CUNY’s New Community College, in New York City, is attracting plenty of attention in higher ed circles. It’s an attempt to apply a panoply of best practices in raising graduation rates to a population that desperately needs it. Whether it becomes an exemplar of a new model, or withers on the vine as an expensive boutique project, remains to be seen.
That said, though, I was drawn to the part of this article at which it mentioned that even before it has opened, the new president has either fired or forced out a majority of the original faculty.
I don’t know what the specific issues were, or the merits of the positions taken on each side. To what degree each side was right or wrong, I can’t say.
But what struck me was the implied trade-off between vision and decentralization.
Whatever else you want to say about it, the New Community College reflects a pretty tightly disciplined vision. Students all take the same classes in their first year, use of support services is mandatory, and students have to be full-time. Remediation must be embedded in credit-bearing courses, if it exists at all. Even student group work is mandated. Academic departments don’t exist.
The idea is to give the purest test case possible. If a college does everything according to the literature -- whether incumbent employees believe it or not -- what would happen? At that level, it could prove a very useful data point.
In a context of “shared governance,” particularly one that also includes collective bargaining, the level of control being exercised centrally at NCC is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. Culturally, the default model in higher education is decentralized control. That’s why so much decision-making on campus resembles town politics more than anything else; it’s the clash of various immovable interest groups who aren’t going anywhere. (The exception, of course, is the students, who come and go and are therefore given no substantive voice, despite being the point of the whole enterprise.) Everything from resource allocation to curricular requirements gets decided in part based on internal politics. That’s the root of the old joke that being a college president is like running a cemetery -- lots of people under you, but good luck getting any of them to do what you want. Add administrative turnover -- itself a factor in reinforcing silos -- and you wind up with a college as a collection of mostly-independent departments battling over resources.
The decentralized model worked tolerably well when there was enough money, and enough cultural deference, to contain the possible damage from conflict. As long as student failure could be blamed on students, a patchwork organizational scheme might be annoying, but it wouldn’t be fatal.
As resources get thinner and results matter more, though, the argument for coherence within a college around a single vision becomes more compelling. The contrast between the City College of San Francisco -- the reductio ad absurdum of decentralization, now in a death spiral -- and the New Community College is striking.
To my mind, the right path for college administrators to take now is neither. The CCSF model -- no administration, basically -- just results in unsustainable chaos. The NCC model can make sense on a very small scale, but vesting too much power in a single office puts an awful lot of faith in one person to get everything right. Nobody is omniscient.
Instead, a more productive path is for administrators to use the birds-eye view afforded by statistics and studies, combined with whatever material incentives are at hand, to set agendas. Share the findings on developmental math with the math department, give it some course releases so it’ll have time to work, and task it with coming up with something better to try. Then track the results, and let the results determine the next step. Have the discipline not to try to intervene in the “coming up with something better” stage, other than signing off on field trips to places that are doing other things so folks can see how they work.
That approach, I think, offers the best of both worlds. It nudges people out of the provincialism that can easily develop over time when people get ensconced in their silos, but it doesn’t dictate content or delivery. It respects faculty agency and expertise as problem-solvers. And it refocuses the discussion from theology -- “This Is How It Should Be” -- to facts on the ground -- “here’s what worked.” It also avoids the mistake of vesting too much authority in any one person, whether that person is a president or a department chair. At the end of the day, the voice that matters is the voice of the results of the experiment.
The difficulty in that approach, other than tuning it right, is resources. Incentives cost money. But I’m willing to gamble that in the long run, sustained failure is far more expensive than a few course releases.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
Amazon?
I did not see this coming.
Amazon.com is offering to pay up to $2,000 per year towards educational costs for its warehouse employees if they pursue Associate’s degrees in certain high-demand fields, including fields like aircraft mechanics that have no obvious value within the company.
I had heard that Amazon was giving up its fight against collecting state sales taxes, so that it could build warehouses in more states and speed up its delivery. But I did not see this coming.
