ever
The following is an actual reason given on a sick leave form by one of my faculty:
- Bronchitis, and a general malaise
I liked that. Imagine the possibilities:
- Flu, and a dark sense of foreboding
- Feverish, and gripped by a nameless fear
- Headcold, and ennui
- Coughing, and humming with dark portent
- Sniffles, and the vapors
Actually, Sniffles and the Vapors might be a good name for a band. For a while as grad school wound down and I was staring at the prospect of unending unemployment, I toyed with the idea of forming a power-punk band called Jonny and the Postdocs. You know, fall back on the relative safety of show business in case the risky academic thing didn’t work out…
- Bronchitis, and a general malaise
I liked that. Imagine the possibilities:
- Flu, and a dark sense of foreboding
- Feverish, and gripped by a nameless fear
- Headcold, and ennui
- Coughing, and humming with dark portent
- Sniffles, and the vapors
Actually, Sniffles and the Vapors might be a good name for a band. For a while as grad school wound down and I was staring at the prospect of unending unemployment, I toyed with the idea of forming a power-punk band called Jonny and the Postdocs. You know, fall back on the relative safety of show business in case the risky academic thing didn’t work out…
Marathon Meetings
In the last week, I’ve had two meetings that each broke the four-hour mark. Both were productive, in different ways, but four-plus hours can be a bit taxing.
For the first hour, all is well. Everyone brings out their best material, bons mots fly, ideas are exchanged, the sun shines, the birds sing, and life is good.
In the second hour, we get serious. We look at possible unintended consequences, we discuss institutional history with similar initiatives, and we try to forecast likely issues with implementation. Not as much fun as the first hour, but still, time well spent.
In the third hour, though, attention starts to flag. Doodles become more interesting. Language gets franker, as accepted euphemisms are replaced with the ‘everybody knows’ directness of the exhausted. We start unpacking clichés (true quote: “Every year, we’re told it’s a bad budget year. I’ve been here twenty-five years, and we’ve never had a good budget year.”). Personal hobby horses are ridden hard. Sentences get shorter. We interrupt each other more.
By the fourth hour, we’re moving into what scholars of religion call a liminal state. We veer wildly between the absurdly long-term and the absurdly immediate. Daydreaming spins out of control, and anecdotes about people who worked here twenty years ago take on a weird immediacy. Frustration simmers. I have to look at my notes to remember what we decided two hours ago. The effect is not unlike drunkenness, even though none of us has had anything harder than a diet coke.
We haven’t actually cracked the five-hour barrier yet, though we came perilously close at one of them. I’m almost curious to see what would happen. Would we break into spontaneous musical numbers? Have collective, out-of-body experiences? Name ourselves after visions (“call me Runs Into Deer”)? Most unlikely of all, come up with new revenue sources?
Stay tuned…
For the first hour, all is well. Everyone brings out their best material, bons mots fly, ideas are exchanged, the sun shines, the birds sing, and life is good.
In the second hour, we get serious. We look at possible unintended consequences, we discuss institutional history with similar initiatives, and we try to forecast likely issues with implementation. Not as much fun as the first hour, but still, time well spent.
In the third hour, though, attention starts to flag. Doodles become more interesting. Language gets franker, as accepted euphemisms are replaced with the ‘everybody knows’ directness of the exhausted. We start unpacking clichés (true quote: “Every year, we’re told it’s a bad budget year. I’ve been here twenty-five years, and we’ve never had a good budget year.”). Personal hobby horses are ridden hard. Sentences get shorter. We interrupt each other more.
By the fourth hour, we’re moving into what scholars of religion call a liminal state. We veer wildly between the absurdly long-term and the absurdly immediate. Daydreaming spins out of control, and anecdotes about people who worked here twenty years ago take on a weird immediacy. Frustration simmers. I have to look at my notes to remember what we decided two hours ago. The effect is not unlike drunkenness, even though none of us has had anything harder than a diet coke.
We haven’t actually cracked the five-hour barrier yet, though we came perilously close at one of them. I’m almost curious to see what would happen. Would we break into spontaneous musical numbers? Have collective, out-of-body experiences? Name ourselves after visions (“call me Runs Into Deer”)? Most unlikely of all, come up with new revenue sources?
Stay tuned…
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Pricing By Major
A moment of heresy…
What if tuition for different majors was priced according to what it cost to run them? Right now, most colleges charge a flat tuition rate for full-time students, regardless of their course of study. (To be fair, sometimes there are ‘lab fees,’ but these don’t even begin to approach paying for the cost differential.)
Some majors require a great deal of money – nursing, for example, or music. Both require low student/teacher ratios, lots of expensive equipment, and a surprising amount of dedicated space. Other majors – history, English, math – are almost entirely “chalk and talk” classes, which allow for higher student/teacher ratios, and which require almost no dedicated equipment. As it stands, the history majors are effectively subsidizing the nursing majors. (In fact, the college is breaking even on the history majors and losing money on the nurses.)
As a consequence, we have a constant backlog of students for the nursing and music programs, with plenty of good seats still available in the chalk-and-talk majors.
What if…we priced tuition differently by major? If you want a plain-vanilla degree just to get ahead at work, psychology or history should work just fine. If you want one of the boutique majors, pay a boutique price. As long as the financial aid people don’t choke on it, we wouldn’t really be limiting access; we’d simply be harnessing market forces to settle an allocation problem, which is one thing market forces do very, very well.
Would more students rush into the cheaper majors? Probably, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’d rather a student complete a history major than take two semesters of nursing and drop out. Leave the boutique courses to the truly dedicated. The beauty of pricing is that it’s adjustable; if too many students are scared away, the premium could always be reduced.
The same principle could be applied to ‘honors’ degrees. Since honors sections run much smaller than regular sections, charging extra seems reasonable. Again, we’d have to make sure the financial aid people don’t have an issue, but those students who qualify academically and are willing to pay extra should have the option for, well, premium service.
Thinking ahead, this may not be a bad way to entice the upper-middle classes to take a fresh look at community colleges for their less-ambitious offspring. If Buffy doesn’t know what she wants to be, but doesn’t want to miss out on small classes, she suddenly has an option. The extra income for the community college could help with the chronic budget issues. Hmm…
I know it’s heresy, since community colleges are supposed to focus single-mindedly on lower-income students, but I’ve noticed that the public services used by the middle and upper classes tend to get better budgets than those reserved for the poor. If we want to provide the best possible service to the poor, we may need to attract some of the better-off to pay for it.
Just a thought…
What if tuition for different majors was priced according to what it cost to run them? Right now, most colleges charge a flat tuition rate for full-time students, regardless of their course of study. (To be fair, sometimes there are ‘lab fees,’ but these don’t even begin to approach paying for the cost differential.)
Some majors require a great deal of money – nursing, for example, or music. Both require low student/teacher ratios, lots of expensive equipment, and a surprising amount of dedicated space. Other majors – history, English, math – are almost entirely “chalk and talk” classes, which allow for higher student/teacher ratios, and which require almost no dedicated equipment. As it stands, the history majors are effectively subsidizing the nursing majors. (In fact, the college is breaking even on the history majors and losing money on the nurses.)
As a consequence, we have a constant backlog of students for the nursing and music programs, with plenty of good seats still available in the chalk-and-talk majors.
What if…we priced tuition differently by major? If you want a plain-vanilla degree just to get ahead at work, psychology or history should work just fine. If you want one of the boutique majors, pay a boutique price. As long as the financial aid people don’t choke on it, we wouldn’t really be limiting access; we’d simply be harnessing market forces to settle an allocation problem, which is one thing market forces do very, very well.
Would more students rush into the cheaper majors? Probably, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’d rather a student complete a history major than take two semesters of nursing and drop out. Leave the boutique courses to the truly dedicated. The beauty of pricing is that it’s adjustable; if too many students are scared away, the premium could always be reduced.
The same principle could be applied to ‘honors’ degrees. Since honors sections run much smaller than regular sections, charging extra seems reasonable. Again, we’d have to make sure the financial aid people don’t have an issue, but those students who qualify academically and are willing to pay extra should have the option for, well, premium service.
Thinking ahead, this may not be a bad way to entice the upper-middle classes to take a fresh look at community colleges for their less-ambitious offspring. If Buffy doesn’t know what she wants to be, but doesn’t want to miss out on small classes, she suddenly has an option. The extra income for the community college could help with the chronic budget issues. Hmm…
I know it’s heresy, since community colleges are supposed to focus single-mindedly on lower-income students, but I’ve noticed that the public services used by the middle and upper classes tend to get better budgets than those reserved for the poor. If we want to provide the best possible service to the poor, we may need to attract some of the better-off to pay for it.
Just a thought…
Monday, January 24, 2005
Low-Hanging Fruit
I’m beginning to feel like the Typhoid Mary of budget cuts. My previous school started a downward spiral financially just as I went into administration; I had to lay off a friend before I left, which still ranks as one of my least favorite things to do, ever. Now, the community college to which I escaped is starting to feel a real pinch. Annual double-digit health care cost increases, combined with several years of flat state aid and county aid rising only at the rate of inflation, are taking their toll.
(Note to Republicans: if Clinton’s health care plan had passed, we wouldn’t be in this pickle. Just a thought…)
So now I’ve watched two different kinds of college deal with belt-tightening. While this doesn’t even begin to approach the comparative work I cried out for in my last entry, it’s more than I’ve read anywhere else, so here goes. (Keep in mind, these are a for-profit technical college and a community college – the costs faced by a research institution are very different.)
The first things to go are ‘discretionary’: travel, journal subscriptions, office parties. Nobody can get terribly upset about these – you can always make the office party potluck --- but they don’t get you very far. A flexible freeze (slush?) on hiring comes next, assuming that hadn’t already been done. These are no fun at all, and much less efficient than they might seem. You’re locking in the most expensive employees and freezing out their cheaper alternatives, thereby ratcheting up your average age (and health care costs). You’re also preserving your existing staff imbalances in amber, which is never a good idea.
‘Release time,’ or course reductions offered faculty to work on other projects, usually gets axed. While it’s tempting to look at release time as featherbedding, most of what I’ve seen it used for has been more than legit. The problem with cutting release time is that the tasks for which it was used still exist; it’s just that they suddenly go uncompensated. Typically, the high performers were the ones with release time, since they were the ones who could be trusted not to treat it as a sinecure. In essence, then, the high performers wind up with what amount to pay cuts, the low performers chuckle with cynical wisdom, and those in between do the math. After a couple rounds of this, good luck getting anyone to volunteer for projects.
(Release time also falls prey to Dilbert Budgeting. It’s usually budgeted as a fraction of a professor’s salary. If a professor who makes 50k usually teaches ten courses a year, a reduction of one course per semester is budgeted at 10k. In reality, the cost is the cost of replacing her with adjuncts for those two courses, which is closer to 3k. Where the other 7k goes, nobody knows. Sucked into the void, as we used to say in the 80’s.)
Minimum enrollments for sections to not get cancelled usually increase, although these changes are easier to declare than to enforce. (A ‘section’ is one timeslot for a course. We might run 30 sections of General Psychology in a semester.) While it sounds like good discipline to say No More Small Sections, the reality is that the smaller sections usually exist for a reason – the only section available for night students, say, or a graduation requirement, or everything else is full. A little belt-tightening here can yield a slight benefit, but it’s harder than it sounds. (Student preferences are harder to change than faculty preferences, contrary to popular belief. I’ve had faculty volunteer to run Friday classes, we’ve scheduled them, and five students sign up. As long as students all want the same timeslots, new efficiencies will be hard to find.)
Usually, we also start to put the brakes on expensive technology purchases as well, which probably saves more than everything else listed so far. It works brilliantly for a year, but you can’t really go beyond that without seriously impacting your programs.
At the for-profit, job descriptions started to change. Just as I was leaving, promotion criteria for faculty were being revised to include helping the Admissions department recruit students. At the community college, the union contract is devilishly specific about job duties, so this kind of move (whatever its wisdom) is largely precluded.
(Larger schools always add ‘deferred maintenance’ to the list. Gotta admit, this has always struck me as opaque. It sounds better than ‘let the campus go to seed,’ I guess, but the reality is that it usually means ‘start hitting up donors for new buildings, and don’t work on the old ones until the new ones are built.’ I’ve heard administrators, in public, admit that this category exists mostly to bluff unions. At the community college, we have too few buildings for anyone to take this bluff seriously.)
These are the low-hanging fruit. They’ve mostly been picked by now. The next steps are much uglier – phasing out smaller programs, administrative consolidation (again, looks good on the outside, until you see the work involved…), combining academic departments, etc. With each of these, someone’s ox is being gored. Not necessarily a bad thing, but far more conflictual than the earlier measures. In a tenure-based environment, conflicts have a way of lingering.
(Note to Republicans: if Clinton’s health care plan had passed, we wouldn’t be in this pickle. Just a thought…)
So now I’ve watched two different kinds of college deal with belt-tightening. While this doesn’t even begin to approach the comparative work I cried out for in my last entry, it’s more than I’ve read anywhere else, so here goes. (Keep in mind, these are a for-profit technical college and a community college – the costs faced by a research institution are very different.)
The first things to go are ‘discretionary’: travel, journal subscriptions, office parties. Nobody can get terribly upset about these – you can always make the office party potluck --- but they don’t get you very far. A flexible freeze (slush?) on hiring comes next, assuming that hadn’t already been done. These are no fun at all, and much less efficient than they might seem. You’re locking in the most expensive employees and freezing out their cheaper alternatives, thereby ratcheting up your average age (and health care costs). You’re also preserving your existing staff imbalances in amber, which is never a good idea.
‘Release time,’ or course reductions offered faculty to work on other projects, usually gets axed. While it’s tempting to look at release time as featherbedding, most of what I’ve seen it used for has been more than legit. The problem with cutting release time is that the tasks for which it was used still exist; it’s just that they suddenly go uncompensated. Typically, the high performers were the ones with release time, since they were the ones who could be trusted not to treat it as a sinecure. In essence, then, the high performers wind up with what amount to pay cuts, the low performers chuckle with cynical wisdom, and those in between do the math. After a couple rounds of this, good luck getting anyone to volunteer for projects.
(Release time also falls prey to Dilbert Budgeting. It’s usually budgeted as a fraction of a professor’s salary. If a professor who makes 50k usually teaches ten courses a year, a reduction of one course per semester is budgeted at 10k. In reality, the cost is the cost of replacing her with adjuncts for those two courses, which is closer to 3k. Where the other 7k goes, nobody knows. Sucked into the void, as we used to say in the 80’s.)
Minimum enrollments for sections to not get cancelled usually increase, although these changes are easier to declare than to enforce. (A ‘section’ is one timeslot for a course. We might run 30 sections of General Psychology in a semester.) While it sounds like good discipline to say No More Small Sections, the reality is that the smaller sections usually exist for a reason – the only section available for night students, say, or a graduation requirement, or everything else is full. A little belt-tightening here can yield a slight benefit, but it’s harder than it sounds. (Student preferences are harder to change than faculty preferences, contrary to popular belief. I’ve had faculty volunteer to run Friday classes, we’ve scheduled them, and five students sign up. As long as students all want the same timeslots, new efficiencies will be hard to find.)
Usually, we also start to put the brakes on expensive technology purchases as well, which probably saves more than everything else listed so far. It works brilliantly for a year, but you can’t really go beyond that without seriously impacting your programs.
