It’s ceremony season. As the end of the semester approaches (two weeks until finals!) every last program, department, and club has its end-of-year performance or celebration or gathering, and they all request the presence of the administration.
This battery of events happens twice a year – late Fall and late Spring. The late Spring version has more events, but no holiday shopping, so they roughly even out in terms of time commitment.
Woody Allen once said that 60 percent of life (or was it 90?) is just showing up. This time of year, that’s true. A deanly presence is a way of showing approval, granting an imprimateur, demonstrating support, etc. This holds whether I actually do anything or not. The trick is to be noticed, but not conspicuous; supportive, but not annoying; committed, yet non-committal; serious, yet chipper. It’s harder than it looks.
The next few weeks are six- or seven-day weeks with several late (post-10 p.m.) evenings, and a few breakfast gatherings. I don’t mind any particular event – some of them are actually fun, they’re all positive in one way or another, and I’ve learned to like the ubiquitous chicken in white sauce – but it makes family life a little tricky. (This is where the feminist argument about jobs presuming the presence of at-home spouses is dead-on accurate; a single parent in this position would be dead meat.) Last Spring, by the end of the run, The Wife was even more exhausted than I was. The In-Laws, bless them, have been generous about babysitting when the etiquette of the event requires The Wife to attend, too, but one can go to that well only so many times. Besides, The Boy has a heartbreaking way of asking “are you staying home today?” that I really get tired of saying ‘no’ to.
Deans wear several hats – academic leader, business manager, diplomat – but for the next few weeks, it’s mostly Public Face of the College. Not a bad thing, but an odd blend of passivity and publicity. The times I’m most noticed are the times when I’m part of the audience. I suspect this may be at the root of some of the faculty distrust of ‘administration’ generally – the times we’re most noticed are the times when other people are doing the work. What they don’t notice is that even if we went home at 11 the night before, we still dragged ourselves in by 8:30 the following morning, and stayed until 11 that night, too. (That’s not a royal ‘we’ – the deans here form a sort of foxhole camaraderie at this time of year. By graduation, we’re all running on fumes.)
I’ve developed a training ritual – the stash of caffeinated diet soda sits at the ready, the blistering soliloquies in the car on the way home are getting more heated, and I’ve noticed a much more aggressive lawn-mowing technique developing of late – but it’s still a tough month. I never thought I’d say this, but I’d almost rather be grading papers.
Almost.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Profit and Purity
I’ve started reading one of those lefty-authored, bemoan-the-corporatization-of-higher-ed anthologies that became a genre a few years ago, and it got me thinking. The organizing conceit is that higher education was once a shining city on a hill, democratic, meritocratic, and open to all, but that corporate values have destroyed it.
It’s almost difficult to describe on how many levels this diagnosis is wrong.
The liberal arts college I attended in the 80’s (if you know higher ed, you’ve heard of it), one of those places routinely held up as an ideal of what liberal arts education looks like, was entirely consumed by a culture appreciative (worshipful?) of wealth. No, there was no ‘business’ major per se, but there didn’t need to be; the most common jobs, post-graduation, were in investment banking. Those who didn’t go directly to work instead went to grad school, med school, or law school, effectively postponing the vocational part of their education until after college. They didn’t forego it, they just postponed it.
At the respected research university where I got my doctorate, the liberal arts undergrads could be pretty easily divided into two camps: the prelaw and the lack-of-any-better-ideas. Since most undergraduate liberal arts courses taught there were 1. huge, and 2. built with utter indifference to the realities of student learning, less-driven students found the liberal arts courses much easier to fake their way through than others. The truly driven aimed at post-college professional education; the rest just wanted to get a degree with a minimum of work. (This probably also explains how the students could accept adjunct-ification with equanimity. If they don’t particularly care about content anyway, and college is really about sex and beer anyway, then who cares how the teacher gets paid?) How either of these embodies the purity of learning-for-learning’s-sake is beyond me.
At the proprietary school at which I worked before, there was no liberal arts major, but there were courses in the liberal arts disciplines. The techies took history, English, etc., partly to please accreditors and state regulators, but also as part of their professional preparation. Employers consistently complained about the rudimentary communication skills of our graduates; we jiggered and re-jiggered the gen ed courses specifically to (try to) improve those skills. Given a surfeit of help desk applicants, why not take the one who can actually write clearly?
At my current school, the ‘liberal arts’ major is the largest major. It is built, explicitly and without apology, for transfer. We do gen ed so upper-tier schools don’t have to.
The proprietary sector offers serious challenges to traditional higher ed, and is vulnerable to the critique that it’s much more dependent on public sector financial aid than is generally acknowledged. (Strip them of Title IV money, and the entire sector would vanish within six months.) But to pretend that the proprietaries descended like locusts on what was, until then, a pristine field is just silly.
So why does this genre (the academic jeremiad?) flourish?
Part of it, I think, has to do with the rise of adjunct positions and the loss of tenure-track positions. Newly-minted Ph.D.’s who can’t find full-time work are at a loss to explain why, and ‘corporatization’ seems as good an explanation as any. Part of it probably has to do with the justifying myths that graduate programs inculcate in their students, the better to justify the low pay and shabby treatment most grad students will encounter. Part of it has to do with the undeniable increase in the number and visibility of proprietary colleges. Part of it has to do with hamfisted or simply obtuse rhetoric from certain academic administrators. Finally, a good deal of it probably comes out of the (correct) recognition that nonprofits are subject to greater cost pressures than in the past, and that managers now have to watch budgets much more carefully (aggressively?) than they did a generation ago. If you want to call that corporate, I guess you can, but it doesn’t really clarify what’s actually happening.
Elite institutions can offer whatever they want, not necessarily because they’re purer, but because their students have the means for additional (professional) education after the degree. Job preparation is just as real; it’s just later.
To me, the relevant distinction isn’t so much ‘corporate’ vs. ‘pure,’ but ‘training’ vs. ‘education.’ Education can (and usually will) include some amount of training, but it’s broader in the sense that it’s about building skills that go beyond a single context. To my mind, it’s at least theoretically possible to have real education in a for-profit setting (and it’s obviously possible to have training in a non-profit).
The real issue for traditional academics (of which, at heart, I am one) is proving our value to a culture that doesn’t, in any sense of the term, buy it. The short-term budget fix of going all-adjunct-all-the-time is a disaster, I argue, because it implicitly concedes the broader cultural prejudice that says that the content of what we teach doesn’t matter anyway. If we concede that point, we shouldn’t be shocked to see a cost-driven race to the bottom.
Right now, the for-profits compete on convenience and employability. Traditional higher ed, if it wants to regain lost ground, has to find a language for competing on quality. If a for-profit decides to try to compete on quality, I say, bring it on. (This happens in other areas of the market all the time; the word ‘upscale’ entered the language to capture the idea of charging more for an allegedly better product.) As long as the concept of quality (as opposed to ‘prestige’) remains merely implicit, it will be difficult to explain to a cost-conscious public why it should pony up even more money to hire faculty at $40k rather than adjuncts who total less than half that.
Thought experiment: some farsighted entrepreneur puts up a wad of cash to assemble a well-paid, highly-credentialed liberal arts faculty, and charges big money for tuition. (Let’s call it Mercedes U.) Mercedes U. is hard to get into, with rigorous academic standards, but it makes its money by selling quality. Would we object to ‘corporatization’ then? I wouldn’t. If the very thought seems outlandish, ask yourself why.
It’s almost difficult to describe on how many levels this diagnosis is wrong.
The liberal arts college I attended in the 80’s (if you know higher ed, you’ve heard of it), one of those places routinely held up as an ideal of what liberal arts education looks like, was entirely consumed by a culture appreciative (worshipful?) of wealth. No, there was no ‘business’ major per se, but there didn’t need to be; the most common jobs, post-graduation, were in investment banking. Those who didn’t go directly to work instead went to grad school, med school, or law school, effectively postponing the vocational part of their education until after college. They didn’t forego it, they just postponed it.
At the respected research university where I got my doctorate, the liberal arts undergrads could be pretty easily divided into two camps: the prelaw and the lack-of-any-better-ideas. Since most undergraduate liberal arts courses taught there were 1. huge, and 2. built with utter indifference to the realities of student learning, less-driven students found the liberal arts courses much easier to fake their way through than others. The truly driven aimed at post-college professional education; the rest just wanted to get a degree with a minimum of work. (This probably also explains how the students could accept adjunct-ification with equanimity. If they don’t particularly care about content anyway, and college is really about sex and beer anyway, then who cares how the teacher gets paid?) How either of these embodies the purity of learning-for-learning’s-sake is beyond me.
At the proprietary school at which I worked before, there was no liberal arts major, but there were courses in the liberal arts disciplines. The techies took history, English, etc., partly to please accreditors and state regulators, but also as part of their professional preparation. Employers consistently complained about the rudimentary communication skills of our graduates; we jiggered and re-jiggered the gen ed courses specifically to (try to) improve those skills. Given a surfeit of help desk applicants, why not take the one who can actually write clearly?
At my current school, the ‘liberal arts’ major is the largest major. It is built, explicitly and without apology, for transfer. We do gen ed so upper-tier schools don’t have to.
The proprietary sector offers serious challenges to traditional higher ed, and is vulnerable to the critique that it’s much more dependent on public sector financial aid than is generally acknowledged. (Strip them of Title IV money, and the entire sector would vanish within six months.) But to pretend that the proprietaries descended like locusts on what was, until then, a pristine field is just silly.
So why does this genre (the academic jeremiad?) flourish?
Part of it, I think, has to do with the rise of adjunct positions and the loss of tenure-track positions. Newly-minted Ph.D.’s who can’t find full-time work are at a loss to explain why, and ‘corporatization’ seems as good an explanation as any. Part of it probably has to do with the justifying myths that graduate programs inculcate in their students, the better to justify the low pay and shabby treatment most grad students will encounter. Part of it has to do with the undeniable increase in the number and visibility of proprietary colleges. Part of it has to do with hamfisted or simply obtuse rhetoric from certain academic administrators. Finally, a good deal of it probably comes out of the (correct) recognition that nonprofits are subject to greater cost pressures than in the past, and that managers now have to watch budgets much more carefully (aggressively?) than they did a generation ago. If you want to call that corporate, I guess you can, but it doesn’t really clarify what’s actually happening.
Elite institutions can offer whatever they want, not necessarily because they’re purer, but because their students have the means for additional (professional) education after the degree. Job preparation is just as real; it’s just later.
To me, the relevant distinction isn’t so much ‘corporate’ vs. ‘pure,’ but ‘training’ vs. ‘education.’ Education can (and usually will) include some amount of training, but it’s broader in the sense that it’s about building skills that go beyond a single context. To my mind, it’s at least theoretically possible to have real education in a for-profit setting (and it’s obviously possible to have training in a non-profit).