The contrast with, say, Wal-Mart is instructive. Wal-Mart contracted with a single national for-profit provider -- American Public University -- and only pays for employees who enroll there. As the 800-pound gorilla of a customer, Wal-Mart will likely exert tremendous influence over APU’s course offerings, which are offered entirely online.
Instead, Amazon is giving employees the means with which to choose where they want to study. The programs supported have to be designated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as high-demand and high-wage, and the providers must be accredited, but bachelor’s and master’s degree programs are ineligible. Between those rules and the low reimbursement, I’d guess that most of the people who take advantage of this will do so at community colleges. $2,000 per year won’t go far at many four-year schools, and many of the applied programs they’re supporting tend to be found in the community college sector.
So far, I’m liking this. Increase my state’s tax revenues while also providing jobs here, send my college motivated adult students, and get me my stuff quicker. I’ve certainly heard worse ideas.
I can guess that part of the motivation stems from heading off bad press in new locales about working conditions in the warehouses. But honestly, it’s hard to get mad at a company for responding to public concerns about how it treats workers by treating them better. If anything, that strikes me as positive.
Given that employees have to work in a warehouse for three years before becoming eligible, and given the physical demands of warehouse work, I doubt that we’ll be inundated with people. But the ones who do show up will likely be very motivated, conscientious students, and those are always welcome. And if some folks are able to move from the warehouse to a higher-paid occupation with minimal student loan debt, again, I find it hard to get terribly upset about that.
Of course, the long term outcomes may not be entirely great. Should Amazon fall on hard times, there wouldn’t be much stopping it from changing its mind. If the “speedy delivery” thing really takes off, the local Best Buy should be very, very worried. If Amazon pushes other retailers into the same death spiral that it did Borders, the long-term effects on local jobs and tax revenues could be negative. I’m probably not the only shopper who sometimes uses Best Buy as a showroom for stuff I later buy on Amazon. Take away the store’s advantage of speed, and the showrooming effect could get even worse. And on the student side, Bureau of Labor Statistics are notoriously imperfect, so it’s possible that someone could take advantage of the program and emerge with the wrong credential at the wrong time.
But those risks mostly exist anyway. In the meantime, Amazon is willing to create jobs in new places, to commit to helping employees attend community colleges, and to pay taxes.
I know there’s no such thing as an unalloyed good, but this strikes me as one of the better ideas to come along in a while. Wise and worldly readers, am I reading this right, or have I been bamboozled?
Amazon.com is offering to pay up to $2,000 per year towards educational costs for its warehouse employees if they pursue Associate’s degrees in certain high-demand fields, including fields like aircraft mechanics that have no obvious value within the company.
I had heard that Amazon was giving up its fight against collecting state sales taxes, so that it could build warehouses in more states and speed up its delivery. But I did not see this coming.
The contrast with, say, Wal-Mart is instructive. Wal-Mart contracted with a single national for-profit provider -- American Public University -- and only pays for employees who enroll there. As the 800-pound gorilla of a customer, Wal-Mart will likely exert tremendous influence over APU’s course offerings, which are offered entirely online.
Instead, Amazon is giving employees the means with which to choose where they want to study. The programs supported have to be designated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as high-demand and high-wage, and the providers must be accredited, but bachelor’s and master’s degree programs are ineligible. Between those rules and the low reimbursement, I’d guess that most of the people who take advantage of this will do so at community colleges. $2,000 per year won’t go far at many four-year schools, and many of the applied programs they’re supporting tend to be found in the community college sector.
So far, I’m liking this. Increase my state’s tax revenues while also providing jobs here, send my college motivated adult students, and get me my stuff quicker. I’ve certainly heard worse ideas.
I can guess that part of the motivation stems from heading off bad press in new locales about working conditions in the warehouses. But honestly, it’s hard to get mad at a company for responding to public concerns about how it treats workers by treating them better. If anything, that strikes me as positive.
Given that employees have to work in a warehouse for three years before becoming eligible, and given the physical demands of warehouse work, I doubt that we’ll be inundated with people. But the ones who do show up will likely be very motivated, conscientious students, and those are always welcome. And if some folks are able to move from the warehouse to a higher-paid occupation with minimal student loan debt, again, I find it hard to get terribly upset about that.
