Ask the Administrator: Ranks

A new correspondent writes:

Why are ranks at Community Colleges sometimes different from those at 4-year schools? For example, my rank is "Instructor," but I'm full-time tenure track. I only achieve the rank of "Assistant Professor" in five years, after I get tenure. The other ranks are for various levels of promotion.

I know it's a minor issue, but frankly it drives me a little nuts having to explain to people that I am, in fact, TT and that I'm not a part-timer. Sometimes I just fudge and say "Assistant Professor," to avoid the confusion.

Any idea why the ranks are so often different? How naughty am I to refer to myself as Asst. Prof. if that's not what it's called at my school?

This may seem weaselly, but my first response is to ask the context in which you refer to yourself that way. On a cv, in an official document, or in a job interview, it would be fraud. In informal conversation, though, I don’t see the issue.

DIfferent systems use different criteria and definitions for names, but the names themselves don’t change much. This leads to no end of confusion.

It starts with something as simple as “professor.” Much of the unhappiness in the profession, I think, stems from people having very different ideas of what a “professor” is. Is a “professor” a researcher with graduate assistants who occasionally gives an auditorium lecture, or a teacher who relies on group discussion, or a learning coach who helps students navigate self-paced learning modules? I’ve seen it carry each of those meanings and many more, but if you think it means the first and you get hired somewhere that believes it means the third, I foresee heartache.

It’s even worse for administrators, if that helps. Is a “dean” an august leader, a middle manager, or a low-level paper pusher? I’ve seen them all...

The instructor-assistant-associate-full ladder is fairly standard across the industry, but each rank carries different meanings in different places. I’ve seen schemes in which ‘instructor’ is reserved for full-timers off the tenure track, though in other places I’ve seen those called “visiting” assistant professors. I’ve also seen schemes in which new t-t hires are called ‘instructor’ until tenure, unless they have Ph.D.’s, at which point they’re called “assistant professor” until hire. (For my money, the best line reading of “assistant professor” belongs to Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But I digress.)

Oddly enough, in some places, ranks are entirely disconnected from tenure status. I’ve never understood that -- it seems to me that if you have a tenure system, then tenure and promotion should be connected somehow -- but it happens. I’ve seen systems in which you could gain tenure, work for decades, and retire still at the rank of assistant professor. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but there it is.

The issue isn’t really that different colleges define the terms differently. The issue is that they don’t know it. Since most tenure-line faculty don’t move around much, they often only know the system in which they personally work. When you try to move between systems, you’ll often see assumptions made based on a lack of awareness that different systems use the same words differently. Are ‘instructors’ on the tenure track? Maybe, maybe not. Do assistant professors have doctorates? Maybe, maybe not. (On the administrative side: do deans have tenure? What’s the difference between a director and a coordinator? Are department chairs administration or faculty? The answers to each of these varies by institution.)

I hope that the quirkiness of the local naming scheme doesn’t cause any real issues for you. As long as you don’t lie in an official context, I say call yourself whatever is easiest.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a particularly odd rank/naming scheme? How did it work?

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

Advising

In our never-ending quest to help students succeed, we’re taking a fresh look at how we do academic advising on campus. From asking around, it seems like there are several different schools of thought on academic advising, each pretty much talking past the others.

First, there’s the “advising is scheduling” school. This group sees advising as a discrete function to be carried out almost entirely in the first week of registration, consisting almost entirely of helping students decipher degree requirements and sequences of prerequisites. I think of this as the sherpa function; the sherpa doesn’t ask why you want to climb this mountain; he just guides you to the top. The appeal of this line of thought is its implied humility: I don’t know why people do the things they do, I just help them realize their revealed preferences. The downside, of course, is that people don’t always know what they want, or they may not understand the difference between, say, “criminal justice” and “prelaw.” If you don’t ask the second question, you’re just helping the student dig herself in deeper.

Then there’s the “whole person” school of advisement, which elevates the adviser to something like guru status. This school holds that the adviser is supposed to see past the student’s self-delusion and suss out what s/he really wants. When it actually works, it’s lovely, but it’s hard to reproduce at scale, and it’s certainly open to charges of arrogance or self-dealing. (My adviser in college was a physics professor who just couldn’t understand why anybody would ever major in anything other than physics. I’m sure he meant well, but he didn’t help me any..)

A close variation on that is the “role model” adviser. This usually gets applied to students in underrepresented groups. The idea is that people make assumptions about what they can do based in part on who’s doing those things now, so putting some recognizably similar faces in key roles can send a powerful message. I’ve never been entirely comfortable with this line of thought, but there’s some empirical support for it, so I hold my tongue.

There’s also a basic tension between those who insist that the faculty should own advisement, and those who believe that it’s reasonable to have full-time advisers. I side with the latter camp, only because the faculty simply aren’t around during the summer and vacations, but students come in year-round. I don’t want to say to a kid who shows up in June “sorry, come back in September and someone will talk to you.” I get the philosophical argument for faculty ownership, and in some tightly-constructed cohort programs (Nursing, music) we go with that by default. But in the fairly popular and loosely-built transfer major, the pragmatic argument for having some folks around whenever seems more persuasive to me.

“Intrusive advisement” is all the rage in the national literature now. I think of it as systematic nagging, though that may say as much about me as it does about intrusive advising. The intrusive model -- yes, they actually call it that -- involves deputizing certain staffers to become a variation on truant officers, chasing down students who miss class to ask them what’s up and help them get back on track before they fall so far behind that there’s just no hope. The whole enterprise strikes me as demeaning and vaguely creepy, but the results I’ve seen suggest that for certain populations, it can actually work.

Finally, there’s the libertarian line of thought, which I think of as the old computer helpdesk term “RTFM” (for “Read the F-ing Manual”). This school says that learning how to navigate bureaucracies is a life skill, and part of what a college graduate should be able to do. As long as the catalog and related information is available and accurate, it should fall to the student to figure out both what she wants to do with her career and how she should do it. If she can’t be bothered, well, let her learn the consequences of that, too.

I’ll admit some philosophical affinity with this view, but pragmatically, it doesn’t work. Part of the reason for that is that the manual itself changes, and I can’t claim with any certainty that it’s flawless. The manual also rests on a series of assumptions about students -- they’re full time, they start in the Fall, they don’t fail anything -- that don’t always hold. (In this setting, they’re actually the exception.) There’s also a perfectly valid argument to the effect that learning how to seek out good help is a useful life skill; a little humility isn’t always a bad thing.

Wise and worldly readers, has your campus found a reasonably successful way to handle undergraduate advisement?

Full-Timers with Overloads

This piece in IHE, and its comments, hit home with me. It’s a variation on a dilemma I face every single semester.

Broadly, it’s about the zero-sum truth that if professor X gets assigned a particular class, then it cannot also be assigned to professor Y. When there’s a limited number of sections of a given course or in a given discipline, and they both want the same one, someone has to lose. Determining who has to lose is the enviable job of administration.

Apparently, the solution at Madison Area Technical College has been to allow full-time faculty to load up on overloads first, until they hit a certain ceiling, and then to allow the adjuncts whatever is left. It’s an imperfect solution at best -- not my personal perference, certainly -- but the comments to the piece largely miss the point.

The issue is not that someone has to lose. That will happen in any system. If you increase your percentage of full-time faculty, you will jettison adjuncts to make room for them. If you increase your number of adjuncts, you probably do it by giving them fewer classes each, or as a way to decrease your full-time faculty. If you go with full-on ‘parity,’ you either hike tuition to the moon -- thereby hurting your students -- or you reduce the pay of full-time faculty to some median level, which is sure to be popular. (In the cc world, “administrative bloat” is largely chimerical, and sports just aren’t a big ticket item. We have fewer deans and fewer teams on my campus now than we did just two years ago. Financially, those wells are dry.)

Although overloads are actually quite common, I rarely see them discussed when people talk about adjunct ratios. Full-timers teaching overloads fall between categories. When determining something as basic as “the percentage of classes taught by adjuncts,” how should the overload sections be counted? I have departments in which the overload sections are as plentiful as adjunct sections; depending on how you choose to count them, you could wind up with very different pictures of what’s going on. If the argument is based on perceived quality or health insurance, I’d argue that the full-timers are full-timers. If the argument is based on salary, it’s more context-dependent.

I’ll admit some cognitive dissonance in talking to full-time faculty who manage to complain about their teaching load and then volunteer for overloads simultaneously. From a labor solidarity perspective, I could imagine a good argument for a full-timers’ union to cast a skeptical eye on overloads, since significant and sustained overloads cast some doubt on claims from workload. Folks who teach overloads also tend to be less available for committee meetings, since they’re more likely to be in class at any given time. Others have to do more unpaid labor so they have time to do more paid labor. It doesn’t smell right, and it somewhat discredits the idea that full-timers should be paid more because of their college service. If they aren’t available to do that college service, what, exactly, are we paying for?

I don’t know if there’s an elegant solution to this, but it’s nice to see the issue acknowledged.

Wise and worldly readers, when you ask about a college’s adjunct percentage, how would you could sections taught by full-timers as overloads?

The Girl, Mastermind

Okay, I’m a little nerdy, but this was a huge moment for us.

The Girl, who is 6, loves playing games with me. We usually play Connect Four -- at which she routinely cleans my clock -- or twenty questions. But lately she’s been on a Mastermind kick. Mastermind is a guess-the-pattern game in which one player constructs a pattern of four colors, and the other player has to suss it out through a series of guesses with feedback. If you get a correct color in an incorrect position, you get a white peg; if you get the color and position right, you get a red peg. If the color is just wrong, no peg. The game has six colors altogether, and as we play it, there are no repeat colors allowed in the pattern, so you couldn’t have three blues in the same row.

