Ask the Administrator: Selling the New Dean on an Idea

A new correspondent writes:

I'm a postdoc at a big research university.  We have a confluence of
events at our University which could really lead to something really
great happening, but no one seems much interested, and it would
frustrate me to no end if the opportunity is missed.   So I'd like to
know -- what's the best way to pitch a new idea to a new Dean?

Without spending a single dollar, our University is in the process of
having a large supercomputing center plopped down right in the middle
of it, and in fact the necessary flow of money will be adminstered by
the University.   This was arranged from start to finish by a small
number of fiefdoms, who quite reasonably feel very possessive about
it, and who control most of the new center and are gearing up and
ready to use this fantastic resource once it comes online.

As things stand now, this enormous resource will ensure that the
members of the founding fiefdoms do exactly what they have already
been doing, but bigger and better.   And that is surely all to the
good; but if this is *all* that happens, it's an enormous missed
opportunity.   This could be a boon to the entire University if
handled properly - if expertise were shared, both among the fiefdoms
and to other groups within the school who currently aren't huge users
of supercomputing for their research.   It could become a catalyst for
bringing together interdisciplinary work - first by sharing techniques
amongst researchers, then by sharing courses (why should every
department have to teach its graduate students their own separate
computational techniques classes?), and hopefully bringing people
across departmental divides to work on problems of overlapping
interests once people realize they're approaching similar problems.
It could improve connections with researchers within the same city and
with some access to this resource but outside the walls of the
University.

But there's currently not much motivation for anyone to follow this
path.   The members of the small group of founding fiefs don't have
much incentive to encourage other groups to use the resource, and
other departments don't seem to be chomping at the bit - partly
because they're almost completely out of the loop as to what's going
on.   Even once they start realizing how to use this new resource on
their own, again it'll just be the same groups doing exactly the same
thing as before but scaled up.    Not a disaster, but not what could
be.

Given that the resource exists, it seems like encouraging its use and
using its existence to encourage interdepartmental collaboration
through a campus-wide `computational science' program could be done
without spending a lot of dollars - it's not clear new faculty lines
necessarily need to be created, for instance.   The founding areas are
already ensuring that new hires are made with this new resource in
mind (at least one such person is already hired).    It's `just' a
matter of setting up institutional incentives for these new people to
talk to each other, and to find people in corners of other departments
willing to start using this resource for their own work.

The other part of this equation is that we have a brand new Dean -- a
very gifted administrator and one who has already successfully
shepherded collective projects across multiple administrative units,
but one whose background is such that the appeal of a campus wide push
for interdisciplinary computational science might not be self-evident.

I want to make sure that the new Dean knows (with lots of examples)
what could be with some administrative support.   I know that everyone
on campus has their own Great Ideas for the school and  there may well
be important reasons why this particular one may not work or can't be
a priority now, but I want to make sure that it at least gets real
consideration.   So what's the best way to do this?

There's a lot here. I'll start with the obvious.

In the short term, the political battles you're asking the new Dean to pick are substantial, and the payoff pretty theoretical. That's a tough sell. (This is especially true if the new Dean isn't a subject matter expert in this area. I've been in situations when I was pretty sure that faculty in a particular area were trying to exploit their greater expertise to paint a pet project as a mortal necessity. Go through that a few times, and the skepticism starts to come easy.) From this side of the desk, it looks like you're asking someone to do all the political dirty work for you, in service of your pet idea. Your pet idea may or may not be great – I have no way of knowing, and neither does he – but the dirty work is clearly difficult.

My suggestion would be to come at the Dean indirectly. Instead of just marching into his office with an idea and a plea, start by doing some of the political groundwork yourself. Flesh out some of the benefits of your pet idea, then target some of the faculty to whom those benefits would be the most attractive. In other words, gain allies. If you can do that in multiple fiefdoms, all the better. This will involve some basic shoe-leather diplomacy, as well as considerable patience and listening skills. It's not something that a few tossed-off emails will achieve.

That said, though, the upside is considerable. For one, you may learn from your prospective recruits that there are real obstacles of which you're currently unaware. Those obstacles may come from the rules set by whomever's paying for the thing, or from logistics, or from technological limits, or weird policy intersections, or departmental budgeting, or just about anything else. By finding out what those are, you will be able to develop work-arounds, or to know what work-arounds to ask to have constructed, or you may decide it simply can't be done in your current context. But whatever happens, you won't leave yourself vulnerable to devastating blindside attacks.

In addition to strengthening the merits of your proposal, you'll also be able – if you play your cards right and catch a break or two – to get around the objection that it's Your Idea. (This works particularly well if you're open to amendments.) The way this usually plays out in campus politics is that the proposal is reduced to the affiliation of the person proposing it. “Oh, that came from X department. We know what they're really up to.” If you have interdepartmental allies, that argument is much harder to sustain.

(If someone gets wind of what you're doing and raises an objection, ask to be recognized as a committee. Deaning 101 suggests that when confronted with conflict, the first and easiest path is to appoint a committee. You'll be pushing an open door.)

When you have interdepartmental sponsorship and an inherently stronger proposal, you'll have a much more compelling argument to take to the new Dean. Theoretical appeals are fine, but theoretical appeals that also have faculty champions across departments, and that have already been vetted for their practicality, are so much better.

The other thing I'd do is be prepared to achieve success gradually, rather than all at once. “Pilot project” can be a magic phrase, when properly deployed. The great virtue of presenting an idea as a pilot project is that it's much harder to argue against an experiment than against a wholesale change. If you can create enough of an opening to at least generate some of your proposed payoff on a pilot basis, then you can argue from actual success. Nothing succeeds like success, especially when that success has faculty champions from multiple areas at once. At that point, the momentum will be considerable, and the Dean will be both more sympathetic and better positioned to do something about it. (Insider Tip: we administrators get all excited whenever someone builds “outcomes assessment” into the design of the pilot. In other words, when pitching the pilot, tell us how you'd define and measure success. It takes a little more time upfront, but being able to say “we met or exceeded our expectations in key areas” gives you major credibility.) A pilot project that succeeded on its own terms becomes an incredibly powerful argument for a larger project.

Of course, you can also try the traditional and time-honored methods of brown-nosing, currying favor, etc. I have to admit that those sometimes work, depending on context, but they're pretty much independent of the merits of the proposal. The approach I'm suggesting could actually strengthen the merits of your proposal in demonstrable ways, such that you wouldn't have to worry overmuch about the usual political crap. Try the high road first; the low road will always be there anyway.

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers – any thoughts?

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

Friday Quotables

From IHE:

Charles Manning, chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents, acknowledged that adjuncts teach a large share of the classes at the board’s institutions. “They are critical,” he said. Asked if they were well paid, he said that they are “clearly not.”

At the same time, he defended the decision not to raise the maximum [pay] level. “That would raise expectations when we don’t have the money,” he said.

It's not a matter of enlightening the suits. We know. The problem is deeper.




From Gene Lucas, executive Vice Chancellor of the University of California at Santa Barbara, in response to this week's round of devastating midyear budget cuts:

I’ve been at the executive vice chancellor position for six, going on seven years, and I’ve had five years of budget cuts out of that and no year of recovery,” he said. “It hasn’t been all that much fun.

Solidarity, brother. I'm right there with ya.



From Drew Gilpin Faust, President of Harvard:

Tradeoffs and hard choices that can be avoided in times of plenty cannot be averted now.

When even Harvard has to economize, it's time to stop pretending that this is anything other than structural.




From Rahm Emmanuel, President-Elect Obama's incoming Chief of Staff:

You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.

Exactly.

Responses to the Gates Foundation

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced that community colleges will be the next beneficiaries of their largesse. A few responses:

First, Woo-Hoo! (insert video of DD doing the Snoopy dance)

Second, I hope they're willing to recognize the work that has already been done, so they don't spend great googahs of money reinventing the wheel. Philanthropists have been known to do that.

According to the IHE account, they're focusing on four key areas: backloading financial aid, changing student incentives, building partnerships, and improving remediation. I've written before on the first two, so all I'll say here is that innovation is more than welcome, but we underestimate the political hurdles at our peril. In terms of improving remediation, I'll just do a plug for a really serious look at how we do ESL. We have entire populations for whom college simply isn't an option unless we get better at ESL.

In terms of partnerships, though, I have some misgivings. At one level, this isn't anything we haven't been doing for decades. In cases with stable employers and long-term labor shortages (that is, hospitals, long-term care facilities, daycare centers, and, increasingly, hotels), we've been able to build very successful partnerships. But in many cases, the problem is precisely that there's a shortage of good local employers. We'd be more than happy to train people for high-paying jobs, if those jobs were out there. But the high-paying jobs that are out there require advanced (graduate) degrees, so our 'transfer' curriculum IS our vocational curriculum. I'm consistently annoyed at how many people don't get that.

A genuine, honest-to-goodness breakthrough – and one that the Gates Foundation is uniquely capable of fostering almost unilaterally – would involve recognizing the transfer curriculum as vocational, and therefore eligible for the resources that are targeted at vocational programs.

The distinction between 'transfer' and 'occupational' may have served certain purposes in the past, and I'll certainly admit that there are some degrees for which there's no relevant credential above the Associate's (yet). But in popular discussion – and, sadly, policy discussion – people fall back much too quickly into the old stereotypes of 'ivory tower' versus 'job training.' What the hell are you doing teaching literature when you could be teaching welding?