Of course, the long term outcomes may not be entirely great. Should Amazon fall on hard times, there wouldn’t be much stopping it from changing its mind. If the “speedy delivery” thing really takes off, the local Best Buy should be very, very worried. If Amazon pushes other retailers into the same death spiral that it did Borders, the long-term effects on local jobs and tax revenues could be negative. I’m probably not the only shopper who sometimes uses Best Buy as a showroom for stuff I later buy on Amazon. Take away the store’s advantage of speed, and the showrooming effect could get even worse. And on the student side, Bureau of Labor Statistics are notoriously imperfect, so it’s possible that someone could take advantage of the program and emerge with the wrong credential at the wrong time.
But those risks mostly exist anyway. In the meantime, Amazon is willing to create jobs in new places, to commit to helping employees attend community colleges, and to pay taxes.
I know there’s no such thing as an unalloyed good, but this strikes me as one of the better ideas to come along in a while. Wise and worldly readers, am I reading this right, or have I been bamboozled?
Sunday, July 22, 2012
MOOCs from Here
The normally sober Tim Burke had a bit of a meltdown on his blog about MOOCs and their attendant hype. (MOOCs are Massively Open Online Courses, such as the ones offered through Coursera.) He rightly called out the techno-utopians for their eager willingness to believe that the latest techno-toy will Change Everything, and offered helpful reminders of previous techno-toys that were supposed to Change Everything, and didn’t. (Sunrise Semester, anyone?)
My view is probably closer to Burke’s than to the true believers’, but in some ways, I’m much less worried about it than he seems to be.
MOOCs, at this point, are webcast courses that anybody can follow online for free. The most popular ones are based at name-brand universities and have online viewers from around the world. (In fact, the vast majority of the students who stick with the MOOCs seems to be from outside the United States.) They don’t offer academic credit, although some universities are starting to experiment with ways of including MOOCs in packages that include credit. And, of course, anyone could follow a MOOC for a while and then test out of a class for credit.
Given the ways MOOCs work, they strike me as absolutely wonderful supplementary resources for students who are already taking classes. But outside of a small number of very high-achieving autodidacts, I don’t see them replacing what we do in their current form.
For the insanely gifted but isolated student in East Nowhere, a high-end MOOC is a chance to both pick up great information and even prove something. That’s terrific, but that’s not our core demographic. Our core demographic, here at the community college level, is the average student. This is the student whose K-12 preparation was anywhere from “pretty good” to “you’d really rather not know.” More of our students place into developmental math than place out of it. They are not busting down the doors to take Intro to Engineering at MIT in their first semester.
Many of our students show up with learning disabilities -- some documented, some not -- and/or some bad study habits picked up in high school. Others simply have habits of weak performance that become self-fulfilling expectations, unless somebody intervenes. And others are perfectly capable, but just need structure. They’ll study when compelled, but they don’t make a habit of seeking out supplementary texts in the library, let alone watching 45 hours of online lecture.
At the community college level, we’re finding, student success is very much about replacing bad habits with good ones, and low expectations with high ones. That’s partly an academic function, but it’s largely about emotions and expectations. Students who form study groups and stick with them do much better than students who don’t. For that matter, students who join extracurricular activities tend to do better academically than students who don’t. It doesn’t appear to be entirely a function of self-selection, either; student feedback, and the scholarship I’ve seen on it, suggest that having allies makes a difference.
The contribution I can see MOOCs making at this level is supplemental. Many students, especially those with certain kinds of learning disabilities, already rely on lecture-capture technology to help them review outside of class. Having an expensively produced MOOC as an option gives that student another resource on which to draw. (Our tutoring center already uses certain Khan Academy videos that way, especially for algebra.) To the extent that a well-produced MOOC can help a student visualize a concept, or review it, I see it as a plus. But it’s a useful extra, rather than a replacement.