Over the last week or so, whenever I’ve been the one trying to guess the pattern, I’ve vocalized my thought process. “Let’s see, I only got two white pegs on that one. That means that both of the ‘wrong’ colors must be here, which means that they two colors I didn’t use here must be right.” I’ve even stopped and repeated it when TG looked puzzled.

Last night we had the breakthrough.

TG was guessing the pattern, and got two white pegs for one guess. The play-by-play:

TG: that means I must need orange and blue.

(tries another row, this time gets three white pegs)

TG: hmm. From the first row, I know I need green. That means the other color must be white. And from the second row, I know that orange must go here (places orange) and white must go here (places white). I’ll try blue here and green there.

(gets two red pegs and two white pegs)

TG: Ha! I’ll just switch green and blue.

(I reveal that she got it right.)

I was so excited I gave her a high-five. When The Wife came by, I had TG walk her through the process, and TW made a fuss, too.

Using a perfectly elegant process of elimination, she used clues from earlier rows to piece together the solution. She got it.

She was excited, of course, but she seemed a little surprised that we made as much fuss about it as we did. I thought it was HUGE. She walked herself through a non-trivial bit of deductive logic and found the right answer herself, without hints or lucky guesses.

She didn’t use numbers as such, but I think of the approach as basically mathematical. She was able to discern patterns, and to accumulate clues from multiple turns to narrow down the possibilities.

As a parent, I was fairly bursting with joy. A six-year-old was putting together the basic operations of deductive reasoning, and enjoying the “click” when things fell into place. And she was doing it in the context of a game with Daddy, where she got affirmation for walking deliberately through the thought process.

This must be how other Dads feel when a kid hits a home run. In my world, this was a home run.

Just had to brag a little.

Build Your Own Orientation

We’ve had some discussions on campus recently about new employee orientation, which starts in a few weeks. The general consensus seems to be that some sort of orientation is called for, but nobody seems terribly happy with the current version.

The constituency for the orientation is new employees across the college. That means faculty, but it also means full-time staff from various offices. (The faculty start with the staff for the first week, then have a separate series of faculty-only meetings focusing mostly on classroom issues.) The idea is to help the newbies put faces to names and offices; to go through some basic information on employee benefits; to make some statements about the mission of the college and its commitments to fairness and diversity; and to introduce a few basic policies.

In the past, it was a two-day event, with fairly significant griping by the end of the second day.

Then it morphed to a one-day event with a series of 90-minute followups monthly for a semester. By the end of the semester, though, attendance flagged badly.

Since many sets of eyes are better than one, I’m hoping to crowdsource a solution to this. Given that certain institutional needs have to be met -- for legal reasons, for example, it’s useful to be able to say that everyone was introduced to the sexual harassment policy -- is there a way to make new employee orientation more useful and compelling for the new employees?

Do you remember anything particularly good (or awful) about your own orientation? If you could have constructed it , what would you have done differently? (And no, “Not having one” is not an option.)

Thanks!

Pulling the Goalie

In conversation recently with a colleague at another college, I realized that what she was describing something I’ve seen a few times, too. I call it pulling the goalie.

In hockey, if a team is behind near the end of the game, it will sometimes take out its goalie and put in another offensive player. (The total number of players on the ice is six per team.) The rationale is that it’s easier to score with an extra shooter, and if you’re losing anyway, what’s the difference between losing by one and losing by two? It’s a high-risk maneuver, obviously, and it would be suicidal to try to play an entire game that way. But when you have little to lose and you need a quick score, it’s a reasonable strategy.

I’ve seen administrators who are angling for higher-level jobs in other places do the equivalent of pulling the goalie on their home campus.

It works like this: Dean X wants to be a Vice President elsewhere. She tries for a while, to no avail. Out of impatience, she pulls the goalie by abruptly going from a traditional management approach to rampant backroom deal-making, complete with mutually contradictory promises behind the scenes. The idea is to “get things done” in a hurry, to make a conspicuous splash and line up support artificially to put her application over the top before people figure out what has happened. Let the next person clean up the mess.

In the very short term, it can work. If you have a reputation for being trustworthy, there will be a time lag between when you start lying and when people figure it out. If you can land another job during that lag, you win.

But the clock is ticking, and if you don’t beat the clock, things will get ugly. And even if you do, things will get ugly on the campus you left.

Unlike the hockey move, I consider this a major ethical violation, since it subordinates the good of the campus to one person’s career ambitions. It also makes the job much harder for whomever comes next, since folks who’ve been burned are much slower to trust again. The first few months are sort of like the Spring thaw in the East River, when all the mob victims suddenly turn up as floaters. Ugliness keeps getting unearthed, and just when you think it’s over, there’s more.

Doing this job well, I’m increasingly convinced, means playing the long game. It means having patience, accepting setbacks, and keeping your expectations realistic. Quick hits happen, but forcing them to happen usually costs far more than it’s worth. If you’re planning to stick around for the entire game, you don’t pull your goalie early.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen administrators pull the goalie on your campus? If so, how did the campus recover?

If Only We Had a Government Capable of Making Rules...

As regular readers know, I used to work in for-profit university. I fled it for various reasons, but still find some of the commentary about them unhelpfully reductive. Naturally, I’ve been following Senator Harkin’s hearings -- and the responses to the hearings -- with interest.

Broadly, the hearings are addressing abusive and/or misleading and/or illegal recruitment practices at various for-profit colleges and universities. The stated idea is to prevent taxpayer money (in the form of Federal financial aid) from being squandered on diploma mills or colleges that charge far too much for what they deliver. The unstated idea seems to be to have a referendum on the very idea of for-profit education.

It seems to me that it would be a lot more productive to focus instead on the rules of the game.

In my time at Proprietary U, there was a chronic internal tension between Admissions and Academics. The folks in Admissions were accountable for hitting their numbers -- they did somersaults and backflips to explain how that wasn’t commission pay, but it was commission pay -- and some of them did pretty much whatever they had to do. On the positive side, that meant helping students set up carpools, navigate paperwork, and get scheduled. On the negative side, it led to some pretty dramatic overpromising, some really unhelpful denigrating of the gen ed classes that students still actually had to take, and a level of ‘message management’ that sometimes became silly.

On the Academic side, we had to actually teach the students who got recruited. The numbers by which we were judged were retention percentages and job placement statistics. As some of us never tired of pointing out (hi!), those two numbers often pointed in different directions. Those of us who believed that fighting attrition by lowering standards was a bad idea would cite the employability of graduates, but we weren’t always on the winning side.

When the market was booming, the conflict was more stylistic than substantive. Students stayed in programs because they saw the payoff; retention efforts amounted to little more than open discussions of starting salaries. (For a while there in the late 90’s, the truth was good enough that you didn’t have to sugarcoat it.) Since the institution charged more per student than it cost to educate each student, growth was a source of profit, so it could grow quickly to meet mushrooming demand. On the national level, that growth has continued, and has far outpaced anything happening in the nonprofit world, where growth is typically a cost.

When the market turned, though, things got ugly fast. And this, oddly enough, is where the nonprofits have an advantage (or would, if the states would step up).

In most public colleges, there’s an allocation from the state and/or county and/or city that goes directly to the operating budget. In practice, if not in theory, that allocation is usually pretty independent of enrollment numbers. During enrollment booms, that means that the percentage of the budget paid for by the students directly increases. But during declines, there’s at least the cushion of some revenue that’s independent of tuition.

The for-profits can grow much more easily, but they have a harder time dealing with decline. That’s because they don’t have the enrollment-independent cushion of funding that the non-profits have.

Now it’s certainly true that the state-provided cushion is proportionately much smaller than it used to be, which means that declines hurt more now than they once did. But a drop that might register as ‘difficult’ for a community college could put a for-profit out of business altogether.

That is, unless the for-profit does what cornered animals tend to do. I’d expect to see any ethical gloves come off in times of decline, as they fight and scrap for every single student.

And this is why my position on for-profits is neither ‘for’ nor ‘against.’ It’s that they need to be meaningfully regulated. If they’re forced to fight fair but still manage to thrive, then presumably they’re adding value somewhere. At that point, the sober objection to their existence seems to fade away. But leaving them alone to do as they will is madness. Left to their own devices, they’ll act much like the cable tv monopolies did when they were deregulated; it’s naive to expect that they wouldn’t..

In the hearings, the for-profits have raised some fair points in their own defense. The one I find most compelling is the (correct) contention that the investigation doesn’t have a control group. Do we really, honestly believe that unethical behaviors are confined to the for-profit sector? Do we really believe that desperate tuition-driven nonprofits won’t do whatever they have to do to survive? For that matter, do we really believe that every accredited nonprofit actually provides a quality education?

But there, too, my response is that picking one side over the other misses the point. The point is a need for rules of the game, evenhandedly enforced, that will punish institutions for giving in to the temptations of untoward behavior. That’s true whether the institution is publicly traded, church affiliated, or state-identified. If a college is incompetent or corrupt, I don’t much care that it’s not for profit.

Ideally, the nonprofits would learn from the best elements of the for-profits. Is the agrarian calendar really cast in stone? Might a ‘career development’ style class make sense as a requirement, at least in some majors?

And ideally, higher ed will get past the kabuki of outrage at the existence of profit and actually address the rules of the game. If only we had a government capable of making rules...

Well, That’s Different...

This Fall’s enrollment patterns aren’t looking anything like historical norms. I’m curious to see if that’s a local quirk, or if folks elsewhere are seeing the same thing.