The short answer is that the local employers who used to hire welders have outsourced their production to another hemisphere, and the folks whose training was limited to that skill are pretty much SOL. But the folks who transferred their literature credits to four-year colleges and universities were able to get jobs higher up the value chain.

The longer answer is that 'job training' only makes sense when you're pretty sure that those jobs are going to be sticking around for a good long time. In areas like health care, law enforcement, and early childhood education, those are probably pretty safe bets. But other industries are wildly cyclical. (I'm reminded of a discussion we had a few years ago about running non-credit workshops for Realtors.) In my days at Proprietary U, where the entire curriculum was built around employability, we had a crisis of purpose when the tech boom crashed and companies started outsourcing a lot of their IT work to India. Training in a narrowly-defined skill set can leave you awfully vulnerable to industry swings.

(The other way around that is to train people for extremely low-end jobs. Those aren't going anywhere, either, but it's not clear to me what purpose is served.)

I've seen enough of these conversations to know that the usual line of attack goes something like this: you wimpy/feminine academics don't understand the REAL world (harumph, harumph), where manly male masculine stuff is valued, like construction and welding and using big tools. Don't you pinko liberal commie wussies understand that book learnin' is for sissies? College isn't for everybody – you should step aside and let us manly male he-men initiate the youth into real jobs.

You know, like building pickup trucks and houses.

Sigh.

This critique, which I think of as Archie Bunker by way of Charles Murray, simply misses the economic (not to mention social) changes of the last forty years. Anything that can be automated and/or outsourced, will be. That is the way of things. We can equip people to thrive in that world, or we can mutter darkly about kids today.

Maybe we can start by deep-sixing the false dichotomy between transfer and vocational curricula. In this economy, you move up or you move on. The 'employer partnership' model may have made sense when we had industrial behemoths bestriding the landscape, but they're mostly gone. (I wonder how many high-paying jobs at Microsoft don't require at least a four-year degree or its functional equivalent. Yes, Gates himself is a Harvard dropout, but he's hardly representative.) Employers are too volatile now, and industries change too quickly. Pipelining students into the GM's of the world may have made sense in the 60's, but it's insane now.

In this world, the way to prepare most students for high-paying jobs is to prepare them for more education.

If the Gates grants can get that ball rolling, I'll be doing the Snoopy dance for many years to come.

A Promising First Novel

TB, who is in second grade, wrote his first novel yesterday. With names changed, and sans the distinctive illustrations, an annotated guide to the text:

Title Page: TB and TG and a Walk in the Woods (with illustration) by TB

(on the side, there's a diagonal stripe that says “New Series!”)

Contents Page: Woodsy...Page 1 Home!...Page 4

First Text Page: “Chapter 1...Woodsy!” (picture of two stick figures walking hand-in-hand near a forest) “One fine day me and my sister were playing when we noticed that we were lost. We were near the woods and we went in. It was very dark and scary but we were with each other.”

(I'm not sure that the first move, upon discovering that you're lost, should be to go into the woods. Still, it's sweet that they took comfort in each other.)

Page Two: “Oh no! We were lost!” (pictures of stick figures with big eyes and 'O' mouths)

(The liberal use of empty space on this page nicely complements the plot, I think)

Page Three: “We walked through the woods and thought we saw a house!” (picture of stick figures, TB with his hand shielding his eyes from the sun.)

Page Four: (Chapter heading: Home!) “It was our Grandma's house! We were back with them!”
(Picture of stick figures raising arms in triumph, yelling “yay!”)

Page Five: “The End”

(Chapter two was a bit short, but that's okay.)

Page Six: “Other TB Books” “Bball – Bball is my favorite sport!” (picture of TB dunking) “Soccer! -- I'm a soccer player! Will we win or not?” (picture of TB scoring a goal)

(Clearly, TB has the marketing gene. He gets that from his mother. I like that he has already planned the next two installments in the New Series.)

Back Cover: “TB Books are Great! -- Booklist”

(He blurbed himself! That's my boy!)

Be on the lookout for the next installment in the series...

Votes of No Confidence

(Happily, this isn’t a concrete issue for me now. This just falls under “I’ve always wondered…”)

What are the rules governing faculty votes of no confidence?

I’ve been lucky enough that I haven’t actually faced one of these, either directly or indirectly, which may explain some of my ignorance on the subject.

From a spectator’s perspective, they strike me as somewhat ambiguous.

Historically, the idea of a vote (or motion) of no confidence is an import from parliamentary systems of government, in which the Prime Minister is actually elected by the Parliament. The Parliament – which has the power to hire the PM – has the power to fire the PM. But faculties don’t hire Presidents, so it’s not clear to me where they get the standing to fire them.

From this side of the desk, I can attest that faculty aren’t the only interested parties at a college. Whenever faculty talk as if their voice is the only one that matters, the staff bristle. (At my cc, I find myself defending the faculty from the staff, who’ve had it with what they perceive as arrogance.) Yet votes of no confidence seem to be the exclusive province of faculty.

As near as I can tell, votes of no confidence don’t have to come with reasons or abide by criteria; they’re the equivalent of a mob yelling “we don’t like you.” The mob may or may not have good reasons, but the simple fact of group anger, by itself, strikes me as neither here nor there. If the anger is a response to valid grievances, then it seems to me the grievances should be spelled out; if it isn’t, then the vote is baseless and should be treated accordingly.

The usual reading of votes of no confidence is that they’re ‘symbolic,’ but that doesn’t really answer the question. Symbolic of what? I’m not convinced that people vote the same way on ‘symbolic’ questions as they do when they believe the decision will actually happen. (Voters frequently vote to ‘send a message,’ not meaning the content of the vote literally.) By casting the meaning of the vote as symbolic, a distortion of intended meaning is baked into the cake. But that distortion defeats the value as a symbol.

Someone out there has probably done the legwork; I'd like to know the aftermath of Presidential 'votes of no confidence.' How many occur in a given year? How long do Presidents typically last afterwards? It could be tough to define success in this case, since a definition of success presumes a definition of purpose, but I'd take something like "an improved campus climate" as a success, whether with the current President or a new one.

I suppose one could defend votes of no confidence as the cri de coeur of an otherwise-powerless bunch, but I'm wary of making policy based on that. Besides, one could just as easily define them as an unaccountable method for the tenured to bully the untenured.

So I'm not entirely sure what to make of them. Wise and worldly readers -- what's your take? What have you seen?

College at 16?

An alert reader sent me a link to this story about New Hampshire. Apparently, the Granite State is considering funneling most high school students into community colleges after tenth grade. (Tellingly, the story allows that "those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years.")

This is one of those ideas that carries in it a real grain of truth, but that takes it much too far.

The grain of truth is that the later part of high school is frequently academically spotty. Since many states only require, say, two or three years of most subjects, many seniors start senior year already having met nearly every graduation requirement. In most cases, states deal with that through sponsoring 'dual enrollment' with local community colleges, and/or through AP or IB courses. All of those arrangements allow the junior or senior who is already bumping the academic ceiling of high school to take college-level courses, sometimes for dual credit, while remaining enrolled in high school. (In my limited observation, the advantage of dual-enrollment over AP or IB courses is the difference between transcripted credits and test scores. Some colleges that will only use AP scores for placement purposes -- rather than actually granting course credit -- will accept transcripted credits in transfer.)

Nationally, the trend in average age of cc students is conspicuously downward, which is at least partially a reflection of the popularity of dual enrollment. Add a whole cohort of 16 and 17 year olds, and the effect on a college's average age is predictable.

The New Hampshire plan apparently takes dual enrollment all the way out. Instead of taking some college courses in high school, why not truncate high school altogether and get a jump on college?

It strikes me as a little too convenient.

First, there's that part about 'those who want to go to a prestigious university...' Why would prestigious universities want an extra two years of academic preparation? Could it be that...I'm going out on a limb here...there's some academic value to those last two years? Perhaps that the typical 18 year old is more mature than the typical 16 year old? I'm guessing that the student who has had pre-calc in high school will do better in calculus than the student who hasn't. Call it a hunch.

There's also the democratic rite of passage part of high school. I get as tired of the high school 'coming of age' dramas as everybody else, but I think part of the reason they survive is that high school is the last time that every social class is forced to cohabit. Granted, residential segregation does a number on that, but even so, high school is a common experience. Yes, some of it amounts to what Newt Gingrich memorably called 'subsidized dating,' but I'd even suggest there can be developmental value in that.

My preferred solution would be to greatly improve the academic quality of the average high school experience. The tippity-top is already sufficiently challenged, what with dual enrollment and AP/IB courses and the whole selective-college-application-dance. But the vast majority doesn't fit that description. That's where the work needs to be done. Rather than throwing up our hands and simply making community colleges the new 11th grade -- which, if implemented, would have the disastrous effect of making community colleges the new 11th grade -- let's fix the 11th grade. Prepare the students so they're capable of succeeding at whatever comes next, whether it be college, trade school, the military, or work. Any of those requires a certain work ethic and sense of responsibility, along with a decent sense of math, writing, and the basic facts of the world.

Anyway, that's my first take. Wise and worldly readers -- especially those in New Hampshire -- what say you?

Tax Credits? Hmm...

According to IHE, President-elect Obama has supported a fully refundable tax credit of $4000 for the first two years of college. Whether this (or anything akin to it) has a chance of seeing the light of day is another question, but it's a neat idea to bat around.