To me, the relevant parallel is the public library. It’s already possible for students to go to their local public libraries -- or, yes, the internet -- and read ahead on concepts covered in classes. That has been possible for a long time. But most don’t. The few who do tend to be the ones who would do well anyway. Some companies have sold cassettes (!) of lectures at high-profile universities for years; they haven’t displaced high-profile universities. I’d be afraid of MOOCs if I were afraid of BOOKs. I’m not.
If anything, MOOCs in the right courses could be incredibly helpful in enabling faculty to experiment with flipped (or semi-flipped) instruction. To the extent that MOOCs might enable professors on site to focus more on helping students get through knotty issues, rather than just explicating the same old stuff at the board, they could add value. (Alternately, they could give an exasperated instructor an option to refer the slowest-moving student to, without making the entire class wait.) But the structure, the pacing, the human connection, and the institutional legibility all still need to be provided first by the professor, and subsequently by student support folks -- advisors, counselors, etc.
We already have online courses, but they aren’t MOOCs, and the difference matters. Our online sections are either the same size, or smaller, than their onsite counterparts, and each one has an actual human being teaching it. (Despite the overheated fantasies on both sides, online courses don’t actually save faculty labor costs. They do save facilities costs. It’s cheaper to add server space than to add classroom space.) They’re highly interactive; faculty here report that an online course takes at least as much time to teach as an onsite one, even if the time is spent in smaller chunks. Onsite courses here are as much about student interaction and engagement as they are about presentation. That’s why we’ve managed to keep our online course completion rate at the same level as our onsite rate.
The real threats to community colleges aren’t MOOCs. Yes, we may lose the occasional prodigy who is suddenly able to show Harvard what he’s got. But those come in ones and twos. When I lose sleep about the fate of my college, it’s because of finances, legislative blind spots, clunky federal rulemaking, and the general political trend towards framing higher education as a private good. It’s not because of MOOCs. I’ll save my meltdowns for the real threats.
My view is probably closer to Burke’s than to the true believers’, but in some ways, I’m much less worried about it than he seems to be.
MOOCs, at this point, are webcast courses that anybody can follow online for free. The most popular ones are based at name-brand universities and have online viewers from around the world. (In fact, the vast majority of the students who stick with the MOOCs seems to be from outside the United States.) They don’t offer academic credit, although some universities are starting to experiment with ways of including MOOCs in packages that include credit. And, of course, anyone could follow a MOOC for a while and then test out of a class for credit.
Given the ways MOOCs work, they strike me as absolutely wonderful supplementary resources for students who are already taking classes. But outside of a small number of very high-achieving autodidacts, I don’t see them replacing what we do in their current form.
For the insanely gifted but isolated student in East Nowhere, a high-end MOOC is a chance to both pick up great information and even prove something. That’s terrific, but that’s not our core demographic. Our core demographic, here at the community college level, is the average student. This is the student whose K-12 preparation was anywhere from “pretty good” to “you’d really rather not know.” More of our students place into developmental math than place out of it. They are not busting down the doors to take Intro to Engineering at MIT in their first semester.
Many of our students show up with learning disabilities -- some documented, some not -- and/or some bad study habits picked up in high school. Others simply have habits of weak performance that become self-fulfilling expectations, unless somebody intervenes. And others are perfectly capable, but just need structure. They’ll study when compelled, but they don’t make a habit of seeking out supplementary texts in the library, let alone watching 45 hours of online lecture.
At the community college level, we’re finding, student success is very much about replacing bad habits with good ones, and low expectations with high ones. That’s partly an academic function, but it’s largely about emotions and expectations. Students who form study groups and stick with them do much better than students who don’t. For that matter, students who join extracurricular activities tend to do better academically than students who don’t. It doesn’t appear to be entirely a function of self-selection, either; student feedback, and the scholarship I’ve seen on it, suggest that having allies makes a difference.
The contribution I can see MOOCs making at this level is supplemental. Many students, especially those with certain kinds of learning disabilities, already rely on lecture-capture technology to help them review outside of class. Having an expensively produced MOOC as an option gives that student another resource on which to draw. (Our tutoring center already uses certain Khan Academy videos that way, especially for algebra.) To the extent that a well-produced MOOC can help a student visualize a concept, or review it, I see it as a plus. But it’s a useful extra, rather than a replacement.