Traditionally, cc enrollments go up during recessions. (That’s because when the job market collapses, so to does the opportunity cost of college.) That happened with a vengeance last year, when we broke records with a double-digit percentage increase in a single year. The severity of the increase was unusual, but the direction was what we expected. Of course, recessions also bring cuts in state funding, making for a nasty financial pincer movement, but that, too, was predictable, even if the severity of it wasn’t.

This Fall, with just a few weeks to go before the start of classes, we’re seeing a weird bifurcation. Applications for enrollment, and applications for financial aid, are both up significantly even when compared to last year. But students who have actually registered are significantly down. Put differently, the number of students who started trying to attend and then vanished is dramatically higher than it has been in past years.

The folks in Admissions have done follow-up calls to the folks who’ve applied and taken their placement tests but not registered, to see what happened. I was hoping to hear that the most common reason was something like “you were my safety school, but my first choice school came through with a great offer.” Instead, the most common answer was “my unemployment ran out.”

I didn’t expect that.

This is where the “education as private good” idea has real social costs. If you have a significant population that just can’t find work because the economy is in the tank, and that population would like to go to college but doesn’t have the income for living expenses -- financial aid is great for tuition and such, but doesn’t do much for living expenses -- then what would you have that population do?

I agree that college isn’t for everybody. Some people prefer to jump straight into the work world; some would likely benefit from something like an apprenticeship or short-term training. But for the twentysomething without a job or any realistic near-term prospect of one, I have to think that community college is one of the better options. Ride out the recession by brushing up on skills and credentials; when the recession is over, hit the job market as a stronger candidate. I can certainly imagine worse strategies.

Last year many of those twentysomethings had enough support to come to college for the first time. Our largest increases were among young men of color, who are otherwise at pretty severe risk in this society, and who don’t typically come here in large numbers. I’d hate to see that population sink back underground, both unemployed and uneducated. That movie doesn’t end well.

Obviously, education is only one component of what needs to be a much larger economic change, but it’s one we can actually sort of control. We can choose to make college an economically accessible option, or we can let unemployment benefits run out before the recession does. I just don’t know how we can do both?

Wise and worldly readers who have access to numbers like these, are you seeing something similar in your neck of the woods?

Ask the Administrator: Incivility Amok!

A new correspondent writes:

This morning I followed up on a Chronicle article from the tail end of last week (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-Faculty-Members-Really/25897/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en), and I was truly disheartened by the comments. The idea itself I liked, mainly the idea of common space for casual interactions (I have experienced isolation both as a faculty member and as an administrator), but the comments were disturbing. How is it acceptable for "scholarly and educated" people to spit out such personal attacks? There were a number of comments that simply said "I think privacy and student conversations will be an issue", but many more simply went straight into the "what an idiot, what a stupid idea" mentality.

I have noticed this in the comments on a number of higher ed sites, even occasionally in the comments on your blog.

Has higher ed always been this way? Have you noticed an increase in this type of attitude? Or is this just an easy outlet for angry people?

I have been working at a community college for 12 years- 9 as faculty, in various ft/pt configurations, and the last 3 as an administrator. While overall I believe the faculty and staff at this college are dedicated and want to see things work, people (on both sides) are still keen to make personal comments and pass judgement on situations of which they have very little understanding.

Although I am a firm believer in the mission of the community college, and of higher education in general, I am considering exploring other industries that might have less rancor.

I suppose the easy answer is to just not read the comments, but then you miss the dialogue and sharing of actual ideas.

Is this something you have noticed?

Before venturing some thoughts, I’ll just make a distinction between the general topic and the historical angle. I’m generally skeptical of “people used to be nicer” arguments, and it’s hard to say in the context of blogs and online discussion boards since their history doesn’t go back terribly far. So I can’t really give an intelligent answer one way or the other on the question of historical trajectory.

But the larger issue of personal attacks is very real.

I’ve read that social psychologists have a term -- the “fundamental attribution error” -- for the common mistake of ascribing others’ objectionable behavior to character flaws, rather than to missing information or external constraints. (I stopped abruptly because someone cut me off; the guy who cut me off is just an asshole.) I’ve seen that both online and in my day job.

In the day job, I’ve been accused repeatedly -- to my face and in public -- of harboring secret agendas to “do in” this program or that one, of thinking of faculty as piece workers, and of being -- in the words of one particularly charming public interlocutor -- “just idiotic.” All of those have been in response to budget-driven decisions. None of them suggested realistic alternatives to my ideas; when pressed, none of them even involved a recognition that budgetary decisions need to get made at all. I’ve had to learn not to take the bait, and to recognize the lashing out as a function of propinquity more than anything else. If I’m goring somebody’s ox, it must be because I’m an asshole; surely there’s no such thing as a real resource constraint. When other administrators do the exact same thing -- since we’re all working against the same state cuts -- well, we’re all just assholes.

Online, of course, it’s frequently worse. In the comments at IHE to my recent posts about the tenure/adjunct dialectic, for example, I was accused of “pathetic self-absorption,” “turn[ing] into a monster,” and my personal favorite:

Dean Dad, when you are meeting with a candidate for a tenure track position at your college, do you tell that person, "You should be aware of the fact that I oppose the idea of tenure and believe higher education would be better off without it"?

It’s easier than actually engaging the argument, I guess, but it doesn’t exactly encourage others to join the debate.

It’s frustrating, but I’m not sure what’s to be done about it beyond sticking to the high road as much as possible. Online, I’ve had to learn to restrain myself from hitting back at comments like those, since the exchanges quickly devolve into free-for-alls.

On campus, of course, “contrapower harassment” is legion, and even blessed with honorifics like “gadfly” or “thorn in the side of the administration.” For a professor to attack me personally in front of two hundred people is considered academic freedom; for me to hit back would be considered retaliation. The double standard does nothing to encourage honest discussion, and frankly, drives a lot of good people out of administration over time. (Oddly, the folks who attack the hardest also complain about administrative turnover, and never connect the dots.) Tenure enables contrapower harassment, which is probably why the harassment is much worse in higher ed than in most settings.

The irony is hard to miss. The same tenure that’s supposed to protect the free exchange of ideas actually enables a culture of embedded hostility that frequently prevents honest discussion. In his wonderful book The No Asshole Rule, Robert Sutton notes that tenured academia is one of the most difficult settings in which to change a culture, since it’s structured almost perfectly to reward me-first behavior. (Notice that it’s a structural argument.) Once you reach a certain critical mass, there really isn’t much to be done.

That said, though, I’ve found a few techniques generally effective in settings that haven’t reached critical mass.

The most basic one is actually listening. People shout when they think they aren’t being heard. The longer they feel ignored, the more blustery and unhinged they tend to be when they finally have a moment. If you make a habit of actually listening, I’ve found that over time, most people will slowly calm down. (I say “most” because some never will. Just a fact of life.) If you only have one shot at being heard, you’ll swing for the cheap seats; if you know you’ll be heard on a regular basis, you can choose your moments more judiciously.

A second, related one is admitting when you’re wrong, and/or incorporating better ideas when you hear them. I’ve made a point of noting changes derived from public input, and of crediting the folks who made the input, whenever possible. It seems to help, since it shows (correctly) that constructive input can actually work. A lot of the more histrionic stuff seems to come from a sense that it’s all just futile anyway; disprove the futility thesis, and some folks will adjust accordingly. Show respect, and eventually some of it will find its way back.

Of course, there’s also modeling. This is tricky since nobody’s perfect, but there’s something to be said for leading by example. At first, it can feel like unilateral disarmament, but it ages well.

And then there’s just knowing your own limits. We all have our hot buttons, and we all have our lesser moments. Sometimes it’s best just to change the subject or postpone the discussion. And some people will be contrary or difficult for sub-rational reasons no matter what you do; once you suss out who those folks are, tune them out.

So to answer your question, yes, I’ve noticed. I wish it weren’t so, but there it is. Wise and worldly readers, have you found ways of dealing successfully with folks who think it’s reasonable to yell insults across crowded auditoriums?

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

Lessons from the Woods

The vacation was a much-needed blessing. We were lucky in many ways: the weather cooperated, the kids were on their very best behavior, traffic wasn’t awful, the car behaved, and I was able to shed most of my workweek crankiness by midweek.

Scenes from the middle of nowhere:

- Kids plus large rocks equals climbing. This is true regardless of the depth of the prospective fall, the depth and temperature of the water below, and the relative agility of the kid. This is how parents age.

- At six, bless her, The Girl doesn’t have any sense of how some of her words sound. In a discussion that somehow touched on gumballs, TG announced unselfconsciously that something “tastes like caribou balls.” I informed The Wife that her daughter was talking about caribou balls. This occasioned some philosophical musings on the nature of paternity, the fluidity of language, and the likelihood of quoting that back to her at, say, thirteen..

- It’s amazing what a group can accomplish when nobody whines. I’m just sayin’.

- Nerdiness can pay off. TW questioned why I needed to bring the laptop and aircard until the hotel lost our reservation, and I was able to pull up the email receipt on screen and show the manager at the front desk. Note to self: bring printouts of reservations in the future. Still, it worked.

- When the kids simply refused to get up, they incurred the wrath of the Daddy Monster. The Daddy Monster used his monster-truck-rally-radio-commercial voice, combined with an apelike gait, professional wrestling language, and deadly tickling moves to move the unmovable. (“The Boy won’t stir? (TB giggles) He’s in for a world of pain!” (TB giggles again) Then I’d blow a raspberry on his belly. Worked every time.) At home I just sing. (My version of Katy Perry’s “California Girls” sounds like a cross between Tom Waits and Peter Brady in that episode where his voice changed. You know the one. Yes, you do.)