There's an obvious surface-level appeal for cc's, since that would cover the entire cost of tuition and fees for a full-time student for two years at most cc's. In fact, cc's with costs well below that might think about raising the tuition and fees to $4k, lest they leave money on the table. (The usual argument against significant tuition/fee hikes is 'access,' but this would make that argument largely moot.) The really savvy ones would contract with textbook-rental firms for fixed rates, which could then be included in the $4k total.

I'll admit that with the state funding crisis we're weathering now, the prospect of a large, no-strings infusion of cash is very, very attractive. No sense in denying that. And the public recognition that cc's are viable for transfer, as well as for workforce development or job retraining, is more than welcome. Let's drop the '13th grade' stigma and trumpet the fact that many of our grads go on to get advanced degrees. Yes, yes, yes.

But still...

How do we define 'the first two years of college'? What if the student attends part-time? What about remediation? How about students who did a semester after high school, dropped out, lived life for a while, and returned in their thirties? (We get a significant number of those.) What about non-degree programs? Non-accredited trade schools? Non-credit workforce development? Summer overloads? Dual enrollment in high schools?

And what about those pesky four-year schools? Wouldn't they just raise their tuition by another, say, $4k? After all, if you're already charging 50, what's 54?

If we're really serious about helping people afford colleges that are worth attending, I have a slightly different proposal. It gets around all those annoying 'definitional' issues, and it emphasizes quality as well as quantity.

Drum roll, please...

Parity.

Just parity. That's all.

Make it a national policy that community colleges get the same per-student funding as four-year public colleges.

Give us the sustained, predictable, ongoing operating support, and we'll give you both access and quality. And if we don't, based on relevant measures after a decent interval, then by all means, move those resources elsewhere.

Since we don't do the lavish student centers, the over-the-top athletic programs, the climbing walls, or the various concierge services of the four-year schools, we can devote all that funding to stuff like financial aid, tutoring services, and onsite childcare. We could actually reverse the all-adjunct, all-the-time trend, and provide students with professors who actually have the time to talk to them outside of class. Hell, if we got really ambitious, maybe we could even fund some joint projects with the local high schools to try to get the high school curricula in some vague alignment with college entrance requirements in basic skills areas, like writing and math. If all goes well, in a few years we might not even need to remediate quite so much, since more students will have learned it the first time.

Making cc's both excellent and affordable would achieve far more than would allowing the Swarthmores of the world to bump up tuition another five percent.

Just a thought. And an admittedly imperfect one. But it's honestly refreshing to be able to think along these lines, rather than just “what should we cut this time?”

That's the change we need. Welcome, President Obama.

Turning Down Internal Candidates

This has recently become salient in my world, again.

Internal candidates raise all kinds of issues – information asymmetry, historical baggage, sense of entitlement, and the like. There's a really basic awfulness in saying 'no' to somebody internal.

Saying 'no' to anybody is unpleasant, but it isn't so bad with people you're unlikely ever to see again. You can be vague and relatively quick, and emerge soon enough with both parties' dignity intact. (That doesn't always happen, of course, but it should.) Once the deed is done, it's done, and you can get on with your work.

But with internal candidates – especially those who had a fairly realistic shot, and who harbor a sense, fairly or not, that the job is owed them – it's much harder.

On a basic level, you know you'll see them again, repeatedly. In fact, you'll have to continue to work with them, and hope to get their best from them.

Depending on the candidate, there may also be a disappointed cheering section of friends and allies, some of whom will hold the choice against you. (I've also seen people bad-mouth an internal candidate behind closed doors before the selection is made, then rally to hir side afterwards. So it goes.)

If the choice comes as a surprise (at least to the candidate), you may get the barrage of 'why' questions. Depending on the real answers, these can be easy or hard to address. If it's a relatively bright line credential, you're home free (“your doctorate isn't finished yet”). The disappointment will still be there, but it's really not personal. But if the reason is more of a judgment call, it can be tough to put too much out there without forever poisoning the well.

From this side of the desk, how someone handles rejection tells me a lot. I've seen candidates express disappointment in the moment, but then (maybe after a weekend) get right back to doing what they do well. These are the ones who sow doubt about the selection. More commonly, I've seen candidates intimate that darker forces are at work, that there will be political hell to pay, or that the rejection is 'typical' of (fill in the blank). In these cases, I'm quickly reassured that I made the right call. If the response is selfish, then I have a sense of what I would have been in for.

Having been through this several times now, I'm increasingly convinced that there's a common expectations gap. A non-trivial number of people think of internal postings as spoils, or as rewards for having paid dues, or as something for which you take a number. In other words, they think of them as entitlements, and react to rejection as they'd react to theft: something was taken from them that was rightfully theirs.

Simply put, I don't buy it. Nobody is 'owed' any more than fair consideration. Positions aren't rewards. They're bundles of tasks that the institution needs done as well as they can be, within existing constraints. Sometimes the best candidate is also the next one 'in line,' and that's great. But sometimes not. If a newer hire has a skill set better suited to the job at hand, and has managed to inspire confidence that s/he gets stuff done, then forcing hir to 'take a number' is wasting a valuable resource. It's running the institution for the employees, rather than for the students. It's a category mistake.

Turning down the 'next' candidate carries risks. Flight risk is an obvious one; I've seen heirs apparent get passed over, howl in righteous outrage, and announce a new job elsewhere a few months later. I don't blame them for that; what one college needs at a given moment may be very different from what another one needs. If what you have to offer is out of sync with what your college needs, then finding a place that needs what you have makes a lot of sense. But I wouldn't make a wrong choice just to avoid flight risk; if the fit is wrong, it's wrong. And I have faith – rightly or wrongly – that the world's talent pool is big enough that nobody is really irreplaceable.

There's also the constant churn of rumor, for which difficult choices provide tempting fodder. All I'll say to that is that I've found over the years that there's really no appeasing the gossips. Give some what they want, and you'll magically create others. Worse, you'll embolden the ones you appeased, so they'll crank up the pressure later. There comes a point at which you just have to accept a certain amount of rumormongering as a cost of doing your job. With rare exceptions, these folks have exactly as much power as you give them. Shrug them off.

None of which makes it easier to have that conversation, knowing that the disappointed candidate will still be here next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. So it goes.

The Morning After

I'll try to put together something a little more thoughtful for tomorrow; last night was spent glued to the tv, happily watching the returns. Two quick nuggets:

- From the mouths of babes...Yesterday The Wife took The Boy and The Girl with her when she voted. (I went before work.) As they left the polling place, TB exclaimed “It's like the toilet has been clogged for eight years, and now we can finally flush it!”

In October of 2006, I wrote: “Speaking of Dems, I foresee precisely two possibilities for 2008: Barack Obama, or crushing defeat.” I'm glad we chose wisely.

While Rome Burns...

I'm too distracted by the election to put together a proper post, so this meme from Lesboprof came at a good time. I don't usually do memes, but I can't say no to LP, so here goes...

The “Favorites” Meme

1.Political show - Daily Show and Colbert Report, of course. Olbermann will do in a pinch, and Maddow is starting to show up on my radar.

2. Picnic food – I'm not really a picnic guy, but in a pinch, a big ol' sub will do.

3. Mixed drink – Raspberry daquiri. A bit girly, I know, but still. The best I ever had was in a pool in Kauai, on my honeymoon. For my money, raspberry and chocolate are nature's perfect flavors. Many years ago, Ben and Jerry's did 'chocolate raspberry' as a flavor of the month, and I ordered one in public. I enjoyed it so much that it became socially awkward.

4. U.S. President – FDR.

5. Kind of student to teach -- The ones who don't know they're smart until you point it out. I've had a few of those, and remember all of them.

6. Hobby you do or wish you still did – Does blogging count? And I miss my dj days.

7. Sports commentator – Tim McCarver. I know, I know, but he's informative as hell. I also enjoy John Madden every so often, since he sounds like an aneurysm in progress.

8. Sport to watch on TV – Baseball. In a pinch, the Purina Fittest Dog competition. Or luge.

9. Animal to have as a pet – Big floppy dogs.

10. Halloween costume you have worn – Big Bird, when I was about five.

11. Kind of dessert – See #3

12. Comic strip – Dilbert, though the best ever was Calvin and Hobbes.

13. Style or make of footwear – I've never cared about shoes.

14. Ice cream flavor - See #3

15. College or university president – Prefer not to answer.

16. Internet news source – lately, fivethirtyeight.com. I also check Brad DeLong's blog, the google news aggregator, and about twenty million other things.

17. Vacation spot – Kauai, San Francisco, or Boston. A great hotel is the key ingredient. I don't believe in camping.

18. Wine – A nice red zinfandel. Not that blush/pink crap; the red stuff.

19. Way to waste time instead of working – being silly with the kids.

20. Student excuse for late work -- “I couldn't get the paper done. (Pause) I'm in love.”

21. Reality show – No, thanks. If they can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to watch it.

22. Jewelry on a man – Nope. I feel the same way about tattoos on women. Call me retro, but there it is.

23. Pizza topping – It's all about the sauce. Novices forget this.

24. Children's movie – Finding Nemo or Cars. I also consider Matilda grossly underrated.

25. Celebrity you wish would retire -- Carrot Top.

Tagging -- Aunt B., Danigirl, and anyone who wants to play along.

Thoughts on Student Government at CC's

Last week a reader from a college whose student government recently made a collective ass of itself wrote to ask what I thought was the point of student government at community colleges.

The fact that it took me a week to even attempt a response is probably telling.