To me, the relevant parallel is the public library. It’s already possible for students to go to their local public libraries -- or, yes, the internet -- and read ahead on concepts covered in classes. That has been possible for a long time. But most don’t. The few who do tend to be the ones who would do well anyway. Some companies have sold cassettes (!) of lectures at high-profile universities for years; they haven’t displaced high-profile universities. I’d be afraid of MOOCs if I were afraid of BOOKs. I’m not.
If anything, MOOCs in the right courses could be incredibly helpful in enabling faculty to experiment with flipped (or semi-flipped) instruction. To the extent that MOOCs might enable professors on site to focus more on helping students get through knotty issues, rather than just explicating the same old stuff at the board, they could add value. (Alternately, they could give an exasperated instructor an option to refer the slowest-moving student to, without making the entire class wait.) But the structure, the pacing, the human connection, and the institutional legibility all still need to be provided first by the professor, and subsequently by student support folks -- advisors, counselors, etc.
We already have online courses, but they aren’t MOOCs, and the difference matters. Our online sections are either the same size, or smaller, than their onsite counterparts, and each one has an actual human being teaching it. (Despite the overheated fantasies on both sides, online courses don’t actually save faculty labor costs. They do save facilities costs. It’s cheaper to add server space than to add classroom space.) They’re highly interactive; faculty here report that an online course takes at least as much time to teach as an onsite one, even if the time is spent in smaller chunks. Onsite courses here are as much about student interaction and engagement as they are about presentation. That’s why we’ve managed to keep our online course completion rate at the same level as our onsite rate.
The real threats to community colleges aren’t MOOCs. Yes, we may lose the occasional prodigy who is suddenly able to show Harvard what he’s got. But those come in ones and twos. When I lose sleep about the fate of my college, it’s because of finances, legislative blind spots, clunky federal rulemaking, and the general political trend towards framing higher education as a private good. It’s not because of MOOCs. I’ll save my meltdowns for the real threats.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Friday Fragments
The Girl brought a hardcover copy of my dissertation to me as I was typing.
TG: Daddy, did you write this?
DD: Yes.
TG: So you just wrote your second book?
DD: Well, no. That’s my dissertation, not a book.
TG: What’s a dissertation?
DD: It’s like a really, really long paper that you have to write to get your Ph.D.
TG: Who are the characters?
DD: It doesn’t really have characters. It’s more like an article.
TG: That’s a long article. It has a cover like a book.
DD: Yes, it does.
TG: But it’s not a book?
DD: No.
TG: That’s silly.
Smart girl.
---------
Last week, we spent a few days in Burlington, Vermont. (If you were there, you might have seen me. I was the white guy.) Gotta say, we were all impressed. It’s a very walkable town -- even if it has “too much uphillness,” as The Girl put it -- and the food is amazing. Lots of “locally grown,” organic, and vegetarian offerings to be had.
Lake Champlain was a treat, too. TG was hopeful that we’d see Champ, the local answer to the Loch Ness Monster. We didn’t, but the beach was fun and the water warm.
We also made the ceremonial trips to the Ben and Jerry’s factory and the Vermont Teddy Bear factory for TG’s birthday. Ben and Jerry’s was smaller than I had pictured it, but it put on a good show. The Teddy Bear factory looked more factory-ish, but was still fun.
If you haven’t been there, Vermont looks different. Part of that is the complete absence of billboards, which makes more of a difference than you’d think. And part of it is a certain economy of language. I laughed out loud when I saw signs on the highway that just said “Moose.” Not “Moose Xing” or “Moose, Five Miles,” just “Moose.” You had to fill in the rest. Navigational cues there are generally, well, understated, but “Moose” really captured it.
----------
I read with interest that the City College of San Francisco may need “special” trustees to come in and right the ship. Folks who’ve been following the development of “emergency fiscal managers” in Michigan, or even the municipal bankruptcies in California, will have a sense of deja vu.