The real issue for traditional academics (of which, at heart, I am one) is proving our value to a culture that doesn’t, in any sense of the term, buy it. The short-term budget fix of going all-adjunct-all-the-time is a disaster, I argue, because it implicitly concedes the broader cultural prejudice that says that the content of what we teach doesn’t matter anyway. If we concede that point, we shouldn’t be shocked to see a cost-driven race to the bottom.
Right now, the for-profits compete on convenience and employability. Traditional higher ed, if it wants to regain lost ground, has to find a language for competing on quality. If a for-profit decides to try to compete on quality, I say, bring it on. (This happens in other areas of the market all the time; the word ‘upscale’ entered the language to capture the idea of charging more for an allegedly better product.) As long as the concept of quality (as opposed to ‘prestige’) remains merely implicit, it will be difficult to explain to a cost-conscious public why it should pony up even more money to hire faculty at $40k rather than adjuncts who total less than half that.
Thought experiment: some farsighted entrepreneur puts up a wad of cash to assemble a well-paid, highly-credentialed liberal arts faculty, and charges big money for tuition. (Let’s call it Mercedes U.) Mercedes U. is hard to get into, with rigorous academic standards, but it makes its money by selling quality. Would we object to ‘corporatization’ then? I wouldn’t. If the very thought seems outlandish, ask yourself why.
"All of a Suddenly..."
The Boy recently fired off "all of a suddenly." I really liked that, even if it's technically redundant. (I don't think it says anything that "suddenly" doesn't.) It's right up there with Liz Phair's "I woke up, alarmed" on my list of favorite phrases. Somehow, "all of a suddenly" makes sense.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Blame (and Envy) Canada
As a blue-state American, it’s hard sometimes not to envy Canada. They have a health care system that actually makes some degree of sense (more cars are made in Ontario than Michigan now, due entirely to health costs), a parental leave policy that recognizes that twelve unpaid weeks is a bad joke, a drug policy written by grownups, a Prime Minister who isn't a complete wingnut, and Holly Cole.
But this article in the Chronicle really took it up a notch. Apparently, the Canadian government is changing some rules to make it easier for ‘foreign’ students (including Americans!) to go to colleges and universities there.
As an American academic, I’m starting to worry. At the community college level, I’ve already seen steep drops in ESL enrollments, as the immigration restrictions have tightened. I’ve heard that graduate programs are having a harder time recruiting the best international students to come here, losing them to Australia, India, and (especially now) Canada.
Part of America’s great competitive advantage has been that we’ve been on the right side of the brain drain. Post-9/11, we’ve changed direction, and other countries are stepping in to (happily) take in the brilliant innovators we’re turning away. This is not good.
When the next Microsoft emerges in Toronto, we’ll be very, very sorry. Diana Krall and Holly Cole aren’t the half of it. We're in trouble, eh.
But this article in the Chronicle really took it up a notch. Apparently, the Canadian government is changing some rules to make it easier for ‘foreign’ students (including Americans!) to go to colleges and universities there.
As an American academic, I’m starting to worry. At the community college level, I’ve already seen steep drops in ESL enrollments, as the immigration restrictions have tightened. I’ve heard that graduate programs are having a harder time recruiting the best international students to come here, losing them to Australia, India, and (especially now) Canada.
Part of America’s great competitive advantage has been that we’ve been on the right side of the brain drain. Post-9/11, we’ve changed direction, and other countries are stepping in to (happily) take in the brilliant innovators we’re turning away. This is not good.
When the next Microsoft emerges in Toronto, we’ll be very, very sorry. Diana Krall and Holly Cole aren’t the half of it. We're in trouble, eh.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Do the Hustle: The Bradys at Midtier State
I’ve had some gratifying feedback on yesterday’s entry about the mismatches between graduate school and life on the faculty of a teaching institution. A few folks pointed out that I didn’t mention liberal arts colleges – true, though the same basic dynamic holds there. The elite ones – Williams, Swarthmore, Carleton – offer probably the best undergraduate education in America. Below the top dozen or so, though, the teaching loads start to increase, and you start to get the same pining-for-Cambridge dynamic on the faculty.
The lower-tier schools, I think, need to make a choice. Either embrace their identity as teaching institutions and go for it – which is what community colleges and proprietaries have done – or risk it all and go for the brass ring of research grant nirvana. The latter is much, much harder than the former, especially as government support for basic research is gradually supplanted by private-sector support, which has narrower interests. The ‘comprehensive’ model, in which a pretty-good university is pretty good at just about everything while excelling at nothing in particular, just doesn’t make sense anymore.
Look at retail. Wal-Mart does well competing on price. Everything from Target on up competes on niche. Sears, Macy’s, and the like struggle to survive.
Look at broadcasting. Remember variety shows? People of a certain age will recall absolutely dreadful shows from the 1970's (Tony Orlando, Captain and Tenille, the ubiquitous Bradys, etc.) that offered song, dance, sketch comedy, and even bits of drama, all of it unspeakably bad. Cable killed the variety show, which only existed in the first place because, for most of the country for several decades, there were only three or four things on at any given time. Given more choices, someone who wanted, say, comedy could find a comedy and not have to sit through the Brady kids doing the hustle to get there. With more (and better-defined) niches, the variety show died a welcome death.
To my mind, the comprehensive university is the variety show of higher education. A little something for everybody, but none of it terribly good. Hire faculty (when at all) to teach, and give them substantial teaching loads, but fire them for not publishing enough. Field sports teams, but don’t give scholarships for them. Offer lots of terminal masters’ programs. Respond to industry, but slowly. Try to “raise your academic profile” while adjunct-ing out most of your teaching. Charge employees for parking.
What’s the point? The model made sense, sort of, when geography was paramount, or when public subsidies were generous enough that public midtier schools could charge next to nothing. Now that they cost a lot more, and students are more mobile than ever, what do they offer the typical kid that a cheaper or more convenient alternative wouldn’t?
The catastrophic news for today’s grad students is that this is precisely the group of schools, historically, that formed the backbone of the academic job market. Since they rarely hire full-timers anymore, the job market has bifurcated into the elites and the teaching colleges. Grad schools do a fantastic job of preparing students for the elites, but a criminally negligent job of preparing them for the teaching institutions.
As the proprietaries grow and the community colleges claim a growing share of the ‘traditional student’ population, I just don’t see how the so-so midtier schools can continue in their present form. With ESPN, the Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, and Bravo, who would watch Sonny and Cher now? Why are we still training our best and brightest to do the hustle?
The lower-tier schools, I think, need to make a choice. Either embrace their identity as teaching institutions and go for it – which is what community colleges and proprietaries have done – or risk it all and go for the brass ring of research grant nirvana. The latter is much, much harder than the former, especially as government support for basic research is gradually supplanted by private-sector support, which has narrower interests. The ‘comprehensive’ model, in which a pretty-good university is pretty good at just about everything while excelling at nothing in particular, just doesn’t make sense anymore.
Look at retail. Wal-Mart does well competing on price. Everything from Target on up competes on niche. Sears, Macy’s, and the like struggle to survive.
Look at broadcasting. Remember variety shows? People of a certain age will recall absolutely dreadful shows from the 1970's (Tony Orlando, Captain and Tenille, the ubiquitous Bradys, etc.) that offered song, dance, sketch comedy, and even bits of drama, all of it unspeakably bad. Cable killed the variety show, which only existed in the first place because, for most of the country for several decades, there were only three or four things on at any given time. Given more choices, someone who wanted, say, comedy could find a comedy and not have to sit through the Brady kids doing the hustle to get there. With more (and better-defined) niches, the variety show died a welcome death.
To my mind, the comprehensive university is the variety show of higher education. A little something for everybody, but none of it terribly good. Hire faculty (when at all) to teach, and give them substantial teaching loads, but fire them for not publishing enough. Field sports teams, but don’t give scholarships for them. Offer lots of terminal masters’ programs. Respond to industry, but slowly. Try to “raise your academic profile” while adjunct-ing out most of your teaching. Charge employees for parking.
What’s the point? The model made sense, sort of, when geography was paramount, or when public subsidies were generous enough that public midtier schools could charge next to nothing. Now that they cost a lot more, and students are more mobile than ever, what do they offer the typical kid that a cheaper or more convenient alternative wouldn’t?
The catastrophic news for today’s grad students is that this is precisely the group of schools, historically, that formed the backbone of the academic job market. Since they rarely hire full-timers anymore, the job market has bifurcated into the elites and the teaching colleges. Grad schools do a fantastic job of preparing students for the elites, but a criminally negligent job of preparing them for the teaching institutions.
As the proprietaries grow and the community colleges claim a growing share of the ‘traditional student’ population, I just don’t see how the so-so midtier schools can continue in their present form. With ESPN, the Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, and Bravo, who would watch Sonny and Cher now? Why are we still training our best and brightest to do the hustle?
Sentence You Never Want to Hear, and a Haiku
Great fun with the dentist. A sentence I heard, that you never want to hear, ever:
"You don't seem to be responding to the novocaine."
What tipped him off?
In honor of my dentist, I've composed a haiku:
die, die, die, die, die
you evil, sadistic prick
novocaine, my ass
I still think "Little Shop of Horrors" was a documentary.
"You don't seem to be responding to the novocaine."
What tipped him off?
In honor of my dentist, I've composed a haiku:
die, die, die, die, die
you evil, sadistic prick
novocaine, my ass
I still think "Little Shop of Horrors" was a documentary.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
How Grad School Fails, or, Playing Well With Others
I’ve been reading a whole bunch of grad student and junior faculty blogs lately, and enjoying them, but I couldn’t help but notice a persistent theme. They (accurately, to my memory) invoke the value systems of graduate school, which are hugely different from the value systems at a community college.
See if you can spot the subtle differences:
Grad School Ideals:
Break new ground, nonthreateningly.
Network.
Get famous.
Publish, publish, publish.
Climb the ladder.
Teach as little as humanly possible.
Community College Ideals:
Teach a lot, and at least fairly well.
Get along with colleagues.
Do something positive for the college as a whole (as opposed to your department).
Put down roots in the community.
Stay reasonably current in your field.
Do right by your students.
Grad school works pretty well at inculcating a crippling self-doubt, inuring academics to low pay and insecure work conditions, and reinforcing a (surprisingly brittle) prestige hierarchy. As far as training future academic employees for non-elite schools, though, it’s a colossal failure.
Most faculty don’t think of themselves as employees. They think of themselves as independent contractors, loyal to their discipline rather than their institution. This was, I think, a distinctly twentieth-century development, and a bizarre one.
The Harvards of the world can coast on their research money, and that’s fine, but most colleges and universities can’t, and never will. Most are, and will always be, tuition-based. To the extent that’s true, it would be rational for them to look for faculty who are good teachers, good institutional citizens, and good colleagues; good research is nice too, but peripheral.
