Dad Vanity

We’ve been having some issues with air conditioning at home – it never shuts off – so we called the repair guy to come and take a look. He asked me when the last time was that I changed the filter in the furnace. Honestly, I had no idea, but I couldn’t admit that to the repair guy, so I muttered something noncommittal and changed the subject. After he left, I changed the filter.

Why? Why?

Why couldn’t I just slap my forehead and tell the truth?

Dad Vanity strikes again.

I try not to let Dad Vanity influence too much of our day-to-day life, and it’s usually not that bad – I’ve never been a car snob; my athletic goals for the kids involve participation, rather than stardom; we have one television, and it’s not large. (Though I’ve pined from afar for years now, we still don’t have TiVo.) I mow the lawn often enough to prevent complaints from the neighbors, and spread the evil weedkiller maybe twice a year, but that’s all.

And yet, when asked point-blank by the repair guy, I couldn’t fess up. Just couldn’t do it.

As a recovering nerd, there are some Dad skills I just never picked up. Some of them I don’t mind, but there’s always that lingering guilt about not knowing how to fix something, or what to look for when something breaks, or forgetting some routine maintenance task. My father-in-law knows all of these things, and is more than willing to help, but asking is always a little bit painful.

Deconstructing gender roles is all well and good, but there’s just something about being asked point-blank by the repair guy…

Letters of Recommendation, Revisited

An aside in a previous entry, on the silliness of letters of recommendation, brought forth a flurry of emails and comments. Apparently, I’m not the only one who sees them as archaic and fundamentally flawed.

This morning I received an especially troubling email from a professor who discovered that the “characteristic caution” with which she wrote was being misread as “damning with faint praise.” Part of me wanted to tell her to think about her audience, rather than her ‘characteristic’ anything, but part of me had to admit that she has a point. Letters of recommendation, in this employer’s market, need to be effusive, distinctive, on-point, and (preferably) from famous people. A thoughtful, balanced, circumspect letter from a solid-but-not-famous author is worse than nothing; it screams ‘mediocrity,’ which is death in this market. (Whether famous people are better mentors is another issue – in my experience, it’s pretty much the opposite. They get famous by being self-centered, not by nurturing others. Exceptions exist, but they’re exceptions.)

The great tragedy, of course, is that letters are such horrible indicators. They really don’t tell you much at all.

I’ve never been trained in how to write a letter of recommendation. I’ve never seen an industry standard. HR has issued a few ‘thou-shalt-nots,’ addressing the predictable no-nos, but that’s about it. You’re just supposed to know: know not to be ‘characteristically cautious,’ not to be thoughtful or pensive or even fair. Swing for the fences, and hope for the best. This, in the name of finding the best academic minds! (Although I’ve never seen anything written specifically on this, this may be another area in which female academics are at a disadvantage. If it’s true that women are more likely to shy away from either self-promotion or hyperbole in promoting others, they may both get and give less effective letters. The cultural issues here are potentially legion: a mentor from another part of the world might tend towards a more circumspect style, dooming her students to endless adjuncting. There’s nothing fair about it.)

Worse, the larger graduate programs, which are precisely the ones with the famous names, are so laden with students that the letters inevitably start to sound the same.

In administrative job searches, letters have pretty much been dispensed with altogether, probably because fear of litigation has made them so predictably bland. They’ve been replaced by requests for (ever longer) lists of names, phone numbers, and email addresses, on the theory that spontaneous comments may be less guarded, and therefore more helpful, than written ones. There’s considerable truth to this, but it raises an awkward issue for the administrative job seeker: when you ask someone to be a reference, you’re effectively announcing that you’re considering leaving. The more considerate committees will say in the ad that they’ll only contact the references of finalists, which at least minimizes the collateral damage, but it still poisons the well for finalists who don’t get the job.

(Oddly, this is the one area – okay, the only area – in which grad students actually have an advantage. They’re supposed to be looking. The question of ‘what if they find out I’m leaving?’ is a non-issue. Once you’re actually ensconced somewhere, though, getting tagged as disloyal can be a real problem.)

A modest proposal: get away from letters altogether, shorten the list of references, and do more telephone interviews of candidates themselves. Put more emphasis on the cover letter, which, in my experience on committees (both faculty and administrative), is almost always more revealing than third-party letters anyway. Focus on the candidate, not on the references. I’ve seen too many candidates with exemplary letters who turned out, in person, to be underwhelming; I shudder when I think of how many exemplary people got passed over for uninspired letters.

What this implies about the larger issue of peer review, well…

New Email Address

For some pretty uninteresting reasons, I've adopted a new email address: ccdean (at) myway (dot) com. Please direct any private messages there.

Thanks!

A System Nobody Would Design

The Girl will be a year old next month, which I mention because this story won’t make sense without knowing that.

I’m still fighting my health insurance provider to get payments for the doctors who attended her birth. I’ve been denied several times now, on the grounds that The Girl’s name was not on the original enrollment form from two years ago. When I counter that the reason for that is that she hadn’t been BORN YET, I get told to send a letter to that effect.

!!!!!!

So I do, which occasions another denial.

The insurance provider, which is technically a nonprofit but you’d never know it (it rhymes with ‘shoe floss’), suffers absolutely no harm in denying payment for the birth of my daughter. In fact, quite the opposite; it continues to earn interest on the money it isn’t paying my doctors. It’s immune from lawsuit (on the novel grounds that lawsuits would drive up costs – wouldn’t want that!), immune from damages, and effectively monopolistic (I can’t shop around for another provider retroactively), so it can dawdle all it wants. In the meantime, my daughter’s doctors don’t get paid, and my credit rating is just sitting there...

By any objective standard, this is insane.

Start with the obvious: the medical literature is fairly clear on finding that childbirth often results in a child. Ergo, if childbirth is covered, you’d expect the insurance company to recognize the possibility of a resultant child. You’d think.

I tried to construct a scenario in which I played by the (retroactive) rules the company told me. Prior to birth, I would apply for a social security number for Little One. I’d get turned down, since I couldn’t specify a date of birth that hadn’t happened yet. So I’d schedule an induced labor (sorry, honey!), guess a gender, pick a name, and apply. I’d get turned down, on the grounds that there’s no birth certificate, because Little One hadn’t been BORN YET.

Meanwhile, my college struggles financially because health insurance premiums have been going up at double-digit rates for years.

Where is the money going? It obviously isn’t going to the doctors or the hospitals. It certainly isn’t going to the patients.

I have noticed lots of ads for pills that cause anal leakage and/or four-hour erections, so I assume some of the money is going into marketing. I can only assume the rest is divided between profits (the nonprofit I used is under investigation for building windfall reserves, preparatory to going for-profit) and marketing.

Nobody would design this system. It’s a money sink, and it’s starving out just about every other part of the economy (except the parts that don’t provide health insurance, like temp agencies). If rates increase 15% a year, they double in five years. That’s about the pace we’re on.

(In fact, nobody designed this system. It emerged during World War II, as employers needed to compete for employees during a wage freeze. "Fringe benefits" became the method for doing that. After the war, the interests in favor of maintaining that system blocked Truman's proposal for national health care. The insanity has mushroomed since.)