- Hotels that offer breakfast are better than hotels that don’t.

- Some people smoke on the beach, apparently on the theory that one form of cancer isn’t enough. Cigarette butts in the sand are disgusting. It gives the beach a “litterbox” feel that kinda doesn’t work for me.

- Restaurants that don’t have children’s menus are missing out. And the first restaurant that goes beyond the same three or four items on it (chicken fingers, burger, mac and cheese, pasta) wins.

- Whoever invented Dramamine deserved the Nobel prize. That’s all I’m sayin’.

- There’s something wonderful about being able to read whatever you want. The gender gap in action: TW read a William Styron novel, and I read Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. The last chapter is worth a blog post unto itself. Somewhere, someone is going to write a brilliant essay rereading John Dewey’s notion of “organized intelligence” in light of crowdsourcing. Hell, if not for the day job, I’d write it myself. Anyone so inclined, go for it.

- A week away from office politics is a glorious thing. It clears the system of bile. When overlooking some of the most beautiful vistas nature has to offer, all that silly status-jumping stuff just fades away. There’s a lesson in there somewhere...

Textbook Alternatives

My psychic powers tell me that in the next few weeks, as the back-to-school rush hits, we’ll be inundated with complaints about textbook costs. This is about as risky a prediction as guessing that the sun will rise in the East.

Textbook costs are remarkably high and climbing quickly; in the context of a community college, they frequently equal or exceed the actual tuition for the class. Textbook publishers have been remarkably brazen about tamping down competition from the used-book market, whether relying on online codes, frequently updated editions, or ‘bundling’ of textbooks with ‘free’ extras that don’t come with used editions. The idea has been to push students into buying new editions, since that’s where the publisher’s profit is. (Bookstores themselves, I’m told, often make more profit on used books, which creates some interesting internal tensions.)

Financial aid often covers textbook costs, but that’s less transparent than it seems. Financial aid usually consists, at least in part, of loans that must be paid back. In some cases, financial aid includes vouchers for textbooks, but the vouchers are only good at the college bookstore. (As far as I know, the new law requiring disclosure of ISBN numbers for textbooks doesn’t address that, though I could be wrong on that.) And then there’s the uncomfortable fact that many colleges get a cut of textbook revenues, whether directly (when the bookstore is owned by the college) or indirectly (when a bookstore leases space and preferred access). In the latter case, the more profitable the bookstore, the more rent it’s willing to pay, so the incentives wind up pretty similar.

I’ve been hearing predictions of catastrophic, technology-driven change in the textbook market for years now, but haven’t seen it yet on the ground. Among the game-changers, I’m told, are the ipad, the kindle, free/open websites, and textbook rental programs.

Based on my own experience with the kindle, I’m skeptical there, at least so far. Yes, they’re cheaper than they once were, but they’re hard to use for quick thumbing-through. Note-taking is inelegant at best, and you can’t share (or sell back) downloaded copies when you’re done with them. The same seems to apply with the ipad, which is also (in my limited observation) kinda heavy for a reader.

Free/open websites are platform-independent, which is nice, and the price is right. But they require screen and internet access, they often require printing, and if they vanish, they vanish.

Textbook rentals sound promising to me, though I’m not entirely sure how highlighting or marginal note-taking works with that model. In my student days, I sometimes made some less-than-civil comments in the margins as a way of making even the driest text “interactive.” If you have to treat the book like your aunt’s sofa with the plastic still on it, I suspect that many students will take the path of least immediate resistance and simply not bother with it at all.

The new Higher Ed Authorization Act requires making public the titles and ISBN’s of assigned textbooks as early as practicable, with the goal of introducing some competition -- or at least the prospect of competition -- into the textbook market as a way to control costs. (The idea is that an enterprising student could crib the list and get the same books on Amazon for less.) In some limited contexts, that may help, but I’d be surprised if it made much of a dent overall. Too many professors wait until the last minute to pick books anyway, too many students wait until the last minute (or later) to buy them, and too many financial aid packages include nontransferable book vouchers. But at least it’s something.

Since my campus has been relatively slow to move on this, I’m eager to hear from those of my wise and worldly readers who’ve seen some or all of these tried. If you’ve taught (or studied) on a campus that used open source, or kindle, or rental solutions, how well did they work? What didn’t work? What do you wish you had known first? I’m hoping to find some practical way to help students avoid getting shocked on cost without sacrificing usefulness.

Calculators

My scholarly background is in a social science discipline, not math. I have no particular pet theory on the right and proper way to teach math. Frankly, if someone convinced me that counting sheep were the most effective way to do it, I’d gladly requisition a flock or two and tell the soccer team to practice someplace else.

That said, it’s pretty clear at my college -- and at many, many others -- that lower-level math classes (especially developmental) are the most difficult academic obstacles many of our students face. The drop/fail rate in developmental math is embarrassingly and stubbornly high, and the national literature suggests that students who drop out because they feel overmatched in math are among the least likely ever to return. (The same does not hold true of developmental English, interestingly enough.)

In a discussion this week with someone who spends most of her time working with students who are struggling mightily in developmental math, I heard an argument I hadn’t given much thought previously: students who have passed algebra and even pre-calc in high school frequently crash and burn when they hit our developmental math, because the high schools let them use calculators and we don’t.

Among math people, the calculator/no calculator divide seems pretty strong. I’ll admit an uninformed sympathy with the ‘no calculator’ camp, just because I’ve had several experiences in which the ability to guesstimate the ballpark of a correct answer helped me recognize a ludicrous answer when I saw one. Calculators offer precision, but they’re just and only as precise as the numbers you put in. If you hit a number twice, or leave out a digit, or place the decimal point wrong, you’ll get a precisely wrong answer. If you can do the basic math in your head, you’ll have a better shot at recognizing when something is wildly off.

That said, part of me wonders if we’re sacrificing too much on the altar of pencil and paper. It’s great to be able to do addition in your head and long division on paper -- yes, I know, I’m old -- but is it worth flunking out huge cohorts of students because their high schools let them use calculators and we don’t?

At my job, I use statistics all the time. Most of the statistics I use are computer generated. Excel and its progeny (I’m an OpenOffice fan, myself) can crunch huge sets of numbers much faster than I ever could, leaving me free to do other things. Although I like knowing that, in a pinch, I could do a whole bunch of arithmetic myself, I typically don’t. And in most jobs, most people don’t. I agree that it would be better to have the ability than not to have it, but if the cost of holding the line against calculators is turning half a generation away from college, is it worth it?

At this point, the local high schools seem largely to have moved into the calculator camp. Wise and worldly readers, should we follow?

(Program note: next week the gang will be tromping through woods in another state. I’ll resume posting on Monday, August 2.)

Professor Plum, With a Candlestick, In the Study

The comments to yesterday’s post shed more heat than light, but I’ll concede one point: the piece was snarkier than necessary. It was a reaction to the persistent and fundamental failure of our major opinion leaders to even understand the question. Sometimes my frustration at their obtuseness boils over, as it did yesterday.

That said, though, a few commenters raised the serious question of transition. How would we get from a tenure system to a contract system? What are the likeliest sources of change? If tenure gets killed, who will have killed it?

I’ve thought about this off and on for years. A few scenarios, with annotations:

1. The Class Polarization Hypothesis. I consider this the likeliest. In this scenario, tenure fades away to irrelevance at all but the most elite institutions, driven almost entirely by cost. The Harvards of the world can keep it forever if they want to, but the St. Somebody Colleges in the East Wherevers of the world just can’t. I’d expect that a combination of program closures, campus closures, and generational rule changes will continue the trend of reducing the presence of tenured faculty outside the elites. It’s basically an extension of the trend line of the past forty years or so.

2. Judicial Fiat. Although some like to claim that tenure is nothing more than an entitlement to “due process,” the courts have consistently recognized it as a property claim. Of course, courts can change their minds. If a high-level court of appeals were to reconstrue the meaning of tenure, all bets would be off. I consider this unlikely in my neck of the woods, but in the South or Southwest, I wouldn’t rule it out. Get a conflict going between federal circuits, and things could get unpredictable.

3. PATCO. In the early 1980’s, the Air Traffic Controllers’ union (Patco) went on strike. President Reagan hired permanent replacements for the striking workers, and the precedent has stood since. Imagine a tenured, unionized public faculty going on strike, and the governor declaring that he’ll just hire permanent replacements. It would be horrendous on the ground, and would probably only occur if a governor were Republican, desperate, and prone to confrontation. In other words, I’d look at California or Arizona, or maybe South Carolina.

4. Displacement. It may be that tenure survives in many lower-tier institutions, but those institutions themselves become largely irrelevant. Nobody seriously disputes that the major growth sector in higher ed for the last two decades or so is the for-profits, and I’ve never heard of a for-profit with a tenure system. (Some of them have full-time faculty, but not tenure.) Since the for-profits thrive on growth and the publics choke on it, it’s unsurprising that the for-profits are becoming progressively larger and more important players. Over time, this could feed into scenario 1.

5. Everything is Fine. This strikes me as the least likely by far, given the trend lines of the lasty forty years. It’s also the majority position in higher ed. Every so often the cognitive dissonance gets a little wearing.

I recognize that many of my wise and worldly readers think I’m mistaken. So I’ll pose my question to them. What will keep tenure alive and widespread? (The key word in that sentence is ‘will,’ as opposed to, say, ‘should.’)