That’s what every community college I know does, and a fair number of four-year colleges, too. (So do the proprietaries, for that matter.) Combined, these are the majority of colleges in the U.S. (I’m not as familiar with the Canadian system.)
Some midtier schools (you know who you are) try to emulate Harvard’s system, in hopes of ‘raising its academic profile,’ or climbing the hierarchy to where the research money flows like manna from heaven. Good luck with that. In reality, they wind up neither fish nor fowl, firing good young faculty (who are frequently better than their tenured executioners) in the name of recasting themselves as something they will never be. Meanwhile, their budgets suffer the strain of unrealized ambitions, the students get crabby as their increasingly-adjunct professors come and go, and the state legislature, smelling blood in the water, noses around for more.
Higher Ed suffers from Harvard Envy. As long as the prestigious research university is taken, whether explicitly or implicitly, as the only legitimate model, we’ll continue to waste tremendous amounts of money and talent. Training all those Ph.D.’s for jobs that (increasingly) only exist at the top of the food chain doesn’t make sense.
The Prima Donna model (the suffering artiste, the noble but misunderstood intellectual, etc.) works pretty well at Yale, but it crashes and burns here. We want serious thinkers, yes, but not so serious that they can't play well with others. I didn't learn that in grad school.
See if you can spot the subtle differences:
Grad School Ideals:
Break new ground, nonthreateningly.
Network.
Get famous.
Publish, publish, publish.
Climb the ladder.
Teach as little as humanly possible.
Community College Ideals:
Teach a lot, and at least fairly well.
Get along with colleagues.
Do something positive for the college as a whole (as opposed to your department).
Put down roots in the community.
Stay reasonably current in your field.
Do right by your students.
Grad school works pretty well at inculcating a crippling self-doubt, inuring academics to low pay and insecure work conditions, and reinforcing a (surprisingly brittle) prestige hierarchy. As far as training future academic employees for non-elite schools, though, it’s a colossal failure.
Most faculty don’t think of themselves as employees. They think of themselves as independent contractors, loyal to their discipline rather than their institution. This was, I think, a distinctly twentieth-century development, and a bizarre one.
The Harvards of the world can coast on their research money, and that’s fine, but most colleges and universities can’t, and never will. Most are, and will always be, tuition-based. To the extent that’s true, it would be rational for them to look for faculty who are good teachers, good institutional citizens, and good colleagues; good research is nice too, but peripheral.
That’s what every community college I know does, and a fair number of four-year colleges, too. (So do the proprietaries, for that matter.) Combined, these are the majority of colleges in the U.S. (I’m not as familiar with the Canadian system.)
Some midtier schools (you know who you are) try to emulate Harvard’s system, in hopes of ‘raising its academic profile,’ or climbing the hierarchy to where the research money flows like manna from heaven. Good luck with that. In reality, they wind up neither fish nor fowl, firing good young faculty (who are frequently better than their tenured executioners) in the name of recasting themselves as something they will never be. Meanwhile, their budgets suffer the strain of unrealized ambitions, the students get crabby as their increasingly-adjunct professors come and go, and the state legislature, smelling blood in the water, noses around for more.
Higher Ed suffers from Harvard Envy. As long as the prestigious research university is taken, whether explicitly or implicitly, as the only legitimate model, we’ll continue to waste tremendous amounts of money and talent. Training all those Ph.D.’s for jobs that (increasingly) only exist at the top of the food chain doesn’t make sense.
The Prima Donna model (the suffering artiste, the noble but misunderstood intellectual, etc.) works pretty well at Yale, but it crashes and burns here. We want serious thinkers, yes, but not so serious that they can't play well with others. I didn't learn that in grad school.
Day of Atonement
Today's actual, no exaggeration to-do list:
1. Four-hour meeting about technology issues.
2. Finish tax return.
3. Get tooth filled.
Committee meeting, taxes, AND the dentist! My cup runneth over.
Musta done something pretty rotten in a previous life...
1. Four-hour meeting about technology issues.
2. Finish tax return.
3. Get tooth filled.
Committee meeting, taxes, AND the dentist! My cup runneth over.
Musta done something pretty rotten in a previous life...
Thursday, April 07, 2005
The Scariest (Common) Student Question
What Should I Take?
Such an innocent question, but it still scares me. How the hell should I know? It’s easy if the student already has a desired major and a track record of success in it – then it’s just a matter of checking the transcript against the remaining requirements. Usually, though, those students don’t ask, since they don’t have to. Usually, the question comes from students who have absolutely no idea what to study. They’re in college because, at some level, they (or their parents) think they are supposed to be, but they don’t know why.
It’s a tough one. I usually respond with a question, something along the lines of “what do you care about?” or “what are you good at?” or even “what do you want to do when you graduate?”
Sometimes students surprise me. I’ve been working with one for about a year – I’ll call him Otto – whose lack of self-awareness is simply breathtaking. He was carrying a zero-point-something GPA (lower than a D) after three semesters, stubbornly trying to succeed in a major that he chose because his friends were in it. Otto came to me at registration to ask if I could sign off on letting him try yet again. I asked him why he wanted to keep doing something he obviously hated. He just stared blankly. I suggested that, judging by his transcript, the only classes he actually flourished in were in another discipline. He agreed, saying those were the only classes he actually liked. I asked why he didn’t just switch majors.
(Sound of crickets)
Otto is in the new major now, and thriving. Last semester he carried a B-plus, he’s on track for graduation, and he’s already looking to transfer to a four-year school. All it took was for someone to point out the obvious.
I wonder how many Otto-like students we have who just never have that talk.
It’s tougher with the kids fresh from high school. They don’t have a track record yet, so there’s really nothing to judge. They ask someone to pick a major for them, as if we can see into their heads. I usually default to the generic transfer program, on the theory that it gives them more time to decide, but it’s astonishing how completely they expect clairvoyance.
When we talk about students from disadvantaged backgrounds and the struggles they face in college, we usually talk about either academic ability/preparation or money. I wonder, though, how much of it is just not knowing the rules of the academic game. It just never occurred to Otto to switch majors. Once he did, he was fine. He has the ability to be a pretty good student, when he’s taking subjects he actually cares about.
How do you teach ‘savvy’?
Such an innocent question, but it still scares me. How the hell should I know? It’s easy if the student already has a desired major and a track record of success in it – then it’s just a matter of checking the transcript against the remaining requirements. Usually, though, those students don’t ask, since they don’t have to. Usually, the question comes from students who have absolutely no idea what to study. They’re in college because, at some level, they (or their parents) think they are supposed to be, but they don’t know why.
It’s a tough one. I usually respond with a question, something along the lines of “what do you care about?” or “what are you good at?” or even “what do you want to do when you graduate?”
Sometimes students surprise me. I’ve been working with one for about a year – I’ll call him Otto – whose lack of self-awareness is simply breathtaking. He was carrying a zero-point-something GPA (lower than a D) after three semesters, stubbornly trying to succeed in a major that he chose because his friends were in it. Otto came to me at registration to ask if I could sign off on letting him try yet again. I asked him why he wanted to keep doing something he obviously hated. He just stared blankly. I suggested that, judging by his transcript, the only classes he actually flourished in were in another discipline. He agreed, saying those were the only classes he actually liked. I asked why he didn’t just switch majors.
(Sound of crickets)
Otto is in the new major now, and thriving. Last semester he carried a B-plus, he’s on track for graduation, and he’s already looking to transfer to a four-year school. All it took was for someone to point out the obvious.
I wonder how many Otto-like students we have who just never have that talk.
It’s tougher with the kids fresh from high school. They don’t have a track record yet, so there’s really nothing to judge. They ask someone to pick a major for them, as if we can see into their heads. I usually default to the generic transfer program, on the theory that it gives them more time to decide, but it’s astonishing how completely they expect clairvoyance.
When we talk about students from disadvantaged backgrounds and the struggles they face in college, we usually talk about either academic ability/preparation or money. I wonder, though, how much of it is just not knowing the rules of the academic game. It just never occurred to Otto to switch majors. Once he did, he was fine. He has the ability to be a pretty good student, when he’s taking subjects he actually cares about.
How do you teach ‘savvy’?
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Vultures and Budgets
It’s hard, sometimes, not to feel like a vulture.
My office got a call today from a very senior professor asking about the paperwork for retiring. He makes over $100k. His replacement, assuming I’m allowed to hire one, would probably come in somewhere in the $40’s. The difference, or breakage, just goes into the black hole of the general budget, to help balance that. (If I’m not allowed to hire one, and we go with all adjuncts, the breakage would be even greater, but at considerable cost to quality.)
From the college’s perspective, this is free money. If we hire the replacement, we’ve kept the staffing levels constant, but cut the budget significantly anyway.
In this budgetary climate, this means that managers spend inordinate amounts of time speculating about retirements.
Salaries here are determined entirely by seniority and contractual, across-the-board raises. They are completely independent of job performance. Some senior faculty are quite good, but there are some whose best work is behind them. They make very high salaries (I have several in the six figures), but often produce at a lower level than their junior counterparts. Since they have tenure, and the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom abolished mandatory retirement ages for professors (the cutoff used to be 70, which strikes me as reasonable), they leave only when they decide to, or when their health decides for them.
My current college has a very top-heavy full-time faculty, in terms of age and seniority (and therefore salary). Retirements have been fewer and farther between than anticipated, so savings from breakage haven’t been as forthcoming as had been assumed.
In a different fiscal climate, we could prime the pump by offering retirement packages. Philosophically, I’m not a big fan, but it would solve some short-term issues. The state is sufficiently strapped at this point, though, that packages aren’t going to happen. The taxpayers get very crabby about retirement packages, and I can’t say they’re wrong.
So I get unduly excited when a senior professor steps down. I wish that wasn’t true – if the budget were sufficiently flush that it didn’t matter, or if the mandatory retirement age came back so we could anticipate and budget accordingly, or if salaries and raises were tied in some meaningful way to performance – but there we are.
Vultures of the world, unite!
My office got a call today from a very senior professor asking about the paperwork for retiring. He makes over $100k. His replacement, assuming I’m allowed to hire one, would probably come in somewhere in the $40’s. The difference, or breakage, just goes into the black hole of the general budget, to help balance that. (If I’m not allowed to hire one, and we go with all adjuncts, the breakage would be even greater, but at considerable cost to quality.)
From the college’s perspective, this is free money. If we hire the replacement, we’ve kept the staffing levels constant, but cut the budget significantly anyway.
In this budgetary climate, this means that managers spend inordinate amounts of time speculating about retirements.