At the for-profit, job descriptions started to change. Just as I was leaving, promotion criteria for faculty were being revised to include helping the Admissions department recruit students. At the community college, the union contract is devilishly specific about job duties, so this kind of move (whatever its wisdom) is largely precluded.
(Larger schools always add ‘deferred maintenance’ to the list. Gotta admit, this has always struck me as opaque. It sounds better than ‘let the campus go to seed,’ I guess, but the reality is that it usually means ‘start hitting up donors for new buildings, and don’t work on the old ones until the new ones are built.’ I’ve heard administrators, in public, admit that this category exists mostly to bluff unions. At the community college, we have too few buildings for anyone to take this bluff seriously.)
These are the low-hanging fruit. They’ve mostly been picked by now. The next steps are much uglier – phasing out smaller programs, administrative consolidation (again, looks good on the outside, until you see the work involved…), combining academic departments, etc. With each of these, someone’s ox is being gored. Not necessarily a bad thing, but far more conflictual than the earlier measures. In a tenure-based environment, conflicts have a way of lingering.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Missing the Obvious
As a discipline-trained academic (as opposed to an Ed.D.), delving into the literature on academic management has been a shock. Most of it is simply dreadful: every initiative is fully successful, everybody cooperates with everybody else, and everybody seems to think that saying “you need a sense of humor” constitutes some kind of insight. Smart, classically-trained people should know better.
Even worse, almost every published article deals with what social scientists call an ‘n’ of one. In other worse, every case is unique. If the title is “Rethinking Diversity: The xxxx Initiative at East Ishkabibble State,” you can bet that the author works at East Ishkabibble State. The closest thing to ‘comparative’ work is anthologies of first-person accounts, with an introduction lauding the successes of all and sundry.
I can understand the CYA imperative, but really, most of this stuff is appallingly useless. For example, I recently ran across a Jossey-Bass volume called “Dimensions of Managing Academic Affairs in the Community College,” comprised of articles by various administrators across the country. It has articles on managing conflict (“many aspiring deans don’t realize that conflict is inevitable”), leading change (“change brings resistance”), and making difficult decisions (“deans should acquire a habit of examining the aspects of different situations before making a decision.”) Ya think?
Nothing on how to handle reduced resources, top-heavy faculties, budget cuts, external grants, or staff. Amazing.
Budget cuts, in a tenure-based institution, are unbelievably ugly. With health insurance premiums going up by double digits every year, and with state aid flat, the trend line for our budgets is bad and getting worse. Most of our costs are either fixed (physical plant) or increasing (salaries, health insurance, etc.). Education is, by definition, labor-intensive, and most of the labor is either adjunct (and therefore too cheap to cut) or tenured (and therefore bulletproof). Toner, paper, and the like just don’t add up to much, and any cuts made in those areas would probably creep back into the budget anyway, since they’re necessary to get anything done.
I would LOVE to hear how other schools have dealt with budget cuts. Apparently, this would involve inventing an entirely new literature. Makes ya wonder.
Even worse, almost every published article deals with what social scientists call an ‘n’ of one. In other worse, every case is unique. If the title is “Rethinking Diversity: The xxxx Initiative at East Ishkabibble State,” you can bet that the author works at East Ishkabibble State. The closest thing to ‘comparative’ work is anthologies of first-person accounts, with an introduction lauding the successes of all and sundry.
I can understand the CYA imperative, but really, most of this stuff is appallingly useless. For example, I recently ran across a Jossey-Bass volume called “Dimensions of Managing Academic Affairs in the Community College,” comprised of articles by various administrators across the country. It has articles on managing conflict (“many aspiring deans don’t realize that conflict is inevitable”), leading change (“change brings resistance”), and making difficult decisions (“deans should acquire a habit of examining the aspects of different situations before making a decision.”) Ya think?
Nothing on how to handle reduced resources, top-heavy faculties, budget cuts, external grants, or staff. Amazing.
Budget cuts, in a tenure-based institution, are unbelievably ugly. With health insurance premiums going up by double digits every year, and with state aid flat, the trend line for our budgets is bad and getting worse. Most of our costs are either fixed (physical plant) or increasing (salaries, health insurance, etc.). Education is, by definition, labor-intensive, and most of the labor is either adjunct (and therefore too cheap to cut) or tenured (and therefore bulletproof). Toner, paper, and the like just don’t add up to much, and any cuts made in those areas would probably creep back into the budget anyway, since they’re necessary to get anything done.
I would LOVE to hear how other schools have dealt with budget cuts. Apparently, this would involve inventing an entirely new literature. Makes ya wonder.
Friday, January 14, 2005
Love is Gross!
"Love is gross!" Thus spoke The Boy the other day when I got home and kissed The Wife.
The Wife wanted to correct him, but I didn't. At his age, he's entirely correct. Let him learn otherwise, later.
The Wife wanted to correct him, but I didn't. At his age, he's entirely correct. Let him learn otherwise, later.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Hierarchy is an Amplifier
Nothing quite brings home to me the Rashomon-like differences in perspectives among faculty as effectively as a large-scale faculty meeting. This week I emceed the division meeting, in which the 80-plus full-time faculty pepper me with questions for about an hour. (Okay, maybe about 65, discounting the no-shows, but still…)
Tenure, apparently, loosens the tongue. Professors who have been here for 30 years or more referred to the college variously as a mall, a factory, a business, and, mystifyingly, a gang bang. Questions ranged from the choice of paint colors for the walls (“it’s so dreary, no wonder enrollment is going down!”) to how many offices a memo should go through before reaching a professor’s mailbox (the preferred answer was four, for reasons unknown to me), to appeals to class snobbery. I tried to maintain that ever-so-slightly-distant pose that allows a manager to acknowledge an issue without actually validating it, which is more tiring than it looks.
In a sense, the performance of showing concern without directly acknowledging that there is anything to be concerned about is one of the central skills of administration. It’s not lying, really; it’s something closer to discretion. While it probably isn’t a great deal of fun to watch, the alternative could be disastrous. Imagine if I adopted absolute candor as my rhetorical strategy: “I know where you’re going with that comment, you underperforming cretin, and if it weren’t a felony I’d choke you with my bare hands.” “The fact that you’re even here to ask that question suggests that the bar must have closed early.” Not good. The principle that hierarchy is an amplifier would mean that a comment that would go unnoticed from a tenured professor would get endlessly repeated, distorted, and taken out of context, coming from a dean. It’s very much like politics, except that I’m not elected by the faculty. I have to keep them happy enough that they’ll focus on teaching, rather than on institutional politics, but I also have to keep my VP happy, since it’s in his power to send me packing.
About forty years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay called “Mau-Mauing the flak catchers,” about a hapless bureaucrat in hush puppies whose job it was to absorb the ritual abuse dished out by discontented community groups, preparatory to hiring the more employable ones for government jobs. Deaning isn’t exactly like that – I rarely get to hire – but there’s certainly a resemblance.
Classes start Tuesday. I look forward to the relative calm.
Tenure, apparently, loosens the tongue. Professors who have been here for 30 years or more referred to the college variously as a mall, a factory, a business, and, mystifyingly, a gang bang. Questions ranged from the choice of paint colors for the walls (“it’s so dreary, no wonder enrollment is going down!”) to how many offices a memo should go through before reaching a professor’s mailbox (the preferred answer was four, for reasons unknown to me), to appeals to class snobbery. I tried to maintain that ever-so-slightly-distant pose that allows a manager to acknowledge an issue without actually validating it, which is more tiring than it looks.
In a sense, the performance of showing concern without directly acknowledging that there is anything to be concerned about is one of the central skills of administration. It’s not lying, really; it’s something closer to discretion. While it probably isn’t a great deal of fun to watch, the alternative could be disastrous. Imagine if I adopted absolute candor as my rhetorical strategy: “I know where you’re going with that comment, you underperforming cretin, and if it weren’t a felony I’d choke you with my bare hands.” “The fact that you’re even here to ask that question suggests that the bar must have closed early.” Not good. The principle that hierarchy is an amplifier would mean that a comment that would go unnoticed from a tenured professor would get endlessly repeated, distorted, and taken out of context, coming from a dean. It’s very much like politics, except that I’m not elected by the faculty. I have to keep them happy enough that they’ll focus on teaching, rather than on institutional politics, but I also have to keep my VP happy, since it’s in his power to send me packing.
About forty years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay called “Mau-Mauing the flak catchers,” about a hapless bureaucrat in hush puppies whose job it was to absorb the ritual abuse dished out by discontented community groups, preparatory to hiring the more employable ones for government jobs. Deaning isn’t exactly like that – I rarely get to hire – but there’s certainly a resemblance.
Classes start Tuesday. I look forward to the relative calm.
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Thoughts on Publishing
Over the break, I had several opportunities to catch up with some old friends, most of whom are in academia in various ways. Naturally, we talked some shop, and I picked up a few things from them.
One of the most basic, and this is more pressing outside of the community-college sector, is the really fundamental mismatch between what tenure committees take publishers to signify and what they actually signify.
In the humanities and social sciences, book publishing is absolutely part of the game for tenure. (In the physical sciences, it’s all about the journals.) Getting a book published is a milestone on the road to tenure, particularly if it is published by a ‘reputable’ press. The theory is that publishing houses have to be relatively picky, so if someone’s work passes muster there, it must be good, whether or not a particular department can see it.
The theory has become false over the last ten years or so, but very few departments (or institutions) have adjusted accordingly. With the precipitous drop in book-buying by academic libraries, and the precipitous drop in subsidies to publishers by universities, publishers have had to recalibrate their criteria from something like academic merit to something closer to salability.
Salability is fine, as far as it goes, but it has much more to do with fashion, established names, and ease of marketing than it does with academic merit. A well-researched and well-written monograph on an esoteric topic by a no-name author just won’t sell as much as a reheated compilation of occasional pieces by a Name. Some publishers have adopted a blanket policy of not publishing dissertations or ‘first’ books, having noted that neither sells especially well. No job without experience, no experience without a job.
While this shift is economically rational for the individual publisher, over the long term, we’re eating our young. By raising the bar for tenure in the first place, then raising the bar for publication, we’re making it ever harder for new people to break in. This is partially by design – if they break in, we’d have to PAY them – but mostly by negligence.
Journal articles come closer to the ‘academic merit’ criterion, since any given issue can contain a dozen articles; as long as one or two grab attention, the rest can be merely well-executed. Still, even there, I’ve noticed a distressing trend towards ‘special issues,’ and the same names popping up in the same journals over and over again.
Departments (and institutions) need to recognize that publication simply doesn’t mean what it used to mean. It could, if institutions were willing to pony up the cash for library book purchases and publication subsidies, but I don’t see that happening. The other alternative I could see would involve the web – since the physical cost of web publishing is close to zero, I don’t know why a purer ‘academic merit’ standard couldn’t hold there. Long term, that will probably happen. In the meantime, though, we’re losing a generation.
One of the most basic, and this is more pressing outside of the community-college sector, is the really fundamental mismatch between what tenure committees take publishers to signify and what they actually signify.
In the humanities and social sciences, book publishing is absolutely part of the game for tenure. (In the physical sciences, it’s all about the journals.) Getting a book published is a milestone on the road to tenure, particularly if it is published by a ‘reputable’ press. The theory is that publishing houses have to be relatively picky, so if someone’s work passes muster there, it must be good, whether or not a particular department can see it.
The theory has become false over the last ten years or so, but very few departments (or institutions) have adjusted accordingly. With the precipitous drop in book-buying by academic libraries, and the precipitous drop in subsidies to publishers by universities, publishers have had to recalibrate their criteria from something like academic merit to something closer to salability.
Salability is fine, as far as it goes, but it has much more to do with fashion, established names, and ease of marketing than it does with academic merit. A well-researched and well-written monograph on an esoteric topic by a no-name author just won’t sell as much as a reheated compilation of occasional pieces by a Name. Some publishers have adopted a blanket policy of not publishing dissertations or ‘first’ books, having noted that neither sells especially well. No job without experience, no experience without a job.
While this shift is economically rational for the individual publisher, over the long term, we’re eating our young. By raising the bar for tenure in the first place, then raising the bar for publication, we’re making it ever harder for new people to break in. This is partially by design – if they break in, we’d have to PAY them – but mostly by negligence.
Journal articles come closer to the ‘academic merit’ criterion, since any given issue can contain a dozen articles; as long as one or two grab attention, the rest can be merely well-executed. Still, even there, I’ve noticed a distressing trend towards ‘special issues,’ and the same names popping up in the same journals over and over again.
Departments (and institutions) need to recognize that publication simply doesn’t mean what it used to mean. It could, if institutions were willing to pony up the cash for library book purchases and publication subsidies, but I don’t see that happening. The other alternative I could see would involve the web – since the physical cost of web publishing is close to zero, I don’t know why a purer ‘academic merit’ standard couldn’t hold there. Long term, that will probably happen. In the meantime, though, we’re losing a generation.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Recent True Quotes
Two wonderful true quotes from my world over the past week:
1. The Boy, watching a weatherman in front of a map of the United States:
"Is he in space?"
It makes perfect sense, if you think about it.
2. One of my students this semester, on the final exam, introducing a paragraph:
"According to me,"
I really liked that. She cited her source, the statement is self-confirming, and it nicely blends humility and narcissism.
1. The Boy, watching a weatherman in front of a map of the United States:
"Is he in space?"
It makes perfect sense, if you think about it.
2. One of my students this semester, on the final exam, introducing a paragraph:
"According to me,"
I really liked that. She cited her source, the statement is self-confirming, and it nicely blends humility and narcissism.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Incentives and Intentions
Yesterday I endured one of those “how-do-we-do-this” operations meetings that drive managers to drink. (Happily, I was an invited guest for one meeting, as opposed to a member of the committee.) Without going into too much gory detail, the gist of it was how to get ‘continuing’ students (those who have already been here for at least one semester) to register online, rather than in-person. It’s fairly important for the college, since online registration saves a tremendous amount of labor. Most students have already made the switch, but there’s a non-trivial contingent that has steadfastly refused.
Leaving aside the dreary which-screen-is-which and which-bugs-can’t-we-fix discussions, the drift of the conversation was towards how to convince the holdout students to go online. Revealingly, everybody’s first instinct was to hold a series of workshops to teach the students how to navigate the website.
The group spent about a half hour discussing the logistics of the workshops, who would run them, and the like, while I sat in mute disbelief. When I finally couldn’t stand it anymore, I asked why we don’t just charge the in-person registrants an extra fee; premium service justifies a premium rate. Line up the incentives, and the behavior will follow.
There was a pause, followed by a round of “oooo.” You’d think I had landed from Mars.
In the years that this committee had been meeting, nobody had ever raised the issue of incentives. I was amazed.
Students who like to register in person do so because they don’t want to be bothered to learn another way, and/or because they like to be served. Workshops won’t change either of those; those who don’t want to be bothered certainly won’t be bothered to go to a workshop, and those who like to be served won’t attend, either. Workshops make sense if the desire is there but the know-how isn’t; with this population, it’s (almost) entirely the other way round.
The conversation that ensued was much more animated, but also revealing. As educators in a nonprofit setting, we’re so used to the ‘service’ ethic that the idea of intentionally creating an inconvenience is almost blasphemy. (That’s not to say that we don’t create inconveniences – we absolutely do – but they’re byproducts, not goals.) I argued that the same students who bitch, moan, and whine about having to navigate a website when in-person is available will miraculously get over it when it saves them fifty bucks. Those who are simply too prima donna-ish to bother are welcome to pay extra.
I’m not generally a fan of the run-it-like-a-business school of thought, but a little attention to motivation seems like a good idea.