The sad thing is, higher ed gets raked over the coals for tuition increases that are far slower than health insurance increases. Our tuition increases are read as signs of waste; health insurance increases are taken as facts of nature. So we cut, and cut, and cut, and it’s never enough. We have contract negotiations coming up soon – I don’t even want to imagine how tense those will be. Nobody wants their benefits cut, but at the rate we’re going, what else is there to do?

I read that Canada just repealed its ban on private health insurance. Note to Canadian readers: are you sure?

Peer Review, Part 2: Actual Responses from Actual Peers!

Yesterday’s admittedly scattershot rant attracted some really thoughtful and intelligent commentary (thereby implicitly invalidating my thesis). Maybe peer review works best in the blogosphere?

Ianqui made an excellent point about the turnaround time on academic journal articles. I’ve heard stories of frustrated authors mailing birthday cards to articles they’ve submitted. Back in the day, typesetting needs dictated long lead times. Obviously, this is no longer the case, and in the age of email and blogs, the only lags should be caused by readers not getting around to reading.

I suspect that part of the problem is a lack of incentive. If you’re a reader for a journal, is good performance rewarded? (That’s a symptom of a larger issue in academia, which I think can be traced to its aristocratic pretensions: letters of recommendation. Is there a less useful, less rewarded, less practical holdover than these? As with reading journal submissions, writing letters of recommendation is taken as part of the noblesse oblige of academia, thoughtful nuggets of wisdom to be tossed off between swigs of sherry, yet entire careers hinge on them. To call this system ‘unsustainable’ would be too generous.)

Doc turned one of my examples around on me, pointing out (correctly) that most of the substance of Freakonomics originated in peer reviewed journals. Good point. Slogging through the peer reviewed journals in my own discipline (which isn’t economics), I’ll just say that Leavitt strikes me as exceptional.

Doc also pointed out, correctly, that blind peer review can prevent favoritism and the dominance of Names. The downside of that, though, is that it also seems to prevent anything risky, interdisciplinary, or terribly interesting. By homogenizing the product, we can diversify the producers; Henry Ford figured that out 100 years ago. Is that really a worthy goal?

Single-editor journals can be maddeningly idiosyncratic, but that’s part of their utility. As with blogs, they reflect the editorial tastes of actual people. They create space for risk-taking.

Finally, the divine Aunt B (whose blog, tiny cat pants, has quickly become a favorite) made a point about authorial position that I had never thought of in quite that way. She noted that, in writing for a peer-reviewed journal, you’re assuming that you’re writing for the three people in the field who know more about your work than you do – in other words, you’re writing like a student, trying to curry approval. Hence the forced prose, pedantic footnoting, bootlicking, etc. When you assume instead that you know more than your audience does, you tone down the pedantry, adopt clearer prose, get to the point, and produce something more readable. Maybe part of the reason so much academic writing is so painfully bad is that we’ve adopted a cultural practice based on a sort of professional regression. Rather than owning the authority of knowledge, we hide behind footnotes, just like the nervous students we once were.

It may just be me, but it’s hard to convey just how brilliant an insight that is. Compare the prose style and authorial positioning of a Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, or Barbara Ehrenreich to a typical academic journal article. The former could be charged with arrogance, but damn, they’re readable. And read. Unlike journals.

Aunt B’s observation may give me a way out of the (admittedly stupid) dilemma in which I trapped myself. In criticizing peer review, I’m obviously vulnerable to the question “as opposed to what?”. Maybe the problem is instead the criteria the peers use. Ianqui, Doc, and Aunt B gave me some damn good peer review, unpaid, on the same day the entry was posted. Thank you all for proving me at least partially wrong. Maybe there’s hope...

Peer Review, Small Audiences, and The Incredible Shrinking Guilds

A friend recently asked me who I’ve been reading. I had to admit that most of the folks I’ve been reading for the last several years have been from outside my home discipline. (I don’t just mean the management lit, but the stuff I read to keep my ‘scholarly’ side alive.) When asked why, I could only say that the stuff from cognate disciplines is simply better – better focused, less caught up in the fetish of methodology, less imprisoned by footnotes, more willing to take risks.

From what I’m told by people in those cognate disciplines, though, the same problems hold true there, as well; I’m just reading the exceptions.

Without taking my personal taste as normative, I still have to wonder how a field with such wonderfully interesting subject matter became mired in such turgid irrelevance. When I try to think of contributions to the public discourse to emerge from my field in the last thirty years, I can think of exactly one, and that one is iffy.

What the hell? How can so many bright people, applying rigorous (and very, very extended) study to compelling issues, produce such unreadable crap?

I’m beginning to suspect ‘peer review.’ In order to be taken seriously, a scholarly article needs to be ‘peer reviewed,’ or given the stamp of approval by people already in the field. The idea is to prevent quackery, or faddism, and to keep a premium on academic rigor.

Well, okay, but has it worked?

Freakonomics and Moneyball, two of the more interesting popular books of the last few years, are both premised on the (empirically-tested) idea that groupthink can trump evidence. They both tell stories of people using empirical proof to show that articles of faith among ‘experts’ in a given field are either false or badly limited. In both books, the empirical evidence had to become overwhelming before the groupthink was broken.

What would a Freakonomics or Moneyball of academia look like?

Some fields lend themselves easily to reality checks. An engineer friend used to like to tell the story of the first-day lecture by a prof in her first semester of grad school: You Build Bridge. Bridge Fall Down. No Partial Credit! If the bridge falls down, peer review ain’t gonna save it. Other fields, like literature, are impervious almost by definition. If the very subject matter is, by definition, fiction, then empirical evidence can only be of glancing relevance.

(Before the inevitable flaming, let me just admit that I’m using broad strokes here. Certainly, it’s possible to discover new facts about old texts. Although I’m using Manichean language here, I’ll admit that there’s more of a continuum in reality. Polemical license.)

In the social sciences, we’re somewhere in between. There are some basic facts we can use to check interpretations – I recall explaining to one incredulous undergrad that Hamilton couldn’t have been influenced by Marx, because Hamilton died before Marx was born — but there’s also considerable space for interpreting the facts that exist. More basically, there is considerable disagreement over what constitutes an interesting problem.

In theory, I guess, peer review could help make up the difference between what we can verify objectively and what makes for a good interpretation. In practice, though, it seems to fall prey to a really dreary version of groupthink. A typical journal submission will be sent to three ‘peers’ to review. If one of those three doesn’t find the problem interesting, that’s that.

Interesting-ness was never supposed to be a criterion. Peer review is the worst possible mechanism for determining interesting-ness. In a sample size that small, interesting-ness is somewhere between groupthink and whim.

Accordingly, we get journal articles about ever-smaller and more specialized subjects (such as would appeal to, say, three reviewers), using ever more arcane methods (each carefully footnoted), while the world blissfully ignores everything we say.

I think this is part of why so many younger academics have taken to blogging. The gatekeepers are so caught up in the internal fetishes of their respective guilds that they’ve lost sight of the big picture. Blogging gets rid of the gatekeepers, and lets authors find their own peers. If the people who find my stuff interesting come from literature, or engineering, or chemistry, that’s cool.

As a biochemist correspondent noted, guilds were built to ensure that production took place in the interests of the producers. When consumers found other options, the guilds dissolved rapidly. I see the guild system of publishing (and all that goes with publishing) starting to break down. The growth of the University of Phoenix (and of business majors generally) is a signal from the public that we’ve stopped talking about what they care about. The academic job market, as brutal and perverse as it is, is a kind of reality check; the guilds are losing their ability to reproduce themselves. Maybe they’re producing what nobody wants?