Salaries here are determined entirely by seniority and contractual, across-the-board raises. They are completely independent of job performance. Some senior faculty are quite good, but there are some whose best work is behind them. They make very high salaries (I have several in the six figures), but often produce at a lower level than their junior counterparts. Since they have tenure, and the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom abolished mandatory retirement ages for professors (the cutoff used to be 70, which strikes me as reasonable), they leave only when they decide to, or when their health decides for them.
My current college has a very top-heavy full-time faculty, in terms of age and seniority (and therefore salary). Retirements have been fewer and farther between than anticipated, so savings from breakage haven’t been as forthcoming as had been assumed.
In a different fiscal climate, we could prime the pump by offering retirement packages. Philosophically, I’m not a big fan, but it would solve some short-term issues. The state is sufficiently strapped at this point, though, that packages aren’t going to happen. The taxpayers get very crabby about retirement packages, and I can’t say they’re wrong.
So I get unduly excited when a senior professor steps down. I wish that wasn’t true – if the budget were sufficiently flush that it didn’t matter, or if the mandatory retirement age came back so we could anticipate and budget accordingly, or if salaries and raises were tied in some meaningful way to performance – but there we are.
Vultures of the world, unite!
Monday, April 04, 2005
We're Raising Him Right
A few mornings ago, we walked into The Girl’s room to find The Boy standing on a stepstool, peering into the crib, serenading her gently with his inimitable version of “Thunder Road.”
“You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright…”
Perfect.
“You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright…”
Perfect.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
The Only Time I Will Ever be Happy to See Her Standing on the Couch
The Girl is standing! She needs help to get there, but once you prop her up, she can stand while holding onto the couch!
The look on her face was priceless. Pure surprise. Her knees wobbled, but she stood up for close to a minute before falling on her behind. (The other function of diapers – they’re like airbags for wobbly walkers.)
I think the exersaucer is the key. She loves it, and standing in it has strengthened her legs. She likes to bounce in it, when makes a lot of noise, generating complaints from The Boy that she’s too loud.
When he was her age, it sounded like a freakin’ freight train in the living room.
To the chagrin of The Wife, The Girl has inherited my eyebrows. I try to reassure The Wife that Brooke Shields has done quite well for herself, but she remains dubious. The good news is that they give The Girl an unusually expressive face; we always know exactly what she’s thinking. Last week we gave The Girl a very small taste of mostly-melted ice cream – she sucked in her lip, knit her brow, glared, then lit up, smiled, started moving her arms quickly, and laughing. All this in five seconds. No protective ambiguity at all, and bless her for it.
She isn’t crawling yet, but she’s close. She can prop herself up on her arms and push herself around, legs flailing behind her, so it won’t be long. She already goes for The Boy’s toys; once she gets some velocity, all hell will break loose.
It’s different this time. With The Boy, we were first-time parents, exhausted and scared pretty much all the time. Each new developmental stage brought pride and (especially) relief. With The Girl, since she’s likely to be our last, each new stage still brings pride and relief, but also a kind of sadness. We’ll never have anyone that young again. Putting away the bassinet was tough; putting away the exersaucer in a few months will be, too. As exhausting as this age is, there’s a sweetness about it. When I get home from work and The Girl sees me, she smiles and giggles and makes that cooing noise that only babies make. She won’t do that for much longer. I’ll be insanely proud when she starts talking, of course, but for now, I just want to enjoy the cooing a little longer.
The look on her face was priceless. Pure surprise. Her knees wobbled, but she stood up for close to a minute before falling on her behind. (The other function of diapers – they’re like airbags for wobbly walkers.)
I think the exersaucer is the key. She loves it, and standing in it has strengthened her legs. She likes to bounce in it, when makes a lot of noise, generating complaints from The Boy that she’s too loud.
When he was her age, it sounded like a freakin’ freight train in the living room.
To the chagrin of The Wife, The Girl has inherited my eyebrows. I try to reassure The Wife that Brooke Shields has done quite well for herself, but she remains dubious. The good news is that they give The Girl an unusually expressive face; we always know exactly what she’s thinking. Last week we gave The Girl a very small taste of mostly-melted ice cream – she sucked in her lip, knit her brow, glared, then lit up, smiled, started moving her arms quickly, and laughing. All this in five seconds. No protective ambiguity at all, and bless her for it.
She isn’t crawling yet, but she’s close. She can prop herself up on her arms and push herself around, legs flailing behind her, so it won’t be long. She already goes for The Boy’s toys; once she gets some velocity, all hell will break loose.
It’s different this time. With The Boy, we were first-time parents, exhausted and scared pretty much all the time. Each new developmental stage brought pride and (especially) relief. With The Girl, since she’s likely to be our last, each new stage still brings pride and relief, but also a kind of sadness. We’ll never have anyone that young again. Putting away the bassinet was tough; putting away the exersaucer in a few months will be, too. As exhausting as this age is, there’s a sweetness about it. When I get home from work and The Girl sees me, she smiles and giggles and makes that cooing noise that only babies make. She won’t do that for much longer. I’ll be insanely proud when she starts talking, of course, but for now, I just want to enjoy the cooing a little longer.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Alligator Alert
They're at it again. According to this article in the Tallahassee Alligator (!), Republicans in the Florida legislature have voted in committee to pass a law mandating ideological 'balance' in college faculties. Gotta clamp down on those faculty socialists poisoning the minds of the youth. You know, all those socialist youth you see swinging elections to the Green party...
Last year, I did an entry on the 'viewpoint diversity' movement. I've reprinted most of it below, with an update at the end:
Conservatives have taken up the slogan of ‘viewpoint diversity’ to force colleges to hire more politically-conservative faculty. The state legislature in Florida is now moving to give this slogan the force of law.
I admit that my first response involved an unattractive combination of gagging and giggling. But, upon sober reflection, I realized that the idea has considerable merit. It just needs to be more fully fleshed out. As a public service, I’ve taken the task upon myself…
Start with the religious colleges. Their faculty are disproportionately religious! How can students possibly expect to be exposed to differing points of view? I’m pleased to hear the Republicans urge Lynchburg College to hire more Jews, liberals, and homosexuals. Catholic colleges and universities tend to have disproportionately-Catholic faculties; this too must stop! How can anyone fully embrace a faith until exploring the alternatives? I join the Republicans in calling upon every Catholic college in the U.S. to start a stepped-up hiring program for secular liberals immediately.
Some of the displaced Catholic faculty could find work at, say, Brandeis…
And what about the military colleges? The faculty at West Point could use some openly gay, vegetarian pacifists. The women’s studies department at the Army War College could use some beefing up…
Business schools are vastly overrun with Republicans. Obviously, a purge is in order. To make sure all points of view are represented, we could mandate that every other hire come from, say, the leadership of a labor union. One for business, one for labor. That’s fair!
What about the proprietary sector? Since the very nature of proprietary schools is capitalist, they need a counterbalancing faction of socialist faculty. After all, students mustn’t be indoctrinated. Dispatch the University of Phoenix to the MLA, stat!
In fact, why should we limit viewpoint diversity to colleges? Why not other important public institutions?
Over half of Congress is comprised of millionaires. That’s not representative! Let’s get a representative sample of Wal-Mart workers in there. Let them vote on tax policy. For that matter, let’s get the median income of Congress down to the national average. That might have some interesting effects on the laws about parental leave, health care, tax distributions…
And what about the judiciary? Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas – outta there! 7 out of the 9 current members of the Supreme Court were appointed by Republicans – no wonder they threw the election to Bush! Make it an even split – hell, while we’re at it, let’s extend the income-diversity rule there, too. Let’s see what someone making $25k has to say about equal protection of the laws…
Sigh…
Apparently, affirmative action is only okay when it benefits conservatives.
The idiocy of the law is even deeper than it looks. Leave aside the question of higher-ed exceptionalism; what’s even more disturbing is the idea that everybody’s political thinking has to fit cleanly in certain boxes. If I’m hired to be the token liberal, and my thought evolves, I could lose my job! If I stitch positions together in ways that don’t reflect the approved categories (say, a Daniel Bell type – socially conservative, but left on economics), I don’t count, so I can’t get hired. Best to avoid thinking anything new.
For the idea of ‘viewpoint diversity’ to make any sense, we have to assume that all possible viewpoints are already known, as is the proper numerical distribution of viewpoints. We also have to assume that all of the interesting questions have already been asked, all answers to all questions coalesce into only two or three possible constellations, that political preference colors all knowledge (“Democrats argue that the atomic number for hydrogen is 1, but Republicans…”), and that students are perfect sponges for what their professors tell them. In other words, we have to be morons.
Update:
I can't imagine a worse idea for higher education than to prescribe the 'correct' answers in advance, whatever they are. Don't be fooled by the 'leftist professor' crap; if ideological balance had anything to do with anything, Bush would appoint several liberal justices to the Supreme Court to keep the conservatives honest. The Republicans control the Presidency, the Congress, and the Judiciary. They control the mainstream media, most state governments, and most of the wealth in America. It just kills them not to have a (legally-mandated!) clean sweep.
To make higher education the political handmaiden of anybody would be a tragic mistake. The purpose of higher ed, I always thought, was to expose people to ideas they hadn't seen before, to sharpen their critical thinking skills and enable them to take part in a democratic society as agents of their own interest. To declare that exposing someone to new ideas violates his 'rights' is both obtuse and insanely dangerous.
It's also a betrayal of one of the more honorable lines of conservative thought. As any serious student of American political history can attest, the postwar 'fusion' in American conservatism was held together by the glue of anti-communism. Anti-communism was premised on the (correct) idea that an open society (in which people are allowed to question those in power) is preferable to a closed one. Buckley, Taft, Popper, Friedman, von Hayek: all of these conservatives understood that absolutism leads to oppression.
Drunk with power, the new conservatives have forgotten all that. They believe that everything worth knowing is already known, and that, therefore, any questioning of the existing order can only be explained by bad faith. (This is a nearly perfect mirror of the old Soviet habit of explaining discontent with the workers' paradise as a psychiatric malady.) To them, the only role for higher ed is to produce workers.
Fox News's obsession with Ward Churchill makes sense, in this context. He's what Trotsky used to call a 'useful idiot.' Academically, he's a nonentity, but never mind that; he embodies the conservative stereotype of the left-wing professor, giving a convenient cover for a purge. Inflame populist outrage against some insignificant little twit, and channel that outrage to squash independent thought generally. It's an old move, but apparently, it still works.
I'm not naive about the limitations of the academy; as my regular readers know, I bump up against them with some frequency. That's not the point. The point is that education, done right, involves exposure to things you didn't know before. You build cognitive skill by engaging with ideas different from your own. Are some professors arrogant? Sure. So are some businesspeople, but I don't see conservatives calling for more regulation there.
The alligator's nose is under the tent. By all means, step on it.