In high school, student government tends to be in charge of the prom. In grad school, I've never heard of a student government. (I've heard of grad student associations within given departments, which are pretty narrow by definition, and I've heard of grad student labor unions, but those are different.) At colleges that have student governments – my alma mater didn't – they seem to veer between complete invisibility and a sort-of platform for a smallish group of students to talk about various issues and/or run charity drives. Charity drives are well and good, of course, and I'm all for students attempting to address the issues of the day, even if only to get practice in the skills of citizenship. But the gap between the ideal – something like 'the voice of the students' – and reality – 'toys for tots bins in the student center' – is hard not to notice. And just like real government, every so often a well-organized clique of wingnuts steps in and starts banning rain or some such.

At cc's, student governments labor under the additional handicaps of a more transient student body and a shorter time to graduation, so it's that much harder to gain anything resembling continuity. When the degree is only two years anyway, and you add both attrition and the lack of leisure time characteristic of commuter students working their way through school, there just isn't much attention left to pay to student government. So it tends to reflect the interest of a very small number of students.

From an evil-administrator point of view, the function of student government is to provide just enough of a safety valve to keep protests at bay. “Of course we listen to the students. The student government gives a standing report to the faculty senate!” If it didn't exist, there wouldn't be a preferred alternative to protest.

On a more constructive note, though, I'd like to think that student governments at their best could actually try in a serious way to represent the interests of students as students. For example, they could pressure colleges to release textbook information as early as possible, to allow students to comparison-shop online. If, say, Amazon or Powells or Chegg can undercut the college bookstore, then that's real money the students are saving. (Don't expect colleges to do this without pressure, since most colleges use the bookstore as a revenue source.) Or they could work with local public transit authorities to try to synchronize the local bus routes to class schedules (or vice versa), so students don't have to lose huge blocks of time just waiting for buses. Sustainable carpool arrangements could also help with both cost and parking, both of which are huge issues for many students.

Those are just off the top of my head; I'll grant upfront that there are many more possibilities, sometimes depending on local contingencies. That's sort of the point. But I haven't seen student governments function that way, which strikes me as a missed opportunity.

In my own college days, we didn't have a student government, and I don't recall anybody pining for one. Of course, that was back in the days when 'pirated music' referred to cassette tapes; we would have thought 'mp3' referred to a ska band. Ah, to be young again...

Wise and worldly readers – have you seen a student government really step up? If so, how?

From Chaos to Order

High School Friend on Right Ocean recently got a new provost at his university. He writes:

What was interesting was his response to a question (of mine incidentally) about resources and if there may be resources that could be tapped by a new dean. He said that he can't walk across the quad without someone coming up to ask him for a new faculty line, a new program, etc., and that suggests that the practices in the past must have been very odd. There may be a few scarce opportunities for resources (given the funding climate), but what is important is instituting a process so the requests for resources are more transparent.

His response was good to hear. I like the idea of there being a way things are done, rather than there being a person who does the deciding by applying whatever guidelines seem good at the time.

This isn't news to you, but I thought you may find the idea of "being asked for positions while walking on campus" to be interesting for the blog.

It certainly struck a chord with me.

My colleagues and I are currently trying to shift a culture from the 'kiss the ring' style of resource management to something more transparent and rational. It's harder than you might expect, since people learn habits under previous regimes that can be intensely difficult to dislodge. Legacies of distrust take time to supplant, and when asking people to lower their guard, the safest response is always "you first." Worse, some long-entrenched folk have figured out how to use the language of process to manipulate outcomes, so discussions of process are themselves sometimes taken as coded.

I'm discovering, though, that the new money crunch is actually making the shift a little easier, since now it's actually possible to discuss process in a vacuum. It's no longer in the context of sifting through active requests, since we've put an indefinite hold on all hiring. Since we can't hire for a while anyway, we actually have some time to reflect on our processes (both allocation decisions -- which departments get to hire -- and procedure decisions, as in how the hiring is actually done) without reading every proposal as somehow partisan.

As with HSFRO's university, there's a long and rich legacy here of decisions made for personal reasons. Some of those decisions turned out okay anyway, but that's not really the point. When staffing decisions are made by a single person, based largely on whims, the rest of the college gradually turns its attention to trying to gain access to that person. Time and energy are misdirected. And, frankly, it's degrading to all involved.

The fiscal force majeure we're confronting now actually has the bright side of making it easier to argue for change. When we need to spend so much time and energy scrambling just to take care of the basics, the idea of diverting great bunches of it to internal politicking is just unsustainable. And from the perspective of one who gets asked for a lot of things, I can attest that it's much easier to make good decisions when all the options are in front of you at once, and the criteria for judgment are already developed. (It's even easier than that when you have a decent and open system of committees leading up to that moment, so it's not just you making the call.) That doesn't happen when you're ambushed in the quad (or, in a cc, the cafeteria).

I'm optimistic about HSFRO's provost, based on this note. He'll catch flak from the displaced former favorites, but it's flak worth catching.

Thanks, HSFRO, for helping me crystallize a silver lining.

Training Young Voters

Last week, The Wife decided that it was time to teach The Boy and The Girl about voting.

She converted a spent box of Puffs into a ballot box, and decorated it accordingly. Now we have occasional referenda, complete with preliminary speeches and secret ballots.

On Sunday, we had a discussion about what kind of face to put on this year's jack o'lantern: happy or scary.

TB gave a talk on behalf of 'scary.' I gave one on behalf of 'happy.' All four of us voted, TG getting a little help with her ballot, and 'scary' won, 3 to 1.

TW asked TG why we went with scary. TG replied "because more people voted for scary." I beamed.

I won't give them the electoral college version of the game until they're older. The electoral college frightens small children, who know a monster when they see one.

Now we're looking for good questions for voting. (And we're already decided that "what do we want for dinner" is too pedestrian.) Wise and worldly readers -- any thoughts?

Second-Year Scholarships and Subsidized Slacking

Okay, I'll admit to being a sucker for certain kinds of ideas: they're usually 'what ifs' that involve upending a single thing, and watching the dominos fall. For example, the Car Talk guys recently proposed a sort of price support law for gasoline. It's essentially a variable tax that would go up when the price of oil went down, to ensure that gas doesn't go below, say, three bucks a gallon. (The revenues collected could go for progressive tax rebates, so the working poor don't get nailed.) The idea is to ensure that people factor the cost of gas into car buying decisions, to encourage carmakers to invest in efficiency.

I heard a good one recently. What if we created -- at a significant enough scale to matter -- a new kind of merit scholarship? This one would only kick in after a student had earned, say, thirty college credits at a set GPA, and with no major disciplinary infractions? In effect, what if the student (and/or her family) had to pony up for the first year, but could earn a free ride for the second?

At cc's, I've seen scholarships fall pretty much into two categories. The first is the classic "we'll help pay for you to come here" kind, which is what most people think of. At cc's those are typically based on documented economic need, though not always. (They aren't based on athletics, unlike at some other places.) They're awarded to first-year students, often with some kind of GPA requirement for renewal. The idea is to get the student in the door.

(The second kind, which I honestly don't understand, is the "we'll help pay for your next college" scholarship, awarded by the cc upon graduation. It's a humanitarian gesture, I suppose, but from the cc's perspective the money walks away with the student.)

The "get you in the door" scholarship has obvious merit, and I don't suggest otherwise. But in the case of cc's, getting in is less of an issue than staying in. Our retention and graduation rates simply aren't what they ought to be. We get plenty of people in the door who drop out prior to completing the degree or certificate for which they came. Some of that is harmless enough -- early transfer, for example. But a great deal of it has to do with students feeling overmatched in one way or another, whether academically, economically, personally, or some combination.

As the economy worsens, we get more students in the door, but retention becomes more problematic as already-precarious home lives become even more so. And while I fully believe that a two-year college degree can make a meaningful difference for many students -- whether as an employment credential or as a stepping-stone to a four year degree -- I'm not convinced that picking up a few credits here and there before dropping out does anybody very much good. (For present purposes, I'm not talking about adults who take the occasional class simply for personal fulfillment -- the retiree who takes a couple semesters of Italian before taking a trip to Italy. That's fine and lovely.) Far too many students show up with the best of intentions, but their cobbled-together support arrangements fall apart after a while and they walk away.

The second-year scholarship has the considerable virtue of rewarding tenacity. Those students who manage to keep their stuff together long enough to get through the equivalent of a first full year with a passing GPA have been, for lack of a better word, initiated; now they get a significant economic break. Now they can reduce their hours at outside jobs, or simply have a little more 'sanity' time to establish a sustainable pace. The second-year scholarship is much less prone to the objection of subsidizing slacking, since only those students who could pull it together in the first place could get it. And it looks at college achievement, rather than high school achievement, so it doesn't punish the late bloomer, the older student, or the product of a lousy school district. (That's not entirely true when one factors in the extra time for remediation, but the basic idea still holds.)

So that's my pitch. Wise and worldly readers -- what do you think?

Ask the Administrator: An Interview Curveball

A new correspondent writes:

I'm currently an adjunct ESL teacher, and I just interviewed for a full-time position in my department.  One of the questions in the interview caught me off-guard.  Even days after the interview, I'm still not sure what my answer should have been.  The question was something to the effect of "what do you see as a full-time instructor's responsibilities in relation to part time workers?"   I've worked at several different colleges & universities, and at all of them (except for the one I'm currently working in), the full-time instructors had quite a bit of authority over part time workers.  They observed our classes, evaluated us, chose our textbooks, etc.  Part-time teachers were invited to some staff meetings, but did not have the option of participating in many committees, etc.  However, in my current department, there are only 8 full-time instructors and about 35 part-time instructors.  Many of these part-time instructors have been around for many years and are every bit as invested and involved in the program as the full-timers.  In this situation, it seems to me that the part-time instructors should be viewed simply as colleagues, not as subordinates.  What do you think?