Sorry for such a shaggy rant. I haven’t nailed this one down yet. Any thoughts?

Freshman Seminars and the Tyranny of Transfer

Every so often, an enterprising professor proposes that we establish some team-taught interdisciplinary freshman seminars, both to stimulate student interest (read: retention) and to stimulate faculty interest (by breaking the monotony of teaching yet another section of the same intro course). It’s a great idea, I’d love to do it, but we can’t.

As a two-year school in an affluent area, we live and die by transfer. If a given course doesn’t transfer cleanly to the relevant four-year schools, we can’t do it. And, for reasons known only to them, four-year schools don’t accept our interdisciplinary offerings (even though they have no problem with their own, even in the freshman year).

Sometimes they’ll try to finesse the transfer issue by accepting a course as a ‘free’ elective. This sounds okay, until you realize that they’re classifying 24 credits as ‘free’ electives, and their program only accepts 12. In effect, they’ve disallowed twelve credits, without actually owning up to doing so. ‘Free elective’ status is where credits go to die.

I don’t think it’s a ‘quality’ issue. I t.a.’d at a respected university as a grad student, and can say with confidence that a student who gets a small intro class with a real professor here gets at least as much, if not more, than a student in a lecture hall of 300 at State U. (Esp. when a t.a. does the discussion sections and grading!) In a team-taught course, this would be even more true.

It isn’t an issue of ‘giving away’ credits, either, since the local four-year schools accept a full two years from students who stick to the traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Honestly, other than a certain obtuseness in admissions departments, I don’t know what the reason is. Class snobbery, maybe? Maybe freshman seminars are intended only for residential, as opposed to commuter, students? (If that’s the case, the argument strikes me as a very slippery slope!) In trying to negotiate ‘articulation agreements’ with some local four-year schools, I’ve run repeatedly into issues of internal governance. Even if a dean or provost wants to accept our students as juniors, the faculty in a given department frequently block the courses, claiming ‘academic integrity.’ I’ve seen the way some of those schools teach their intro courses: academic integrity is not the issue. Other than either snobbery or turf, I can’t explain it.

I understand the virtue of the traditional disciplinary intro courses, and certainly wouldn’t advocate moving away from all of them. But if a student were to replace, say, a traditional, discipline-based elective with an interdisciplinary, theme-driven course, I just don’t see the academic issue.

Oddly enough, at a two-year college, new preps are actually exercises in faculty renewal. Between the truncated curriculum and the reality of attrition, faculty spend most of their time teaching the same intro course, over and over again, indefinitely. A team-taught seminar would give them a rare chance to take a fresh look at their teaching.

(Full disclosure: for four semesters, I team-taught a course at my previous school with someone from a different, but related, discipline. It was incredibly valuable as a development experience, and, on good days, was one of the best courses I’ve ever taught.)

Do other folks at two-year schools have this problem? Can anyone at a four-year school enlighten me as to the reasons for this?

Keeping the Line Warm

Another Damned Medeivalist made a good point in a comment on an earlier entry. Some older faculty don’t want to retire because they can’t be sure that their positions will be replaced. (In academic jargon, they’d lose the ‘line,’ or position.) If the choice is between a senior tenured prof and a slew of adjuncts, department chairs could be excused for prevailing upon their most expensive faculty to stick around.

There’s some truth to this. I’ve been forced to leave a frustrating number of retirements unreplaced, and I can’t guarantee anybody, at this point, that any given position will actually be filled.

This cycle can quickly become self-fulfilling. If more veteran faculty stick around, their (comparatively) high salaries make the underlying financial situation worse, making replacements of the few who do leave less likely. If an entire cohort went at once, we could be reasonably certain of replacing at least a substantial fraction of it; if only a few go, it’s hard to replace any.

Last Spring I actually had a senior professor tell me that, if I could guarantee in writing that he would be replaced, he’d put in his retirement notice. The offer was tempting, in some ways, but I couldn’t guarantee that I could keep my promise (nor did I completely trust him to keep his). He’s still here, and our fiscal situation continues to erode.

(This wasn’t just a lack of nerve. The precedent, once established, would be toxic.)

To my mind, this is the slam-dunk argument for a mandatory retirement age. If I know, at the start of a year, that I have at least (say) five professors retiring, I can start to plan. As it is, I can only guesstimate. They might go, they might not. And since salary is mostly a function of seniority, the ones who extend their stay at the end cost the most.

(Last year, I asked HR to check some figures. They reported that we have more f-t faculty over 65 than under 40. Since then, the ratio has worsened.)

I’ve argued upwards for ‘trip wires’ for individual departments and programs: set (at least internally) acceptable minima for each area, and authorize replacements when those levels are threatened. The response I keep getting, which is frustrating for being true, is that we need the savings now, and we need them wherever we can get them. If a particular program has to take it on the chin, that’s a shame, but desperate times call for desperate measures. So we go careening past my trip wires in some areas, while others remain fully staffed with some very senior, tenured people. And the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, has ensured that I can’t do anything about it.

Sorry, no clever conclusion to this one. Just an increasing sense of frustration.

Back to the Land?

A new correspondent mentioned, in passing, that his college has employed relatively few adjuncts (even though the provost wanted to go more in that direction) because it’s rural. The available pool of adjuncts is thin, so the only way to cover classes reliably is with full-timers.

Gotta admit, I never thought of that. It makes perfect sense.

Some ed.d. student out there could do a nifty dissertation on the relationship between adjunct-ification and geography. Once you leave the urban and affluent suburban regions, does the adjunct trend dissipate?

The two schools I’ve deaned at have both been in affluent, educated suburbia, so there has been no shortage of willing and capable adjuncts. (Educated trailing spouses of high-earning execs make great adjuncts and lab assistants.) Certainly I’d expect no major difficulties finding adjuncts in major cities, either. But in cow country? Hmm.

I wonder if, ironically enough, the vast swath of Red America is actually less hospitable to this particular version of outsourcing than educated, densely populated Blue America. That would certainly help explain the preponderance of “Help! My Job is in the Middle of Nowhere!” blogs and letters in the Chronicle.

Thanks, new correspondent. I never thought of that. Suburban blindness strikes again…

To Blog, Perchance to Meme...

Adjunct Kait tagged me with the “If I could be” meme. The game is: pick five sentence starters from the list, then pass it along to three people:

The list:

If I could be a scientist…If I could be a farmer…If I could be a musician…If I could be a doctor…If I could be a painter…If I could be a gardener…If I could be a missionary…If I could be a chef…If I could be an architect…If I could be a linguist…If I could be a psychologist…If I could be a librarian…If I could be an athlete…If I could be a lawyer…If I could be an innkeeper…If I could be a professor…If I could be a writer…If I could be a llama-rider…If I could be a bonnie pirate…If I could be an astronaut…If I could be a world-famous blogger…If I could be a justice on any one court in the world…If I could be married to any current famous political figure…

My responses:

If I could be a musician…probably a Paul Westerberg type, with less dysfunction. I’d love to be able to churn out catchy, shambolic pieces of wisdom that sound good in a bar. The ultimate would be touring with (and probably opening for) Kristin Hersh (or any of her various bands) – a married mother of four with some of the most interesting songwriting out there. (Typical KH lyric: “like frat boys who sleep together/we party better/all the world loves a lover.” Okaaay…) We could do a Rock the Suburbs tour. “Hello, Shaker Heights!”