The idea didn’t carry, of course – much too radical, and the Board of Trustees would have to approve it, which they wouldn’t, because it looks like a tax or it might disadvantage somebody or it’s just too complicated – but at least it shifted the discussion for a moment.
Leaving aside the dreary which-screen-is-which and which-bugs-can’t-we-fix discussions, the drift of the conversation was towards how to convince the holdout students to go online. Revealingly, everybody’s first instinct was to hold a series of workshops to teach the students how to navigate the website.
The group spent about a half hour discussing the logistics of the workshops, who would run them, and the like, while I sat in mute disbelief. When I finally couldn’t stand it anymore, I asked why we don’t just charge the in-person registrants an extra fee; premium service justifies a premium rate. Line up the incentives, and the behavior will follow.
There was a pause, followed by a round of “oooo.” You’d think I had landed from Mars.
In the years that this committee had been meeting, nobody had ever raised the issue of incentives. I was amazed.
Students who like to register in person do so because they don’t want to be bothered to learn another way, and/or because they like to be served. Workshops won’t change either of those; those who don’t want to be bothered certainly won’t be bothered to go to a workshop, and those who like to be served won’t attend, either. Workshops make sense if the desire is there but the know-how isn’t; with this population, it’s (almost) entirely the other way round.
The conversation that ensued was much more animated, but also revealing. As educators in a nonprofit setting, we’re so used to the ‘service’ ethic that the idea of intentionally creating an inconvenience is almost blasphemy. (That’s not to say that we don’t create inconveniences – we absolutely do – but they’re byproducts, not goals.) I argued that the same students who bitch, moan, and whine about having to navigate a website when in-person is available will miraculously get over it when it saves them fifty bucks. Those who are simply too prima donna-ish to bother are welcome to pay extra.
I’m not generally a fan of the run-it-like-a-business school of thought, but a little attention to motivation seems like a good idea.
The idea didn’t carry, of course – much too radical, and the Board of Trustees would have to approve it, which they wouldn’t, because it looks like a tax or it might disadvantage somebody or it’s just too complicated – but at least it shifted the discussion for a moment.
Monday, December 13, 2004
The Film Editing Theory of Administration
A friend at another institution emailed me with a story of his dean there, who is raising the tenure bar substantially for people already in the pipeline. My response to him follows:
Some deans think that raising the tenure bar dramatically is a way of
"raising the academic profile" of an institution. It's kind of like
being "tough on crime" by supporting silly sentencing rules; nobody really believes it will work, but nobody has ever been thrown out of office for being too tough on crime, either. It's a way for an insecure dean to pick up cheap points by toying with other people's careers. Unless it's part of a larger, coherent plan for the entire university, driven by the President, it's simply an arrogant career move by a mediocre manager. (It also saves money over the short term by making sure that nobody moves above the Assistant level. Some of those lines might go adjunct, and the rest can be doled out as favors to favored departments. It centralizes power in the dean's office.)
My philosophy of management, of which I am slowly becoming conscious,
is that it's like film editing; when it's done well, you shouldn't notice it. The job of administration, esp. at the middle level, is to put the conditions in place for faculty (and students) to be able to flourish, given the resources available. Part of that is being predictable. If everybody knows the rules, and has faith that the rules will be applied consistently, they can redirect their energies away from internal politics and towards actual productive work. Save the Bold Strokes for things that will actually help, like starting new programs, identifying new funding sources, or fixing the inevitable glitches in the machine.
For example, if I wanted to push a diversity hire, I would make that clear to the dept. chair BEFORE the search began. Agreement to that would be a condition of getting the line. Then, let the work proceed. Changing the rules in the middle, absent some sort of drastic change in the environment, is amateurish.
*After sending this, I came up with another hypothesis: Nixon's "Madman" strategy.
If a culture is too intensely static, a dean might be justified in overreaching simply to get a point across. That said, the "Madman" strategy is high risk, and only viable over the very short term. Long term, people have to know the rules.
Some deans think that raising the tenure bar dramatically is a way of
"raising the academic profile" of an institution. It's kind of like
being "tough on crime" by supporting silly sentencing rules; nobody really believes it will work, but nobody has ever been thrown out of office for being too tough on crime, either. It's a way for an insecure dean to pick up cheap points by toying with other people's careers. Unless it's part of a larger, coherent plan for the entire university, driven by the President, it's simply an arrogant career move by a mediocre manager. (It also saves money over the short term by making sure that nobody moves above the Assistant level. Some of those lines might go adjunct, and the rest can be doled out as favors to favored departments. It centralizes power in the dean's office.)
My philosophy of management, of which I am slowly becoming conscious,
is that it's like film editing; when it's done well, you shouldn't notice it. The job of administration, esp. at the middle level, is to put the conditions in place for faculty (and students) to be able to flourish, given the resources available. Part of that is being predictable. If everybody knows the rules, and has faith that the rules will be applied consistently, they can redirect their energies away from internal politics and towards actual productive work. Save the Bold Strokes for things that will actually help, like starting new programs, identifying new funding sources, or fixing the inevitable glitches in the machine.
For example, if I wanted to push a diversity hire, I would make that clear to the dept. chair BEFORE the search began. Agreement to that would be a condition of getting the line. Then, let the work proceed. Changing the rules in the middle, absent some sort of drastic change in the environment, is amateurish.
*After sending this, I came up with another hypothesis: Nixon's "Madman" strategy.
If a culture is too intensely static, a dean might be justified in overreaching simply to get a point across. That said, the "Madman" strategy is high risk, and only viable over the very short term. Long term, people have to know the rules.
Pinata Therapy, or, The Defenestration of SpongeBob
The Boy was invited to a birthday party this weekend, so we all went. It was held at a sports complex – basically, a big bubble that housed an ice rink, a video arcade, and a big indoor playground. Most of the guests were either three or four years old.
Most of the party was unremarkable, but there was a wonderful moment when they brought out a piñata of SpongeBob and had each kid take a whack. One kid knocked off one of the legs, sending it through an open glass door (okay, not technically a defenestration, but pretty durn close). I realized that adults could use piñatas, too. Let me take a few whacks at some carefully-selected characters, and reward me with chocolate at the end. I’d feel much better. Really.
Most of the party was unremarkable, but there was a wonderful moment when they brought out a piñata of SpongeBob and had each kid take a whack. One kid knocked off one of the legs, sending it through an open glass door (okay, not technically a defenestration, but pretty durn close). I realized that adults could use piñatas, too. Let me take a few whacks at some carefully-selected characters, and reward me with chocolate at the end. I’d feel much better. Really.
Monday, December 06, 2004
December is the Second-Cruelest Month
One of the major differences between managing in a community college and managing at a for-profit is the greater importance of ceremony at the community college. Since the mission here is more diffuse (and altruistic) than at the for-profit, the college sustains any number of extra-curricular groups for the benefit of students and faculty. December and late April-early May are when every last one of these groups has end-of-the-year dinners, celebrations, performances, exhibitions, and the like, and one of the jobs of the dean is to attend as a way of giving the college’s impramateur to the event.
The late April-early May swing is the worst, since every single end-of-the-year event happens then, as do most of the faculty retirement dinners (a few happen in December, but most faculty wait until the end of the academic year.) Still, December has quite a few holiday-themed events, concerts, performances, etc., each of which is terribly important to the people involved. Attendance by the dean is noticed, and non-attendance is noticed, too. The only excuse I’ve had for non-attendance that anyone accepted was when two events happened at the same time – even administrators are subject to those pesky laws of physics. Short of that, it’s time to see and be seen.
While most of the events are enjoyable in their own right, the sheer number can be wearing. The late Spring rush is insane; last year, I averaged four nights a week for about a month; you can imagine how that impacts on parenting time. December is less severe, but it does put a dent in attempts to do holiday shopping, as well as in parenting time.
The etiquette involved is reminiscent of the old science of Kremlinology in the 1980’s. Dress must be appropriate; you must sit in the right place, with the right people. You must be light and companionable, remembering always that anything you say can and will be used against you at any time. You must greet the organizer upon arrival and again before departure; sneaking out the back is not an option. Late arrival is verboten, since it precludes the meet-and-greet beforehand. You have to remember that while this is the third event this week and next week will be worse and you really just want to go home and play with the kids, it’s the culmination of months of work by whomever, and anything less than ebullience will be forever remembered as both a personal and professional insult. (“The administration just doesn’t care about…”) Opinions are welcome, as long as they are positive.
The next day, thank-you notes are mandatory, as are effusions of spontaneous praise in the hallway.
In many ways, this should be filed under problems-you-want-to-have. Most of the performances, dinners, etc., are quite good, and it’s terrific that so many people at the college spend so much time and energy on ways to help the students. I’ll just say that if it weren’t for online shopping, I’d be sunk.
The late April-early May swing is the worst, since every single end-of-the-year event happens then, as do most of the faculty retirement dinners (a few happen in December, but most faculty wait until the end of the academic year.) Still, December has quite a few holiday-themed events, concerts, performances, etc., each of which is terribly important to the people involved. Attendance by the dean is noticed, and non-attendance is noticed, too. The only excuse I’ve had for non-attendance that anyone accepted was when two events happened at the same time – even administrators are subject to those pesky laws of physics. Short of that, it’s time to see and be seen.
While most of the events are enjoyable in their own right, the sheer number can be wearing. The late Spring rush is insane; last year, I averaged four nights a week for about a month; you can imagine how that impacts on parenting time. December is less severe, but it does put a dent in attempts to do holiday shopping, as well as in parenting time.
The etiquette involved is reminiscent of the old science of Kremlinology in the 1980’s. Dress must be appropriate; you must sit in the right place, with the right people. You must be light and companionable, remembering always that anything you say can and will be used against you at any time. You must greet the organizer upon arrival and again before departure; sneaking out the back is not an option. Late arrival is verboten, since it precludes the meet-and-greet beforehand. You have to remember that while this is the third event this week and next week will be worse and you really just want to go home and play with the kids, it’s the culmination of months of work by whomever, and anything less than ebullience will be forever remembered as both a personal and professional insult. (“The administration just doesn’t care about…”) Opinions are welcome, as long as they are positive.
The next day, thank-you notes are mandatory, as are effusions of spontaneous praise in the hallway.
In many ways, this should be filed under problems-you-want-to-have. Most of the performances, dinners, etc., are quite good, and it’s terrific that so many people at the college spend so much time and energy on ways to help the students. I’ll just say that if it weren’t for online shopping, I’d be sunk.
Monday, November 29, 2004
Observation Etiquette: The Chuckles the Clown Episode
Observing a class is always at least slightly awkward. As the observer, I’m acutely aware of walking into an already-formed group and, at some level, trespassing. Some professors introduce me to the class, others pretend I’m not there; either way is fine with me. I never speak, beyond a ‘hello’ if introduced.
This semester I had a situation I’d never seen before. In three-plus years of observing classes, I’ve never before had to struggle to keep a straight face. This time, I had to, and it was close. The students were a small, tightly-knit group, obviously intelligent and clearly irreverent. The professor could fairly be described as humorless.
The class reminded me, in some ways, of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Beavis and Butthead; it consisted of a running commentary, often quite funny, by the audience/students, on the lecture/movie/video. The standard puerile elements of student humor were there – bathroom references, crude sexuality, etc. – but it was laced with a knowing self-consciousness I don’t usually see. (One student, after a particularly silly remark: “I love taking arguments to ridiculous extremes.”) Highlights included the ethics of testing new medicines on prisoners, rather than animals (“what if the guy on death row has a boyfriend?”); wordplay (Prof: “Your argument buttresses his.” Student: “Huh-huh. Buttress. Huh-huh.”); and an entirely gratuitous reference to gay penguins (“gay penguins can be used to illustrate anything!”).
The professor didn’t react to any of it, which is either to his credit or a sign of being utterly humorless. I struggled throughout the class to keep an appropriately straight face, resorting several times to covering my face while I bit my lip.
Strikingly, the students who joked the most (and the most effectively) were also the ones most in command of the material. If anything, I got the impression they kept the patter going so they wouldn’t get bored.
Thinking that much of the interaction might have been affected by my presence, I asked the prof. after class if the students were always like that. He said they were.
This was a new one. I’ve seen great classes, so-so classes, and some not-very-good classes. I’ve seen new profs with stage fright, PowerPoint that didn’t, and student comments from the sublime to the ridiculous. But this was new.
It’s hard to be a fly on the wall when your face is bright red from stifling laughter.
This semester I had a situation I’d never seen before. In three-plus years of observing classes, I’ve never before had to struggle to keep a straight face. This time, I had to, and it was close. The students were a small, tightly-knit group, obviously intelligent and clearly irreverent. The professor could fairly be described as humorless.
The class reminded me, in some ways, of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Beavis and Butthead; it consisted of a running commentary, often quite funny, by the audience/students, on the lecture/movie/video. The standard puerile elements of student humor were there – bathroom references, crude sexuality, etc. – but it was laced with a knowing self-consciousness I don’t usually see. (One student, after a particularly silly remark: “I love taking arguments to ridiculous extremes.”) Highlights included the ethics of testing new medicines on prisoners, rather than animals (“what if the guy on death row has a boyfriend?”); wordplay (Prof: “Your argument buttresses his.” Student: “Huh-huh. Buttress. Huh-huh.”); and an entirely gratuitous reference to gay penguins (“gay penguins can be used to illustrate anything!”).
The professor didn’t react to any of it, which is either to his credit or a sign of being utterly humorless. I struggled throughout the class to keep an appropriately straight face, resorting several times to covering my face while I bit my lip.
Strikingly, the students who joked the most (and the most effectively) were also the ones most in command of the material. If anything, I got the impression they kept the patter going so they wouldn’t get bored.
Thinking that much of the interaction might have been affected by my presence, I asked the prof. after class if the students were always like that. He said they were.
This was a new one. I’ve seen great classes, so-so classes, and some not-very-good classes. I’ve seen new profs with stage fright, PowerPoint that didn’t, and student comments from the sublime to the ridiculous. But this was new.
It’s hard to be a fly on the wall when your face is bright red from stifling laughter.
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
My First Hire
This morning, while working out at the campus gym, an English professor in her 50’s confided that her nickname for me is “my son, the dean.” She is still one of the younger members of her department, and she started in the 1970’s.
A quick scan of the list of faculty in my division (over 80 full-time) revealed that exactly one fits the profile of a married white guy under 50. One wonders what a diversity officer would make of that. (The conservatives who constantly gripe about ‘liberal bias’ among college faculty somehow miss this point. I don’t know why.)
A study published by the American Association of Community Colleges looking at administrative pipelines at community colleges made an interesting point: in 1986, the average age of a Chief Academic Officer (one step below a President: usually titled either Vice President for Academic Affairs or Dean of Academic Affairs) was 49. In 2000, it was 54.
The AACC has issued a series of studies bemoaning the coming leadership crunch for community colleges, pointing to the diminished pipeline that typically leads to Presidencies. Yet there has been almost no systematic effort to connect the dots between the thin administrative pipeline and the lack of full-time faculty hiring.
Today was a banner day for me; I made my first hire. This after 15 months on the job, and as I’m about to lose numbers four and five. The new hire is, himself, over 40.
What’s especially striking about the top-heaviness of academia is that it stands in such stark contrast to, oh, I don’t know, EVERY OTHER INDUSTRY IN AMERICA. In the private sector, people can rise (and fall) quickly, based on a combination of skill, politics, economic waves, and dumb luck. While it’s a brutal world in many ways, it does, at least, produce some opportunity for new people with new approaches to break in. Academia stopped trying to do that sometime in the late 1970’s, and still hasn’t even attempted to come to grips with the implications of that.