The Tenure/Adjunct Dialectic

The New York Times published a colloquy on the future and desirability of the tenure system. Per usual for the Times, not a single contributor there has any experience actually managing in a tenure-based sysem. None. Not one. Nor does any of them work at a community or state college. Honestly, it’s like they’re not even trying anymore...

Anyway, the officially sanctioned view from on high misses the point.

Cary Nelson weighs in for the AAUP, contrasting “tenure and academic freedom together” with adjuncts, as if those are the only two options, and as if they were somehow opposed. The various other contributors note more rationally that other options exist -- Mark Taylor at least mentions renewable contracts, which don’t even exist in Nelson’s piece -- but none of them sees the causal link between tenure and adjuncts. Which isn’t all that surprising, given that none of them have ever actually tried to manage the system.

The cost of tenure goes far beyond the salary of the tenured. It includes the opportunity cost of more productive uses that had to be skipped to pay for a decision made decades earlier in a different context. (We actually have people for whom staff jobs were created when their tenured speciality went away. That’s a direct cost of tenure.) It also includes the cost of the various bribes that have to be paid to the tenured to get them to step up to acknowledge institutional needs: course releases (a direct cause of adjunct hiring), preferential scheduling (whether it makes sense for students or not), and even cash stipends (which have to be paid for somehow).

Whenever we allocate course reassignments for full-time faculty, we hire adjuncts to make up for it. Sabbaticals? Adjuncts. Grant work? Adjuncts. Someone has to teach the classes the tenured faculty won’t. (As one embittered adjunct put it in a department meeting, “I teach so you don’t have to!” Exactly.) Aristocrats need serfs, and the tenured need the adjuncts.

It starts earlier than that. The ‘bait’ of tenure is part of what lures so many young idealists into graduate school, replenishing the reserve army of the adjuncts. That oversupply allows the adjunct trend to continue. The crushed dreams of a generation of underemployed academics are a cost of tenure.

And that’s not even counting the absurd, over-the-top, you-wouldn’t-believe-it-if-you-hadn’t-seen-it procedures necessary to get rid of someone with tenure. Since the courts have interpreted tenure as ownership of the job, you need to meet what amounts to a standard of criminal prosecution in order to ‘expropriate’ someone. But the job doesn’t belong to the employee. That’s a fundamental, and egregious, category mistake. The job belongs to he who pays for it, not he who is paid. Most people understand that intuitively. Combine an ownership interest with the lack of a mandatory retirement age, and you get some pretty entitled, embittered, ineffective people lumbering around, their life support paid by the surplus value created by the adjuncts who teach they courses the cranky veterans would rather not. And do you know what those seventy-somethings are waiting for? Retirement incentives! Another cost of tenure.

Then there’s the cost in the world of public opinion. Given the increasing costs of higher education, the argument from impunity is getting progressively harder to make with a straight face. “Trust us, we’re experts” is not a winning argument, especially when it’s somehow combined with the claim that administrators -- that is, the people charged with actually managing the taxpayers’ money -- are evil and incompetent. (That’s why you need the protections of tenure, the argument goes.) Explain to the rational taxpayer why he should continue to pay progressively more for someone unaccountable (faculty) managed by someone incompetent (administrators). That is the AAUP’s actual position, and it’s insane on its face.

A more rational system would abolish the tenure/adjunct dialectic as a dysfunctional model, and would move to renewable contracts with academic freedom stipulated in the contract language. Contracts could shift over time to reflect the changing needs of institutions -- no more making up jobs -- and nobody would be forced into the artificial “up or out” moment that does so much to squelch real academic freedom. (Ask the typical assistant professor aiming for tenure how much freedom she has to explore where her interests take her.) Faculty incentives could be aligned with institutional incentives -- in any other industry, that’s so obvious as to be almost tautological -- so we don’t hire people to teach and fire them for not publishing. Jobs could change as institutional needs change. Nobody would have to try to guess how productive someone else would be in thirty years, which is the system we have now.

Bring the system back to earth, and we might start to see some rationality in it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the appeal of grad school fade a bit, which would clearly be to the good. The unproductive could be put out to pasture, thereby freeing up resources for the productive. Colleges could staff for actual need, rather than to compensate for decisions made decades earlier in very different contexts. And nobody would be expected to be able to see decades into the future. It’s easier to get out of a bad marriage than to get out of a bad tenure decision, yet the supporters of tenure seldom crusade against divorce. If people can’t get marriage decisions right, why do we expect them to get tenure decisions right?

No. This isn’t about “lifetime earnings,” since people will accrue those either way. It’s about recognizing that the tenure system feeds the adjunct system, and that the only way to get rid of the latter is to get rid of the former.

Note to the Times: next time, just ask. Seriously.

Picking the Perfect Search Committee

Although it doesn’t happen as often now as it once did, we do still occasionally hire full-time, tenure-track faculty. And when we do, we have a pretty well established search process.

But some parts of the process are as much art as science. One of those is picking the members of the search committee in the first place.

We don’t delegate hiring to HR, the way some companies do, or allow department chairs or deans to make unilateral selections. The idea is that it’s important to recognize the disciplinary expertise of the existing faculty where possible -- easy in large departments, harder in small ones -- and that nobody should have unilateral hiring authority.

In practice, we usually have five faculty on a committee. But you can’t just pick any five. Considerations include:

- Disciplinary expertise. Of the five, usually four will be from the department in question, and one will have the mixed advantage of being from outside. In my faculty days at PU, I frequently served as an outside person for hiring technical faculty, and kind of enjoyed it; my colleagues judged content expertise, and I offered feedback on clarity to the novice.

- Of course, it isn’t always that easy. Smaller disciplines (at least as measured by enrollment) don’t always have that many members, and sometimes they get spread so thin that they really don’t want to serve on any more committees.

- Demographic diversity. A committee of all men in the sciences, or all women in Nursing, could tend to replicate itself without thinking. We also try for at least some racial or ethnic diversity, though there, too, you have to be careful not to go to the same few people over and over again.

- Personalities. This probably shouldn’t matter, in a perfect world, but there’s really no way around it. Some people just don’t play well with each other, and a few just don’t play well with others generally. I’ve seen committees torn apart by personality conflicts, and it’s just not worth the institutional cost. If you want to be excluded from key decisions, making yourself difficult is a pretty effective way to do it.

The idea is blend something like ‘peer review’ with something like ‘safeguards against inbreeding.’ Since peer review is a form of inbreeding by definition, it’s a necessarily messy process.

Departmental reactions to search committees are revealingly different. The English department, which is the single largest on campus, has internal competitions to see who gets to serve. Most of the smaller departments have internal competitions to see who has to serve. The difference says a lot.

Wise and worldly readers, how does your college select the members of faculty search committees? Have you found an elegant solution? Alternately, have you seen a seemingly rational method crash and burn?

Lost Illusions

I’m working with a colleague who’s going through the shock that hits every new dean the first time she has to deal with someone being a colossal jerk.

It brought back memories.

In a perfect world, people who move into administration have established themselves as credible, hardworking, intelligent people in their earlier roles. (Admittedly, this doesn’t always happen, but bear with me.) They’ve earned respect by being conscientious and productive, and at some level they expect that others will be conscientious and productive, too. And most of the time, that’s mostly true.

But sooner or later, someone who thinks of the new dean as goodhearted but basically irrelevant will try to take advantage of her good nature. And the new dean will discover that appeals to the better angels of one’s nature don’t always work.

My colleague, bless her, is having trouble believing that the high road won’t prevail. She’s a dedicated traveler of it, and has always succeeded with it. But she has new responsibilities now, and some of the people for whom she’s responsible simply don’t share her high-mindedness. Worse, they read it as exploitable naivete, which it can be. So she’s finding herself painted into a corner in which her options are increasingly distasteful.

I went through the same thing. It’s a painful process.

In a way, it’s a variation on the good student who becomes a teacher, only to discover that she has no idea how students without her own gifts actually learn. Suddenly, some of the teacherly behaviors that had previously seemed inexplicable make sense. As a student, she found them redundant or pedantic, but as a teacher she finds that not all students are just younger versions of her.

In this case, someone who has been blessed with a great work ethic and the respect of her erstwhile colleagues has inherited a turkey farm. She’s such a non-turkey herself that she doesn’t quite know what to do.

Overheated union rhetoric notwithstanding, many administrators take these jobs because we honestly want to help the institutions run better. We try to be fair, and we work hard to walk the walk. If that’s your outlook, then being pushed into a situation in which you have to be the bad guy can be really draining. You don’t want to do it, you try not to do it, but you finally run out of excuses. Invariably, the first time you actually play the heavy, you get monstrous pushback. You get accused of procedural irregularities, of discrimination against whatever category the person can claim, and of a personal vendetta. The hurtfulness of the accusations is real, even if the content isn’t. But you learn, slowly, not to take it personally, and to let the process play itself out. You learn how to interpret certain behaviors. Cornered animals attack. It’s what they do.

If you’re lucky, you’re able (both personally and organizationally) to compartmentalize, and not to let the poisons you have to use in one area seep into others. You learn not to jump to extremes, or to react to your lost illusions by swinging too far in the other direction. In a sense, you cherish the illusions all the more out of recognition of their painful fragility.

But once you’ve gone through it, you can’t un-know it.

My colleague will make her peace with it; she’s bright and dedicated, and she’s in the right. But it’s taking a toll on her, in much the same way it did on me years ago. It just comes with the territory.

What Runs Through My Mind During a Software Demo

- Good God, I'm bored.

- Maybe if I shift in my seat...

- Nope. Still bored.

- Ooh! A dropbox! However might it work?

- Ayup, it drops. Color me impressed.