Last year, I did an entry on the 'viewpoint diversity' movement. I've reprinted most of it below, with an update at the end:
Conservatives have taken up the slogan of ‘viewpoint diversity’ to force colleges to hire more politically-conservative faculty. The state legislature in Florida is now moving to give this slogan the force of law.
I admit that my first response involved an unattractive combination of gagging and giggling. But, upon sober reflection, I realized that the idea has considerable merit. It just needs to be more fully fleshed out. As a public service, I’ve taken the task upon myself…
Start with the religious colleges. Their faculty are disproportionately religious! How can students possibly expect to be exposed to differing points of view? I’m pleased to hear the Republicans urge Lynchburg College to hire more Jews, liberals, and homosexuals. Catholic colleges and universities tend to have disproportionately-Catholic faculties; this too must stop! How can anyone fully embrace a faith until exploring the alternatives? I join the Republicans in calling upon every Catholic college in the U.S. to start a stepped-up hiring program for secular liberals immediately.
Some of the displaced Catholic faculty could find work at, say, Brandeis…
And what about the military colleges? The faculty at West Point could use some openly gay, vegetarian pacifists. The women’s studies department at the Army War College could use some beefing up…
Business schools are vastly overrun with Republicans. Obviously, a purge is in order. To make sure all points of view are represented, we could mandate that every other hire come from, say, the leadership of a labor union. One for business, one for labor. That’s fair!
What about the proprietary sector? Since the very nature of proprietary schools is capitalist, they need a counterbalancing faction of socialist faculty. After all, students mustn’t be indoctrinated. Dispatch the University of Phoenix to the MLA, stat!
In fact, why should we limit viewpoint diversity to colleges? Why not other important public institutions?
Over half of Congress is comprised of millionaires. That’s not representative! Let’s get a representative sample of Wal-Mart workers in there. Let them vote on tax policy. For that matter, let’s get the median income of Congress down to the national average. That might have some interesting effects on the laws about parental leave, health care, tax distributions…
And what about the judiciary? Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas – outta there! 7 out of the 9 current members of the Supreme Court were appointed by Republicans – no wonder they threw the election to Bush! Make it an even split – hell, while we’re at it, let’s extend the income-diversity rule there, too. Let’s see what someone making $25k has to say about equal protection of the laws…
Sigh…
Apparently, affirmative action is only okay when it benefits conservatives.
The idiocy of the law is even deeper than it looks. Leave aside the question of higher-ed exceptionalism; what’s even more disturbing is the idea that everybody’s political thinking has to fit cleanly in certain boxes. If I’m hired to be the token liberal, and my thought evolves, I could lose my job! If I stitch positions together in ways that don’t reflect the approved categories (say, a Daniel Bell type – socially conservative, but left on economics), I don’t count, so I can’t get hired. Best to avoid thinking anything new.
For the idea of ‘viewpoint diversity’ to make any sense, we have to assume that all possible viewpoints are already known, as is the proper numerical distribution of viewpoints. We also have to assume that all of the interesting questions have already been asked, all answers to all questions coalesce into only two or three possible constellations, that political preference colors all knowledge (“Democrats argue that the atomic number for hydrogen is 1, but Republicans…”), and that students are perfect sponges for what their professors tell them. In other words, we have to be morons.
Update:
I can't imagine a worse idea for higher education than to prescribe the 'correct' answers in advance, whatever they are. Don't be fooled by the 'leftist professor' crap; if ideological balance had anything to do with anything, Bush would appoint several liberal justices to the Supreme Court to keep the conservatives honest. The Republicans control the Presidency, the Congress, and the Judiciary. They control the mainstream media, most state governments, and most of the wealth in America. It just kills them not to have a (legally-mandated!) clean sweep.
To make higher education the political handmaiden of anybody would be a tragic mistake. The purpose of higher ed, I always thought, was to expose people to ideas they hadn't seen before, to sharpen their critical thinking skills and enable them to take part in a democratic society as agents of their own interest. To declare that exposing someone to new ideas violates his 'rights' is both obtuse and insanely dangerous.
It's also a betrayal of one of the more honorable lines of conservative thought. As any serious student of American political history can attest, the postwar 'fusion' in American conservatism was held together by the glue of anti-communism. Anti-communism was premised on the (correct) idea that an open society (in which people are allowed to question those in power) is preferable to a closed one. Buckley, Taft, Popper, Friedman, von Hayek: all of these conservatives understood that absolutism leads to oppression.
Drunk with power, the new conservatives have forgotten all that. They believe that everything worth knowing is already known, and that, therefore, any questioning of the existing order can only be explained by bad faith. (This is a nearly perfect mirror of the old Soviet habit of explaining discontent with the workers' paradise as a psychiatric malady.) To them, the only role for higher ed is to produce workers.
Fox News's obsession with Ward Churchill makes sense, in this context. He's what Trotsky used to call a 'useful idiot.' Academically, he's a nonentity, but never mind that; he embodies the conservative stereotype of the left-wing professor, giving a convenient cover for a purge. Inflame populist outrage against some insignificant little twit, and channel that outrage to squash independent thought generally. It's an old move, but apparently, it still works.
I'm not naive about the limitations of the academy; as my regular readers know, I bump up against them with some frequency. That's not the point. The point is that education, done right, involves exposure to things you didn't know before. You build cognitive skill by engaging with ideas different from your own. Are some professors arrogant? Sure. So are some businesspeople, but I don't see conservatives calling for more regulation there.
The alligator's nose is under the tent. By all means, step on it.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Interesting Times
In terms of the storied curse, “may you live in interesting times,” these are interesting times. The Chronicle reported today that the American Association for Higher Education is disbanding for lack of member support. This, on the heels of the dissolution of FIPSE. The Senate voted to reauthorize the Perkins grant program, but didn’t get around to actually allocating any MONEY for it, so senators can claim to have been supporters of the program without actually paying for it. At my college, our president reported this week that our allocation from the state will be flat again this year, with likely cuts for the next several years.
All of that said, the mood among faculty and managers on campus seems to be “hang on.” I’ve noticed a disturbing willingness to postpone decisions, to hold one’s breath, cross one’s fingers, squint real tight, click heels together, and wish it all away.
It looks to me very much like the calm before a storm. Nobody wants to own up to making any of the changes that obviously need to be made, so they’re waiting for circumstances to force their hand. Maybe we can squeeze out one more year of (fill in the blank). Maybe a few more unreplaced retirements will buy us some more time.
Paradoxically, the very need for change becomes an obstacle to it. We can’t take risks now! Money for new initiatives would come at the expense of continuing operations, which are already running lean, so let’s not chance it. Better to just hang on...
From the faculty who are just one or two years away from retirement, I can understand it. But from everyone else, it’s baffling. The tip of the fiscal iceberg is clearly visible, we’re heading right for it, but nobody wants to bother the captain.
Necessity is a mother, as the saying goes. It’s time to put it all on the table: tuition structures, the components of a college degree, faculty tenure, summer vacations, everything. Take a look at Duke’s “professors of the practice,” at college lobbying, and at building/construction priorities.
Hegel wrote that freedom is the insight into necessity. Waiting to be buffeted by external forces is not freedom, or even peace. It’s just suicide.
Sorry to be so airy today; I usually try to focus on specifics. This week the specifics just piled up faster than I could keep track.
All of that said, the mood among faculty and managers on campus seems to be “hang on.” I’ve noticed a disturbing willingness to postpone decisions, to hold one’s breath, cross one’s fingers, squint real tight, click heels together, and wish it all away.
It looks to me very much like the calm before a storm. Nobody wants to own up to making any of the changes that obviously need to be made, so they’re waiting for circumstances to force their hand. Maybe we can squeeze out one more year of (fill in the blank). Maybe a few more unreplaced retirements will buy us some more time.
Paradoxically, the very need for change becomes an obstacle to it. We can’t take risks now! Money for new initiatives would come at the expense of continuing operations, which are already running lean, so let’s not chance it. Better to just hang on...
From the faculty who are just one or two years away from retirement, I can understand it. But from everyone else, it’s baffling. The tip of the fiscal iceberg is clearly visible, we’re heading right for it, but nobody wants to bother the captain.
Necessity is a mother, as the saying goes. It’s time to put it all on the table: tuition structures, the components of a college degree, faculty tenure, summer vacations, everything. Take a look at Duke’s “professors of the practice,” at college lobbying, and at building/construction priorities.
Hegel wrote that freedom is the insight into necessity. Waiting to be buffeted by external forces is not freedom, or even peace. It’s just suicide.
Sorry to be so airy today; I usually try to focus on specifics. This week the specifics just piled up faster than I could keep track.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
GOP 1, FIPSE 0
The Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) is one of the only agencies out there to fund projects that take comparative looks at multiple institutions. The Republicans in Congress have voted to de-fund the competitive pool for grants entirely, to replace it with 'earmarks' (pork barrel projects) for particularly well-placed Republican legislators.
The Irascible Professor said it better than I could, here.
Let me get this straight. In order to pay for the latest round of tax cuts and wars, we're going to de-fund one of the few agencies in higher ed that actually tried to make INTELLIGENT COST-CUTTING POSSIBLE.
Sigh.
The Irascible Professor said it better than I could, here.
Let me get this straight. In order to pay for the latest round of tax cuts and wars, we're going to de-fund one of the few agencies in higher ed that actually tried to make INTELLIGENT COST-CUTTING POSSIBLE.
Sigh.
Taking the Show on the Road
The speech went really well – it was gratifying to see such an enthusiastic response to the themes and topics I’ve been developing in this blog. I was the last item on the agenda, post-lunch and pre-going-home, but the faculty stayed an extra half-hour to keep the discussion going.
That’s not to toot my own horn – I make no grand claims about stage presence – but just to say that there’s an eagerness out there to get at the issues that higher ed seems to face over and over again.
This morning I heard from a friend at my previous school. They just had a major layoff of staff, with a major layoff of faculty expected at the end of the semester. Some familiar faces gone, others shuffled into roles that, well, wouldn’t have been their first choices.
Despite their very different profiles (for-profit tech school vs. community college), my previous and current employer share a few key traits, as do most colleges in America: low on the prestige hierarchy, tuition-driven, teaching-centered, and utterly below the radar of the mainstream media (MSM). Also, major and chronic budget issues that seem to defeat any sort of internal solution.
As far as the MSM is concerned, though, higher ed in America is confined to about a dozen institutions (Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, Michigan, Berkeley…), affirmative action for admissions is the hottest potato going, and every professor in America is simply abuzz about Lawrence Summers’ latest bout of foot-in-mouth disease.
Makes ya wonder. Elite research universities are, all things considered, a very small piece of the puzzle. More students are enrolled in community colleges in America than in every other college and university combined. For us, of course, affirmative action for admissions is a non-issue; we take everybody. Lawrence Summers strikes me as vaguely embarrassing in a Shatner-esque sort of way, but he’s also, in my universe, utterly unimportant. He no more affects my world than do Brad and Jennifer.