A duet with Liz Phair on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” might be fun…

If I could be an athlete…a corner infielder, in the Robin Ventura mold. I’d be the laconic one who drew a lot of walks.

If I could be a professor…the beloved sage at a liberal arts college. Tweed, elbow patches, the whole bit. Lots of small seminars, great students, periodic public speaking engagements at which I wouldn’t even think of using PowerPoint.

If I could be a writer…a columnist for some sort of opinion journal. Honestly, blogging is my approximation of that, only without the pay. Having readers would definitely up the ‘cool’ factor. As would a salary. Once the readership gets large enough, I could publish a series of autobiographies. The first would be called I’m Finally Published! The follow-up would be Bite Me!: A Response to my Critics.

If I could be a justice on any one court in the world…I would make Antonin Scalia my personal bitch. “I’ll show you what strict construction means…”

Tagging: Harvey, Danigirl, and timna.

From Gold Brick to Golden Parachute

The June 3 issue of the Chronicle has a must-read cover story on the aging of full-time faculty. Simply put, the combination of lifetime tenure and the repeal of mandatory retirement means that nobody is leaving. The f-t faculty just ages in place, while younger scholars are frozen out of full-time employment.

I laughed out loud at a line from the token young professor in a very mature department:

“During the daily lunches, he says, his colleagues often bring up the subject of colonoscopies or talk about some provost from the 1970’s.”

Solidarity, brother.

The story is dead-on, yet oddly incomplete. It never mentions salaries, for example – if you replace a cohort at the top of the scale with a cohort at the bottom, a lot of fiscal issues simply go away. Replace someone over 100k with someone in the 40’s, multiply that by a dozen or two positions, and it adds up.

Strikingly, the article quotes a dean of a research university arguing for early-retirement packages, offered on a case-by-case basis. That way, a college can hold on to its stars, while clearing the deadwood.

(Insert Jon Stewart-esque raised eyebrow, tie adjustment here.)

I pity the poor fool who inherits the deanship next. Once word gets out among the 50 and 60 somethings (who are the majority!) that the way to a nice package is through underperformance, all is lost. Good luck getting anybody – anybody – to do anything. From gold brick to golden parachute. Your tax dollars at work!

Only someone who has never worked in a bottom-line environment could advocate something this horrifyingly stupid. It’s one thing to offer packages to the faculty as a whole, with certain bright-line qualifiers: x years of service, etc. That’s fine, and there are times in which it makes sense fiscally (though I’m still not sold on it, morally). The ever-present risk is that the stars will take it, while the deadwood will linger. But to punish the stars and reward the deadwood would be exactly wrong, and it would poison the well for a generation to come.

In the spirit of reality, let me offer the profession a compromise: we can keep tenure, or we can keep open-ended retirement ages, but not both. The consequences of keeping both are staggering, and we’re only beginning to see them. When the boomers pass 70, we’ll all go broke.

Breathtaking. Absolutely breathtaking.

Why Managers Sometimes Fall for Crap (Part 1 of...)

As a faculty member, I adhered faithfully to the widespread belief that managers are morons. There was ample evidence for that thesis: they fell for tall tales, rewarded (or just noticed) all the wrong things, and had absolutely no idea what I did in class. (In a way, this belief motivated me to go into administration – I can’t possibly be any dumber than those people…)

As a manager, I can’t deny any of the specific charges, but I don’t think I’ve become noticeably dumber, either. Instead, the position carries with it, structurally, certain blind spots.

Some of those blind spots are obvious. As a teacher, for the most part, you stay in the academic discipline in which you were trained. (At most, in a small school, you may have to cover an adjoining one – sociology and psychology, say, or physics and math.) As a manager, you have to oversee disciplines far removed from your own, and the higher the management position, the more true this becomes. A college president has to oversee everything from music to nursing to literature to the non-credit evening yoga classes; asking her to be expert in all of those would be insane. While deans have smaller scopes of control than presidents do, we still have to venture far outside our home disciplines, which means that, when it comes to subject matter, we frequently have to take the faculty’s word for it. To a professor, that can look like idiocy.

We can’t sit in on every class, all the time, either, so much of what goes on in the classroom will, of necessity, go unnoticed. I like to think of that as respect for professional autonomy (I have no intention of micromanaging every instructional decision everyone makes!), but it’s also in part just a concession to reality. I know that basing evaluations on limited inputs is less than ideal, but limiting input is the only way to get anything done.

Other blind spots are less obvious from the outside. One of the lessons that managers have to keep re-learning (and that wouldn’t kill others to notice, either!) is that other people see things differently than you do.

I’ve had occasion to see this recently in comparing retirements. We’ve had a few faculty retire this year, and each one managed her departure differently. One wanted a full day of acknowledgement, with former students, pomp and circumstances, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Another wanted to slip away without mention, even going so far as to ask that the customary retirement gift not be personalized, so she could donate it to a charity that could then sell it. One wanted a departmental party but nothing larger; another insisted on calling in luminaries from past decades to an after-hours party at a posh restaurant with an open bar.

I’m okay with any of these; being allowed to call your last shot strikes me as a basic professional courtesy. That said, I have to take on faith that each one’s stated desires are, in fact, what they want. (Hence, the oft-noted blindness of administrators to irony or sarcasm.) If I wrote off a heartfelt request as ironic, the charges of arrogance would fly fast and hard. So I take a chance, and try to honor requests as they’re made. If someone requests the wrong thing hoping to be talked out of it, well, sorry.

(Corrolary: Never self-deprecate to a manager. Never, Never, Never. S/he will believe you!)

(Sub-Corrolary: This is why pompous windbags sometimes get rewarded. For all their flaws, at least they don’t self-deprecate.)

Differences in perspective emerge where you wouldn’t expect them. Without getting too detailed, I recently had a relatively banal request from a student to verify a grade. Ordinarily, I would expect the professor to check her records, report the grade, and that’s the end of that. This professor took extreme umbrage, charging all manner of interference and intimidation, questioning my motives, etc. Now, what should have been a five-minute matter will involve several days of diplomacy.

I can’t respond candidly (i.e. “get over yourself!”), lest I fuel the fire even more. So I do the it’s-just-procedure dance, carefully reassuring all and sundry that doublechecking a grade is not, in fact, tantamount to a full assault on tenure, higher education, democracy, and All Things Good. You’d think this would be obvious, but it isn’t.

The unpredictability (and inexplicability!) of others’ worldviews means that managers have to fall back on rules of thumb, heuristics, procedures, etc., all of which are sometimes wrong. Omniscience isn’t an option, and what professor Bob thinks is clear evidence of an evil conspiracy will strike professor Mike as beneath notice. Each will think his perspective is unquestionably right. In that, at least, they’re both wrong. And each will, at one time or another, decide that I’m an idiot for not seeing what is unquestionably right.

Dilbert Budgeting

If Scott Adams hasn’t won the Pulitzer yet, he should.

The budget director for academics recently informed me that we’re heading for trouble, because several departments are on pace to exceed their annual budget line for adjunct instructors. We’re spending too much on adjuncts. When I calmly replied that that’s because we haven’t replaced any full-timers in over a year, so of course the adjunct line would go up, he informed me that those are two separate budget lines.