- Why is the presenter staring at me? Am I rolling my eyes?

- Try to look interested. Try to look interested.

- Good God, I'm bored.

- I bet celebrities don't have to watch dropbox demos.

- I bet Lindsay Lohan doesn't have to watch dropbox demos.

- I bet they don't even do dropbox demos in prison.

- They should.

- Naw, that's cruel and unusual.

- What's she in for, anyway? Doesn't crime at least require actually doing something?

- Maybe I should have turned to a life of crime.

- Cool crime, though, not lame crime.

- To “save,” hit “save.” Got it.

- I wonder if those Witness Relocation people get to pick where they go.

- I'd request San Francisco, maybe. Or Seattle.

- And a cooler name, like “Brock Codpiece.”

- Naw, then the kids would be little Codpieces. That wouldn't be right.

- I wonder what the kids are doing right now?

- They're probably swimming. That sounds fun.

- I hope TG actually goes in the water this time.

- She takes after me, poor kid.

- Hey, it can add up numbers! Nice use of server space in 2010!

- I wonder if I should get a Droid.

- Nah, too big. Besides, what would I use it for?

- Other than games during software demos, anyway.

- At least I could hold it left-handed.

- I don't know why they say only lefties are inconvenienced by the iphone. I sometimes hold phones in my left hand, too.

- Does that mean I go both ways?

- Just like Lindsay Lohan! But she doesn't
have to sit through a software demo.

- Look at all of us in here. I wonder what the hourly wage of everyone in this room adds up to.

- Your tax dollars at work. Look, you can refresh the page!

- He's looking at me again! Look like you care, look like you care...

- I wonder if the tech guys think we're losers, running the demo on an xp machine.

- Yes, I know how to type in a box. You can stop demonstrating now.

- Anyone who misbehaves spends the night in the box.

- Whatever happened to Broderick Crawford, anyway?

- “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” God, that's true.

- Didn't Broderick Crawford do some sort of California cop movie or something?

- California. I'll miss it when it falls in the ocean.

- Poor bastards.

- Of course, in the ocean, you don't have to sit through software demos.

- I'd like to be under the sea, in an Octopus' garden...

- TG used to love that song. What is it about girls and Ringo?

- Zooey Deschanel liked Ringo in that movie.

- How the hell did the dweeb from Third Rock get Zooey Deschanel?

- Third Rock was a good show. Surprisingly accurate about college faculty.

- “Alpha order.” Nice. Just say “alphabetical.” Nobody's impressed.

- Click “save.” Okay. Learned that one in '86, thanks.

- They should 86 this presentation.

- What does that even mean, anyway?

- Brock Codpiece would know. He'd google it on his Droid, on his way to bust Lindsay Lohan out of prison. Then Broderick Crawford would catch him, and he'd spend the night in the box.

- Sigh.

- I wonder if I'll have time for lunch...

- Click “close.”

I Heart This Story

This piece in IHE went uncommented the day it was published, which, I’ll admit, surprised me. It was one of the most hopeful pieces I’ve read in a long time.

It’s about the Community College of the District of Columbia, a new institution growing out of the University of the District of Columbia. As many people know, the District of Columbia has some issues with poverty, crime, and public school performance. Just a few. Not like you’d notice. So a new community college there makes a world of sense.

But what’s especially heartening is that, as a new institution, it’s actually taking the (vanishingly rare) opportunity to build all of its systems from the ground up around a robust assessment program. Put differently, it’s building an experimental ethic into its design.

Go, CCDC!

Too often, assessment measures are appended as afterthoughts, which, in fact, they were. Departments generally consider themselves the unquestionable local experts in their fields, above being told anything by anyone about what they teach. Accordingly, they don’t see much point in assessment, and treat it as meddlesome busywork to be minimized when it can’t be entirely ignored. They assume they already know the answers, so they don’t like being asked questions.

CCDC is reversing the order. The burden of proof is not on the data; it’s on the programs. If the programs fall short, presumably, they’ll have to adjust. Expertise will be in the service of the mission.

It’s still early in the game, and I’d expect to see ‘pushback’ in various areas gradually get stronger over time. Some people will try, sincerely or not, to explain programmatic failures by reference to lack of funding; if the college falls for that, it will quickly fall into the same sinkhole that has swallowed much of the rest of higher education. The inevitable lag between when you need to make decisions and when the data actually comes in will create some awkward moments. There will be honest and real disagreements over the interpretations of some of the findings, some of which will probably become heated. To the extent that destination colleges make their acceptance of transfer credit decisions based on other criteria, there may be gaps between what the data says and what’s politically possible. And probably some interpretations will be unfortunate, reductionist, or otherwise flawed.

But still. This is absolutely the right way to go. The community college exists to serve the students and the community, rather than the faculty. That means relocating ‘truth’ from ‘he who huffs and puffs the loudest’ to ‘what actually happens with the students.’ Allocating resources based on data is much easier if the data measures are built in from the beginning. The students are too important, and too vulnerable, to trust their fates to the way things are usually done. We know perfectly well how they’ll fare if that happens.

If anything might help, this might. Best wishes, CCDC. I’m rootin’ for ya!

When Students are Homophobic

This happens about once a year, even here in blue-state land.

A student shows up to complain that his professor is gay, and that s/he is “trying to convert everybody.” When I ask for specifics, the student quickly shifts gears to clarify that “I don't care what you do at home, but you shouldn't wave it around in my face.” Seeing a complete lack of response, the student then asserts victimhood, alleging that the professor won't give a fair shake to students who don't agree with her.

I've tried a number of different responses over the years, with varying degrees of success.

There's the basic “well, you know, we don't discriminate. If you have a concern with the professor, you should talk to her directly.” There's a certain legal clarity to that, but it doesn't seem to defuse the anger. Since it essentially replaces one accusation with another, it doesn't do much to build trust.

Then there's the “Columbo” approach. “Help me understand. How, exactly, is she trying to convert you?” This works a little better, since frequently “efforts to convert” amount to little more than “acknowledging the existence of gay people in the historical record.” When I've allowed students to try to piece together a bill of particulars, I've seen them slowly retreat in embarrassment when they realize that there's really nothing there. Sometimes it's nothing more than a short haircut on a woman. (I'm also struck at how frequently the accusations are false, but that's another post altogether.)

Once I even decided to roll with the absurdity to see what would happen. “What solution do you propose? Should I write a note to the professor asking her to stop being gay? Would that help?” The student's eyes were the size of dinner plates for a moment before he backed down, even laughing a little at himself. In retrospect, this approach probably assumed a little more common cultural ground than was wise, and I haven't tried it again, but it worked pretty well the one time I used it. I don't recommend it, given the potential for ruinous misunderstanding, but it made a hell of a teachable moment.

Lately I've been experimenting with the “put it in writing” approach. It's only fair, I explain, that a professor being complained about has the right to respond. Please write out your complaint, being as specific as possible, and we'll go from there. So far nobody has actually taken me up on that.

As silly as the complaints are, though, they inadvertently raise a real issue. Most of our discrimination procedures and policies are based on the idea that bias occurs between peers, or from the top down. Those are both real, of course, and they need to be addressed. But bias from the bottom up exists in a weird nether zone.

At some level, of course, students have always complained about professors, and always will. There's a certain degree of gossip and static that simply goes with the job, and a certain thickness of skin that any authority figure – in the classroom, the professor is clearly the authority figure – has to have. The student grapevine is real, and inevitable, and even healthy to some degree. But to me, there's a difference between students in a class blowing off steam together and a student complaining to a dean. The former is a cost of doing business, but the latter is serious.

In my cultural studies days, I learned that discrimination was really about power. But in these cases, the bias is among the disempowered. That doesn't make it any less real, but it does put many of our policies in an odd light.

I've read that student bias frequently surfaces in course evaluations, where students will punish non-traditional gender performance. Alpha males and nurturing females do well; nurturing males and alpha females get punished. But this is both more specific and more severe than that. There's a difference between 'liking someone a little less than someone else' and 'going to her boss to get her fired.'

(For the record, no, nobody gets called on the carpet here for 'suspicion of gayness.' I recognize that there may be regional variation in this.)

It has also occurred to me to wonder if I get more of these complaints since I look 'safe' -- a straightlaced, short-haired white guy. There's no real way of knowing, but I've been discomforted by some of the assumptions the complainers exhibited when they tried to bond with me.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen (or do you have a suggestion for) a more graceful way to handle the next student who takes grave offense at a visibly (or apparently) gay professor?

When Technology Doesn’t Help

Joshua Kim’s piece yesterday reminded me of a basic, but widely ignored, truth.

In most industries, new technology is adopted because it’s expected to lower costs and/or improve productivity (which lowers costs over time). It doesn’t always succeed, of course, and the usual vagaries of faddism are certainly there. But by and large, the point of adopting a new technology is to make the underlying business stronger.

But that doesn’t apply in either higher education or health care. In both of those, institutions adopt technology to meet rising expectations, whether it helps with cost or not. Much of the time, it actually leads to increased costs.

For example, take the typical college library. Libraries don’t bring in much revenue on their own, if any; they’re pretty pure ‘cost centers’ for most colleges. They’re central to the educational mission of the college, to be sure; I’d suggest that in the context of a commuter campus, that’s even more true than elsewhere. But income is tied to credit hours, and libraries don’t generate credit hours of their own.