Alas. On to turkey day.
A quick scan of the list of faculty in my division (over 80 full-time) revealed that exactly one fits the profile of a married white guy under 50. One wonders what a diversity officer would make of that. (The conservatives who constantly gripe about ‘liberal bias’ among college faculty somehow miss this point. I don’t know why.)
A study published by the American Association of Community Colleges looking at administrative pipelines at community colleges made an interesting point: in 1986, the average age of a Chief Academic Officer (one step below a President: usually titled either Vice President for Academic Affairs or Dean of Academic Affairs) was 49. In 2000, it was 54.
The AACC has issued a series of studies bemoaning the coming leadership crunch for community colleges, pointing to the diminished pipeline that typically leads to Presidencies. Yet there has been almost no systematic effort to connect the dots between the thin administrative pipeline and the lack of full-time faculty hiring.
Today was a banner day for me; I made my first hire. This after 15 months on the job, and as I’m about to lose numbers four and five. The new hire is, himself, over 40.
What’s especially striking about the top-heaviness of academia is that it stands in such stark contrast to, oh, I don’t know, EVERY OTHER INDUSTRY IN AMERICA. In the private sector, people can rise (and fall) quickly, based on a combination of skill, politics, economic waves, and dumb luck. While it’s a brutal world in many ways, it does, at least, produce some opportunity for new people with new approaches to break in. Academia stopped trying to do that sometime in the late 1970’s, and still hasn’t even attempted to come to grips with the implications of that.
Alas. On to turkey day.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Thank You Emails, or, How to Get Into Heaven Sooner
This morning I received an email from a former student who had taken classes with me back in 1997-98. It was gracious and kind, thanking me for making a real difference in his life. He has found a way to make a career out of what I had taught him.
As an educator, that absolutely made my day. I’m sure it didn’t take more than a few minutes to write, but I’ll be dining out on that one for weeks.
There’s a proverb attributed to Henry Adams, to the effect that a teacher never knows where his influence ends. It’s true, but it’s easy to lose sight of that in the quotidian flow of events.
Ironically enough, given the direction many of my posts have taken, this student’s first course with me was when I was an adjunct. I got hired full-time after that, and he took a second course with me when I was on staff. My adjunct semester was very much an audition period, so I gave it everything I had. Somehow, I think that’s different from ‘perpetual adjunct’ status, which so many academics find themselves consigned to now.
I remember hearing a theory that student course evaluations should be given about three years after the conclusion of the course – see what held up over time, rather than how entertaining the course was. There’s something to that, even if it would be institutionally more-or-less impossible.
Last year I did something similar, sending a thank-you email to my 9th grade English teacher. She was incredibly demanding – I used to refer to her as the ‘Grammar Nazi’ – but I never learned more in a class than I did in hers. Remarkably, twenty years later, she was still at the same school, with the same name. 9th grade English pretty much exemplifies “Thankless Job,” so I thought she deserved thanks. It didn’t take long to do, but I felt like I had made a small payment on a life debt, and her response was sweet and touching.
Teachers’ pay is famously underwhelming, but once in a while, the benefits can be really something.
As an educator, that absolutely made my day. I’m sure it didn’t take more than a few minutes to write, but I’ll be dining out on that one for weeks.
There’s a proverb attributed to Henry Adams, to the effect that a teacher never knows where his influence ends. It’s true, but it’s easy to lose sight of that in the quotidian flow of events.
Ironically enough, given the direction many of my posts have taken, this student’s first course with me was when I was an adjunct. I got hired full-time after that, and he took a second course with me when I was on staff. My adjunct semester was very much an audition period, so I gave it everything I had. Somehow, I think that’s different from ‘perpetual adjunct’ status, which so many academics find themselves consigned to now.
I remember hearing a theory that student course evaluations should be given about three years after the conclusion of the course – see what held up over time, rather than how entertaining the course was. There’s something to that, even if it would be institutionally more-or-less impossible.
Last year I did something similar, sending a thank-you email to my 9th grade English teacher. She was incredibly demanding – I used to refer to her as the ‘Grammar Nazi’ – but I never learned more in a class than I did in hers. Remarkably, twenty years later, she was still at the same school, with the same name. 9th grade English pretty much exemplifies “Thankless Job,” so I thought she deserved thanks. It didn’t take long to do, but I felt like I had made a small payment on a life debt, and her response was sweet and touching.
Teachers’ pay is famously underwhelming, but once in a while, the benefits can be really something.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Conference Revelations
Conference travel, at this stage of my career, feels very much like a field trip did in elementary school. We’re all let out of our cages, roaming free on the bushveld, with no idea what we’ll find.
Last week I went to a mini-conference on the grant that I’m administering. It was useful in several ways, some intended, some not. Getting a night in a hotel, away from The Boy and The Girl, was a nice break; there’s still something wonderfully decadent about hotel stays. What was useful about the conference itself was discovering that many of the issues that plague my campus are, in fact, common. I was a little annoyed at the way that some people used “college” to mean four-year institution – the majority of college students in America attend two-year schools – but these things happen.
One of the things that struck me was that I was clearly the youngest manager in the room. Most looked like they were in their 50’s. There were a few people younger than me, but they were either postdocs working for managers, or office staff. The pipeline is looking thin.
A generational gap quickly emerged in the discussions, though it wasn’t really addressed as such. The 50-somethings take ‘diversity’ to mean ‘race,’ which, in turn, means ‘African-Americans.’ The office staff, the postdoc, and I took ‘diversity’ to mean sexual orientation, religion, and international students, with race and gender as secondary categories. I raised the point once, to no apparent resonance, but when a 50-something raised the same point later in the context of what an undergraduate had told him, it seemed to strike a chord. (A prophet in his own country…)
The disconnect between the generation in charge of higher education and the students in it is getting worse, only because the generation in charge isn’t reproducing itself. To a kid raised on “South Park,” what would diversity education actually mean?
I’d love to see a shift to honest questions, as opposed to pre-approved sermons. How (if at all) should we tolerate the intolerant? What does tolerance mean when it isn’t reciprocated? As student religious groups become more fundamentalist, evangelical, and/or self-confident, this is becoming a real issue. (That they draw aid and comfort from the Republican Party doesn’t help matters any.) It’s a stickier issue than just saying all races are equal, but honestly, aren’t sticky issues the ones where progress happens? I’m tired of students claiming that someone else’s free speech rights end at their own threshold of taking offense; I’ve scanned the Constitution, and I don’t see anything in it about a right to never be offended.
If we don’t get out in front of these questions, instead of repeating comfortable lessons of the 1960’s, I’m afraid we’ll just lose the attention of the young altogether. They’re already fleeing the liberal arts in droves, in favor of fields they consider more marketable. Our market niche is the pursuit of truth. Once we’ve found Truth, we’ve lost our reason to exist. If we aren’t intellectually honest in our own realm, the students are probably well-advised to go with something vocational.
One way or another, this train will leave the station. I’d just rather be on the train than under it.
Last week I went to a mini-conference on the grant that I’m administering. It was useful in several ways, some intended, some not. Getting a night in a hotel, away from The Boy and The Girl, was a nice break; there’s still something wonderfully decadent about hotel stays. What was useful about the conference itself was discovering that many of the issues that plague my campus are, in fact, common. I was a little annoyed at the way that some people used “college” to mean four-year institution – the majority of college students in America attend two-year schools – but these things happen.
One of the things that struck me was that I was clearly the youngest manager in the room. Most looked like they were in their 50’s. There were a few people younger than me, but they were either postdocs working for managers, or office staff. The pipeline is looking thin.
A generational gap quickly emerged in the discussions, though it wasn’t really addressed as such. The 50-somethings take ‘diversity’ to mean ‘race,’ which, in turn, means ‘African-Americans.’ The office staff, the postdoc, and I took ‘diversity’ to mean sexual orientation, religion, and international students, with race and gender as secondary categories. I raised the point once, to no apparent resonance, but when a 50-something raised the same point later in the context of what an undergraduate had told him, it seemed to strike a chord. (A prophet in his own country…)
The disconnect between the generation in charge of higher education and the students in it is getting worse, only because the generation in charge isn’t reproducing itself. To a kid raised on “South Park,” what would diversity education actually mean?
I’d love to see a shift to honest questions, as opposed to pre-approved sermons. How (if at all) should we tolerate the intolerant? What does tolerance mean when it isn’t reciprocated? As student religious groups become more fundamentalist, evangelical, and/or self-confident, this is becoming a real issue. (That they draw aid and comfort from the Republican Party doesn’t help matters any.) It’s a stickier issue than just saying all races are equal, but honestly, aren’t sticky issues the ones where progress happens? I’m tired of students claiming that someone else’s free speech rights end at their own threshold of taking offense; I’ve scanned the Constitution, and I don’t see anything in it about a right to never be offended.
If we don’t get out in front of these questions, instead of repeating comfortable lessons of the 1960’s, I’m afraid we’ll just lose the attention of the young altogether. They’re already fleeing the liberal arts in droves, in favor of fields they consider more marketable. Our market niche is the pursuit of truth. Once we’ve found Truth, we’ve lost our reason to exist. If we aren’t intellectually honest in our own realm, the students are probably well-advised to go with something vocational.
One way or another, this train will leave the station. I’d just rather be on the train than under it.
Monday, November 08, 2004
I'm Officially a Soccer Dad
We signed The Boy up for a soccer class on Saturdays. This past weekend was the first meeting, and I took him. It meets in a gym at the Y.
The class is mostly 4-6 year olds, all boys. The warm-ups alone were worth the price of admission – watching 4 year olds try to negotiate jumping jacks is almost painfully funny. The Boy, true to his genetic heritage, struggled mightily to get the concept. Other concepts like not using your hands or kicking the ball to your partner (“I want my own ball!”) were a bit fuzzy, too. Still, he persevered valiantly, and even enjoyed himself, and I have to admit that it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
His unique style of push-ups should be patented.
This week, I’ll have to give him some home tutoring on the whole jumping-jack concept. The Wife will probably have to shield her eyes to save the marriage. I hope the neighbors are away…
The class is mostly 4-6 year olds, all boys. The warm-ups alone were worth the price of admission – watching 4 year olds try to negotiate jumping jacks is almost painfully funny. The Boy, true to his genetic heritage, struggled mightily to get the concept. Other concepts like not using your hands or kicking the ball to your partner (“I want my own ball!”) were a bit fuzzy, too. Still, he persevered valiantly, and even enjoyed himself, and I have to admit that it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
His unique style of push-ups should be patented.
This week, I’ll have to give him some home tutoring on the whole jumping-jack concept. The Wife will probably have to shield her eyes to save the marriage. I hope the neighbors are away…
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
The Downside of Working in Higher Education
I’m not giving away any secrets when I say that many college students are in their late teens or early twenties. What you forget, as you get older, is just what the world looks like at that age.
I did (yet another) class observation today. The professor referred to the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996; from the student reactions, she could just have well have been talking about Cromwellian England. I was a little surprised until I did the math – 8 years ago, they were 10 or 11 years old. One male student, towards the back (I was almost directly behind him), spent most of the period text messaging on his cell phone. Having the dean behind him didn’t slow him in the slightest.
I don’t think of myself as old, but the students certainly do. (Remember how old 30 seemed at 18? Me neither.) Simply having conscious memory of major world events before the year 2000 makes me old to them.
On the way to my office this afternoon, I passed a male student in a blue oxford shirt, khakis, and bright red sneakers. There was an age at which I would have worn the same thing. You forget.
I envy them their forgiving metabolisms and their thick heads of hair, but not much else. In Plato’s Republic, Cephalus, a successful older man, tells his young charges that aging is actually liberating: the animal instincts subside somewhat, leaving you free to think before you act. I’m beginning to see the wisdom of that. As a professor, I could be leading a discussion on something I consider insanely interesting, and I’d wager that half of the male students of traditional age are spending the bulk of the period thinking about girls. You just forget. (This also explains the quality of some of their papers.)
Alas.
Working around so many young people can be great, of course. But sometimes it just makes you feel old.
I did (yet another) class observation today. The professor referred to the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996; from the student reactions, she could just have well have been talking about Cromwellian England. I was a little surprised until I did the math – 8 years ago, they were 10 or 11 years old. One male student, towards the back (I was almost directly behind him), spent most of the period text messaging on his cell phone. Having the dean behind him didn’t slow him in the slightest.
I don’t think of myself as old, but the students certainly do. (Remember how old 30 seemed at 18? Me neither.) Simply having conscious memory of major world events before the year 2000 makes me old to them.
On the way to my office this afternoon, I passed a male student in a blue oxford shirt, khakis, and bright red sneakers. There was an age at which I would have worn the same thing. You forget.
I envy them their forgiving metabolisms and their thick heads of hair, but not much else. In Plato’s Republic, Cephalus, a successful older man, tells his young charges that aging is actually liberating: the animal instincts subside somewhat, leaving you free to think before you act. I’m beginning to see the wisdom of that. As a professor, I could be leading a discussion on something I consider insanely interesting, and I’d wager that half of the male students of traditional age are spending the bulk of the period thinking about girls. You just forget. (This also explains the quality of some of their papers.)
Alas.
Working around so many young people can be great, of course. But sometimes it just makes you feel old.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Dilbert Budgeting
If Scott Adams hasn’t won the Pulitzer yet, he should.
The budget director for academics recently informed me that we’re heading for trouble, because several departments are on pace to exceed their annual budget line for adjunct instructors. We’re spending too much on adjuncts. When I calmly replied that that’s because we haven’t replaced any full-timers in over a year, so of course the adjunct line would go up, he informed me that those are two separate budget lines.
(Insert forehead-slap here.)
Currency beats the barter system because currency is fungible. Whoever invented the concept of budget lines didn’t quite grasp this.
We can’t replace full-timers who leave, because adjuncts are cheaper. But we can’t increase our total allotment for adjuncts. We are, literally, trying to replace something with nothing. This, while trying to increase enrollment, presumably by offering students more options.
Basic arithmetic suggests that we’re at cross-purposes.
Dilbert Budgeting (hereafter DB) takes as a premise that no two budget lines are related in any way. Therefore, according to DB, cuts in one should have no impact on any other. If we reduce the number of full-timers, but we don’t reduce the number of classes, DB suggests that we should be shocked to find that we’re spending more on temps.
DB operates at many levels. Over time, DB actually rewards profligacy, since one of the tenets of DB is “use it or lose it.” Savvy department chairs figure this out, and find ways to blow through whatever they’re allocated, whether they really need to or not, because they know that a real need will come along eventually and previous frugality will be held against them. In the meantime, they build secret stashes of blue books, copier paper, etc., to make sure they hit the golden zero at the end of the budget year.
(In an earlier blog entry, I explored the implications of ‘use it or lose it’ on faculty hiring. Simply put, a department that believes that it will lose a line if it denies someone tenure will avoid hiring anybody ‘risky’ – anybody doing anything new, taking a different approach, etc. Short-term rationality, long-term devastation to the academic mission.)
DB completely overlooks the concept of incentives. For example, it’s common for academic managers to support new initiatives by faculty (say, running the student newspaper) with ‘release time,’ which is a reduction in courseload. The idea is that running the newspaper takes a significant amount of time, so the only way to keep the professor’s workload reasonable is to drop a class. In practice, the cost to the institution is the cost of the adjunct who has to be hired to cover the class dropped by the full-timer.