It’s not entirely clear just what powers the emergency trustees would have. Given the issues faced by CCSF, they’d have to be pretty drastic. In the absence of a funding model in which growth more than pays for itself, I’m guessing that some forced programmatic shrinkage is on the horizon. Since “shared governance’ models are historically unsuccessful at dealing with shrinkage, it will probably have to be done top-down.
If they’re smart, they’ll tie the decisions of which programs to keep, at least in part, to the willingness of the faculty in those programs to get with the assessment program. (Obviously, employability, transferability, and graduation rates should matter, too.) That way, faculty in the various departments will have some ability to control their own fates. That won’t solve every issue -- departments with strong ged ed presence, like English and math, aren’t going anywhere -- it should at least generate enough progress on key indicators to get the accreditors to back off for a while. Done right, it might even set the stage for eventual improvement, which is kind of the point.
Either way, though, this is the (admittedly large) canary in the coal mine of California’s public higher education system. You can’t run a college like the Paris Commune in an anti-tax state forever. This is one of those cases in which both sides are wrong, and the likeliest outcome is unlikely to address the real problem. But if the emergency can get some drastic structural changes enacted -- including a complete re-do of the funding system -- then it’s at least possible to have hope.
For now, I have hope. And if someone in authority in California is looking for a thoughtful out-of-state observer with actual community college administrative experience and a long history of writing on higher ed issues to provide input, well, I check my inbox frequently...
TG: Daddy, did you write this?
DD: Yes.
TG: So you just wrote your second book?
DD: Well, no. That’s my dissertation, not a book.
TG: What’s a dissertation?
DD: It’s like a really, really long paper that you have to write to get your Ph.D.
TG: Who are the characters?
DD: It doesn’t really have characters. It’s more like an article.
TG: That’s a long article. It has a cover like a book.
DD: Yes, it does.
TG: But it’s not a book?
DD: No.
TG: That’s silly.
Smart girl.
---------
Last week, we spent a few days in Burlington, Vermont. (If you were there, you might have seen me. I was the white guy.) Gotta say, we were all impressed. It’s a very walkable town -- even if it has “too much uphillness,” as The Girl put it -- and the food is amazing. Lots of “locally grown,” organic, and vegetarian offerings to be had.
Lake Champlain was a treat, too. TG was hopeful that we’d see Champ, the local answer to the Loch Ness Monster. We didn’t, but the beach was fun and the water warm.
We also made the ceremonial trips to the Ben and Jerry’s factory and the Vermont Teddy Bear factory for TG’s birthday. Ben and Jerry’s was smaller than I had pictured it, but it put on a good show. The Teddy Bear factory looked more factory-ish, but was still fun.
If you haven’t been there, Vermont looks different. Part of that is the complete absence of billboards, which makes more of a difference than you’d think. And part of it is a certain economy of language. I laughed out loud when I saw signs on the highway that just said “Moose.” Not “Moose Xing” or “Moose, Five Miles,” just “Moose.” You had to fill in the rest. Navigational cues there are generally, well, understated, but “Moose” really captured it.
----------
I read with interest that the City College of San Francisco may need “special” trustees to come in and right the ship. Folks who’ve been following the development of “emergency fiscal managers” in Michigan, or even the municipal bankruptcies in California, will have a sense of deja vu.
It’s not entirely clear just what powers the emergency trustees would have. Given the issues faced by CCSF, they’d have to be pretty drastic. In the absence of a funding model in which growth more than pays for itself, I’m guessing that some forced programmatic shrinkage is on the horizon. Since “shared governance’ models are historically unsuccessful at dealing with shrinkage, it will probably have to be done top-down.
If they’re smart, they’ll tie the decisions of which programs to keep, at least in part, to the willingness of the faculty in those programs to get with the assessment program. (Obviously, employability, transferability, and graduation rates should matter, too.) That way, faculty in the various departments will have some ability to control their own fates. That won’t solve every issue -- departments with strong ged ed presence, like English and math, aren’t going anywhere -- it should at least generate enough progress on key indicators to get the accreditors to back off for a while. Done right, it might even set the stage for eventual improvement, which is kind of the point.