In a way, I shouldn’t complain. The very blindness of the MSM (and the discipline-based ‘opinion leaders’ within academia) to the majority of colleges in America means that the issues I’ve been raising aren’t stale. If anything, to judge by my audience’s reaction, they have the novelty that comes from recognizing something familiar in a new way.
Well, enough of that. I have to get the dog and pony ready for a show tomorrow.
That’s not to toot my own horn – I make no grand claims about stage presence – but just to say that there’s an eagerness out there to get at the issues that higher ed seems to face over and over again.
This morning I heard from a friend at my previous school. They just had a major layoff of staff, with a major layoff of faculty expected at the end of the semester. Some familiar faces gone, others shuffled into roles that, well, wouldn’t have been their first choices.
Despite their very different profiles (for-profit tech school vs. community college), my previous and current employer share a few key traits, as do most colleges in America: low on the prestige hierarchy, tuition-driven, teaching-centered, and utterly below the radar of the mainstream media (MSM). Also, major and chronic budget issues that seem to defeat any sort of internal solution.
As far as the MSM is concerned, though, higher ed in America is confined to about a dozen institutions (Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, Michigan, Berkeley…), affirmative action for admissions is the hottest potato going, and every professor in America is simply abuzz about Lawrence Summers’ latest bout of foot-in-mouth disease.
Makes ya wonder. Elite research universities are, all things considered, a very small piece of the puzzle. More students are enrolled in community colleges in America than in every other college and university combined. For us, of course, affirmative action for admissions is a non-issue; we take everybody. Lawrence Summers strikes me as vaguely embarrassing in a Shatner-esque sort of way, but he’s also, in my universe, utterly unimportant. He no more affects my world than do Brad and Jennifer.
In a way, I shouldn’t complain. The very blindness of the MSM (and the discipline-based ‘opinion leaders’ within academia) to the majority of colleges in America means that the issues I’ve been raising aren’t stale. If anything, to judge by my audience’s reaction, they have the novelty that comes from recognizing something familiar in a new way.
Well, enough of that. I have to get the dog and pony ready for a show tomorrow.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Putting the Puzzle Together, Part 2: Commodity Hell in a Handbasket
I've started working on the implications of the health care/higher ed analogy. Assuming that our political culture is too far gone to embrace the obviously correct solution (use progressive taxation to fund single-payer health care, and use some of the savings to beef up basic research in the universities), what I think may happen is the emergence of something like HMO's in higher education.
Since our culture treats these things in a bass-ackwards way, let's assume that the rage for 'cost control' that gave rise to 'managed care' spawns similar offspring for higher ed.
Take the next step. Given the rise of distance ed, and the recent move away from charging out-of-county students a premium (gotta get those enrollments up somehow!), what's to stop some enterprising capitalist from starting an Efficient Degree Organization that compiles data on the cheapest and most convenient ways for students to put together degree programs? Take these Smith County College courses via the web, add a few Jones CC courses, transfer the batch to Midtier State, and pay the EDO either a flat fee or a percentage of the money saved.
Take the next step after that. Assume the EDO gets big, which it might. What's to stop it from negotiating group discounts? After all, if every community college in the state offers English Composition on the web, and the EDO has an impressive number of students, the incentive for any given college to cut it a break is substantial. We've entered what manufacturers call "commodity hell," in which the only way to compete is on price. After all, if the program is knit together from a pile of different schools, the prestige variable has been more-or-less tabled. What's left is price.
None of this would have been realistic before the emergence of internet courses, since physical distances would have been prohibitive. Nor would it have made sense when the public picked up more of the tab for higher ed, because tuition was low enough that any savings would have been too small to bother. Now, distance is irrelevant, and tuition is climbing fast.
If the EDO gets big enough, there might be some counter-pressure from the academic side, claiming that quality control has become untenable. The obvious legislative response would be...wait for it...drum roll, please...standard, external exams! Outcomes assessment, taken to the next level! The relation of colleges to degrees would become closer to the relationship between law schools and the bar exam.
It's not really all that otherworldly, if you think about it. Universities have already effectively outsourced their personnel decisions to publishers. (No book, no tenure.) Why not outsource degree decisions, too? Colleges would become something closer to Stanley Kaplan test prep centers.
Substantively, this is a terrible, horrifying idea. Academic freedom would wither away, good luck defining criteria for the exam, etc. Still, while nobody would advocate a system defined this way from the beginning, it could easily take shape in the interstices, while everyone just whines about cost.
(No sooner had I polished off this missive than the latest Chronicle of Higher Ed arrived, featuring an article by Dick Armey suggesting…say it with me, now…replacing subsidies to public colleges with tuition vouchers for students! My goodness, these people are predictable.)
Since our culture treats these things in a bass-ackwards way, let's assume that the rage for 'cost control' that gave rise to 'managed care' spawns similar offspring for higher ed.
Take the next step. Given the rise of distance ed, and the recent move away from charging out-of-county students a premium (gotta get those enrollments up somehow!), what's to stop some enterprising capitalist from starting an Efficient Degree Organization that compiles data on the cheapest and most convenient ways for students to put together degree programs? Take these Smith County College courses via the web, add a few Jones CC courses, transfer the batch to Midtier State, and pay the EDO either a flat fee or a percentage of the money saved.
Take the next step after that. Assume the EDO gets big, which it might. What's to stop it from negotiating group discounts? After all, if every community college in the state offers English Composition on the web, and the EDO has an impressive number of students, the incentive for any given college to cut it a break is substantial. We've entered what manufacturers call "commodity hell," in which the only way to compete is on price. After all, if the program is knit together from a pile of different schools, the prestige variable has been more-or-less tabled. What's left is price.
None of this would have been realistic before the emergence of internet courses, since physical distances would have been prohibitive. Nor would it have made sense when the public picked up more of the tab for higher ed, because tuition was low enough that any savings would have been too small to bother. Now, distance is irrelevant, and tuition is climbing fast.
If the EDO gets big enough, there might be some counter-pressure from the academic side, claiming that quality control has become untenable. The obvious legislative response would be...wait for it...drum roll, please...standard, external exams! Outcomes assessment, taken to the next level! The relation of colleges to degrees would become closer to the relationship between law schools and the bar exam.
It's not really all that otherworldly, if you think about it. Universities have already effectively outsourced their personnel decisions to publishers. (No book, no tenure.) Why not outsource degree decisions, too? Colleges would become something closer to Stanley Kaplan test prep centers.
Substantively, this is a terrible, horrifying idea. Academic freedom would wither away, good luck defining criteria for the exam, etc. Still, while nobody would advocate a system defined this way from the beginning, it could easily take shape in the interstices, while everyone just whines about cost.
(No sooner had I polished off this missive than the latest Chronicle of Higher Ed arrived, featuring an article by Dick Armey suggesting…say it with me, now…replacing subsidies to public colleges with tuition vouchers for students! My goodness, these people are predictable.)
Monday, March 14, 2005
Putting the Puzzle Together, Part 1
In preparing for a speech I’ll be giving soon about some of the dilemmas of higher ed, it hit me that higher ed and health care are similarly positioned, and facing many of the same issues.
Both are, at their core, labor-intensive. Doctor with patient, teacher with student. Both have endured tremendous infusions of technology, with their varying costs and mixed blessings. Both have been on the receiving end of de-professionalizing trends: HMO’s and managed care treading on the autonomy of doctors, and adjunct-ification treading on the academic freedom and security of the professoriate. Both have attracted unflattering public attention due to rising cost. (In fact, a non-trivial portion of the rising cost of higher ed reflects the rising cost of health insurance.)
In both cases, and contrary to almost every other industry, technology has moved in without so much as a nod towards economic efficiency. In the case of medical care, advanced technologies improve the quality of care, albeit at tremendous cost. The public gripes mercilessly about the cost, but refuses to entertain any serious conversation about reducing access or quality. (Much of the rhetoric directed against single-payer health care revolves around the bugaboo of ‘rationing,’ as if the market doesn’t already do that.) In the case of higher ed, we adopt new technologies because the industries for which we prepare students have adopted them, whether they save us any money or not (and they almost never do). For example, the photography program in my division has had to make major purchases to adapt to the onset of digital photography, but it can’t just stop working with film. It has to support both. Therefore, we purchase digital cameras, high-end computers, and advanced software, and still purchase enlargers, darkroom curtains (fireproofed, naturally, at additional cost), and the traditional trappings. Do we get better outcomes? Yes and no; we get a student ready to enter the field, just like we did before. It just costs twice as much, and those rising costs are taken as evidence that academics are lazy and out of touch.
Tuition has been rising more slowly than health-care costs, probably because the pace of technical advance has been slower and the costs of those technologies usually lower. (Naturally, there’s an exception for the allied-health majors, in which we have to adopt the technologies that hospitals have, just because hospitals have.) The trend towards adjuncts hasn’t hit health care in quite the same way, though I’m told that nurses now shoulder some of the tasks that doctors used to.
Both industries suffer by comparison to most of the private sector, which our political culture now regards as normative. A car company will adopt those technologies that promise to save (or make) money; everything else, it ignores. Neither a hospital nor a college has that luxury. When our prices rise faster than the car company’s, then, politicians make great hay attacking the out-of-touch elites (doctors and professors) whose presumed arrogance is (to them) the only possible explanation for comparatively rapid inflation. (Not for nothing, but car company executives’ salaries make professors’ salaries look simply pitiful.)
In both cases, what are truly and properly understood as public goods (health care, education) have been miscast as private goods, with predictable consequences. Whether I use the MRI machine at the local hospital or not, I benefit from its presence. I benefit from discoveries made possible by the treatments given to other people. In the same way, the economic benefits of an educated workforce benefit me, even when the education goes to other people.
By dropping the category of ‘public goods’ from our political conversation and elevating the standards of mass retail as the basis for judgment, we have fundamentally misunderstood and mismanaged two of the most important pillars of our society.
The United States has, by far, the most expensive health care system in the world, but its results are nowhere near the top when measured by such standards as life expectancy, infant mortality, or percentage of population covered. We’re spending the most, but getting mediocre performance. We’re screwing it up.
In higher education, the picture is both murkier and more positive. On the high end of the prestige hierarchy, we still draw some of the best minds from around the world to the U.S. for undergraduate and graduate education (although that has slowed somewhat with the Bush administration’s clampdown on immigration, post-9/11. Richard Florida, among others, has called attention to the Bush brain drain, with the best minds from other countries eschewing the U.S. for study in Australia, Canada, or India. We don’t feel it now, but when the next Microsoft emerges in Bangalore or Canberra, instead of Seattle, we’ll be in trouble.)