DB sets ‘release time’ as a separate budget line, and cuts it every time the budget gets sticky (which is, more or less, always). Over time, the star performers (the full-timers who actually take initiative) are punished for their leadership by having the course reductions go away while keeping the extra tasks, while the cynical, punch-the-clock types are confirmed in their ‘wisdom’ of doing the absolute minimum to not get fired.
The tenure system raises the stakes of DB exponentially. Low performers with tenure are a chronic nightmare. DB, because it fails to understand incentives, relies on a strategy of ‘working around’ the low performers. Like Dr. Seuss’ north-going Zax and south-going Zax, low performers quickly learn that by just standing their ground indignantly, they can make everyone else do more work to compensate. The high performers are effectively punished, since their extra labor is usually uncompensated (or, to the extent that it is compensated, the compensation is cut, over time), and the fence-sitters figure out pretty quickly on which side they’d rather sit. Since the low performers are tenured, and indignant people with job security can cause no end of headaches, the temptation to simply indulge them is real.
Alternatives are easy on the micro scale, but hellishly difficult on the macro scale. Since our subsidies are increased (when at all) by fixed (and small) increments, there’s a temptation to suspend all ‘special pleading’ from various departments and simply implement ‘across-the-board’ freezes, or increases, or cuts. It’s easier than thinking, and it looks, from a distance, like fairness. The problem is that it fixes existing unfairnesses in place, more or less permanently.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed had a piece a year or two ago about a regional university in what I think was Tennessee, where the budget director suspended the ‘use it or lose it’ rule and allowed departments to carry over unused surpluses from one year to the next. Overall spending went down, which makes sense – with the incentive to waste suspended, department chairs put the kibosh on their local boondoggles. A move like that requires a certain leap of faith in the departments, and, over time, a leap of faith in the legislature that it won’t simply regard unused funds as excuses to cut appropriations. If each side holds up its end of the bargain, the result should be more bang for the buck. The test will be to see what happens after a few years, if external funding tightens. Those sitting surpluses could make awfully tempting DB targets…
The budget director for academics recently informed me that we’re heading for trouble, because several departments are on pace to exceed their annual budget line for adjunct instructors. We’re spending too much on adjuncts. When I calmly replied that that’s because we haven’t replaced any full-timers in over a year, so of course the adjunct line would go up, he informed me that those are two separate budget lines.
(Insert forehead-slap here.)
Currency beats the barter system because currency is fungible. Whoever invented the concept of budget lines didn’t quite grasp this.
We can’t replace full-timers who leave, because adjuncts are cheaper. But we can’t increase our total allotment for adjuncts. We are, literally, trying to replace something with nothing. This, while trying to increase enrollment, presumably by offering students more options.
Basic arithmetic suggests that we’re at cross-purposes.
Dilbert Budgeting (hereafter DB) takes as a premise that no two budget lines are related in any way. Therefore, according to DB, cuts in one should have no impact on any other. If we reduce the number of full-timers, but we don’t reduce the number of classes, DB suggests that we should be shocked to find that we’re spending more on temps.
DB operates at many levels. Over time, DB actually rewards profligacy, since one of the tenets of DB is “use it or lose it.” Savvy department chairs figure this out, and find ways to blow through whatever they’re allocated, whether they really need to or not, because they know that a real need will come along eventually and previous frugality will be held against them. In the meantime, they build secret stashes of blue books, copier paper, etc., to make sure they hit the golden zero at the end of the budget year.
(In an earlier blog entry, I explored the implications of ‘use it or lose it’ on faculty hiring. Simply put, a department that believes that it will lose a line if it denies someone tenure will avoid hiring anybody ‘risky’ – anybody doing anything new, taking a different approach, etc. Short-term rationality, long-term devastation to the academic mission.)
DB completely overlooks the concept of incentives. For example, it’s common for academic managers to support new initiatives by faculty (say, running the student newspaper) with ‘release time,’ which is a reduction in courseload. The idea is that running the newspaper takes a significant amount of time, so the only way to keep the professor’s workload reasonable is to drop a class. In practice, the cost to the institution is the cost of the adjunct who has to be hired to cover the class dropped by the full-timer.
DB sets ‘release time’ as a separate budget line, and cuts it every time the budget gets sticky (which is, more or less, always). Over time, the star performers (the full-timers who actually take initiative) are punished for their leadership by having the course reductions go away while keeping the extra tasks, while the cynical, punch-the-clock types are confirmed in their ‘wisdom’ of doing the absolute minimum to not get fired.
The tenure system raises the stakes of DB exponentially. Low performers with tenure are a chronic nightmare. DB, because it fails to understand incentives, relies on a strategy of ‘working around’ the low performers. Like Dr. Seuss’ north-going Zax and south-going Zax, low performers quickly learn that by just standing their ground indignantly, they can make everyone else do more work to compensate. The high performers are effectively punished, since their extra labor is usually uncompensated (or, to the extent that it is compensated, the compensation is cut, over time), and the fence-sitters figure out pretty quickly on which side they’d rather sit. Since the low performers are tenured, and indignant people with job security can cause no end of headaches, the temptation to simply indulge them is real.
Alternatives are easy on the micro scale, but hellishly difficult on the macro scale. Since our subsidies are increased (when at all) by fixed (and small) increments, there’s a temptation to suspend all ‘special pleading’ from various departments and simply implement ‘across-the-board’ freezes, or increases, or cuts. It’s easier than thinking, and it looks, from a distance, like fairness. The problem is that it fixes existing unfairnesses in place, more or less permanently.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed had a piece a year or two ago about a regional university in what I think was Tennessee, where the budget director suspended the ‘use it or lose it’ rule and allowed departments to carry over unused surpluses from one year to the next. Overall spending went down, which makes sense – with the incentive to waste suspended, department chairs put the kibosh on their local boondoggles. A move like that requires a certain leap of faith in the departments, and, over time, a leap of faith in the legislature that it won’t simply regard unused funds as excuses to cut appropriations. If each side holds up its end of the bargain, the result should be more bang for the buck. The test will be to see what happens after a few years, if external funding tightens. Those sitting surpluses could make awfully tempting DB targets…
Monday, October 11, 2004
Retention, Part 73
As a public institution, much of our budget depends either directly (tuition) or indirectly (state aid) on enrollment. When enrollment goes up faster than inflation, we have more resources; when enrollment is flat or down, we have less.
Enrollment is pretty much a function of two things: admissions (new students) and retention (keeping current students around until they graduate). Dropouts are a real problem, ethically, financially, and educationally. Like most community colleges, we have a high dropout rate. Some of that is simply the nature of the beast; I’m not bothered by students who attend four-year schools out of state who come home for the summer and take a course or two here to get a jump on their B.A., or ‘non-matriculated’ students (those who aren’t pursuing a degree) who just take a course or two out of pure interest. They count as ‘attrition’ when they leave, but they always intended to leave, so I don’t see that as failure.
Some students take a year here, then transfer to a four-year school for their sophomore year, rather than finishing the associate’s first. It’s irksome, but I can’t really blame them; if they just wanted to compensate for a sketchy high school record, and they really wanted to be elsewhere, that’s just the way the cookie bounces.
Still, a major chunk of attrition is students who wanted to stick around, but couldn’t. Some of them just don’t have the academic wherewithal for college work. Again, these don’t bother me much as a dean (though they’re incredibly irksome as a teacher), because they didn’t really belong here in the first place. The troubling ones are the ones who leave for financial reasons, or personal reasons, or because they just never connected emotionally with either the institution or the goal of graduation.
Some of those personal reasons are beyond anything we can influence: drug or alcohol issues, family crises (you wouldn’t believe some of the family crises!), mental illness, etc. As an open-admission institution, we take all comers, including those with high-drama personal lives. Financial issues are tricky. I used to have a student worker in my office (she graduated) who was constantly struggling to make ends meet; I was sympathetic, until the day she complained that she didn’t have money for lunch because the tanning salon raised its rates again. The tanning salon!
You can lead a horse to water…
From what studies have shown, students who get involved in campus organizations (whether teams, or clubs, or the radio station, or whatever) stick around at much higher rates than those who don’t. I don’t know to what degree this reflects self-selection, but it at least suggests an institutional strategy to improve graduation rates. At a commuter school with students who have jobs, though, there are natural logistical limits to how much club activity there will be. If we had dorms, it would be a different ballgame, but we don’t, and we won’t.
The upshot of all this is that retention is devilishly hard to influence in a sustainable way. So much of it has to do with the ambitions the students brought with them, the level of academic preparedness they bring with them from high school (again, you wouldn’t believe…), their family circumstances, and so on. We can try to minimize some of the bureaucratic inconveniences students face, and we can sponsor clubs and organizations, but most of the low-hanging fruit has long since been picked.
Republicans in Congress have recently sponsored several bills to rank colleges based on their graduation rates. I don’t know where they went to school, but nobody who has ever seen an open-admissions institution would ever make that mistake. If we wanted to increase our graduation rates, the first thing we could do is to ban part-time students. That would eliminate the drop-ins who just take a course or two over the summer. We could also become much more selective; if we screen out the low-achieving students at the door, imagine what it would do for our graduation rates! These moves would completely eviscerate our mission and our usefulness to the community, of course, which means that raw graduation is a rotten metric, but Republicans will be Republicans.
On campus, we’ve been debating the merits of requiring a study skills class for students who show need for remediation in both English and math. It looks good on paper – if they students are ‘double developmental,’ it’s a pretty safe bet that they aren’t very good at studying – but it’s remarkably hard to sell to students. They don’t want to take anything that “doesn’t count,” and they’re often remarkably focused on getting out as quickly as humanly possible. You’d think that a ‘double developmental’ student would welcome the opportunity to improve her study skills, and a few do, but some odd combination of pride, overestimation of ability, and short-term cost considerations leads most to get very snarly about it.
We’ve also started a program in which faculty reach out personally to ‘double developmental’ students during their first semester, to try to establish some sort of connection. Anecdotally, these students don’t return calls.
I think the root of the problem is the loss of decent jobs that don’t require a college degree. Not all that long ago, a kid who just wasn’t the college type had plenty of other options that could lead to a decent life. That’s not as true as it used to be, and the ubiquity of college-degreed folk out there has ratcheted-up hiring requirements even in jobs where it’s not clear that a degree should be relevant, so now the kid who hated every minute of high school comes here (or is dragged, via his nose ring, by his parents) by default, and performs accordingly. Factories aren’t hiring, retail pays squat, and joining the military isn’t as safe as it used to be (again, Republicans will be Republicans).
Making college as ubiquitous as high school runs the risk of turning college into high school. I’m all for second chances – educators, as a species, usually are – but the kid has to want the second chance. Some do, and they make good on it, and those students are why we’re here. I’m just tired of being punished for the rest.
Enrollment is pretty much a function of two things: admissions (new students) and retention (keeping current students around until they graduate). Dropouts are a real problem, ethically, financially, and educationally. Like most community colleges, we have a high dropout rate. Some of that is simply the nature of the beast; I’m not bothered by students who attend four-year schools out of state who come home for the summer and take a course or two here to get a jump on their B.A., or ‘non-matriculated’ students (those who aren’t pursuing a degree) who just take a course or two out of pure interest. They count as ‘attrition’ when they leave, but they always intended to leave, so I don’t see that as failure.
Some students take a year here, then transfer to a four-year school for their sophomore year, rather than finishing the associate’s first. It’s irksome, but I can’t really blame them; if they just wanted to compensate for a sketchy high school record, and they really wanted to be elsewhere, that’s just the way the cookie bounces.
Still, a major chunk of attrition is students who wanted to stick around, but couldn’t. Some of them just don’t have the academic wherewithal for college work. Again, these don’t bother me much as a dean (though they’re incredibly irksome as a teacher), because they didn’t really belong here in the first place. The troubling ones are the ones who leave for financial reasons, or personal reasons, or because they just never connected emotionally with either the institution or the goal of graduation.
Some of those personal reasons are beyond anything we can influence: drug or alcohol issues, family crises (you wouldn’t believe some of the family crises!), mental illness, etc. As an open-admission institution, we take all comers, including those with high-drama personal lives. Financial issues are tricky. I used to have a student worker in my office (she graduated) who was constantly struggling to make ends meet; I was sympathetic, until the day she complained that she didn’t have money for lunch because the tanning salon raised its rates again. The tanning salon!
You can lead a horse to water…
From what studies have shown, students who get involved in campus organizations (whether teams, or clubs, or the radio station, or whatever) stick around at much higher rates than those who don’t. I don’t know to what degree this reflects self-selection, but it at least suggests an institutional strategy to improve graduation rates. At a commuter school with students who have jobs, though, there are natural logistical limits to how much club activity there will be. If we had dorms, it would be a different ballgame, but we don’t, and we won’t.
The upshot of all this is that retention is devilishly hard to influence in a sustainable way. So much of it has to do with the ambitions the students brought with them, the level of academic preparedness they bring with them from high school (again, you wouldn’t believe…), their family circumstances, and so on. We can try to minimize some of the bureaucratic inconveniences students face, and we can sponsor clubs and organizations, but most of the low-hanging fruit has long since been picked.
Republicans in Congress have recently sponsored several bills to rank colleges based on their graduation rates. I don’t know where they went to school, but nobody who has ever seen an open-admissions institution would ever make that mistake. If we wanted to increase our graduation rates, the first thing we could do is to ban part-time students. That would eliminate the drop-ins who just take a course or two over the summer. We could also become much more selective; if we screen out the low-achieving students at the door, imagine what it would do for our graduation rates! These moves would completely eviscerate our mission and our usefulness to the community, of course, which means that raw graduation is a rotten metric, but Republicans will be Republicans.
On campus, we’ve been debating the merits of requiring a study skills class for students who show need for remediation in both English and math. It looks good on paper – if they students are ‘double developmental,’ it’s a pretty safe bet that they aren’t very good at studying – but it’s remarkably hard to sell to students. They don’t want to take anything that “doesn’t count,” and they’re often remarkably focused on getting out as quickly as humanly possible. You’d think that a ‘double developmental’ student would welcome the opportunity to improve her study skills, and a few do, but some odd combination of pride, overestimation of ability, and short-term cost considerations leads most to get very snarly about it.
We’ve also started a program in which faculty reach out personally to ‘double developmental’ students during their first semester, to try to establish some sort of connection. Anecdotally, these students don’t return calls.
I think the root of the problem is the loss of decent jobs that don’t require a college degree. Not all that long ago, a kid who just wasn’t the college type had plenty of other options that could lead to a decent life. That’s not as true as it used to be, and the ubiquity of college-degreed folk out there has ratcheted-up hiring requirements even in jobs where it’s not clear that a degree should be relevant, so now the kid who hated every minute of high school comes here (or is dragged, via his nose ring, by his parents) by default, and performs accordingly. Factories aren’t hiring, retail pays squat, and joining the military isn’t as safe as it used to be (again, Republicans will be Republicans).
Making college as ubiquitous as high school runs the risk of turning college into high school. I’m all for second chances – educators, as a species, usually are – but the kid has to want the second chance. Some do, and they make good on it, and those students are why we’re here. I’m just tired of being punished for the rest.
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Software, Prescriptions, and Higher Ed
One of the joys of budgeting for an academic division is trying to accommodate the software requests from the various departments within the same operating budgets as the several years before. Few of the requests I get are frivolous – it’s not shocking that the photography program wants Photoshop, or that journalism wants Quark, or that music wants ProTools – it’s just that they’re hellaciously expensive, and they don’t save us anything.