In the past, typical library costs included labor, acquisitions, utilities, and not much else. Tables, desks, chairs, and carrels could be expected to last decades (and judging by some of the graffiti I saw at Flagship State, they did.) Yes, you might find microfilm or microfiche, but even there the space requirements were minimal and the purchases could last for decades. (For younger readers: microfilm was sort of like cassette tape...no, wait, you wouldn’t know that...it was sort of like movies watched really slowly...no, not like dvd’s...ah, screw it, I’m old.) It wasn’t at all rare for the highest-tech thing in the library to be the coin-operated photocopier.

Now, students expect/demand that the library offer plenty of computer workstations with high-speed internet access, good wifi everywhere, all manner of ‘assistive technology’ for the visually or otherwise challenged, and access to proprietary (paid) databases for all sorts of materials. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but none of it displaced what had come before, and none of it came with its own revenue sources. And that’s before mentioning the price pressures that publishers have put on traditional acquisitions.

As a result, the library is far more expensive to run than it once was. It isn’t doing anything wrong; it’s just doing what it’s supposed to do. The problem is that the technological advances it adopts -- each for good reason -- don’t, and won’t, save money.

Something similar holds true in the health-related majors. As medicine has adopted more high-tech equipment and methods, we’ve had to adopt them, too, to train the students on them. But we don’t get any of the gains from that. We have to pay for it, but the productivity gains, if any, accrue to the industry rather than to us. Worse, many of the purchases are so complex and high-maintenance that they require dedicated staff, thereby adding higher labor costs to the equation.

There are excellent societal reasons why that’s a good idea. I like the idea of the rookie Nursing student making his first medical mistakes on simulators, rather than on people, for the same reason that I like pilots to use flight simulators before they first fly planes. Fewer casualties that way.

But the college doesn’t capture the gains from that. It’s saddled with the costs, heaven knows, but not with the other side of the equation. And in an era of declining state support, there are only so many places to go to find the difference.

I agree that certain applications of technology can save colleges money, and that colleges should take those opportunities seriously. But to assume that it will only be deployed where it saves money, or even that it will be a net financial gain, strikes me as reaching. We train people on the latest stuff because we have to, whether it saves money or not.

Summer Bonus

Put down the flamethrowers, I’m not talking about money.

In the summer, with fewer people on campus and some of the committees that usually fill my calendar on hold until September, I’ve discovered an unexpected bonus: time for wide-ranging, unstructured conversation.

I don’t just mean shooting the breeze, either. I mean the kind of discussions in which people have the time and implied permission to go off-agenda and really explore a topic.

Last week I had a long and unexpectedly meandering conversation with a colleague in which we gradually realized that the college was missing something pretty fundamental, and not all that hard to implement. It wasn’t part of the agenda for the original meeting; I don’t think I’d heard it discussed before at all. But since we both had time to actually follow ideas where they led, we were able to move from the planned topic to an unplanned topic to an actual (potential) solution. We had time to explore, and complete, a thought.

That’s hard to do during the regular semesters. Then, meetings are six to a day, and they need to be pretty tightly planned. Just getting all the relevant people together in a room takes planning; with time at a premium, we have to get to the issue quickly. That’s not to say that the meetings are entirely free of tangents -- we are academics, after all -- but the tangents are more a form of social glue (or comic relief) than real exploration.

With the faculty away and with staff and administrators staggering vacations, though, the summer is a different animal. I wouldn’t call it slow, but it’s less fast. There’s time to ask the second question, and even the third.

Some people try to achieve the same thing with retreats, but in my experience, even the better retreats fall victim to too many people in the room. With that many people competing for floorspace, you still don’t have time for free-floating discussion. The most effective venue for the free-range conversation is two people; three can work if you’re really, really lucky. Go beyond that, and it’s just not the same.

I used to think that the best breakthroughs came from individual reflection. But experience, and blogging, have taught me that the best breakthroughs come from unpredictable interaction. Sometimes I don’t know what I think until I say it; I’ve actually surprised myself in conversations. In formal meetings, that doesn’t work, but when there’s time to hash something out one-on-one, the openness can lead to good surprises.

I’ll call that my summer bonus.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found the same thing? Have you found a setting in which your best breakthroughs happen most often?

Busting Perps

I have to admit enjoying this article a little too much.

Anyone who did time with Foucault will immediately think ‘panopticon’ when reading this piece about the anti-cheating technologies at the University of Central Florida. But I remember vividly the frustration as a teacher when students would cheat, and I remember the palpable sense of relief among the better students when I interrupted a cheat in progress.

At least for me, student cheating was a serious morale issue. It made me feel foolish for having poured so much energy into teaching when the students couldn’t even be bothered to try to learn. And I had good students tell me that faculty indifference to obvious cheating bugged them, because it made them feel like dupes for actually doing the work. When the ones who follow the rules feel like suckers, something is fundamentally wrong.

I served for several years on the academic dishonesty review board, which ‘tried’ cases in which students were accused of plagiarism or other cheating. (The majority of the board was faculty, but it needed a token admin.) Based on what I saw there, I have to admit a certain impatience with the idea that Gen Y doesn’t grasp the concept of plagiarism. Granted, things sometimes got murky on ‘group assignments,’ in which one member would coast on the labor of others, but the whole “copy my paper off the internet” thing wasn’t ambiguous. In those cases, when presented with the evidence, there wasn’t really much argument either way. Nobody even tried to argue that copy-and-paste was kosher.

I’ve heard arguments to the effect that in-class tests are artificial environments and not reflective of what students will encounter in the real world. There’s some truth to that, but there’s also a basic truth to the assertion that any environment will have rules of the game. Certain rules are necessary for the integrity of the game. And showing the ability to adapt to rules and work hard seems like it should carry some weight in the real world.

Policing cheating can be a real challenge with online classes, since you don’t know who’s sitting at the keyboard. (“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”) Anecdotally, the biggest threat there is usually the spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend. But that doesn’t strike me as an argument for giving up; it strikes me as an argument for cleverness.

Call it the broken windows theory of plagiarism. If it looks like nobody else cares, then following the rules can seem like selling out. But if you see people get nailed, and the flagrant cases lead to real punishments, then following the rules looks like a better deal.

This is where the “law and order” part of my “law and order liberalism” comes through. I define “law and order liberalism” as the simultaneous belief that laws should be both fair and enforced. Banning copy-and-paste papers strikes me as utterly fair, and therefore enforceable without apology. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

So bravo, UCF! May you make “just doing the work” the easy way out.

Mobility

This piece, and its attendant comments, stuck in my craw a little. It’s a discussion with an author of a book about the obstacles to low-income students’ success in college.

The author obviously means well, and wants to see students succeed. And there isn’t much arguing with much of what he mentions: complicated family lives, shaky academic preparation, and finances all pose real obstacles. Yup, they do. In the cc world, we see that every day. And I absolutely agree with him that community colleges have a key role to play, especially when the K-12 system in some areas just isn’t getting the job done.

All of that said, though, sometimes I wonder if we’re asking higher ed to do too much.

It’s great when we’re able to help students become truly competitive for the good jobs out there. But when the economy just isn’t producing those jobs in sufficient number, getting even more students prepared is of limited short-term value.

Of course, economic mobility isn’t the only ‘good’ that education serves. I like to think that, say, a literate and numerate electorate will generally make better choices; a literate and numerate population will make for better jury pools; and that the very real expansion of mental horizons that good education can foster is a good in itself, in addition to whatever eventual economic payoff it may generate.

But to the extent that ‘income polarization’ is the problem and ‘higher education’ is the solution, I suspect we’re outgunned.

To see that, we don’t have to go much farther than higher education itself. For a putatively liberal population, we have a markedly inegalitarian reward structure. That’s true within institutions -- compare the salary per course of senior tenured faculty to the pay adjuncts receive for the same courses -- and between them; the salary scale at the typical cc is far below that of a state university, even with higher teaching loads. (One of my recurring fantasies has Gail Mellow achieving high political office and actually enacting the per-student funding parity between sectors of higher ed that she has advocated for years.)

Outside of higher ed, the trend is actually somewhat less pronounced, but it’s still there. Routes into the middle class from below are fewer and slipperier than they once were. More education can help with that to some degree, but at some level, if the demand for employees just isn’t there, it just isn’t there.

Put differently, student loans don’t seem so burdensome when you have a well-paying job upon graduation. When the job isn’t there, the loans suddenly loom large, but they’re really more a symptom than a cause. The lack of the job is the cause.

This is probably obvious at some level, but political discourse sometimes skips important steps. I’d hate to see higher education punished for the sins of the broader economy. Assuming that Achieving the Dream and the Gates-funded projects bear fruit, and colleges do a better job of helping struggling students brush up their skills and complete degree programs, I wouldn’t necessarily expect the jobs to follow. Over time, I’d guess that an educated workforce would be more productive than an uneducated one, but there could be a delay long enough to obscure the connection. And in the meantime, those student loan payments don’t win many friends.

When Students Can’t Get Broadband

I’ll stipulate upfront that this will vary by region.

In my neck of the woods, broadband coverage is just common enough for people who have it to assume that anybody who wants it can get it. But that’s not the case. Some of the smaller, more isolated parts of the college’s service area still don’t have a meaningful broadband option. They can get dialup, but most of our online courses (and many of our online self-service modules) are complex enough that dialup really isn’t a satisfactory option. And ‘mobile broadband’ -- whether in the form of air cards, mifis, or smartphones -- is both spotty and well beyond the budgets of most students. (Microsoft discovered that with the failure of the “kin.”)

In many ways, my college (and most others) has moved to embrace online delivery of both courses and services. It enables a certain independence from the constraints of time, place, and facilities, and in some cases it’s clearly an efficiency gain. (I remember the unmitigated glee when I discovered in grad school that I could check on the presence or absence of a book in the university library by logging in from home. The time saved was astonishing.) It also allows students to get business done when they’re actually available, rather than just during normal business hours; for students with jobs and families, this is no small thing.