There's almost certainly some history behind the question. And without knowing the specific local history, it's hard to say what the 'correct' answer is.

When confronted with loaded questions like that, my preferred approach is to ask for clarification.

For example, last year at an interview I was asked about my attitude towards people who work in Student Affairs. I paused, blinked, and asked the questioner to rephrase. As it was asked, I considered the question bizarre. Which people? Why? (I later learned that there had been a history of serious turf battles between academic affairs and student affairs.) When the question was rephrased – I honestly couldn't reconstruct how, other than to say it was a lot less off-putting the second time – I was able to answer truthfully that I thought internecine battles were asinine and destructive, since they distract from the shared mission of the college. Since 'shared mission' was my key message anyway, I considered it a reasonable answer.

In this case, I'd guess that there's some sort of history regarding the proper roles of full-time and adjunct faculty – if they're talking about faculty – and they're trying to find someone to join the ranks on the 'right' side. Instead of trying to suss out what they thought the right answer was, I'd recommend taking this as a chance to figure out what the right answer should be. Should full-time faculty supervise adjuncts, or should that fall to the Chair? Should adjuncts be included in meetings if they can't be paid for it? Should full-timers and adjuncts share the same union, or should each group have its own?

The issues get tricky when you really start mucking around in them. If adjuncts aren't quite at the quality level of full-timers, however defined, then treating them as colleagues dilutes the currency. If they are at the quality level of full-timers, then all that money for health insurance and real salaries and lifetime job security is money wasted. Some adjuncts really want full-time jobs, and are cobbling together a meager living trying to catch that big break; others are largely focused on something else, and treat adjuncting as an enjoyable way to pick up some money on the side. The needs of those groups are very different, and I would imagine each would have different requests of the full-timers.

If it were up to me, and if we didn't have the money to expand vastly the ranks of the full-time, I'd like to see the 'evaluation' part go to department chairs and program coordinators, leaving the rest of the full-time faculty to serve as resource people. That way, evaluation can be more consistent, and the adjuncts won't have to work in a panopticon. But that's me; surely there are other perfectly functional ways to organize a department or program.

A charitable read of the question might be that they're trying really hard to find a workable, humane, and sustainable model, so they wanted someone who has already given the question serious thought. A more cynical, and I think likelier, interpretation is that there's already a hard-won local consensus on it, and they want to make sure that your instincts will align with it, whatever it is.

Interviews aren't always fair, unfortunately.

Good luck with your search!

Wise and worldly readers – any thoughts on this one? Any weird interview questions you've run across?

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

Monday Musings

Things have been a little doom-and-gloomy of late on the blog, so it's time to lighten up a bit. A few recent scenes from real life:

Basketball

TB loves basketball, and we want to encourage him, so we finally broke down and bought him one of those driveway basketball nets-on-poles-with-hollow-bases. The idea is that you fill the base with water (including two gallons of antifreeze, according to the directions) or sand, and that provides the ballast to keep the thing from falling forward.

You wouldn't believe how difficult and complicated those *%^#(%& things are to assemble. You'd think – okay, I'd think – that it would just be a few steps: connect pole pieces, attach top of pole to backboards, attach net to backboard, secure to base, add water, and voila. Uh, no.

I'll admit that I'm not the handiest critter on the planet. In eighth grade when they gave those aptitude tests that were supposed to reveal your future career, I crashed and burned on the 'spatial relations' section. They'd draw an unfolded box with lots of dotted lines, and ask you what it would look like folded up in three dimensions. They might as well have asked me to solve cold fusion. High school geometry was a disaster, because the teacher kept focusing on shapes, and proving that triangles were triangles. To this day, I'm utterly hopeless at jigsaw puzzles. So this would have been a stretch on a good day.

But yumpin yiminy, this was beyond belief. The pieces that were supposed to fit, didn't; the instructions took abstraction to a new level; and my usual impatience with this kind of stuff sent my mistake rate even higher than usual, and that's saying something. TW finally had to bail me out, since she has the spatial gene. After several weeks – yes, weeks – the *()&%^) thing finally went up. TB's first shot was nothing but net. My first shot was an air ball. Insert metaphor here.

Saturday night in the wind and rain, it fell forward.

I'm thinking we'll encourage him to try baseball instead.

When I Grow Up, by Juliana Hatfield

For some reason, when I heard that the musician Juliana Hatfield had published an autobiography, I had to have it. I can't really explain why. I liked a few of her songs in the mid-90's, but lost track of her after that. I remembered her being unusually pretty, but she's hardly unique in that, and that was some time ago. It was probably just the novelty of realizing that my contemporaries have hit the age at which they can start writing autobiographies.

Whatever the reason, I enjoyed it immensely. About half of it is a tour diary from the mid-2000's, well after what she calls her “moment of cultural relevance.” It reads like Spinal Tap as filtered through depression. The vignette that stuck with me was of a concert she gave in a multipurpose room at a community center. Five people showed up, each looking embarrassed at her own conspicuousness. JH plowed forward anyway – if she didn't, she wouldn't get paid – and sang to the clock on the opposite wall.

There's something poignant about the post-relevance pop star. Although the culture remembers her, if at all, as a creature of about 1994, she didn't go away. In the arc of her life and career, the fame part was relatively brief and aberrant. Other than the obligatory and off-key happy ending, the book is really about the compulsion to keep on plodding, long after most people have stopped caring. I admire the spirit, even if the point is sometimes hard to isolate.

TB's Rejection

This weekend TB asked his favorite girlfriend if he could kiss her, and she said no.

The tradition continues...

Halloween Preparations

Our annual protest against the tyranny of the Disney princesses continues. This year TG will be an astronaut. She has the orange jumpsuit, and TW found her a soft astronaut's helmet online. It even has a little black microphone that comes around the front, so she can talk to mission control. Last year she was a “kittycat doctor,” so we're keeping with a theme.

Lost Ipod at the Gym

Last week I lost my ipod in the gym. I've heard it said that you can find lost items by blogging about them, so here goes. Heeeeeere, ipod. Heeeeere, ipod. I have some nice podcasts for you...

Rocks

There was a time when I usually used the word “rocks” as a verb. Now it's very much a noun.

In implementing the current round of budget cuts, the first task has been to get every example of a few categories of expense on a single list, so we can prioritize. This is harder than you might think. I've already had several meetings that have gone pretty much like this:

DD: “Okay, so now we finally have everything, right?”

Colleague 1: “Right.”

DD: “Good. So our total is...”

C1: “Wait! What about [bizarre, byzantine exception]?”

DD: “Huh?”

C1: “That started several years ago, when [long-gone admin] told [litigious tenured prof] that if he did [something he didn't want to], he would get [plum] every [so often]”

DD: “Huh?”

C2: “My area does that differently. We do the plums twice as often!”

C3: “And I stopped giving them out two years ago, based on a conversation with [other long-gone admin]”

C1: “Is that why [other tenured prof] is always complaining about unequal treatment?”

DD: {sigh}

Repeat for several hours, until the living envy the dead.

Every time we turn over a rock, something nasty and slimy and awful crawls out. Worse, the nasty thing manages to dislodge another rock.

The long-term good news, I keep telling myself, is that eventually we'll run out of rocks. Eventually, all the nasty and slimy stuff will be exposed, and we can get a handle on it and move forward. And replacing all the slimy stuff with transparent and aboveboard arrangements will be more sustainable, once we overcome the inertial resistance.

That's what I keep telling myself.

But I'll admit, at the end of a day like this, it's a stretch. There's just an amazing number of rocks out there, and it's tiring. And each little slimy discovery mounts its own defense.

It it really still only October?

Intersession

Wise and worldly readers, I need the benefit of your varied experience.

Have you been able to make a January intersession work on your campus?

If so, how?

Which Job Market Are We Talking About?

I had one of those moments of cognitive dissonance this week, when I was at a meeting trying to establish a regional consortium to prepare workers for a particular industry.

The 'industry' people who were there were anxious to form partnerships with cc's to prepare entry-level workers. Most of the cc's there were eager, too, since our students want jobs, and we would love to be able to tell them truthfully that a given program is highly likely to lead to a solid job. (That's already the case in the Nursing program, which is why it has to turn away many more students than it accepts.)

I didn't share the enthusiasm of the group, though, and it took me the drive home to figure out why.

The industry in question is concentrated heavily in a different part of the state. The students at my cc, and they aren't unusual in this, generally like to stay local. They want jobs, but they want the jobs to be local.

What makes that tricky is that some of the locally-stronger industries are in national decline. They still need employees in certain areas, and periodically hire our grads, but the overall trend line is pretty clear. For argument's sake, it's like the last remaining dot-matrix printer company is local, and it needs a steady, if declining, flow of new people trained in dot-matrix technology. The local students want jobs, and would be happy (in the short term) to get those jobs. Should we train them for a dying industry? Or should we focus on industries that are growing elsewhere, but that aren't really here yet?