(Insert forehead-slap here.)

Currency beats the barter system because currency is fungible. Whoever invented the concept of budget lines didn’t quite grasp this.

We can’t replace full-timers who leave, because adjuncts are cheaper. But we can’t increase our total allotment for adjuncts. We are, literally, trying to replace something with nothing. This, while trying to increase enrollment, presumably by offering students more options.

Basic arithmetic suggests that we’re at cross-purposes.

Dilbert Budgeting (hereafter DB) takes as a premise that no two budget lines are related in any way. Therefore, according to DB, cuts in one should have no impact on any other. If we reduce the number of full-timers, but we don’t reduce the number of classes, DB suggests that we should be shocked to find that we’re spending more on temps.

DB operates at many levels. Over time, DB actually rewards profligacy, since one of the tenets of DB is “use it or lose it.” Savvy department chairs figure this out, and find ways to blow through whatever they’re allocated, whether they really need to or not, because they know that a real need will come along eventually and previous frugality will be held against them. In the meantime, they build secret stashes of blue books, copier paper, etc., to make sure they hit the golden zero at the end of the budget year.

(In an earlier blog entry, I explored the implications of ‘use it or lose it’ on faculty hiring. Simply put, a department that believes that it will lose a line if it denies someone tenure will avoid hiring anybody ‘risky’ – anybody doing anything new, taking a different approach, etc. Short-term rationality, long-term devastation to the academic mission.)

DB completely overlooks the concept of incentives. For example, it’s common for academic managers to support new initiatives by faculty (say, running the student newspaper) with ‘release time,’ which is a reduction in courseload. The idea is that running the newspaper takes a significant amount of time, so the only way to keep the professor’s workload reasonable is to drop a class. In practice, the cost to the institution is the cost of the adjunct who has to be hired to cover the class dropped by the full-timer.

DB sets ‘release time’ as a separate budget line, and cuts it every time the budget gets sticky (which is, more or less, always). Over time, the star performers (the full-timers who actually take initiative) are punished for their leadership by having the course reductions go away while keeping the extra tasks, while the cynical, punch-the-clock types are confirmed in their ‘wisdom’ of doing the absolute minimum to not get fired.

The tenure system raises the stakes of DB exponentially. Low performers with tenure are a chronic nightmare. DB, because it fails to understand incentives, relies on a strategy of ‘working around’ the low performers. Like Dr. Seuss’ north-going Zax and south-going Zax, low performers quickly learn that by just standing their ground indignantly, they can make everyone else do more work to compensate. The high performers are effectively punished, since their extra labor is usually uncompensated (or, to the extent that it is compensated, the compensation is cut, over time), and the fence-sitters figure out pretty quickly on which side they’d rather sit. Since the low performers are tenured, and indignant people with job security can cause no end of headaches, the temptation to simply indulge them is real.

Alternatives are easy on the micro scale, but hellishly difficult on the macro scale. Since our subsidies are increased (when at all) by fixed (and small) increments, there’s a temptation to suspend all ‘special pleading’ from various departments and simply implement ‘across-the-board’ freezes, or increases, or cuts. It’s easier than thinking, and it looks, from a distance, like fairness. The problem is that it fixes existing unfairnesses in place, more or less permanently.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed had a piece a year or two ago about a regional university in what I think was Tennessee, where the budget director suspended the ‘use it or lose it’ rule and allowed departments to carry over unused surpluses from one year to the next. Overall spending went down, which makes sense – with the incentive to waste suspended, department chairs put the kibosh on their local boondoggles. A move like that requires a certain leap of faith in the departments, and, over time, a leap of faith in the legislature that it won’t simply regard unused funds as excuses to cut appropriations. If each side holds up its end of the bargain, the result should be more bang for the buck. The test will be to see what happens after a few years, if external funding tightens. Those sitting surpluses could make awfully tempting DB targets…

(Since we have graduation this week, I've rerun this fave from last October.)

Attack of the Forty-Pound Barnacle

The Boy has morphed into a Butt Barnacle. When I’m at work, he gloms onto Mommy and never lets more than about five feet (usually less) come between them. When I get home, he does the same to me.

It’s cute, and sweet, and endearing, and unbelievably annoying after a few hours. The Girl needs attention, too, but it’s hard to juggle both while getting anything else done.

When does the Butt Barnacle phase end? When does the ability to play quietly by himself develop? It’s physically impossible to entertain both The Boy and The Girl while also making dinner, or emptying dishes, or any of the other housekeeping stuff that takes up an astonishing amount of the day.

This is the dark side of the “let’s limit the tv time” theory of parenting. When he isn’t watching tv, which we limit pretty strictly, he has to be doing something else. In olden times, we’d just send him out into the fields, but we live in the burbs and don’t have fields. He’s too little to play outside unsupervised, he can’t read, and he has the energy level of a ferret on meth. Legos sometimes work for a little while, but that’s about it.

When he was smaller, if the weather was nice, we could just take him to the park for an hour or two and run him down. His endurance now defeats that; when we get home, he’s the same forty-pound hummingbird he was when we left.

If mine were a publish-or-perish job, I’d be in deep trouble. Score one for administration…

Alternate Paths

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ways that people I know (or have reached through this blog) have found ways to get around the awful entry-level job market in academia. A few examples:

- a bio/chem. postdoc who picked up web design on the side, and used that skill to become indispensable to her principal investigator. Instead of half a job, she now has one and a half.

- a struggling assistant prof. in the social sciences who took some time to study programming language, and is now designing his own program to change the kind of data that can be gathered and analyzed. He has already drawn the attention of his state government, even as his home department continues to dicker.

- a tenured historian of ideas at Mediocre State who has accepted a high-level administrative position at an Australian university. His marching orders are to step up recruitment of students from China who don’t want to bother hacking their way through the worsening thicket of US immigration laws.

- an English Ph.D. with a J.D. (same person!) who adjuncted her way through New England, catching on as a visiting prof in the Mid-Atlantic. Her chemical engineer Ph.D. partner managed to navigate his way to tenure at You’ve Heard Of It New England University by deftly dancing around an idiot dean.

Of course, my own story (social science doctorate; adjunct at proprietary; move to full-time faculty and then administration at same proprietary; move to admin. position at community college) is similarly oddball.

I think that what all of these share (besides luck) is a combination of tenacity and a willingness to adapt. The first step is letting go of the idea that anything short of the Golden Path (grad school to assistant-prof-at-good-university to recruited-by-Ivy) represents failure. It doesn’t. The grad-school ethic that says it’s better to adjunct at Ivy U. than to make a living at Forgettable College is just plain wrong.

There’s just too much talent being wasted out there. As one correspondent noted, academia is coming to resemble the competitiveness of the music industry, but without the payoff.

Your thoughts?

Conversation with The Boy

This morning, while I was tying his sneakers:

TB: Daddy?

DD: Yes?

TB: You stay home today, right? Today’s Saturday.

DD: That’s right.

TB: I love it when you stay home. I know you have to go to work to pay for the house and clothes and toys, but I miss you when you’re gone.

DD (after stunned silence): I miss you too.

Meetings and Tics

A sentence you will never hear: "Faculty morale is high."

I’ve been dean-ing for almost five years now, in two different institutions, and I’ve never heard this. People who have been deaning much longer than I have confirm my impression – they’ve never heard it either.