But we still can’t take the ubiquity of broadband for granted. Which means we still have to duplicate many of our services. Cost and productivity gains will remain ephemeral until we can stop duplicating.

So, a thought: why don’t mobile ISP’s offer meaningful student discounts? (I say ‘meaningful’ in the sense of both ‘substantial’ and ‘visible.’ Right now some of them offer small discounts if you know to ask, but you have to know to ask, and the discounts aren’t much.)

I can imagine a college including an optional discounted mobile ISP account in student fees, and students choosing the ISP that best covers their own area. Then, the students could access needed services, and they’d also become accustomed to the amazing convenience of having broadband where you want it, when you want it. As a mobile broadband user myself, I can attest that once you get used to it, you’re hooked. It’s remarkably handy, often in ways you wouldn’t have anticipated at first. But I love the idea that even a student in the middle of nowhere could slip a modem into the usb port of a cheapo netbook and be able to do whatever she needs to do.

Ideally, of course, we’d have a fully built-out wired system with substantial public subsidies, so mobile would be largely redundant. But we’re not there, and in some areas, it will be years before we are. In the meantime, we have entire cohorts of students whose options are markedly more limited than their peers’, and we have duplication of services at a time when budgets are inadequate and shrinking.

The business case for an ISP offering a student discount seems straightforward enough. With four major carriers nationally (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon) and a bunch of smaller regional carriers, there typically isn’t much separating one company’s service from another’s. The internet is the same no matter whose service I use to get to it. But a company that offered students half off during the academic year would be able to distinguish itself from its competitors, and inertia is such that once people pick a carrier, they tend to stick with it. Build brand loyalty -- or at least inertia -- and you’ll make money over time.

Until something like this comes along, we’ll still have to duplicate most of our services, paying for the new while still supporting the old. Worse, some students simply won’t have the access to what’s becoming increasingly essential, and others will eat their lunch.

Eventually, of course, the ideal would be cheap and ubiquitous broadband, much like the cheap and ubiquitous phone service before it. But until then, this seems like a good bridge. Verizon, can you hear me now?

Preparing for Dying Industries

Should a community college train people for the industries that are currently there, or for the industries that seem likely to be there in the near future?

I’ve been chewing on this one in light of some recent proposals floating around to get students prepared to certain kinds of manufacturing firms that, in my humble estimation, may not be much longer for this continent. (To be fair, a similar objection could be lodged at certain kinds of journalism programs, though I suspect that journalism will morph rather than die.)

I can imagine arguments on both sides, and I’ll admit being half-convinced by each.

On one side is the perfectly valid argument that students need jobs now, not years from now, and there’s an inherent difficulty (if not arrogance) in trying to read the future. While some broad, system-level trends may be legible, they don’t necessarily tell you what will happen in any given local market, or with any given company. Even if, say, manufacturing is on the decline nationally, that doesn’t mean that every single manufacturing company will either go under or go overseas. And if a few of the survivors are local, why the hell not prepare students for them?

There’s some truth to that. Even if the job only lasts a few years, that’s still a few years of gainful employment that might not have occurred otherwise. And who’s to say that one opportunity won’t lead to another?

But then there’s bitter experience. Having gone to grad school in an evergreen discipline in the 90’s, I saw and experienced firsthand the frustration of doing everything right only to emerge with a credential nobody wants. Having grown up in a city that’s still paying the price for putting so many eggs in the basket of a single industry, only to wind up with egg on its face, I’m a little nervous about pretending not to notice industrial decline. As late as the 90’s, the American car industry was doing great, riding the wave of SUV’s (and the undercurrent of cheap gas) as far as it could go. We know how that turned out, and it’s not like nobody saw it coming.

It’s one thing to be blindsided by change; it’s quite another to shut your eyes to it and pretend it’s not there.

Even the “buying time” scenario -- a few years of gainful employment will give you time to adjust to the next big thing -- seems more optimistic than history suggests is warranted. What seems to happen instead is that as the immediate crisis recedes, people turn their attention elsewhere and just assume that everything is back to normal.

I don’t want to contribute to a false sense of security, but I don’t want to sacrifice other people’s real opportunities to my own intuitions, either.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Should cc’s spend resources on training people to work for dying industries?

Taxi Medallions and Midwestern Zombies

Credit where credit is due: this story suggests that the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association -- the regional accreditor of record for much of the middle of the country -- is finally righting a longstanding wrong.

As this story from IHE notes, several for-profit companies have built a wildly lucrative business model on treating regional accreditation as a taxi medallion. I don’t know if the taxi system still works this way, but for a long time New York City rationed the number of taxis, requiring a medallion issued by the City as a condition of operation. Medallions could be openly traded, and often went for six figures. The City didn’t especially care who had them; it only cared about the overall number. In that setting, the system made a degree of sense. (One could always argue about the morality of limiting the overall number, but that’s a separate issue.)

For reasons I won’t pretend to understand, some regional accreditors have chosen to treat accreditation the same way. When a tiny, struggling, traditional college gets bought by an entrepreneur and immediately transmogrified into an online behemoth, it gets to carry over the accreditation as if nothing happened. An accreditation saying that it had resources and processes sufficient for 350 students on a nonprofit basis gets used to educate 30,000 students on the internet for profit, as if it were still the same thing.

The incentive for the investors is that getting a new accreditation for a new institution is time-consuming and expensive. Buying a ‘used’ one is much faster and cheaper, and gets you immediate access to Federal (and usually state) financial aid. That gives you the operating income for rapid expansion and double-digit profits.

If the only purpose of accreditation were to limit the overall number of colleges, the outright sale of accreditation medallions could make sense. But to the extent that accreditation is supposed to attest to a certain level of quality, their outright sale is absurd. It would be like me selling my Ph.D.

Several commenters to the IHE story raised the spectre of some struggling colleges dying, and of the rationality of a college changing its strategy when its current one doesn’t work anymore. But those both miss the point.

Under the rule change, colleges can still change strategies, and they can still sell themselves to for-profits. The only change is that sale to a new owner will trigger a new review of the accreditation. If they pass the new review, they’re good to go. Nobody is blocked from making changes; they just don’t get a rubber stamp saying they’re still the same institution afterwards.

Of course, having to prove that the new college is worthy of accreditation would take time and money, and would therefore reduce the economic appeal of struggling colleges to investors. But that strikes me as reasonable. Their economic appeal now is based on what amounts to fraud.

Will some colleges die on the vine? Yes. Frankly, there’s no way around that. If anything, I think there’s a perfectly reasonable argument for letting some die, rather than letting them walk among us as bloated, hollow, undead shells of their former selves, wielding unearned stamps of approval as talismans against sunlight. I say kill the zombies, and make room for the new kids.

Bravo, North Central. I hope the other regional accreditors do the same thing.

Bingo for Books

Last night TW and I took the kids to the local library for Bingo for Books. (It doubled as an excuse to return a pile of books we all had finished, and to get some new piles.)

On the way into the library, we ran into a family whose younger daughter is in TB’s class. When she saw TB, she immediately hid behind her older sister. Her sister shoved her out in front, and she smiled at TB. It was a classic embarrassed-to-see-my-crush move. TW and I decided that his charm comes from double recessive genes.

We got there early to comb through the stacks. The Boy found a series of adventure novels, and The Girl found a book about wild animals in Africa. (TW found several novels, and I found a characteristically nerdy nonfiction piece about political economy.) Then we filed into the Community Activity room for Bingo.

Anyone who has kids knows the drill. It’s a rectangular multipurpose room with long rectangular folding tables and stackable plastic chairs. The kids found their friends, and TW and I sidled in alongside.

Each kid got three sheets of paper with a bingo grid on it. Each square had the title of a children’s book or a well-known children’s author in it. As kids got Bingo, they’d go up front and get to choose a book as a prize.

Watching the kids with their friends was worth the time. TB and the girl with the secret crush sat facing each other, making faces and making each other laugh. They haven’t figured out self-consciousness yet, so their interaction was sweetly unguarded. Crush Girl referred to her sister at one point as “Butthead,” eliciting approving laughter from TB.

TG, meanwhile, sat across from Crush Girl’s younger brother. As TW put it, the younger brother looked like he belonged in a creek, jeans rolled up, triumphantly holding up a giant frog he had just caught. He was squirmy and silly and incredibly animated; TG tolerated him, but proved mostly immune to his wiggly charms.

Every kid won something. TB picked My Side of the Mountain, which struck me as an unusual choice, and TG picked a Cam Jansen mystery. Crush Girl picked The Other Side of the Mountain, the sequel, and told TB they’d have to swap after they were done. He agreed, suspecting nothing. I just smiled.

In a cruel trick on the parents, the events concluded with a panoply of sugary snacks. Sugar ‘em up and send ‘em home. What could possibly go wrong?

As we walked out to the car, Crush Girl’s younger brother yelled “bye, TG!” with surprising poignancy; TB suggested that he was thinking “goodbye, my future wife!” TG let it slide.

It was a small evening in the scheme of things, but as a parent, it was a real win. We’re such frequent customers at the library that the children’s librarians greet the kids by name. The kids already know their favorite shelves. They were excited to go, and excited to start reading their latest acquisitions when they got home. They enjoyed the activity, behaved well, and had fun with their friends. They’re growing up, but they haven’t hit the self-conscious “shut the parents out” stage yet. It’s all just there. It all just worked.

I just wanted to capture that in writing before it fades.