In private industry, technology pays for itself or better (if you’re using it right) by increasing productivity (reducing unit labor costs). If computers reduce the need for secretaries, then $400 for the Microsoft Office package is a good deal. A company can buy the software it thinks will help, and ignore the rest.
In education, though, software is pure cost. Updating Photoshop doesn’t save me any money. All it does is keep us current with potential employers of our graduates, who now want students who are fluent in both film and digital (meaning that I get to keep paying for the infrastructure for both). Adobe can charge us pretty much whatever it wants, and I just have to find the money to pay them. Meanwhile, my operating budget remains flat (since our govt. support remains flat), so every new purchase or increase means something else gets cut (usually, replacing f-t faculty with adjuncts.)
It’s incredibly frustrating. Copyright law, which the software companies use as a cudgel, was never intended to hamper education. There’s a doctrine in copyright law called fair use, which allows for limited non-profit educational and scholarly use of copyrighted material without a fee. (The classic example is quoting a sentence or two from a book in a book review. You can do that without asking or paying.) The idea was to foster a healthy exchange of ideas, which can only happen when ideas are allowed to escape the confines of intellectual property. Fair use has limits – as soon as you cross into for-profit territory, the whole doctrine collapses – but that’s okay. The idea is to balance the need to reward creators for their work with the need for an educated public.
For reasons that escape me, there’s no fair use doctrine for software. Non-profits don’t get any special treatment, except at the discretion of individual vendors. What that means is that I can’t afford to keep up with the technology as much as I’d like, and to the extent that I try, it comes at the expense of other things (like, say, faculty).
Politicians love to make hay by attacking tuition increases, but what else are we supposed to do? The public sector has utterly failed to even try to maintain its historic levels of support, and our non-optional costs keep going up. I think it’s similar to the situation in the medical field with prescription drugs. I can’t choose to ignore the internet revolution without dire consequences for my programs, any more than a psychologist can afford to pretend that anti-depressants never happened. Since we allow drug companies to charge whatever they want for purchases that – let’s face it – aren’t optional in any meaningful way, they do. That drives health insurance costs up (and gives us yet another incentive to go all-adjunct, all the time). If I’m running a photography program, I can’t pretend that the digital revolution didn’t happen. (Kodak tried, and it’s bleeding badly.) I just have to eat the costs, continually raiding other parts of my (overall static) budget to pay for it. We pass on a limited portion of the increase as tuition, to the scornful howls of all and sundry, and we split the rest between a gradual erosion of purchasing and a gradual erosion of faculty. The only winners are the software companies, who have us over a barrel, and know it.
Why there’s no non-profit fair use doctrine for software is utterly beyond me. There’s an unimpeachable argument for it – by making sure the next generation is technically savvy, we’re creating future customers – but it just hasn’t happened. (The internet wouldn’t even exist if it hadn’t been nurtured in the non-profit defense and higher education sectors!) Meanwhile, my division’s software requests exceed my annual budget line for software by a factor of ten, and some departments’ requests aren’t even in yet.
Back in the day, our budgets had to cover classrooms and faculty. Now, they also have to cover computers, software, tech support, etc., but our marginal increases over the years have simply not kept up. (In truth, just about the entire tuition increase each year gets swallowed up by health insurance. Our operating budgets have been flat or declining for years.) The software part, at least, should be an easy fix, if we could just get the law right. Until then, we’ll just keep hollowing ourselves out.
In private industry, technology pays for itself or better (if you’re using it right) by increasing productivity (reducing unit labor costs). If computers reduce the need for secretaries, then $400 for the Microsoft Office package is a good deal. A company can buy the software it thinks will help, and ignore the rest.
In education, though, software is pure cost. Updating Photoshop doesn’t save me any money. All it does is keep us current with potential employers of our graduates, who now want students who are fluent in both film and digital (meaning that I get to keep paying for the infrastructure for both). Adobe can charge us pretty much whatever it wants, and I just have to find the money to pay them. Meanwhile, my operating budget remains flat (since our govt. support remains flat), so every new purchase or increase means something else gets cut (usually, replacing f-t faculty with adjuncts.)
It’s incredibly frustrating. Copyright law, which the software companies use as a cudgel, was never intended to hamper education. There’s a doctrine in copyright law called fair use, which allows for limited non-profit educational and scholarly use of copyrighted material without a fee. (The classic example is quoting a sentence or two from a book in a book review. You can do that without asking or paying.) The idea was to foster a healthy exchange of ideas, which can only happen when ideas are allowed to escape the confines of intellectual property. Fair use has limits – as soon as you cross into for-profit territory, the whole doctrine collapses – but that’s okay. The idea is to balance the need to reward creators for their work with the need for an educated public.
For reasons that escape me, there’s no fair use doctrine for software. Non-profits don’t get any special treatment, except at the discretion of individual vendors. What that means is that I can’t afford to keep up with the technology as much as I’d like, and to the extent that I try, it comes at the expense of other things (like, say, faculty).
Politicians love to make hay by attacking tuition increases, but what else are we supposed to do? The public sector has utterly failed to even try to maintain its historic levels of support, and our non-optional costs keep going up. I think it’s similar to the situation in the medical field with prescription drugs. I can’t choose to ignore the internet revolution without dire consequences for my programs, any more than a psychologist can afford to pretend that anti-depressants never happened. Since we allow drug companies to charge whatever they want for purchases that – let’s face it – aren’t optional in any meaningful way, they do. That drives health insurance costs up (and gives us yet another incentive to go all-adjunct, all the time). If I’m running a photography program, I can’t pretend that the digital revolution didn’t happen. (Kodak tried, and it’s bleeding badly.) I just have to eat the costs, continually raiding other parts of my (overall static) budget to pay for it. We pass on a limited portion of the increase as tuition, to the scornful howls of all and sundry, and we split the rest between a gradual erosion of purchasing and a gradual erosion of faculty. The only winners are the software companies, who have us over a barrel, and know it.
Why there’s no non-profit fair use doctrine for software is utterly beyond me. There’s an unimpeachable argument for it – by making sure the next generation is technically savvy, we’re creating future customers – but it just hasn’t happened. (The internet wouldn’t even exist if it hadn’t been nurtured in the non-profit defense and higher education sectors!) Meanwhile, my division’s software requests exceed my annual budget line for software by a factor of ten, and some departments’ requests aren’t even in yet.
Back in the day, our budgets had to cover classrooms and faculty. Now, they also have to cover computers, software, tech support, etc., but our marginal increases over the years have simply not kept up. (In truth, just about the entire tuition increase each year gets swallowed up by health insurance. Our operating budgets have been flat or declining for years.) The software part, at least, should be an easy fix, if we could just get the law right. Until then, we’ll just keep hollowing ourselves out.
Friday, October 01, 2004
Philanthropy, Part II
Watching the "analysis" of last night's debate, I was again struck by how much craftier the Right is than the Left when it comes to philanthropy. As David Brock pointed out in his confession/expose "Blinded by the Right," it's simply easier to make a living as a conservative "analyst" than as a liberal one. Why? Because conservative philanthropists understand what they're investing in, and liberal philanthropists don't.
Liberal philanthropists want to give money once, see it used up, and see what they created outlive their actual support for it. Seed money. Sort of a deadbeat dad model, writ large. Create, then leave.
Conservative philanthropists understand that while the check might be made out to a particular "think tank," the think tank is a tool, not a goal. The goal is political power. They underwrite the ongoing operations of right-wing think tanks for decades on end, because they aren't the least bit concerned about creating dependency. They want power, and they understand that when you're in the business of politics, a certain amount of philanthropy is simply a cost of doing business. They get it.
That means that conservative think tanks don't have to spend all their time figuring out how to survive. They pay well, they move quickly, and they shift the terms of public debate. The liberal side is too busy staging fundraisers and churning out dreary social science to really hit back, so the center keeps moving farther and farther right.
Sadly, most higher ed philanthropists follow the 'seed money' model, with predictable consequences. If we had the same kind of philanthropy that, say, Richard Mellon Scaife provides for no end of conservative talking heads, we could stop chasing grants so much, and actually focus on the business at hand. Maybe we could even hire faculty!
Never underestimate the power of opposition research...
Liberal philanthropists want to give money once, see it used up, and see what they created outlive their actual support for it. Seed money. Sort of a deadbeat dad model, writ large. Create, then leave.
Conservative philanthropists understand that while the check might be made out to a particular "think tank," the think tank is a tool, not a goal. The goal is political power. They underwrite the ongoing operations of right-wing think tanks for decades on end, because they aren't the least bit concerned about creating dependency. They want power, and they understand that when you're in the business of politics, a certain amount of philanthropy is simply a cost of doing business. They get it.
That means that conservative think tanks don't have to spend all their time figuring out how to survive. They pay well, they move quickly, and they shift the terms of public debate. The liberal side is too busy staging fundraisers and churning out dreary social science to really hit back, so the center keeps moving farther and farther right.
Sadly, most higher ed philanthropists follow the 'seed money' model, with predictable consequences. If we had the same kind of philanthropy that, say, Richard Mellon Scaife provides for no end of conservative talking heads, we could stop chasing grants so much, and actually focus on the business at hand. Maybe we could even hire faculty!
Never underestimate the power of opposition research...
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Philanthropy and "Seed Money"
My college is a public institution, so it enjoys the blessings of public subsidies and the curses of government rules and procedures.
Like all public agencies, it’s chronically underfunded, since econ 101 teaches us that anything ‘underpriced’ (i.e. subsidized) will be overused. Since our mission is to provide access to students who might not otherwise have access to higher education, we have to shoulder a wide range of programs while keeping costs as low as possible, without sacrificing too much quality. To call it a balancing act would be generous.
As a chronically-underfunded institution, we are drawn like moths to philanthropic donations. One of the hats I’m wearing now is co-chair of one of the larger grants we’re using.
Between the vagaries of government funding and the vagaries of donor taste, I’m beginning to realize that there’s a giant hole in the funding schemes that support us.
In a nutshell, we have two main budgets: capital (fixed assets – buildings, computers, etc.) and operating (salaries, office supplies, etc.). The government likes to fund buildings and, to a lesser extent, computers. You know, Things. Governors, state senators, and the like love to stand in front of buildings at ribbon-cutting ceremonies. They don’t want any part of paying the people who work in those buildings.
Donors come in three flavors: those who like buildings, those who like scholarships, and those who like events. The ones who like buildings, (who I think are more common at the research-university level) like to be immortalized in brick. The ones who like scholarships at least understand the importance of sustaining funding over time, even if the criteria they select are often maddeningly arbitrary (must be flute majors of Irish ancestry, from one of the following boros…). The ones who like events see themselves as entrepreneurs of ideas, distributing seed money and walking away, always keen that whatever they started with their money is sustained later with ours.
None of these comes without severe issues for the college. The ones who like buildings tend to prefer cutting-edge, sexy buildings, which may or may not be what is needed at the time. (I’ve never heard of the Big Muckety-Muck Memorial Snowplow Shed.) The ones who like scholarships undoubtedly accomplish some good for some students, but most of those students would have come here otherwise anyway, so from an institutional perspective, they’re largely a wash. The ones who like events, such as the one I’m dealing with now, may actually do some long-term harm.
The problem with Events is that they require the time and effort of full-time staff to pull off, they establish expectations and precedents, and then they go away. There’s a special circle of hell reserved for whoever coined the term ‘seed money.’ Events donors like the idea of starting something, but hate the idea of sustaining it. They want whatever they helped create to outlast their donation, which means that, once the initial grant expires, it becomes yet another drag on operating expenses.
That’s not to say that many of the events lack merit; obviously, some of them are quite wonderful. That’s not the point. The point is that over time, operating budgets become laden with the overhang of long-ago funded projects, at the expense of our core operations. We can build new student centers, buy computers by the gross, and stage a never-ending series of Events celebrating All Fashionable Good Things, but we can’t hire faculty or buy toner cartridges. (Maybe we need to develop the Muckety-Muck Memorial Toner Cartridge.)
Politically, this is understandable. Donors like to see ‘results,’ which means, roughly, enduring commitments to continue to hollow out our core to gratify their tastes. Politicians like Big Ticket Items that look good on camera and sound good in speeches; saying “I made possible the hiring of three new history professors” just doesn’t have the oomph of cutting the ribbon at the new computer center. Different levels of government also sometimes make “matching funds” available for construction – I’ve never heard of matching an increase in operations.
Even if, somehow, some exceedingly insightful and generous donor were to set aside an endowment to fund continued operations, the legislature would simply reduce its contribution accordingly. We can’t win for losing.
Educationally, this is a disaster. Whatever else we do, at the core is the interaction of student and professor. That’s the one thing I can’t get money for.
Like all public agencies, it’s chronically underfunded, since econ 101 teaches us that anything ‘underpriced’ (i.e. subsidized) will be overused. Since our mission is to provide access to students who might not otherwise have access to higher education, we have to shoulder a wide range of programs while keeping costs as low as possible, without sacrificing too much quality. To call it a balancing act would be generous.
As a chronically-underfunded institution, we are drawn like moths to philanthropic donations. One of the hats I’m wearing now is co-chair of one of the larger grants we’re using.
Between the vagaries of government funding and the vagaries of donor taste, I’m beginning to realize that there’s a giant hole in the funding schemes that support us.
In a nutshell, we have two main budgets: capital (fixed assets – buildings, computers, etc.) and operating (salaries, office supplies, etc.). The government likes to fund buildings and, to a lesser extent, computers. You know, Things. Governors, state senators, and the like love to stand in front of buildings at ribbon-cutting ceremonies. They don’t want any part of paying the people who work in those buildings.
Donors come in three flavors: those who like buildings, those who like scholarships, and those who like events. The ones who like buildings, (who I think are more common at the research-university level) like to be immortalized in brick. The ones who like scholarships at least understand the importance of sustaining funding over time, even if the criteria they select are often maddeningly arbitrary (must be flute majors of Irish ancestry, from one of the following boros…). The ones who like events see themselves as entrepreneurs of ideas, distributing seed money and walking away, always keen that whatever they started with their money is sustained later with ours.
None of these comes without severe issues for the college. The ones who like buildings tend to prefer cutting-edge, sexy buildings, which may or may not be what is needed at the time. (I’ve never heard of the Big Muckety-Muck Memorial Snowplow Shed.) The ones who like scholarships undoubtedly accomplish some good for some students, but most of those students would have come here otherwise anyway, so from an institutional perspective, they’re largely a wash. The ones who like events, such as the one I’m dealing with now, may actually do some long-term harm.
The problem with Events is that they require the time and effort of full-time staff to pull off, they establish expectations and precedents, and then they go away. There’s a special circle of hell reserved for whoever coined the term ‘seed money.’ Events donors like the idea of starting something, but hate the idea of sustaining it. They want whatever they helped create to outlast their donation, which means that, once the initial grant expires, it becomes yet another drag on operating expenses.
That’s not to say that many of the events lack merit; obviously, some of them are quite wonderful. That’s not the point. The point is that over time, operating budgets become laden with the overhang of long-ago funded projects, at the expense of our core operations. We can build new student centers, buy computers by the gross, and stage a never-ending series of Events celebrating All Fashionable Good Things, but we can’t hire faculty or buy toner cartridges. (Maybe we need to develop the Muckety-Muck Memorial Toner Cartridge.)