Those of us (okay, I'm a nerd, I admit it) who remember the debates over “industrial policy” have learned a knee-jerk aversion to the idea of “picking winners.” Supposedly, it's arrogant to substitute one's own judgment for the all-knowing market. Of course, one could also argue that it's criminally shortsighted not to notice larger national and international trends. (One could also argue that the market is, itself, the sum of individual judgments, so it's a bit of a false dichotomy.) Take Kodak as an example. As recently as the 90's, Kodak looked like an indestructible behemoth; now, with digital photography having rendered film obsolete for most purposes, Kodak is a shell of its former self. Training people for Kodak seemed to make sense just a short time ago; now it would be insane. My suspicion is that some of our local industries are roughly where Kodak was around, say, 1998. They're still chugging, but I wouldn't place bets on their continued viability. But the new stuff hasn't come around yet to replace it, and it's always possible that my suspicion is wrong.

It would be easy to favor the new over the old if we had enough of the new stuff locally to make the argument plausible. But we don't. So we're in the weird position of either asking our students to take skills and move away, or to acquire skills with what is likely to be a terribly finite lifespan to stay local.

Although we like to talk about a national or global economy, for many of our students, the economy that's relevant to them is the one within a half-hour radius. That local economy may or may not reflect (yet) the larger global trends. Telling our students that there are great jobs several hours away in an industry they've never seen before is just too abstract for many of them.

The educator in me sees this as a teachable moment, and in a way, it is. Provincialism is a form of ignorance, and in certain ways, it's curable. But it's not just a question of ignorance. Family ties are real, and personal history is not to be taken lightly. CC students in particular often come bundled with family obligations, local ties, and various reasons to stay local; that's part of what makes cc's unique. The “community” part of “community college” shouldn't just be rhetorical. But what do you do when the economy of the local community is on the losing side of a much larger trend?

Clueless in Seattle

An alert reader sent me this story from the Seattle Times. It's about the hiring and abrupt firing, with allegations of physical assault, of Washington State University Provost Steven Hoch. It's worth reading in its entirety, since every detail seems sillier than the one before it. Even without any additional information, I read the story very differently than its author apparently does.

A quick read would suggest that Hoch is the bad guy, and he may be. (I don't know any of the principals in this case, and I don't have any inside information about it.) Certainly the headline -- “WSU did not verify provost's references” -- would lead a casual reader to suspect that Hoch had, say, a taste for heroin or a penchant for streaking. But read on, and a few gems come to light.

Apparently, prior to starting there, a few administrators Hoch thought would report to him “made it clear that they would not be answering to him, but only to [President] Floyd.” Alarmed, Hoch sent a memo to the President, outlining what he thought the proper chain of command actually was. The President, Elson Floyd, responded:

"I write to tell you that I find your memorandum ... deeply troubling for several reasons: 1) In over three decades of university administration, I have never received this type of confirming correspondence from a colleague. In my judgment, it sends a strong signal of lack of trust; and 2) I do not intend to have a relationship with colleagues desirous of reducing conversations to writing."
Floyd goes on to say in the e-mail that as "you gain a deeper familiarity with the WSU culture and climate, you will come to understand that I have created an organization that is more driven by relationships than reporting lines."

Wow. Just, wow.

“I have created an organization that is more driven by relationships than reporting lines.” If there's a more succinct summary of narcissistic management, I haven't seen it.

Reducing unclear (or high-stakes) conversations to written summary is Management 101. It's done specifically to prevent misunderstandings that can result from selective memory, inattention, ambiguous language, or worse. Hoch encountered a scenario different from the one he thought he had agreed to, so he tried to get written clarification. That's what you're supposed to do. It's a way of clarifying boundaries. The President took offense, since narcissists hate boundaries.

Later, when Hoch started the job, the underlings took offense when he took the written chain of command literally. He reacted badly, but he was right to be shocked.

Now, the President is insinuating – without proof – that there's a deep character flaw in Hoch. (That's the subtext of “we should have checked his references.”) There may or may not be, but that sort of tut-tutting is straight out of the manage-by-favoritism playbook. If someone didn't play along, the only possible explanation is a character flaw. (Soviet psychology worked by the same principle – if you're unhappy in the workers' paradise, you must be insane.) It couldn't be, say, a realization that the courtier system is fundamentally flawed.

Now Hoch looks bad for accepting the extraordinarily well-paid fallback position to which he's contractually entitled, and the President is quoted in the story as deliberately fostering a hostile work environment. Amazing.

Honestly, I couldn't make this stuff up.

It's notoriously difficult to spot toxic situations before getting into them. People are often on their best behavior during the interview/courtship phase, and enough of that ritual is scripted that it can difficult to pick up red flags while there's still time. At that point, information is limited and filtered, and often viewed in the most optimistic possible light. And very few people have enough self-awareness to know their flaws, let alone the confidence to confess them. (Weirdly, I've seen plenty of people with just enough self-awareness to explicitly deny their own flaws, even while displaying them. How exactly that works I'll leave to the psychologists.) Besides, if you're on the market in the first place, it's probably because there's something unsatisfying about your current situation, so you may be willing to discount red flags at the new place on the grounds that hey, at least it's not the old place.

I suppose it's possible that WSU is the land of milk and honey, in which peace and love reign, and into which an outsider attempted to introduce sin. Anything's possible, I suppose.

But I don't buy it. I wish Dr. Hoch well in his new faculty role. And I suggest that if he wants to clear his name, that he publicly donate a huge chunk of his salary to the WSU foundation for student scholarships. Kill them with kindness.

"Find the Money in the Budget"

If you want to watch a dean's eyes roll back into her head, just ask for something and tell her to “find the money in the budget.”

I've heard this phrase dozens of times over the last several years, but it still strikes me as slightly odd. It gives the impression that funding new projects is a matter of looking for change between sofa cushions. And, in a way, it is.

Budgets are comprised of line items, each of which is supposed to be dedicated to a particular expenditure. Some of those commitments are 'hard,' and therefore inviolate: contractually-guaranteed salaries, matching funds for grants, utility payments. The rest are varying degrees of 'soft,' ranging from travel funding to office supplies to software training workshops. This isn't to say that they're unnecessary or frivolous, but that they're fungible; if needed, it's possible to move money from workshops to office supplies or vice versa. (The softest of all is the increasingly mythical “contingency” line, which is the “in case of emergency, break glass” line. In tight times, this is always the first to go. And you'd be surprised how many different ways people can define “emergency.”) “Finding the money in the budget” consists of deciding that you could probably take a given line a little lower without disaster striking, and using the proceeds to pay for something else.

From the outside, it's probably easy to imagine that 'soft' money is just sitting there for the taking, a slush fund to bankroll all manner of perfidy. But that's pretty much only true when there's a huge stinkin' pile of it. In fact, those 'soft' accounts are what we look to when people propose new projects, repairs, affiliations, accreditations, or whatever else wasn't planned over a year in advance. If we didn't have something soft, we couldn't respond to anything less than a year in advance. The server died yesterday? Can you wait a year?

When the cuts come, as they have, those soft accounts get hit first. That's not because they're flush, but because everything else requires more lead time. Over two-thirds of the college budget is personnel, most of whom are under annual (or lifetime) contract. That means that midyear cuts have to come from the remaining less-than-one-third, just by default. The trick, and it's a mean one, is in guesstimating just how low you can take each of those 'soft' lines without running aground by June.

(There's a great old Dilbert cartoon in which the boss asks for an itemized list of all unexpected expenses for the coming year, so he can budget for them. If only...)

Unexpected expenses happen. Yes, good management can usually discern reasonable ballpark figures for various things, but nobody is omniscient. Boilers die when they die, and any given winter can be snowier or less snowy than the one before it. On the personnel side, I don't know which professors will drop out sick this year, but I can bet that some will, and that we'll have to have money for long-term subs. And anybody who would care to share insights about the price of oil in the next six months is welcome to do so. (My guess is like the economist who was asked to predict interest rates over the next year: “I believe they will fluctuate.”)

Several years ago, Eric Klinenberg wrote a wonderful book about the 1995 heat wave in Chicago. Among the many points he made, he noted that part of the reason the city was so underprepared for the heat wave was that it had made so many cuts to so many “inefficiencies” over the years that there wasn't enough slack left in the budget for when something catastrophic happened. (The book came out before Katrina hit; reading it now, it seems prescient.) If the state wouldn't mess with our budget, we could leave enough 'soft' money to handle most reasonably-foreseeable disasters. When the state makes itself a disaster, we're really at the mercy of the fates.

Back before “Keynesianism” became a dirty word, some people grasped that when the economy implodes, the Feds should increase aid to states, specifically to prevent services from collapsing precisely when they're most needed. During recessions, the opportunity cost of education is unusually low; this is precisely the time to invest in it. There was once a time when policymakers grasped that. Perhaps soon they will again. Until then, I have to find some more money in the budget. Here's hoping for a mild winter...

Calm

Maggie's post on temperament and leadership really gets it right – check it out.

Although the term “servant leadership” creeps me out – my past experience with people who used it was that they were juuuust a little too self-congratulatory about it – Maggie really nails the dynamic of blending confidence and egolessness. Watching the debates, I'd be hard-pressed to repeat anything Obama said, but his demeanor stuck with me; in the midst of nuttiness, he's unflappable. After watching, I come away seeing McCain less as another Bush than as another Cheney, angrily grumbling at the neighborhood kids to get the hell off his lawn. With Obama, there's a contagious, confident calm.

I don't have Obama's gifts, and I certainly haven't had a life like his. But he's absolutely worth watching as a leadership study.