Accordingly, a sentence like “Faculty morale is low” simply bounces off. It’s sort of assumed. It’s like declaring that the sun rose in the East this morning.

I had a division meeting this morning, fielding questions from about 65 f-t faculty. It went relatively well, as these things go, but I noticed a few verbal tics that, if I had my druthers, I would simply ban. Start with the faculty morale point.

“The perception is…” This is a meaningless statement. At best, it’s an attempt to place some courtesy distance between the speaker and the statement, but it’s fundamentally disingenuous. I’d much rather hear “I think…” or even “You are…” Perceptions don’t exist independently of perceivers, so let’s specify the perceivers and get on with it.

“I just wanted to say…” If you delete this phrase and start with the next word, you lose absolutely no meaning.

“It appears that…,” or, even worse, “It would appear that…” Just say it.

The odd thing, given how desperate so many new Ph.D.’s are to find full-time work, is how crabby so many tenured folk are. Some of it is end-of-semester exhaustion, which is understandable, but some of it is chronic. If it were really that bad, I wouldn’t expect to see so many smart, talented people desperately trying to break in.

I’ll look at the bright side. If they’re that willing to complain, they must perceive an open atmosphere. Yeah, that’s it. I’ll go with that…

"I Could Never Do That," or, The Good Girl Theory of Academia

About once a week, some faculty member asks me how/why I went into administration, usually in tones of incomprehension, and ends with “I could never do that.”

Some couldn’t, and to the extent that that’s true, kudos for self-awareness. Still, I wonder at the speed with which so many say it. If it came at the end of a conversation about the things I do all day, I’d take it as a reasoned conclusion, but it usually comes at the end of the question. The conclusion precedes the conversation (if there is one).

It’s almost like the Seinfeldian “not that there’s anything wrong with that.” It’s a way of putting distance between the speaker and the subject of the conversation.

Why?

Granted, a great many administrators are sorely lacking, but that, to me, is an argument for getting in, rather than staying out. If good people don’t step in, bad ones will.

Some don’t want to give up summers. That, I understand. Especially this week…

Some are conflict-averse. Those folk are well-advised to avoid management generally. The ability to maintain composure while receiving torrents of ill-founded abuse from tenured faculty is a job requirement.

Still, the job has much to recommend it. It’s more family-friendly than faculty life, to the extent that most of my job stays at work when I go home at night. (Not true in December or late April/early May, but true the rest of the year.) That was never true when I was on faculty. Job opportunities, weirdly enough, are easier to come by. The pay is (usually) better, to compensate for the loss of summers. You get a broader view of both your college and higher ed generally, which, for the curious, is great fun. You even get to observe other instructors’ classes, which, for those who have taught, can be a hoot.

I suspect that the knee-jerk rejection of the prospect of managing, in academia, is another outgrowth of the weird academic service ethic. It’s a kind of modesty, worn as a badge of honor. (The contradiction in proudly displaying one’s modesty is rarely addressed.) Leave such vulgar pursuits to lesser folk – I’m too busy nobly and selflessly pursuing truth (and tenure, and status, and travel money…).

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the more interesting and insightful academic bloggers are female. The tension between self-effacement and self-promotion that pervades academic culture is structurally similar to the tension in the definition of the ‘good girl’ – be sexy but not sexual, get attention without looking like you’re trying to get attention, etc. Women academics have seen the contradictions twice, so they seem (generally) better able to articulate them. “I could never do that” is a classic good-girl sentiment. Seek approbation through self-effacement – yeah, that should work…

As the classic tenure-track faculty line evaporates into budgetary purgatory, I think many academics would be well-advised to retire their modesty. The existing rules have set up an entire generation to fail. It’s time to write some new rules.

I’ve been corresponding with some folk who have crafted some wonderfully interesting career paths through (and outside) the interstices of the academy. The first thing all of them did was to junk the good-girl notion that the only acceptable job is a pure teaching job at an ‘appropriate’ school. When the dinosaurs died, the small mammals that scurried under rocks survived. There’s a lesson there…

Have you carved a unique path? If so, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know which parts of your story are share-able; if we can break someone’s tunnel vision, we will have achieved something. There is more to life than endless adjuncting. Even good girls (and boys) gotta eat.

Chubby-Cheeked Godzilla

The Girl is on a rampage. We keep the kids’ toys in the living room, where the tv isn’t, as a sort of in-house social engineering project. The kids spend most of their indoor time in the living room, playing with The Boy’s toys. The Girl has toys; she just likes his better.

That would be fine, except that he plays with his toys, too. He has some fairly elaborate Thomas the Tank Engine tracks, legos, and Lincoln logs, and he constructs admirably sophisticated cities with them. The Girl, now that she can crawl, has become a chubby-cheeked Godzilla, smashing cities with a smile. She’s driving The Boy to distraction. This morning she sat on the train tracks, blocking Thomas and Percy with her well-padded backside.

How quickly they learn to use their powers for evil…

Academic Advisement

It’s finals week, so students are beginning to confront the realities of failed courses, missed graduation requirements, and the next step in life.

This means, among other things, that this is when lots of students first figure out that they need to decide what to take next. My college requires full-time students to get an advisor’s clearance before scheduling courses, so the students have to track somebody down and get a stamp of approval. The idea is to prevent silly mistakes, like a kid with a full-time job taking 24 credits, or taking the same course twice having passed it the first time. (You smirk, but I’ve seen it happen.)

You’d think this would be easy, but it isn’t. The faculty, as a group, like to claim ownership of academic advisement, and for lots of good reasons: they understand course content better than anybody else, they build relationships with students, and they see up close the consequences of a marginally-capable kid taking 21 credits at a time. When a student is able to have a productive conversation with a professor in his chosen field, everyone wins.

The catch, of course, is that many faculty also like to get the hell off campus at the first possible opportunity. Once final exams begin, as far as many of them are concerned, the time for student contact is done.

Hence, the dilemma. Heaven forbid that anybody other than a professor advise a student; heaven forbid that a professor be asked to do anything resembling advisement between early May and early September.

The more I deal with faculty ‘ownership’ of various parts of the college (advisement, curriculum, standards, etc.), the more I realize that we’re dealing with different definitions of ownership. To my mind, ownership implies control, but it also implies responsibility; if you give up responsibility, you give up control. Many faculty (and I keep saying ‘many’ because I don’t mean ‘all’) seem to have in mind something closer to veto power. They don’t want to put in the hours and do the work, but they do want to be able to shoot down the products of anyone else’s labor. We don’t want to be bothered with advisement, but those boneheads in counseling who actually put in the hours are terribly incompetent. Don’t they care about the students?

If we had more students than we could shake a stick at, the issue wouldn’t be quite so urgent – just adopt ‘sink or swim’ as an ethos, and be done with it. Sadly, we’re not there.

Various solutions suggest themselves, but each is ugly in its own way. We could simply declare that advisement is the province of the counseling office, but the faculty wouldn’t accept that, and would take it as (still more) evidence of The Administration Trying to Run The College Like a Business. (I have a macro for that phrase now.) We could agree that the faculty owns advisement, and require everyone to put in office hours all year accordingly, but I don’t even want to think about the reaction to that. We could adopt a don’t-bitch-if-you-don’t-bother policy, which is my personal preference, but it would run so utterly counter to the local culture that it would surely fail.