Politically, this is understandable. Donors like to see ‘results,’ which means, roughly, enduring commitments to continue to hollow out our core to gratify their tastes. Politicians like Big Ticket Items that look good on camera and sound good in speeches; saying “I made possible the hiring of three new history professors” just doesn’t have the oomph of cutting the ribbon at the new computer center. Different levels of government also sometimes make “matching funds” available for construction – I’ve never heard of matching an increase in operations.
Even if, somehow, some exceedingly insightful and generous donor were to set aside an endowment to fund continued operations, the legislature would simply reduce its contribution accordingly. We can’t win for losing.
Educationally, this is a disaster. Whatever else we do, at the core is the interaction of student and professor. That’s the one thing I can’t get money for.
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Class Observations
One aspect of my job involves doing observations of classes taught by full-time faculty. As a teacher myself, it still feels somehow indecent, voyeuristic. Sure, there’s nothing ‘private’ about getting up in front of 30 students, but it’s hard not to feel a little out-of-place judging other teachers when I know I’m a flawed teacher myself.
Some instructors videotape themselves in the classroom, then watch the tapes later as a form of self-critique. I think I’d rather be doused with honey and tied to an anthill. It took several years of teaching to get past a paralyzing self-consciousness; my not watching tapes of myself is sort of like an alcoholic not drinking. I’m much too prone to self-consciousness as it is; seeing myself on tape would take it to a whole new level. Maybe some people can get away with it, but I suspect no good would come from it.
I try to be the kind of observer I’d want to have – big picture, forgiving of small quirks, couching criticism (when it exists) as suggestions for improvement – and I’ve been lucky in my own teaching that those are the observers I’ve had. Still, it’s not hard to understand why teachers recoil in horror from the idea of ‘merit’-based pay. Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it,” which is pretty close to my notion of good teaching. I can define elements of it (subject matter knowledge, organization, projection, addressing multiple learning styles, exemplifying critical thinking, not being unspeakably boring, etc.), but there have been cases where I could check off every box on my mental list, but somehow the class didn’t work. (The converse is also true – the instructor made some basic technical mistakes, but it worked anyway.) There’s just too much art involved. An observer more attuned to the checklist than to the art is every teacher’s nightmare.
That’s probably part of what is behind the movement for ‘outcomes assessment’ – since it can be so difficult to measure inputs, let’s measure outputs. If students succeed, we should assume the instructor is doing something right. This approach has a certain common-sense appeal, but it overlooks what any good teacher can tell you, which is that some students could learn from a rock, and others resemble rocks. I’ve had students so bright and driven that all I had to do was throw some assignments at them and jump out of their way; others, I’ve wondered how they feed themselves. To blame or credit the teacher for either just doesn’t make sense.
I do what I can – look for obvious no-no’s, praise obvious successes – acutely aware that these judgments are, at some basic level, intuitive. I know there’s a literature out there about how the gender and race of the instructor affect student perceptions of the professor’s performance, and I try not to fall into that, but there’s just no way to be sure. (From what I recall, students punish instructors who don’t fit the role that students like to assign – female professors are supposed to be nurturing classroom Moms, male professors are supposed to be intimidating authorities. As Dr. Seuss put it, everything’s fine when a moose dreams of moose juice, and nothing goes wrong when a goose dreams of goose juice, but when mooses go dreaming of juices of gooses…)
There’s also a basic question of motivation. In an institution with a unionized and tenured faculty, and without merit pay, how much do observations really mean? If someone with tenure and union protections does a merely workmanlike job, there’s really nothing I can do about it, other than look vaguely disappointed. Some have enough pride that that’s enough, but some don’t.
Thirty observations in the next thirty days. Ugh.
Some instructors videotape themselves in the classroom, then watch the tapes later as a form of self-critique. I think I’d rather be doused with honey and tied to an anthill. It took several years of teaching to get past a paralyzing self-consciousness; my not watching tapes of myself is sort of like an alcoholic not drinking. I’m much too prone to self-consciousness as it is; seeing myself on tape would take it to a whole new level. Maybe some people can get away with it, but I suspect no good would come from it.
I try to be the kind of observer I’d want to have – big picture, forgiving of small quirks, couching criticism (when it exists) as suggestions for improvement – and I’ve been lucky in my own teaching that those are the observers I’ve had. Still, it’s not hard to understand why teachers recoil in horror from the idea of ‘merit’-based pay. Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it,” which is pretty close to my notion of good teaching. I can define elements of it (subject matter knowledge, organization, projection, addressing multiple learning styles, exemplifying critical thinking, not being unspeakably boring, etc.), but there have been cases where I could check off every box on my mental list, but somehow the class didn’t work. (The converse is also true – the instructor made some basic technical mistakes, but it worked anyway.) There’s just too much art involved. An observer more attuned to the checklist than to the art is every teacher’s nightmare.
That’s probably part of what is behind the movement for ‘outcomes assessment’ – since it can be so difficult to measure inputs, let’s measure outputs. If students succeed, we should assume the instructor is doing something right. This approach has a certain common-sense appeal, but it overlooks what any good teacher can tell you, which is that some students could learn from a rock, and others resemble rocks. I’ve had students so bright and driven that all I had to do was throw some assignments at them and jump out of their way; others, I’ve wondered how they feed themselves. To blame or credit the teacher for either just doesn’t make sense.
I do what I can – look for obvious no-no’s, praise obvious successes – acutely aware that these judgments are, at some basic level, intuitive. I know there’s a literature out there about how the gender and race of the instructor affect student perceptions of the professor’s performance, and I try not to fall into that, but there’s just no way to be sure. (From what I recall, students punish instructors who don’t fit the role that students like to assign – female professors are supposed to be nurturing classroom Moms, male professors are supposed to be intimidating authorities. As Dr. Seuss put it, everything’s fine when a moose dreams of moose juice, and nothing goes wrong when a goose dreams of goose juice, but when mooses go dreaming of juices of gooses…)
There’s also a basic question of motivation. In an institution with a unionized and tenured faculty, and without merit pay, how much do observations really mean? If someone with tenure and union protections does a merely workmanlike job, there’s really nothing I can do about it, other than look vaguely disappointed. Some have enough pride that that’s enough, but some don’t.
Thirty observations in the next thirty days. Ugh.
Friday, September 17, 2004
Wit and Wisdom of The Boy
I may be biased, but I think The Boy has an extraordinary verbal sense for a three-year-old. It's funny, though, because the thoughts he conveys are no more sophisticated than what you would expect from a three-year-old; he's just better at it. The effect can be jarring.
Tuesday:
Dad: Eat your veggies and you will grow up to be a big boy, just like Daddy.
T.B.: You're not a boy, you're a daddy.
Yesterday:
T.B.: How was your day at work, Daddy?
Dad: I had a good day, thanks. I had a committee meeting, but we got a lot done.
T.B.: What's a committee?
Dad: A committee is a bunch of people who sit down and talk about things, and sometimes even do things.
T.B.: Yeah, like you shouldn't eat macaroni and cheese in the bathtub.
Actually, that would be a better decision than many made by committees I've seen.
Tuesday:
Dad: Eat your veggies and you will grow up to be a big boy, just like Daddy.
T.B.: You're not a boy, you're a daddy.
Yesterday:
T.B.: How was your day at work, Daddy?
Dad: I had a good day, thanks. I had a committee meeting, but we got a lot done.
T.B.: What's a committee?
Dad: A committee is a bunch of people who sit down and talk about things, and sometimes even do things.
T.B.: Yeah, like you shouldn't eat macaroni and cheese in the bathtub.
Actually, that would be a better decision than many made by committees I've seen.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Fun with Faculty Meetings
My ‘division’ (the academic departments of which I am the dean) had a meeting yesterday, so I got to stand in a lecture hall in front of 80 faculty and try to set the agenda for the coming year. These are people whose full-time job it is to stand in front of lecture halls, so a certain amount of stage fright is justified.
It went relatively well, actually, but I was surprised at what struck them as important. When a professor complained about students committing plagiarism with impunity, I offhandedly noted that he should just refer the student to the college disciplinary committee, and that would be the end of that. He (and many others) expressed surprise, and asked if I wouldn’t hold the reporting of students against the faculty.
Wow.
I reassured him that I considered reporting cheating simply part of a professor’s job. Later, he sent me an email asking to have that comment in writing, so he could paste it into the faculty union newsletter.
Wow.
These people are really scared. Somewhere along the line, they got the impression that they would be punished for enforcing the rules. (I gave him the blurb, btw).
The student-as-customer mentality has seeped even deeper than I had thought. A little of that is probably a good thing – to the extent that we can streamline the Byzantine registration procedures, we’ll all be happier – but to extend it to legalized cheating is just a bit much. It’s the difference between a store competing on price and a store putting out a sign saying ‘Shoplifters Welcome.’
Some of this existed at my previous school, but that was a for-profit, where ethical and scholarly imperatives competed (at a disadvantage, frequently) with stockholder returns. This is a community college; profit is off the table. Yet the pressure, apparently, is still there.
I wonder to what extent this is a sign that we’re using the wrong measures. If our sole criteria for measuring institutional success are enrollment numbers and graduation rates, faculty have every incentive to take it as easy as humanly possible on the students. (This is, more or less, the situation in American high schools.) What makes our higher education system the envy of the world (as opposed to our secondary education system, which is fairly broadly pitied) is that colleges are allowed to flunk people out. We are allowed to have standards – that’s why college degrees carry weight with employers. Not everybody can get one. To the extent that we define student attrition as institutional failure, rather than a cost of doing business, we are hollowing out our reason to exist.
Anyway, I reassured the surprisingly-frightened troops that I’d back them. We’ll see if it works…
It went relatively well, actually, but I was surprised at what struck them as important. When a professor complained about students committing plagiarism with impunity, I offhandedly noted that he should just refer the student to the college disciplinary committee, and that would be the end of that. He (and many others) expressed surprise, and asked if I wouldn’t hold the reporting of students against the faculty.
Wow.
I reassured him that I considered reporting cheating simply part of a professor’s job. Later, he sent me an email asking to have that comment in writing, so he could paste it into the faculty union newsletter.
Wow.
These people are really scared. Somewhere along the line, they got the impression that they would be punished for enforcing the rules. (I gave him the blurb, btw).
The student-as-customer mentality has seeped even deeper than I had thought. A little of that is probably a good thing – to the extent that we can streamline the Byzantine registration procedures, we’ll all be happier – but to extend it to legalized cheating is just a bit much. It’s the difference between a store competing on price and a store putting out a sign saying ‘Shoplifters Welcome.’
Some of this existed at my previous school, but that was a for-profit, where ethical and scholarly imperatives competed (at a disadvantage, frequently) with stockholder returns. This is a community college; profit is off the table. Yet the pressure, apparently, is still there.
I wonder to what extent this is a sign that we’re using the wrong measures. If our sole criteria for measuring institutional success are enrollment numbers and graduation rates, faculty have every incentive to take it as easy as humanly possible on the students. (This is, more or less, the situation in American high schools.) What makes our higher education system the envy of the world (as opposed to our secondary education system, which is fairly broadly pitied) is that colleges are allowed to flunk people out. We are allowed to have standards – that’s why college degrees carry weight with employers. Not everybody can get one. To the extent that we define student attrition as institutional failure, rather than a cost of doing business, we are hollowing out our reason to exist.
Anyway, I reassured the surprisingly-frightened troops that I’d back them. We’ll see if it works…
Friday, August 27, 2004
Registration, Speed Limits, and Whining
Part of the sheer joy of being a manager during registration is manipulating the course caps (enrollment limits on any given section). By definition, this pisses absolutely everybody off, and is absolutely necessary.
Faculty want the smallest classes possible, both to increase potential attention to each student and to keep the grading load down. Students want small classes, as long as they, personally, can get in. (When they’re excluded by a low cap, they suddenly convert to fans of open enrollment.) VP’s of finance love huge classes, amortizing faculty salaries over the most tuitions possible. The fire marshall has something to say about class sizes, as does the dean of students, the marketing committee, etc.
About once a month, some highly-placed official asks me why we set a given cap at, say, 30, knowing full well that we’ll gradually inch it up to 35. Why not just start at 35 and not change it? That way, you’re not inadvertently punishing early registrants.
That’s the kind of superficially sound logic that seems compelling unless you actually know what you’re talking about.
One of the first laws of registration is that certain time slots are universally popular. (At my current institution, that’s Monday through Thursday, late morning to early afternoon.) They will fill immediately, no matter at what level you set the cap. Given limited faculty and limited rooms, you can run only so many of these. The next law of registration is that there is always some non-trivial number of students who will show up after you’ve hit the limit who absolutely, positively have to have that particular time slot, lest they fail to graduate, lose financial aid, lose their off-campus job, miss their carpool, question their faith, develop tremors, or have to get up before 9:00 a.m. These students say (sometimes sincerely) that if they can’t get that time slot, they can’t attend school at all.
Given the reality that most colleges are enrollment-driven, we really aren’t in a position to tell those students to take a hike. So we bite our lips and squeeze them in.
So initial course caps function like speed limits – you set them with the assumption that they will be broken. If you want people to drive 65, you post 55. If you want classes of 35, you set limits of 30. It’s sort of an opening bid. If I started at 35, I’d get 40.
By raising the burden of proof for the 31st student, I can drive some of those potential 31sts to take other sections – Fridays, early mornings, late afternoons, etc. – without which we’d be in deep trouble. Those who simply can’t take the other sections are invited to try their luck at a peculiar version of ‘queen for a day.’ In essence, we wind up rewarding student whining, which I’m convinced bleeds over into the classroom.
This makes absolutely nobody happy. I feel like a sellout every time I raise a cap, but I know that holding the line isn’t a realistic option. The faculty get mad because they take the initial caps literally, students get mad because they have to jump through multiple hoops or take less convenient times, the staff get crabby because this is a very labor-intensive method, and I get blamed all the way around. Yet nobody has the stomach to try the alternative, which is to tell the desperate students to come back in the future when they can get their stuff together.
This is part of the reason that administrators are so high on online courses. It isn’t that you can put more people in any given section – the amount of written feedback required really precludes that – but that you can get around the timeslot games. Since online courses are asynchronous, and don’t require classrooms, you can eliminate the timeslot shuffle. It’s hard to overstate the appeal of this to a harried dean.
I’m still not entirely comfortable with the ethics of all this – I’d much rather give the conscientious early registrant that 35th seat than some talented last-minute whiner – but until I’m allowed to tell students to take a walk, that’s the way it has to be.
Faculty want the smallest classes possible, both to increase potential attention to each student and to keep the grading load down. Students want small classes, as long as they, personally, can get in. (When they’re excluded by a low cap, they suddenly convert to fans of open enrollment.) VP’s of finance love huge classes, amortizing faculty salaries over the most tuitions possible. The fire marshall has something to say about class sizes, as does the dean of students, the marketing committee, etc.
About once a month, some highly-placed official asks me why we set a given cap at, say, 30, knowing full well that we’ll gradually inch it up to 35. Why not just start at 35 and not change it? That way, you’re not inadvertently punishing early registrants.
That’s the kind of superficially sound logic that seems compelling unless you actually know what you’re talking about.
One of the first laws of registration is that certain time slots are universally popular. (At my current institution, that’s Monday through Thursday, late morning to early afternoon.) They will fill immediately, no matter at what level you set the cap. Given limited faculty and limited rooms, you can run only so many of these. The next law of registration is that there is always some non-trivial number of students who will show up after you’ve hit the limit who absolutely, positively have to have that particular time slot, lest they fail to graduate, lose financial aid, lose their off-campus job, miss their carpool, question their faith, develop tremors, or have to get up before 9:00 a.m. These students say (sometimes sincerely) that if they can’t get that time slot, they can’t attend school at all.