I've watched on my campus as the budget news has progressed with surprising speed from 'bad' to 'awful' to 'repent your sins.' And I've watched people at different levels react in different ways, each eliciting different reactions. I'm beginning to realize that when you're a public figure, even if in a limited context, demeanor is what people remember.

When someone in a staff role has a meltdown, that person and his immediate coworkers feel it. When someone in a public role has a meltdown, everybody gets scared. Public meltdowns make a bad situation worse, even when they're based on a clearsighted recognition of some external reality.

The usual administrator's playbook says that when things get bad, you get evasive. Change the subject, or find something to praise, or if you're really stuck, trot out the vague cliches. This is actually better than having a meltdown, but it doesn't really inspire confidence, either. At best, it's a holding action. Sometimes that's the best you can do, of course, but it rarely has the desired effect.

Lately, I've been experimenting with a new approach. On a few recent occasions, as things have become particularly scary, I've gone into public discussions with my guard down and plenty of facts at hand. Instead of bracing for confrontation, I've simply admitted the limits of what I know, put the facts out there, acknowledged my own biases, and asked for input. And I have to admit being embarrassed at how badly I've underestimated some of my colleagues. (I'll even admit being embarrassed now, when I reread some of my posts from a few years ago.)

Okay, I'm a slow learner. And it's hard.

The responses, mostly, have been heartening. Instead of the self-righteous pushback and 'gotcha' moves that have been entirely too common over the years, I'm actually starting to see a real exchange of ideas. Some of that is the clarity that crisis brings – when the state is in free-fall, it's hard to reduce all bad things to this or that dean. But some of it, I think, is an almost palpable need for a sense of safety and calm. The best responses come when we collectively bring some legibility to the chaos. That feeling of 'getting a handle on it' seems to help, like pretending you're steering when you're on a roller coaster. And sometimes getting a handle on it means letting go of some of your own stuff.

The trick is to make it look easy, to project calm. That's freakin' hard, but it's also half the message.

Ask the Administrator: VP's du Jour

This isn't a question, per se, but it's too good not to quote. A longtime correspondent writes (edited for relative anonymity):

Our chief academic officer (CAO) just submitted his resignation. He will have been here (less than three years) when he steps down. Over the last decade, we have had more 'interims' than 'permanents' in that role, and few have lasted more than a couple of years.


From the time the current CAO arrived until this past summer, he and our chief administrative officer (a staff position, not our president) fought over their relative status on campus and about access to the president. Last summer, things came to a head, our faculty governance group took a very strong position in support of the CAO, and our president asked for the resignation of the administrative honcho. Reluctantly.


So here we go again. For more than a decade, we've had really, really fragmented academic leadership, no clear direction, things happening in fits and starts, declining-to-stagnant enrollments, individual programs more concerned with protecting their turf (a problem in good times; imagine what it's been like here) than with helping develop the institution. And several presidents, so not all that much continuity of leadership there, either.


My current feeling is that we should call the position Interim Acting Temporary Until Things Get Worse While We Spend Another Five Years Looking for a Permanent VC Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, but I don't think anyone would apply for that.

Yuck. This kind of turnover is distressingly common, in my observation. In fact, not long ago, a national study pegged the average length-of-service of an academic vice president at a jaw-dropping three years. I don't know if that counted 'interims,' but even if it did, that's an amazing amount of turnover when you factor in learning curves.


My first reaction, which may or may not be accurate, is that the current President has a gladiatorial style of management, in which he pits his various underlings against each other as a conscious strategy. The theory behind that, as near as I can muster, is that competition is supposed to bring out everyone's best. (Donald Trump did this on The Apprentice.) Of course, student services and academics aren't supposed to be in competition, so what actually happens is one-upsmanship, silly political infighting, and focus directed away from the health of the institution as a whole and towards games of leapfrog among the courtiers. It's pathological, degrading, and silly. (My personal theory is that the 'competition' justification is just a rationalization for the preferences of narcissistic personalities, though I'll admit that's just a theory.) Eventually, vp's subjected to this will either lose so badly that they can't really stay there, or just get sick of it all and walk. Either way, it's a turnover generator, and you couldn't pay me enough to walk into that.


Based on other observation, I also suspect a direct correlation between a leadership vacuum in the middle, and hard silos on the ground. When the center doesn't hold, departments and programs usually turn inward and play defense. It's individually rational, even if collectively insane. When programs are more concerned about scoring points against each other than with growing the institution as a whole, it isn't hard to predict the long-term trend. Worse, it tends to be self-amplifying over time, since the first department to let down its shields gets mobbed, which the rest take as confirmation that they should continue to play defense.


Turning around a situation like that takes extraordinary leadership. Off the top of my head, it would require a new and very different President, a housecleaning of many of the upper-level administrative ranks, an early retirement package for long-entrenched faculty, a reorg or two, some farsighted union leadership (if you have unions), and a Board willing to take the short-term heat for a long-term improvement. Also, a big blast of external money would help. That's a tall order in the best of times. Whichever of those happens first will encounter tremendous opposition, and may or may not survive.


Although bashing administrators is great sport, and very frequently justified, the truth is that the strike zone in these jobs is remarkably narrow. Presidents can overreach and micromanage, thereby destroying the integrity of the institution, or they can withdraw, leaving each division for itself and sowing divisiveness. VP's who have to please mercurial Presidents can't necessarily make the best decisions for their own areas, with destructive fallout all the way down. And a faculty that puts too much faith in a given VP, without understanding the insanity of the situation higher up, is setting itself up for bitter disappointment. That's true regardless of individual intention or preference.


I don't envy you your situation. Honestly, if my diagnosis is anywhere near correct, your CAO probably has the right idea. Sometimes the best answer is to walk.


Good luck!


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

Maybe I'm Jaded, But...

This story didn't surprise me.

Having been on this side of the desk for a while now, I can attest that I've heard deans, HR directors, department chairs, and even vice presidents say candidly that adjuncts are underpaid. We pretty much all agree on that. (I've never heard a counterargument beyond “nobody put a gun to their heads.”) It may be surprising to hear it from a podium, but it's nothing that hasn't been floating around for some time.

Some of the comments to the IHE story are dispiriting, in that they seem to suggest that any administrator who wants to can just wave a magic wand and create tenure-track positions out of the clear blue sky. They also fall into the trap of assuming that bad results can only be explained by bad intentions.

Quick quiz: which of the following bothers the public more?

1.Tenured professors being replaced by adjuncts
2.Tuition increasing faster than inflation

If you guessed 1, you probably work in higher ed. The correct answer is 2. And keeping a relative lid on 2 is one of the driving forces behind 1.

In my state, as in most at this point, we're actually taking budget cuts right now. The taxpayers are crying out for more and deeper cuts. We're running a deficit supporting the faculty and staff we have now. In this context, the resources for conscience-driven hiring are supposed to come from where, exactly?

(Perversely enough, the percentage of courses taught by full-timers in the short term will probably increase, even without new hiring, since we're balancing this year's budget by cutting released time. When that happens, the existing full-time faculty teach more courses, and the adjuncts fewer. Our adjunct percentage will drop accordingly. I doubt this is what Cary Nelson had in mind, but there it is.)

Over the years I've blogged, I've seen repeatedly that the attitudes prevalent in higher ed have yet to catch up to the facts on the ground. Conscience-driven appeals may have at least held the potential of working, back when resources were relatively flush. But at this point, especially at the cc level, we make the decisions we have to make. They can be carried out well or badly, and I absolutely agree that the common practice of making implied promises to adjuncts to lead them on is objectionable. (It goes the other way, too – I'm concerned that integrating adjuncts too completely into the life of the college will open up the college to a backbreaking lawsuit. If adjuncts become truly indistinguishable from full-timers, then the pay differential is unsustainable. To protect the institution, it's crucial to have some sort of clear boundary, even if we'd rather not. The ability to believe both “what must be” and “what I'd prefer,” even when the two conflict, is a basic job requirement for administration. I like to think of it as a tragic sensibility.) But assuming infinite freedom of action among administrators is simply false, and it leads to blind alleys and useless infighting.

I'd prefer to see the loop-the-loop arguments wind down, in favor of action that might actually help. For example, and I know that most of us aren't ready to hear this yet, I think it's time we drop the “one size fits all” idea of the job of a professor. Is the daily work of a community college professor really the same as the daily work of an R1 professor? If it isn't – and it isn't – then why do we insist on using all the same terms and categories to judge both?

And rather than continuing to pretend that community colleges are sitting on Ivy-sized endowments, let's take the battle for resources where it really belongs: the public. Until the public buys into the idea of steady, reliable, sustained, serious funding for public higher ed, we're chasing our tails. I think that the first move there is to reframe it as a truly public good, rather than as a private good to be supported by user fees. After decades of horrific politics, the concept of a public good seems almost quaint, but in its absence we just don't make sense. Either we're serious about an educated workforce and citizenry, or we are not.

Until that happens, administrators everywhere will make choices we'd rather not make, knowing full well their human costs. Bash us when we mess up, but let's stop pretending that it's all just a matter of bringing enlightenment to a few suits. We know. We know.

In Praise of Boondoggles

I have the relative misfortune of following in the footsteps of some pretty good managers. Right now a brain-dead predecessor would come in handy.

As veterans of downcycles in the public sector can tell you, large-scale cuts are often done in an 'across the board' way. (“Every cc in the state will lose ten percent of its appropriation this year” -- that kind of thing.) That means that previous profligacy can actually save an institution, since there's fat to cut. It also means that previous frugality is punished, since the only way to sustain a serious reduction when the fat is already gone is to cut things that actually matter. Across-the-board cuts are made without reference to the spending habits of any given college, so an already-efficient college has nowhere easy to go.