On the low end, our uniquely-American community college system has drawn international interest for its ability to bring the benefits of higher education to the middle and working classes at reasonable cost. For all its flaws, it’s a wonderful system, founded on a clear understanding that an educated workforce is, in fact, a public good.
What to do? I haven’t finished the speech yet...
Both are, at their core, labor-intensive. Doctor with patient, teacher with student. Both have endured tremendous infusions of technology, with their varying costs and mixed blessings. Both have been on the receiving end of de-professionalizing trends: HMO’s and managed care treading on the autonomy of doctors, and adjunct-ification treading on the academic freedom and security of the professoriate. Both have attracted unflattering public attention due to rising cost. (In fact, a non-trivial portion of the rising cost of higher ed reflects the rising cost of health insurance.)
In both cases, and contrary to almost every other industry, technology has moved in without so much as a nod towards economic efficiency. In the case of medical care, advanced technologies improve the quality of care, albeit at tremendous cost. The public gripes mercilessly about the cost, but refuses to entertain any serious conversation about reducing access or quality. (Much of the rhetoric directed against single-payer health care revolves around the bugaboo of ‘rationing,’ as if the market doesn’t already do that.) In the case of higher ed, we adopt new technologies because the industries for which we prepare students have adopted them, whether they save us any money or not (and they almost never do). For example, the photography program in my division has had to make major purchases to adapt to the onset of digital photography, but it can’t just stop working with film. It has to support both. Therefore, we purchase digital cameras, high-end computers, and advanced software, and still purchase enlargers, darkroom curtains (fireproofed, naturally, at additional cost), and the traditional trappings. Do we get better outcomes? Yes and no; we get a student ready to enter the field, just like we did before. It just costs twice as much, and those rising costs are taken as evidence that academics are lazy and out of touch.
Tuition has been rising more slowly than health-care costs, probably because the pace of technical advance has been slower and the costs of those technologies usually lower. (Naturally, there’s an exception for the allied-health majors, in which we have to adopt the technologies that hospitals have, just because hospitals have.) The trend towards adjuncts hasn’t hit health care in quite the same way, though I’m told that nurses now shoulder some of the tasks that doctors used to.
Both industries suffer by comparison to most of the private sector, which our political culture now regards as normative. A car company will adopt those technologies that promise to save (or make) money; everything else, it ignores. Neither a hospital nor a college has that luxury. When our prices rise faster than the car company’s, then, politicians make great hay attacking the out-of-touch elites (doctors and professors) whose presumed arrogance is (to them) the only possible explanation for comparatively rapid inflation. (Not for nothing, but car company executives’ salaries make professors’ salaries look simply pitiful.)
In both cases, what are truly and properly understood as public goods (health care, education) have been miscast as private goods, with predictable consequences. Whether I use the MRI machine at the local hospital or not, I benefit from its presence. I benefit from discoveries made possible by the treatments given to other people. In the same way, the economic benefits of an educated workforce benefit me, even when the education goes to other people.
By dropping the category of ‘public goods’ from our political conversation and elevating the standards of mass retail as the basis for judgment, we have fundamentally misunderstood and mismanaged two of the most important pillars of our society.
The United States has, by far, the most expensive health care system in the world, but its results are nowhere near the top when measured by such standards as life expectancy, infant mortality, or percentage of population covered. We’re spending the most, but getting mediocre performance. We’re screwing it up.
In higher education, the picture is both murkier and more positive. On the high end of the prestige hierarchy, we still draw some of the best minds from around the world to the U.S. for undergraduate and graduate education (although that has slowed somewhat with the Bush administration’s clampdown on immigration, post-9/11. Richard Florida, among others, has called attention to the Bush brain drain, with the best minds from other countries eschewing the U.S. for study in Australia, Canada, or India. We don’t feel it now, but when the next Microsoft emerges in Bangalore or Canberra, instead of Seattle, we’ll be in trouble.)
On the low end, our uniquely-American community college system has drawn international interest for its ability to bring the benefits of higher education to the middle and working classes at reasonable cost. For all its flaws, it’s a wonderful system, founded on a clear understanding that an educated workforce is, in fact, a public good.
What to do? I haven’t finished the speech yet...
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Higher Ed and the New York Yankees
First, a disclaimer: I can’t stand the Yankees.
That said, they make an awfully good metaphor for a recent development in higher ed.
The Yankees’ modus operandi (at least, during the years when Steinbrenner isn’t suspended) is to treat their farm system as trade bait. They rarely promote from within; rather, they send away their promising younger players, preferring to pay top dollar for established veterans. The upside of this strategy is that the Yankees land some great talent, and they don’t have to put up with learning curves. The downsides, though, are several: the costs are astronomical (they have the highest payroll in baseball, by a large margin), established players don’t come with guarantees (Raul Mondesi, anyone?), their best years are often behind them (Jason Giambi, anyone?), and they lose out on some wonderful, cheap young talent.
This is, more or less, the situation facing colleges now when they do administrative searches (albeit at dramatically lower salaries, alas…).
Historically, academic managers (chairs, deans, vice presidents, provosts) have emerged from the faculty. Faculty who show promise have often risen through the ranks, carrying with them the ground-level knowledge of what is involved in actually teaching. The pipeline starts in the faculty.
With the move over the last twenty or thirty years to a mostly-adjunct workforce, the opening of the pipeline has narrowed dramatically. (In baseball terms, we shut down the farm system to cut costs.) As with any promotion system, the effects were felt first at the bottom: graduate students suddenly had tremendous difficulty finding stable, full-time employment. The effects have moved up the food chain over time. After more than a generation of skimping on new blood, many colleges now find themselves scrambling to find qualified people willing to take on administrative positions. In my home state, for example, several academic VP searches have been extended, simply for lack of desirable candidates. From what the Chronicle reports, the same is becoming true even of college presidencies.
As with the Yankees, lack of development at the early levels leads to greater costs and desperation at the higher levels. Oddly, though, I haven’t seen anywhere (except in this blog) a connecting of the dots.
The recent articles (and whispered scuttlebutt) about extended searches are still treating each extension as an isolated event, a fluke. The committee is too picky, or the cost of living in that area is too high, or the fundraising demands have spun out of control. Even allowing some truth to each of these, the more glaring and fundamental explanation has gone completely unaddressed: if you cheap out on your farm system, you just aren’t going to get the talented rookies.
The Yankees can sort of get away with it, since they have the luxury of infinite budgets. Colleges (generally) don’t, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
I’ve noticed the consequences of these developments in my own career. Coming out of graduate school, I couldn’t get arrested. After a spell of borderline employment, I latched on to a faculty position at a proprietary college – twelve-month teaching calendar, no prospect of tenure, all service courses, etc. For several years, I applied for faculty positions elsewhere, never landing one. After moving into administration, though, and shifting my search to administrative jobs, I suddenly became a (relatively) hot commodity. My current employer, to whom I am eternally grateful, hired me as a dean; it hasn’t hired a new professor in my academic discipline since the Nixon administration. Now, some neighboring colleges are struggling to fill VP positions, bemoaning the lack of good candidates. We recently had a consultant’s visit for one of our programs, and I was her tour guide for the day; our President specifically asked her not to recruit me. (I know that because she told me, with a mischievous plausible-deniability grin.)
In trying to find a faculty job, I struck out. In looking for administrative jobs that pay substantially more, I hit paydirt fairly quickly. There’s something askew here.
Colleges need to connect the dots, and need to look at full-time faculty not simply as a more expensive alternative to adjuncts, but also as an administrative farm team. The alternative is bidding wars, which would work out fine for me personally, but which are, in the long term, a losing strategy. The Yankees didn’t win the Series last year, or the year before, or the year before that, or the year before that…
That said, they make an awfully good metaphor for a recent development in higher ed.
The Yankees’ modus operandi (at least, during the years when Steinbrenner isn’t suspended) is to treat their farm system as trade bait. They rarely promote from within; rather, they send away their promising younger players, preferring to pay top dollar for established veterans. The upside of this strategy is that the Yankees land some great talent, and they don’t have to put up with learning curves. The downsides, though, are several: the costs are astronomical (they have the highest payroll in baseball, by a large margin), established players don’t come with guarantees (Raul Mondesi, anyone?), their best years are often behind them (Jason Giambi, anyone?), and they lose out on some wonderful, cheap young talent.
This is, more or less, the situation facing colleges now when they do administrative searches (albeit at dramatically lower salaries, alas…).
Historically, academic managers (chairs, deans, vice presidents, provosts) have emerged from the faculty. Faculty who show promise have often risen through the ranks, carrying with them the ground-level knowledge of what is involved in actually teaching. The pipeline starts in the faculty.
With the move over the last twenty or thirty years to a mostly-adjunct workforce, the opening of the pipeline has narrowed dramatically. (In baseball terms, we shut down the farm system to cut costs.) As with any promotion system, the effects were felt first at the bottom: graduate students suddenly had tremendous difficulty finding stable, full-time employment. The effects have moved up the food chain over time. After more than a generation of skimping on new blood, many colleges now find themselves scrambling to find qualified people willing to take on administrative positions. In my home state, for example, several academic VP searches have been extended, simply for lack of desirable candidates. From what the Chronicle reports, the same is becoming true even of college presidencies.
As with the Yankees, lack of development at the early levels leads to greater costs and desperation at the higher levels. Oddly, though, I haven’t seen anywhere (except in this blog) a connecting of the dots.
The recent articles (and whispered scuttlebutt) about extended searches are still treating each extension as an isolated event, a fluke. The committee is too picky, or the cost of living in that area is too high, or the fundraising demands have spun out of control. Even allowing some truth to each of these, the more glaring and fundamental explanation has gone completely unaddressed: if you cheap out on your farm system, you just aren’t going to get the talented rookies.
The Yankees can sort of get away with it, since they have the luxury of infinite budgets. Colleges (generally) don’t, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
I’ve noticed the consequences of these developments in my own career. Coming out of graduate school, I couldn’t get arrested. After a spell of borderline employment, I latched on to a faculty position at a proprietary college – twelve-month teaching calendar, no prospect of tenure, all service courses, etc. For several years, I applied for faculty positions elsewhere, never landing one. After moving into administration, though, and shifting my search to administrative jobs, I suddenly became a (relatively) hot commodity. My current employer, to whom I am eternally grateful, hired me as a dean; it hasn’t hired a new professor in my academic discipline since the Nixon administration. Now, some neighboring colleges are struggling to fill VP positions, bemoaning the lack of good candidates. We recently had a consultant’s visit for one of our programs, and I was her tour guide for the day; our President specifically asked her not to recruit me. (I know that because she told me, with a mischievous plausible-deniability grin.)
In trying to find a faculty job, I struck out. In looking for administrative jobs that pay substantially more, I hit paydirt fairly quickly. There’s something askew here.