Given the reality that most colleges are enrollment-driven, we really aren’t in a position to tell those students to take a hike. So we bite our lips and squeeze them in.
So initial course caps function like speed limits – you set them with the assumption that they will be broken. If you want people to drive 65, you post 55. If you want classes of 35, you set limits of 30. It’s sort of an opening bid. If I started at 35, I’d get 40.
By raising the burden of proof for the 31st student, I can drive some of those potential 31sts to take other sections – Fridays, early mornings, late afternoons, etc. – without which we’d be in deep trouble. Those who simply can’t take the other sections are invited to try their luck at a peculiar version of ‘queen for a day.’ In essence, we wind up rewarding student whining, which I’m convinced bleeds over into the classroom.
This makes absolutely nobody happy. I feel like a sellout every time I raise a cap, but I know that holding the line isn’t a realistic option. The faculty get mad because they take the initial caps literally, students get mad because they have to jump through multiple hoops or take less convenient times, the staff get crabby because this is a very labor-intensive method, and I get blamed all the way around. Yet nobody has the stomach to try the alternative, which is to tell the desperate students to come back in the future when they can get their stuff together.
This is part of the reason that administrators are so high on online courses. It isn’t that you can put more people in any given section – the amount of written feedback required really precludes that – but that you can get around the timeslot games. Since online courses are asynchronous, and don’t require classrooms, you can eliminate the timeslot shuffle. It’s hard to overstate the appeal of this to a harried dean.
I’m still not entirely comfortable with the ethics of all this – I’d much rather give the conscientious early registrant that 35th seat than some talented last-minute whiner – but until I’m allowed to tell students to take a walk, that’s the way it has to be.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Fun With Registration
The students are back, which is good and bad. This is the time of year – the last in-person registration before Fall semester – when the emergencies crop up. This is also the time of year when I get blamed for not being psychic: how come I didn’t know that there would be a sudden surge in demand this year for Japanese? Don’t I care about the students? They’re paying a lot of money for this! And it has to be between 10 and 2, no Fridays…
Nothing is quite so humbling to the idealistic academic as in-person registration. The sheer let’s-make-a-deal quality of the interaction is off-putting; any illusion of programmatic coherence becomes impossible to sustain when you see, up close, just how many decisions are made on the basis of what doesn’t conflict with some kid’s job at the bagel shop.
I’d estimate I get lied to about once every ten minutes at registration. I had this at another college – what do you mean you need to see a transcript? It’s not fair that I have to pass algebra before taking engineering – you’re trying to bilk me! And – my personal fave – I took that course before (so what if I failed it?)!
In the spirit of public service, here’s a hint to all the prospective students out there: don’t make a major life decision with less than a week to go. It doesn’t do wonders for your options.
The whole student-as-customer mindset comes crashing headlong into reality at registration. What do you mean I can’t take 15 credits in nine hours? Why can’t I have the most popular time slot at the last minute? Do you have anything really, really easy? I don’t want to have to read. Does that class have homework? I carpool with my friend who works part-time with different hours each week – is that a problem? I have to miss the first three weeks of class – is that a problem? I know it meets on Tuesdays and Fridays, but I have to work on Fridays – is that a problem? I took something sorta similar to that at my old school in Uzbekistan 15 years ago, and left the transcript at home – can’t you sign me in?
Ugh. Times like these, The Boy seems almost grown up.
Nothing is quite so humbling to the idealistic academic as in-person registration. The sheer let’s-make-a-deal quality of the interaction is off-putting; any illusion of programmatic coherence becomes impossible to sustain when you see, up close, just how many decisions are made on the basis of what doesn’t conflict with some kid’s job at the bagel shop.
I’d estimate I get lied to about once every ten minutes at registration. I had this at another college – what do you mean you need to see a transcript? It’s not fair that I have to pass algebra before taking engineering – you’re trying to bilk me! And – my personal fave – I took that course before (so what if I failed it?)!
In the spirit of public service, here’s a hint to all the prospective students out there: don’t make a major life decision with less than a week to go. It doesn’t do wonders for your options.
The whole student-as-customer mindset comes crashing headlong into reality at registration. What do you mean I can’t take 15 credits in nine hours? Why can’t I have the most popular time slot at the last minute? Do you have anything really, really easy? I don’t want to have to read. Does that class have homework? I carpool with my friend who works part-time with different hours each week – is that a problem? I have to miss the first three weeks of class – is that a problem? I know it meets on Tuesdays and Fridays, but I have to work on Fridays – is that a problem? I took something sorta similar to that at my old school in Uzbekistan 15 years ago, and left the transcript at home – can’t you sign me in?
Ugh. Times like these, The Boy seems almost grown up.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Adjunct Nation
Why is it that higher education is the only industry with highly-credentialed pieceworkers?
Adjuncts at colleges and universities hold graduate degrees – usually master’s, but increasingly doctorates – and get paid peanuts. Someone teaching at my current institution could teach 8 courses a year and total $13,000, without benefits. That’s less than a part-time secretary with a high-school diploma makes. The shocking thing is how many adjuncts are around and available. From an administrative perspective, such cheap labor solves some short-term financial issues quite neatly, even if, I suspect, it slowly erodes the intellectual capital of an institution. (In saying that, I don’t mean to impugn the intelligence of adjuncts, but merely to echo Aristotle’s observation that contemplation requires leisure.)
The financial logic is compelling. Yet only higher ed seems to have latched onto it. Why not other credentialed professions?
Imagine adjunct surgeons. For about $35 an hour, they will perform surgeries on an as-needed basis. Finally, a solution to the rising cost of health insurance! Doctors who couldn’t afford health insurance seems like poetic justice.
Or adjunct cops. Whenever a crime wave breaks out, or a political convention comes to town, local bruisers would join the force at a low hourly rate to wield what Max Weber called a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. What could possibly go wrong?
Adjunct attorneys! The key issue here is pay. Lawyers are often paid by the hour now; why not drastically lower the rate? After all, there’s no shortage of lawyers! Let the market work its magic. $45/hour, tops. If you don’t like it, work at Burger King. As with professors and surgeons, the pay only covers hours actually ‘at work’ (i.e. in the classroom, in the courtroom, in surgery) – preparation is strictly on your own time and your own dime.
Adjunct airline pilots! How many kids grow up wanting to be pilots? $50/hour, covering only time spent in the air. See how long they linger on the tarmac now…
As with our adjuncts, low performers (defined however their managers choose) can be dropped without notice, new people called in at the last minute, etc. Keep a few full-time positions around, just to keep hope alive, so the adjuncts don’t go into a more secure line of work, like show business.
For some reason, academics with doctorates are willing to tolerate conditions that no other trained professionals would even dream of accepting. If academic adjuncts used the same billing logic as, say, business consultants, they would insist on reimbursement for preparation time, travel, meals, and course materials, and would quintuple their rate.
You’d think smart people like professors would have figured this out by now. Colleges pay adjuncts so little because they can. But why can they? Why are Ph.D.’s willing to allow themselves to be so badly exploited, often for years on end?
Adjuncts at colleges and universities hold graduate degrees – usually master’s, but increasingly doctorates – and get paid peanuts. Someone teaching at my current institution could teach 8 courses a year and total $13,000, without benefits. That’s less than a part-time secretary with a high-school diploma makes. The shocking thing is how many adjuncts are around and available. From an administrative perspective, such cheap labor solves some short-term financial issues quite neatly, even if, I suspect, it slowly erodes the intellectual capital of an institution. (In saying that, I don’t mean to impugn the intelligence of adjuncts, but merely to echo Aristotle’s observation that contemplation requires leisure.)
The financial logic is compelling. Yet only higher ed seems to have latched onto it. Why not other credentialed professions?
Imagine adjunct surgeons. For about $35 an hour, they will perform surgeries on an as-needed basis. Finally, a solution to the rising cost of health insurance! Doctors who couldn’t afford health insurance seems like poetic justice.
Or adjunct cops. Whenever a crime wave breaks out, or a political convention comes to town, local bruisers would join the force at a low hourly rate to wield what Max Weber called a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. What could possibly go wrong?
Adjunct attorneys! The key issue here is pay. Lawyers are often paid by the hour now; why not drastically lower the rate? After all, there’s no shortage of lawyers! Let the market work its magic. $45/hour, tops. If you don’t like it, work at Burger King. As with professors and surgeons, the pay only covers hours actually ‘at work’ (i.e. in the classroom, in the courtroom, in surgery) – preparation is strictly on your own time and your own dime.
Adjunct airline pilots! How many kids grow up wanting to be pilots? $50/hour, covering only time spent in the air. See how long they linger on the tarmac now…
As with our adjuncts, low performers (defined however their managers choose) can be dropped without notice, new people called in at the last minute, etc. Keep a few full-time positions around, just to keep hope alive, so the adjuncts don’t go into a more secure line of work, like show business.
For some reason, academics with doctorates are willing to tolerate conditions that no other trained professionals would even dream of accepting. If academic adjuncts used the same billing logic as, say, business consultants, they would insist on reimbursement for preparation time, travel, meals, and course materials, and would quintuple their rate.
You’d think smart people like professors would have figured this out by now. Colleges pay adjuncts so little because they can. But why can they? Why are Ph.D.’s willing to allow themselves to be so badly exploited, often for years on end?
Monday, August 16, 2004
Bob Frickin' Vila
I’m an academic, a recovering nerd, a devotee of the life of the mind. Last week I could be found in the basement, frantically bailing out the French drain while waiting for the power to come back on so the basement wouldn’t take on water again. (It worked, btw. The power came back about two hours before it started to rain.)
Sometimes I wonder about science and engineering in America. For all of the tremendous advances we’ve made, I’m still in the basement, bailing water frantically, hoping that the telephone pole repair folk finish before the rain starts. Why? Because the house is made of termite food (and highly flammable, at that!), the basement features lots of wallboard that is easily destroyed by water, and we haven’t yet mastered DRAIN technology.
I question our priorities. We’ve got the best minds of a generation devising ever-more-pornographic computer games, but we’re still building our houses out of termite food and protecting them with sump pumps that haven’t changed meaningfully for decades. As near as I can tell, neither water nor gravity has changed in any significant way since before we developed the concept of ‘shelter,’ so you’d think we would have made some progress by now.
My barometer for when things get desperate is when I start to know what I’m doing. I’m not Bob frickin’ Vila, and I don’t pretend to be; I’ve dealt enough with basement-drain issues now that I can knowledgably critique sump pumps. That ain’t right.
I hereby challenge the engineers of the world: how about less time dealing with ever-faster ways to deliver pornography to desktops, and more time dealing with WATER? It covers the majority of the globe, so this isn’t quite special pleading. Samples are relatively easy to find. It falls from the freakin’ sky. Heck, check your basement.
Sometimes I wonder about science and engineering in America. For all of the tremendous advances we’ve made, I’m still in the basement, bailing water frantically, hoping that the telephone pole repair folk finish before the rain starts. Why? Because the house is made of termite food (and highly flammable, at that!), the basement features lots of wallboard that is easily destroyed by water, and we haven’t yet mastered DRAIN technology.
I question our priorities. We’ve got the best minds of a generation devising ever-more-pornographic computer games, but we’re still building our houses out of termite food and protecting them with sump pumps that haven’t changed meaningfully for decades. As near as I can tell, neither water nor gravity has changed in any significant way since before we developed the concept of ‘shelter,’ so you’d think we would have made some progress by now.
My barometer for when things get desperate is when I start to know what I’m doing. I’m not Bob frickin’ Vila, and I don’t pretend to be; I’ve dealt enough with basement-drain issues now that I can knowledgably critique sump pumps. That ain’t right.
I hereby challenge the engineers of the world: how about less time dealing with ever-faster ways to deliver pornography to desktops, and more time dealing with WATER? It covers the majority of the globe, so this isn’t quite special pleading. Samples are relatively easy to find. It falls from the freakin’ sky. Heck, check your basement.
Monday, August 09, 2004
"The Tallest Three-Year Old I've Ever Seen"
The Boy had a pediatrician appointment last week, during which the doctor pronounced him “the tallest three-year-old I’ve ever seen.” I believe him, too – The Boy is a moose. I’m not short, and neither is The Wife, but The Boy is much taller than either of us was at his age.
At one level, this is kind of cool. Certainly, he wouldn’t be growing that quickly if he weren’t basically healthy, and to the extent that his size can deter bullies, I’m all for it.
Still, I can’t help but feel a slight trepidation for the kid. Big kids are expected to be athletes, which I just wasn’t. If he gets his coordination from me, he’ll fall prey to the Jeff Goldblum syndrome.
Gender expectations die hard. If he stays as tall-for-his-age as he is now, he’ll be a conspicuously big guy by high school. With that, he won’t have the option of blending in.
I wasn’t very good at boy stuff. I was gawky, slow, introverted, and generally awkward. (I still am, but it matters a lot less now.) Between nature (my chromosomes) and nurture (my general cluelessness about guy culture), the kid could be in for a rough patch.
We’re going to sign him up for some classes at the Y, on the theory that early intervention may help. Still, and as much as I reject much of what I consider the stupid brutality of guy culture, I don’t want The Boy to go through what I went through. There’s no need to contribute another hammerhead frat boy to the world, but I know enough about adolescence to know that some protective coloration could spare a lot of pain. Let him get ironic distance on it later – first, arm him to get through it.
Kids at those ages are the shock troops of gender roles – girls who aren’t hot and boys who aren’t athletes never stop being reminded – and they aren’t shy about enforcement.
The schizophrenia of parenting hits home. Even though I reject many of the values those age groups hold, I want him to be able to hold his own on the terms I know he’ll confront. Even though I was among the least athletic kids I knew, The Boy will be counting on me to prepare him for guy culture.
Here’s hoping some double-recessive genes slipped through…
At one level, this is kind of cool. Certainly, he wouldn’t be growing that quickly if he weren’t basically healthy, and to the extent that his size can deter bullies, I’m all for it.
Still, I can’t help but feel a slight trepidation for the kid. Big kids are expected to be athletes, which I just wasn’t. If he gets his coordination from me, he’ll fall prey to the Jeff Goldblum syndrome.
Gender expectations die hard. If he stays as tall-for-his-age as he is now, he’ll be a conspicuously big guy by high school. With that, he won’t have the option of blending in.
I wasn’t very good at boy stuff. I was gawky, slow, introverted, and generally awkward. (I still am, but it matters a lot less now.) Between nature (my chromosomes) and nurture (my general cluelessness about guy culture), the kid could be in for a rough patch.
We’re going to sign him up for some classes at the Y, on the theory that early intervention may help. Still, and as much as I reject much of what I consider the stupid brutality of guy culture, I don’t want The Boy to go through what I went through. There’s no need to contribute another hammerhead frat boy to the world, but I know enough about adolescence to know that some protective coloration could spare a lot of pain. Let him get ironic distance on it later – first, arm him to get through it.
Kids at those ages are the shock troops of gender roles – girls who aren’t hot and boys who aren’t athletes never stop being reminded – and they aren’t shy about enforcement.
The schizophrenia of parenting hits home. Even though I reject many of the values those age groups hold, I want him to be able to hold his own on the terms I know he’ll confront. Even though I was among the least athletic kids I knew, The Boy will be counting on me to prepare him for guy culture.
Here’s hoping some double-recessive genes slipped through…
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