Annoyingly enough, my predecessors seem to have been pretty good with budgets. What I wouldn't give for an “executive retreat” line item, or maybe an “annual vanity conference” appropriation. Those come in handy when times get tight, since you can cut them without giving up anything that really matters.

Capital projects often resemble boondoggles, but 'capital' and 'operating' budgets are typically kept separate, so savings from 'capital' won't save you if you need to cut 'operating.' There's also the unfortunate truth that once you've gone to a certain point in a construction project, it's actually cheaper just to finish it.

In a perfect world, of course, legislators would be savvy enough to know which colleges make a habit of spending money stupidly and which don't, and would distribute cuts accordingly. (Actually, in a perfect world, the concept of 'cuts' would be foreign and bizarre.) But that's not how these things play out. Typically we either get the flat percentage cut, or – and this can be worse – the percentage cut that also comes with rules (what we on campus call a “negatively funded mandate”). The rules are a gesture towards prudence, but since they're usually at least as blunt as the cuts, they wind up causing all manner of counterproductive response on the ground. I'd rather take a straight 10 percent cut than a 10 percent cut that also comes with a mandatory hiring freeze, for example, since some positions only have one person in them, and not-replacing is really not an option. In practice, we'd take a pretty strict line on hiring anyway, given a 10 percent cut, but it would be nice to be able to make those decisions according to actual need. (“Implement a 10 percent cut, but don't replace the auditor who just quit.” Alrighty then.)

The public image of higher ed doesn't help, either. The Harvards and Stanfords of the world dominate media coverage to such a degree that if you didn't know any better, you'd think that the major issue around higher ed finance is failure to spend enough endowment money. That's true of a remarkably small slice of higher ed – all of it private – but it doesn't help us rally the troops.

The lesson I'm picking up from all this is to be just a little less critical of Presidents who fund otherwise-inexplicable pet projects. When those horrible, thoughtless, across-the-board cuts arrive, it's good to have something relatively painless to sacrifice. Frugality in good times leads to brutality in bad. A little wastefulness in good times may actually serve a purpose.

An Open Letter to the City of Boston

Dear Boston,

Although I mostly enjoyed my recent visit, I couldn't help but notice that some of your residents seem confused on a basic point. Allow me to clarify.

The middle lane is not for parking.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dean Dad

Sustainability

'Sustainability' usually refers to the environment, but I think it makes sense in referring to organizations, too. Some structures, cultures, and behaviors are more sustainable than others over time.

My college is in the midst of some external financial shocks of astonishing severity. (It's a measure of how bad things are nationally that I can say that and not worry about compromising pseudonymity.) There's simply no way to take cuts of this magnitude and not feel them. This is especially true with the academic year already well under way, since we've already committed to the Fall classes and signed most of the staff to annual (July-to-June) contracts. Worse, it's fairly clear that we aren't yet close to hitting the bottom of the current cycle, so whatever cuts we make right now are not likely to be the last.

(This is the real downside to the public sector. When tax revenues crash, we can't help but feel it. And since nobody is about to say “jeez, how many more prisons do we actually need?,” or “let's let the baseball team pay for its own damn stadium,” or “you know, progressive taxation wasn't such a bad idea after all,” higher ed takes a disproportionate slam.)

As a subsidized nonprofit with a mission of providing access for the poor and working class, the tuition and fees we charge don't cover all of our costs. That's not a mistake; that's by design. Although we charge tuition, our underlying model is closer to public libraries or the K-12 system than to a for-profit business. That's because, like public libraries and the K-12 system, there's an underlying concept that community colleges are public goods.

I like that aspect of the community college mission. I can sleep well at night knowing that my job, when push comes to shove, is about helping people with few options acquire the skills and credentials to make better lives for themselves. I'm good with that.

But the boom-bust cycle of public funding does a number on an institution whose work, by design, takes years.

Having spent most of the week reeling from the shock of some of the numbers I've seen, I'm beginning to think there's actually an upside to the collapse. When funding is almost-enough, it's possible to balance the books by trimming here and adjuncting there, without really disturbing the underlying model. Then when the bad times come, you juggle layoffs and furloughs and maybe even a program closure or two, until the money comes back and order can be restored.

No. No more. Enough.

There's a saying that nothing focuses the mind like a gun to the head. When 'shortfall' becomes 'free fall,' the cost of denial becomes prohibitive. In breathtakingly short order, we've blown right past the point at which the usual playbook will do.

If we're going to survive the next few years with the kind of financial hits we're taking now, we're going to have to start working with some blank sheets of paper. And we're going to have to do it in inclusive ways, or the infighting will prevent anybody's idea from succeeding.

Perversely enough, the severity of what we're facing now may actually do some long-term good. The usual half-measures, which avoid just enough conflict, just won't cut it. I'm thinking it's time to get clear on the distinction between means and ends, and to treat means with no more reverence than you'd treat any other tool. Deference to the fiefdoms of strong personalities is just too expensive to sustain.

The tricky part will be in maintaining enough trust to get productive changes on the table and on the ground without falling victim to internal politics. 'Faculty vs. administration' becomes moot when a college closes. In the original meaning of the word, it's time to get radical.

Incrementalism just isn't sustainable anymore.

Governance Without Tears

Yesterday's IHE features a thought-provoking piece on the structural contradictions within shared governance. It isn't entirely successful, but it gets the major things right, and even its failures are instructive.

The 'hook' of the piece is the (correct) observation that faculty's incentives and administrators' incentives are often poorly aligned with each other, and sometimes simply contradictory. Faculty are trained to devote their first loyalty to their disciplines, rather than the colleges for which they work, and the up-or-out nature of tenure often means that they get trapped for life at an institution they've been trained to believe is beneath them. (This is especially true as you move down the academic pecking order. If you got your doctorate at a major, respected R1, but you're teaching at Nothing Special State Teachers College, it can be hard to shake that nagging sense of resentment.) Although the article doesn't mention this, the two-body problem that many younger academic couples have makes matters worse; 'your tenure or your marriage' is not a happy choice to have to make.

Administrators, as a group, face a different environment. Administrative jobs don't carry tenure, and may or may not carry faculty rank. (Mine haven't, for example, though the article seems to assume that most do.) The bulk of my daily work addresses the guts of my college, rather than what one academic discipline might find interesting. 'Service,' the category of faculty work with the least payoff, is most of what I do. To professors oriented to the latest and hottest work in their scholarly fields, most of what I do probably looks like busywork (at best). It (mostly) isn't, but the ubiquity of the perception among faculty speaks to a specific set of attitudes.

Oddly, given the different orientation towards the guts of the institution, administrators actually have more geographic flexibility than do most non-superstar faculty. The folks who care the least about the institution that actually pays them are the ones who stick around the longest; the folks whose day-to-day work is all about sustaining the institution usually last somewhere between two and seven years. The mismatch leads to – among other things – some nasty issues with morale and stereotyping.

There's also an information asymmetry between the groups. Most academic administrators have been faculty, but most faculty haven't been administrators. As the article notes precisely:

Yet there’s a conundrum: While faculty and administrators alike argue that academic administrators must come from the faculty, faculty training does not adequately prepare people to manage large and complex organizations. This is especially important as universities get bigger and more complex. When a campus is the size of a small town, it’s not enough to have been a marvelous cell biologist or a meticulous Romance scholar.

The mismatch of skills sometimes finds expression in the canard that administrators are 'failed faculty.' Other than the obvious, part of the cost of such reverse snobbery lay in the talents untapped by people who aren't willing to buck cultural norms.

Where the article trips up slightly is in its recommendations. After having noted, correctly, that faculty and administrators often misunderstand each other because they're trying to solve different problems, it recommends 'more permeable boundaries' between the two camps. Well, okay, but we're still stuck with the 'conundrum' they nailed so accurately above. If a marvelous cell biologist spends a couple of years as an incompetent associate dean before giving way to a meticulous Romance scholar as the next incompetent associate dean, I'm not entirely clear what's being gained.

Having been trapped in far too many conversations with professors whose concept of college budgets was “there's my department, and then there's everything else,” I can't simply sign on to 'increased transparency' as the panacea. Tendentious reading will defeat transparency every time. Instead, I'd be much more optimistic about shifting faculty incentives so they align more with the actual needs of the college. Get the incentives right, and the behavior will follow. If you want more and better college service, make it count – really count -- in promotion, merit pay, and tenure decisions. I'm intrigued by a few colleges that have tied faculty pay raises to enrollment increases, for example. It's a blunt instrument, to be sure, but at least it has a way of introducing an element of reality to the conversation.

If faculty can become more fluent in some of the economic, legal, and political realities facing colleges, they can become much more effective advocates for their own interests, since they'll know which arguments will actually fly. (I consider this blog my contribution to the cause.) Those who prove particularly good at it would make excellent administrators, the better to build trust over time.

The alternative is simply to abandon shared governance as a quaint carryover from the guild era, and to run colleges like businesses, with faculty as customer service reps and administrators as management. There's a certain simplicity to that, but if we want 'management' to actually understand what's at stake, I'd rather go with the 'new incentives' approach.

What do you think?

Today's List is Brought to You by the Letter 'R'

Recession

Rescission

Revision

Review

Realign

Rethink

Reorganize

Retrench

RIF

Tune in next week, when the list will be brought to you by the letter 'F'