Colleges need to connect the dots, and need to look at full-time faculty not simply as a more expensive alternative to adjuncts, but also as an administrative farm team. The alternative is bidding wars, which would work out fine for me personally, but which are, in the long term, a losing strategy. The Yankees didn’t win the Series last year, or the year before, or the year before that, or the year before that…
Friday, March 04, 2005
Earf and the Grim Reefer
The Boy’s latest obsession is the planets. Mercury, Venus, Earf… It’s great fun to hear him wrestle with the English language. He has his letters now, and he frequently asks how particular words are spelled. You forget how many un-phonetic words there are until a three-year-old starts pop quizzing you on them.
We got him some books about the solar system, which became immediate favorites. One of them mentioned Neil Armstrong walking on the moon; The Boy didn’t believe it! When I assured him it was true, he asked “why?” I wasn’t sure how to answer that.
This morning he announced, pitch-perfect and apropos of nothing, “I’ve been tossing and turning on an old mattress.” It’s almost unnerving.
One of his favorite cartoons is “Billy and Mandy,” which features the Grim Reaper as a character (don’t ask). Yesterday he referred to the Reaper as the Reefer. The Grim Reefer. I would have corrected him, but it was actually an improvement.
We got him some books about the solar system, which became immediate favorites. One of them mentioned Neil Armstrong walking on the moon; The Boy didn’t believe it! When I assured him it was true, he asked “why?” I wasn’t sure how to answer that.
This morning he announced, pitch-perfect and apropos of nothing, “I’ve been tossing and turning on an old mattress.” It’s almost unnerving.
One of his favorite cartoons is “Billy and Mandy,” which features the Grim Reaper as a character (don’t ask). Yesterday he referred to the Reaper as the Reefer. The Grim Reefer. I would have corrected him, but it was actually an improvement.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
The Paper Trail Theory
I just plowed through four piles of documents submitted by faculty and chairs, recommending various professors for promotion, tenure, or reappointment. Were I a martian encountering them all for the first time, I’d wonder why earthlings are so upset about the educational system: according to the files, everybody is practically perfect in every way!
Except that they aren’t. And many of the people who wrote those documents have said very different things to me in person. They just don’t want to commit it to writing.
And here’s where the whole ‘paper trail’ theory of management falls down. According to the paper trail theory (wait – if I want this to catch on, I have to use capital letters: okay, according to The Paper Trail Theory…), whenever some sort of correction or improvement is needed, the manager should document the problem (sorry: the issue…) in a steadily escalating series of writeups. That way, should the low performer continue to fail to improve, any adverse action can’t be characterized as arbitrary or capricious.
Where it collapses is in the differential weight given to written (as opposed to spoken) criticism. Since we don’t want to demoralize the low performers, many of whom have tenure and are therefore bulletproof (or at least immovable), we try to be encouraging. Anything negative is communicated orally, when it’s communicated at all. Since some well-entrenched figures have shown previously-unsuspected gifts for drama when they’ve been criticized in the past, their chairs have decided that it just isn’t worth the trouble.
The net result is a herniating pile of documents crossing my desk, testifying to the unadulterated wonderfulness of all and sundry. This, in the name of ensuring accountability.
The perverse result, of course, is that any adverse actions that have to be taken (and they do!) wind up looking more arbitrary and capricious than they actually are, since the paper trail seemingly contradicts them. (Close reading, of course, reveals that there are actually different levels of praise; to suggest anything less than superhuman powers, in this in-house scheme of grade inflation, is in fact to call someone a blithering idiot. But good luck getting that to hold up in court! “Your honor, when I referred to Prof. X as ‘the best teacher I’ve ever seen,’ you need to read that in contrast to when I referred to Prof. Y as ‘the best teacher God has ever seen fit to create, in this epoch or any other.’” That’ll fly.)
I came to the party late enough to see the forms in a late stage of evolution. They used to have two categories: recommended and not recommended. That didn’t work, since everyone was recommended (for promotion, or tenure, or whatever). So another category was added: highly recommended. Then everyone was highly recommended. Now there’s a fourth category: Most Highly Recommended, which, predictably, everyone is. In my crabbier moments, I like to imagine what the form might look like in ten years. Extremely Highly Recommended, with Sugar on Top. So Superlatively Recommended That the Confines of Mere Language Fail Me. It’s sort of like solving the problem of too many A’s by giving more A-pluses.
Ironically, these same people complain at length about grade inflation for students.
Although I’m philosophically opposed to grading on a curve, I’m beginning to see the logic. If you stipulate, in advance, that there will be a lower end, someone has to fill it. With each person considered independently of every other, though, it’s awfully tempting for the front-line manager just to write nice things and save the nasty stuff for meetings.
Except that they aren’t. And many of the people who wrote those documents have said very different things to me in person. They just don’t want to commit it to writing.
And here’s where the whole ‘paper trail’ theory of management falls down. According to the paper trail theory (wait – if I want this to catch on, I have to use capital letters: okay, according to The Paper Trail Theory…), whenever some sort of correction or improvement is needed, the manager should document the problem (sorry: the issue…) in a steadily escalating series of writeups. That way, should the low performer continue to fail to improve, any adverse action can’t be characterized as arbitrary or capricious.
Where it collapses is in the differential weight given to written (as opposed to spoken) criticism. Since we don’t want to demoralize the low performers, many of whom have tenure and are therefore bulletproof (or at least immovable), we try to be encouraging. Anything negative is communicated orally, when it’s communicated at all. Since some well-entrenched figures have shown previously-unsuspected gifts for drama when they’ve been criticized in the past, their chairs have decided that it just isn’t worth the trouble.
The net result is a herniating pile of documents crossing my desk, testifying to the unadulterated wonderfulness of all and sundry. This, in the name of ensuring accountability.
The perverse result, of course, is that any adverse actions that have to be taken (and they do!) wind up looking more arbitrary and capricious than they actually are, since the paper trail seemingly contradicts them. (Close reading, of course, reveals that there are actually different levels of praise; to suggest anything less than superhuman powers, in this in-house scheme of grade inflation, is in fact to call someone a blithering idiot. But good luck getting that to hold up in court! “Your honor, when I referred to Prof. X as ‘the best teacher I’ve ever seen,’ you need to read that in contrast to when I referred to Prof. Y as ‘the best teacher God has ever seen fit to create, in this epoch or any other.’” That’ll fly.)
I came to the party late enough to see the forms in a late stage of evolution. They used to have two categories: recommended and not recommended. That didn’t work, since everyone was recommended (for promotion, or tenure, or whatever). So another category was added: highly recommended. Then everyone was highly recommended. Now there’s a fourth category: Most Highly Recommended, which, predictably, everyone is. In my crabbier moments, I like to imagine what the form might look like in ten years. Extremely Highly Recommended, with Sugar on Top. So Superlatively Recommended That the Confines of Mere Language Fail Me. It’s sort of like solving the problem of too many A’s by giving more A-pluses.
Ironically, these same people complain at length about grade inflation for students.
Although I’m philosophically opposed to grading on a curve, I’m beginning to see the logic. If you stipulate, in advance, that there will be a lower end, someone has to fill it. With each person considered independently of every other, though, it’s awfully tempting for the front-line manager just to write nice things and save the nasty stuff for meetings.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Snow Day! Snow Day!
It's funny being on campus in the morning, when a huge snowstorm is predicted for the afternoon. Everybody is walking on eggshells, hoping to get The Call.
Having grown up in much snowier territory than I live in now, I'm still a little surprised at the threshold for a snow day here. Still, traffic being what it is, I'll happily take it.
Waiting to hear about a snow day has been a hallowed ritual since I was five years old. It still is. As The Boy approaches public school age (he starts the four-year old program in September. September!), listening to the radio in the morning will become a family ritual.
Nothing bonds a family (or a campus) like the delicious anticipation of slacking. People in Southern climes miss out on the ritual. You learn where your school falls in the alphabetical listing, and your pulse quickens as the announcer approaches the relevant letter. You learn just how many school districts actually exist out there. You learn just how many Catholic schools start with the word "our."
As snow day veterans can tell you, one of the rules is that you have to bake. (I don't make the rules, I just go with them.) Dad shovels, Mom bakes, the kids (if they're old enough) frolic in the snow and come in to watch cartoons. (Lest this seem sexist, I regularly offer to trade with The Wife. She smiles and refuses.) The Boy likes to try to help me shovel, which is both sweet and really awkward. He has a way of getting underfoot anyway; combine that with me swinging a large, heavy shovel, and bad things could happen. The choreography becomes fairly elaborate, as he moves unpredictably and I try to dump snow without injuring either The Boy or my back.
Every time the plow comes by and pushes another ridge of heavy, wet snow onto the foot of the driveway, I come to appreciate the myth of Sisyphus just a little bit more.
Buying a snowblower would constitute admitting defeat. That said, I'll probably break down and do it one of these years. Eventually.
Back to rescheduling meetings. If all goes according to plan, later today I'll be on the couch with The Boy, watching "Totally Spies" on the cartoon network. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon...
Having grown up in much snowier territory than I live in now, I'm still a little surprised at the threshold for a snow day here. Still, traffic being what it is, I'll happily take it.
Waiting to hear about a snow day has been a hallowed ritual since I was five years old. It still is. As The Boy approaches public school age (he starts the four-year old program in September. September!), listening to the radio in the morning will become a family ritual.
Nothing bonds a family (or a campus) like the delicious anticipation of slacking. People in Southern climes miss out on the ritual. You learn where your school falls in the alphabetical listing, and your pulse quickens as the announcer approaches the relevant letter. You learn just how many school districts actually exist out there. You learn just how many Catholic schools start with the word "our."
As snow day veterans can tell you, one of the rules is that you have to bake. (I don't make the rules, I just go with them.) Dad shovels, Mom bakes, the kids (if they're old enough) frolic in the snow and come in to watch cartoons. (Lest this seem sexist, I regularly offer to trade with The Wife. She smiles and refuses.) The Boy likes to try to help me shovel, which is both sweet and really awkward. He has a way of getting underfoot anyway; combine that with me swinging a large, heavy shovel, and bad things could happen. The choreography becomes fairly elaborate, as he moves unpredictably and I try to dump snow without injuring either The Boy or my back.
Every time the plow comes by and pushes another ridge of heavy, wet snow onto the foot of the driveway, I come to appreciate the myth of Sisyphus just a little bit more.
Buying a snowblower would constitute admitting defeat. That said, I'll probably break down and do it one of these years. Eventually.
Back to rescheduling meetings. If all goes according to plan, later today I'll be on the couch with The Boy, watching "Totally Spies" on the cartoon network. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon...
Friday, February 25, 2005
Since Nobody Else Has Asked the Obvious Question...
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Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Merit Scholarships and Bias
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.
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.
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.
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