Alternately, we could simply abandon the requirement that students get advisement before signing up for classes, and simply let them take what they think appropriate. If they take the wrong classes, too bad for them. While I’d like to think this would work, experience suggests otherwise. Too many would get it wrong, and would either drop out in frustration or take eons to graduate. More likely, we’d wind up processing course substitutions until the proverbial cows come home, satisfying nobody.

If every student signed up for September classes by the end of April, we wouldn’t have an issue. But they don’t, and they won’t.

Any ideas out there?

We Have Lift-Off!

The Girl is crawling! This morning, on her maiden voyage, she made a beeline straight for The Boy's toys!

And so it begins...

Breakfast with The Boy

TB: Why are comics so long?
DD: Because the people who write them like them so much, they don’t want them to end.
TB: But they do end.
DD: That’s true.
TB: Are they too long to read?
DD: They’re too long to read out loud, but when you learn how to read, you can read them yourself all the way to the end.
TB: I don’t want to read. I want to be a scientist.
DD: Scientists have to read.
TB: Why?
DD: Because if you thought you were working on making the world’s biggest balloon, and you read somewhere that someone else made an even bigger one, then you’d know that you were just making the world’s second biggest balloon, and what’s the point of that?
TB: Silly Daddy. I want to study volcanoes.

I don't know why it struck me funny, but it did...

Seniority

As my regular readers know, my faculty is very top-heavy in terms of seniority, age, title, and salary. The largest single department, about 30 full-timers, has exactly one untenured prof; most of the rest are full professors. (Adjuncts are another matter altogether; younger, more diverse, badly underpaid. Maybe if we pitched full-time hiring as a diversity initiative…)

In some ways, low turnover speaks well of the place. If the college were a dump, people would leave faster. That’s what’s happening at my previous school – I recently touched base with some former colleagues, who report that after the latest round of layoffs, pretty much anybody with any other options took them. As the place circles the drain, the most capable employees bail out. That hasn’t happened here, which is a good sign.

The bad news, though, is that expectations formed during previous, better-funded decades tend to linger.

The new VP and I have tried, with middling success, to bring performance and rewards into some sort of alignment, where possible. This means, at times, bumping senior people out of their sinecures to make room for the folks who actually do the work. So far, we’ve been greeted more by shock and perplexity than indignation. The idea that performance and reward should go together is so utterly foreign that it isn’t even threatening; it’s mystifying. Intelligent, well-credentialed people have said to me, with straight faces, that it’s immoral to sanction a longtime employee, regardless of performance. When I counter that it’s immoral to continue to draw a paycheck for a job you stopped doing about ten years ago, I get perplexed silence.

Most management textbooks are staggeringly useless for academia. They assume as a matter of course that managers have carrots and sticks at their disposal: merit raises, title changes, quick promotions, threats of dismissal. In tenured, unionized academia, none of these apply. After years of budget cuts, anything discretionary is pretty much wiped out, so I can’t reward good behavior, and the combination of tenure/union rules and institutional culture means I can’t punish bad. At best, I can try to appeal to the better angels of everyone’s nature, but there are natural limits to that.

(Has anybody seen a useful management book for academia? I haven’t yet, and it’s not for lack of trying. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.)

Yesterday, a very senior professor, an intelligent guy with a doctorate and decades of experience here, told me with a straight face that faculty promotions (associate to full professor, mostly) should be based entirely on seniority. I managed not to laugh out loud, but it took effort. If he had been arguing from self-interest, I would have at least understood his position, but he wasn’t; he’s already at the top, and was arguing from principle. I guess it’s possible to design a less productive system, but it would take conscious effort.

This probably wouldn’t bother me so much if there weren’t thousands of ridiculously well-qualified young Ph.D.’s out there desperately looking for full-time work. The few young’uns we have (here, defined as under 50) are generally outstanding. If I could trade a few on-the-job retirees for some first-round draft choices, we could really get the place moving.

Sometimes, I just get tired of hearing “back in 1977…”

Last week I attended (yet another) chamber of commerce rubber-chicken luncheon honoring some ridiculously successful business personage. The guest of honor discussed the growth of his business, using phrases like “tripled in the last three years.” When asked to describe the greatest challenges his business faces, he said things like “finding enough qualified people” and “harmonizing the IT systems and cultures of the businesses we acquire.” In other words, problems of growth. It’s a different world out there. We eliminated almost anything discretionary some time ago, yet the political pressure to cut, cut, cut continues unabated. In our corner of the world, growth is defined as failure. (Internally, of course, it’s the other way around. Deans are in the enviable position of trying to contain the conflict.)

Faculty and union types like to complain that deans try to run colleges like businesses. If only! I’d LOVE to triple the size of the place in three years. I’d LOVE to manage the dilemmas of growth. And a corporate salary wouldn’t suck, either. Instead, I have to look for money in shrinking budgets to cover blue books, enduring all manner of ad hominem abuse from tenured folk who haven’t worked in the corporate world since 1969, if then.

It’s final exam week. One more week of chicken and peas before things calm down. Repeat to self: Life of the Mind, Life of the Mind...

My Secret Agenda

Apparently, I have a secret agenda. (If you talk to enough people, I have many.) I know this because my faculty keep saying so. If I ever forget my secret agenda, all I have to do is ask.

This week a tenured professor told me, without the least self-doubt, that “the administration” (whatever that is) has a secret agenda to abolish his department. This came as news to me, since I keep pouring money into his department, but he was quite sure. The Administration, which is somehow both omnipotent and incompetent at the same time, must be up to no good, and must be stashing money away somewhere, since we aren’t buying goodies at quite the pace he believes would be appropriate.

How, exactly, should one respond to this?

Denial doesn’t work, obviously. Incredulity is taken as an affront. The most effective approach I’ve found so far is Socratic questioning. I want to abolish your department? Why do you think that? Why would I want to do that? What would I gain by doing that? How the hell did you get that?

His use of the third person was, I assume, an effort at tact, since the only alternative would have been direct accusation. My college has admirably few administrators, pouring what resources it does have mostly into instruction, so even by the most generous interpretation, this amounted to a personal attack. I wasn’t hurt by it – learning to depersonalize these things is one of the basic survival skills of this job – but I was perplexed at the certainty with which he said it. He didn’t preface it with “Everybody knows,” but that was the tone and implication.

Charges like these (from various parts of the college) come in about monthly. The Administration (picture the Death Star) harbors a Secret Plan to divert resources from (fill in the blank) to fund Someone’s Pet Project (picture an apartment on the Seine). These charges are nearly always leveled with perfect certainty.

As an educator, this disturbs me. The people who are supposed to instill critical thinking skills in our students are utterly free of critical thought in their own backyards.

Some of it is probably an outgrowth of union rhetoric – rallying the troops is easier when The Enemy is pure evil. To the extent that it’s just demagoguery, I’m inclined to let it slide. But addressing it to me directly isn’t rallying the troops – the troops weren’t there to hear it, and I’m The Enemy.

Conspiracy theories are flawed on many levels, not the least of which is that it puts the alleged victim of the conspiracy at the center of the universe. If the entire college is aligned to ‘get’ one department or one person, that department or person must be awfully important. In truth, most aren’t.

I try to write off much of the secret agenda talk to provincialism. Many professors don’t look beyond their own departments, so they don’t know how the dots are actually connected. To their credit, when I question how some of my accusers reach their conclusions, they fold pretty quickly. Still, it’s annoying to be told, with anger and conviction, what I Really Think.

We Need a Movie

Although academia has its share of decent novels, it doesn’t really have good movies. There are movies from the student perspective, but not much from the faculty or administrative perspective. As long as our public image is defined entirely by either hung-over memories of college days or pathetic right-wing failures like David Horowitz, we’re in trouble. We need the kind of Hollywood treatment that other professions get. (Hollywood images of deans are few, and generally unflattering. Think of Larry Miller being sodomized by a giant gerbil in Nutty Professor II, or of Dean Wormer in Animal House. Something must be done.)

Of course, The Simpsons had Dean Bobby, skilled hacky-sack player and former bassist for the Pretenders. My closest real-life Dean Bobby moment was a few weeks ago, when a circle of students invited me to join their hacky-sack ring. I politely declined.

We need some good grad school/faculty/dean movies. Not just the hot-babe-sidekick-is-an-oceanography-grad-student, but movies that really deal with what higher ed is actually like. Watch as the heroic middle manager bravely balances the budget in the face of state funding cuts, spiralling equipment costs, and intransigent unions! Okay, I’m not a screenwriter. Still, there should be something out there.

I had hopes for We Don’t Live Here Anymore, but it was mostly about marital infidelity. The academic backdrop was mostly just that. Lianna had a few moments, and the only William Dean Howells jokes I’ve seen in a movie, but it was more about lesbianism than academia. Sylvia was, in some ways, about academia, but I’ve had just about enough of the tortured artiste thing. Sometimes a movie will have a mad genius professor who helps the action hero save the day, (or a mad genius professor who turns evil, like Doc Ock in Spider-Man II) but I’ve been around professors for a long time (and been one myself), and most don’t have super powers. Some can barely dress themselves.

Filing Cabinet of the Damned suggests that any work of fiction can be improved by the addition of monkeys or ninjas. Sylvia desperately needed both. Simians hurling feces at Ted Hughes would have been right on so many levels. (This would also work with David Horowitz, actually.)

In grad school, I had an idea for a murder mystery set in a graduate program, in which a prominent faculty member and notorious prick is murdered, but the catch is that, since he was so dreadfully nasty to just about all of humanity, everybody was a suspect. In the end, the detective dropped the case, convinced that it would be immoral to punish someone for offing such a bastard. I never got very far with it, though. Couldn’t write dialogue.

A dissertation movie could have an intermission that becomes the ending.

Phantom of the Adjunct. A mysterious adjunct is rumored to roam the hallways, wreaking havoc on any hapless souls who venture near. She is eventually lured out of hiding with a job offer that mysteriously vanishes just as she is taken into custody. I’m ready for tenure now, Mr. DeMille.

The Melancholy Dean. Is he insane or scheming? He replaced that department chair so quickly!

Remains of the Dean. Capture the poetry of repression as the tragic hero stifles any sign of human emotion in the face of political turmoil. Will he step up as events unfold, or simply continue to avoid conflict at the price of his withered soul?

Casting is key. The reason Boston Public was such a great show wasn’t the writing – oh my, no – but the casting. The teachers were staggeringly good-looking. Clearly, a similar treatment is needed for higher ed. Dean Angelina Jolie must decide whether to fund Professor Orlando Bloom’s center for the study of postcolonial literature or Professor Antonio Banderas’ long-suffering grad student, the neo-Foucauldian Halle Berry. Meanwhile, disgruntled adjunct Catherine Zeta-Jones’ forbidden love for teaching center director Taye Diggs threatens to derail her unionization drive. Will the state budget pass in time?

Throw in some monkeys and ninjas, and you’ve got yourself a movie.

Things I Learned this Weekend

1. Putting tights on a 10-month-old girl is harder than you’d think. She’s squirmy, and toenails are more of an issue than I had appreciated. And when the heel isn’t in quite the right spot, twisting to retrofit is, well, inelegant.

2. Although many people claim that the croup sounds like a dog barking, it’s really closer to a seal.

3. Pinkeye and contact lenses go together like tuna fish and hot fudge.

4. As many as 30 kids can have their first communion at the same time. Luckily, parking (and pew) space is infinite. Otherwise, that would be stupid.

5. Plays are better when you can hear the dialogue.

6. It’s possible, high school geometry aside, for two northbound roads to be perpendicular.

7. There is such a thing as a Jamaican rumba.

I’m all about lifetime learning…

Community Service

“Isn’t that something you’re sentenced to?” – apocryphal student comment

Among other changes, my current college is considering tweaking the criteria for faculty promotion to more tightly define the meaning of ‘community service.’ Until recently, any and all forms of ‘community service’were considered fair points to raise in a promotion application – diabetes fun runs, selling girl scout cookies, running for mayor, seeking converts for your religion door-to-door – anything (and I didn’t make any of those up).

It’s hard to argue against community service per se, but it’s also terribly hard to judge. If a professor claims to be active in his local Knights of Columbus, how do I know if it’s true? More to the point, why should I care? What if the community service had absolutely nothing to do with academia? What if it was, at some level, objectionable? And is it even legal, really, to reward church service with promotion in a public institution? (If a religiously-affiliated college wants to do that, I don’t have an argument. But we’re public, paid for and used by people of multiple and conflicting cultures.)

We’re trying to define the category more narrowly, to focus on outreach activities that have some relationship to the college. It’s a tough sell, though. It’s not a function of a lack of caring about the community, although some will try to interpret it that way. “Screw the Poor” isn’t really the legacy I’d like to leave. Pitched wrong, it could play into the ubiquitous (and deeply misplaced) rhetoric about ‘corporatization.’ In fact, it’s an effort to match our ambitions to our abilities. I don’t want to judge professors’ souls; I’d much rather just judge their work. If their work gets them into heaven, that’s fine, but it’s also way beyond my jurisdiction. What we can do as a college is both valuable and limited.

At its root, I think some of the pushback we’ve had has been based on a (mostly-unthinking) service ethic that seems especially endemic to academia. There’s a weird blend of arrogance and self-effacement in so many academics – we’re better than others because we’re selfless, and damn those who don’t recognize our wonderful selflessness! (I think that’s part of the reason that so many intelligent people would rather adjunct than administrate, even while they have trouble making rent: administration seems so, well, normal. It’s not noble. It’s not special. Adjuncting may lead to starvation, but it’s a noble starvation…) Competition for the moral high ground is fierce, and not for the meek.

Grad student neurosis, I suspect, is a natural and logical outgrowth of the combination of the weird service ethic of academia with declining job prospects. Be the best, most outgoing, most widely-published selfless person you can be. Trumpet your accomplishments, nonthreateningly, and without being too obvious. Break new ground, in ways that the tenured occupants of the old ground find both compelling and welcome. Be revolutionary, and a good fit. Maintaining sanity in the face of these messages takes either a superhuman sense of self or an awfully strong sense of irony.

What should be a common-sense change is colliding with some pretty deeply-embedded cultural norms. If we give up our sense of special-ness, how do we justify our low salaries?

Tonight is yet another benefit to thank those who loudly proclaim that they don’t need to be thanked. My attendance is mandatory.

Stay tuned…

Return of the Rubber Chicken Circuit

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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’?

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!

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.