Either way, though, this is the (admittedly large) canary in the coal mine of California’s public higher education system. You can’t run a college like the Paris Commune in an anti-tax state forever. This is one of those cases in which both sides are wrong, and the likeliest outcome is unlikely to address the real problem. But if the emergency can get some drastic structural changes enacted -- including a complete re-do of the funding system -- then it’s at least possible to have hope.
For now, I have hope. And if someone in authority in California is looking for a thoughtful out-of-state observer with actual community college administrative experience and a long history of writing on higher ed issues to provide input, well, I check my inbox frequently...
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Ask the Administrator: Where Did My Class Go?
A regular correspondent writes:
Am I a mean dean, too? I’ll leave that to the folks who know me. Suffice it to say that there’s a difference between a person and a role.
Since there’s no contractual entitlement to a course, my best guess is that you got bumped. In many systems, full-timers whose courses don’t run can bump adjuncts with full sections. The idea is that the full-timer’s salary has to be covered somehow, so displacing the adjunct -- whose salary doesn’t have to be covered -- offsets some of the loss from the section that didn’t run. The bump may not have been direct, of course. Full-timer takes slot from senior adjunct, so senior adjunct bumps junior adjunct. In that scenario, even if they don’t have a full-timer who could have taught your course, the effect on you is the same as if they did.
If that’s the case, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that you weren’t told why. The goal would be preventing needless drama in the ranks. Better to be angry at the “mean dean” than to sow ill will among colleagues.
Of course, that’s just a guess. Any number of other factors could also have come into play. Someone’s schedule may have had to be adjusted for personal/confidential reasons -- medical or family, say -- and your course made sense, whether directly or indirectly. (There, too, you wouldn’t get the full story.) You don’t mention if there was a new full-time hire; if there was, that would also lead to a domino effect. There may have been another adjunct with a special expertise they desperately needed, and your course was the only way to give that person enough sections to seal the deal. Or, of course, there could always be something nefarious at play. But I’ve done enough of this over the years to report that actual nefariousness is far more rare than some people seem to think.
The more bothersome part of your message is that you were “verbally told” that the section was yours. Depending on “by whom,” and how explicitly, that doesn’t look great. “By whom” makes a tremendous difference. If you were promised by someone who has no authority to make a promise, then the promise is worthless. And there’s a meaningful difference between “we’re pencilling you in” and “the class is yours,” even though some folks conflate the two. The latter is a promise; the former is a hope.
One of the frustrations of administration is knowing facts that you aren’t allowed to share. I’ll give you one from my past. Professor X, who was full-time, had been diagnosed with lupus, and just couldn’t do early-morning sections anymore. She struggled valiantly, and didn’t want her colleagues to know. I adjusted her schedule, and an adjunct who expected an afternoon section was bumped without explanation. He assumed, naturally, that I was a rat and a fink, and let it be known.
I have lived that one personally. That’s the price of administration.
That said, there are better and worse ways of telling someone he won’t have a class. While some specifics can’t be shared, when you’re dealing with someone who has been around for a while and has done good work, it’s probably best not to go with the standard “thanks for applying” form letter.
I realize this may all sound like a series of technicalities. At a basic level, you were expecting some income that you aren’t going to get, and that sucks. I get that. But it’s entirely possible that someone acting in good faith could have done what you describe. If you want to figure out whether this was nefariousness or just a collision of imperatives, watch for patterns over time. A single case could be just about anything.
Good luck. I hope you’re able to find a way to replace the lost income.
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I taught a course as an adjunct at a CC three semesters in a row. No complaints from students that I am aware of, a positive classroom observation from an admin, student evals on a typical bell curve, 1/4 glowing, 1/2 in the middle, 1/4 cranky. Grades likewise pretty typical. Lots of As, some Bs and Cs, a couple Fs.
This Fall the course is listed as fully enrolled with instructor TBD, so I enquired if I'd be teaching it. I had certainly assumed I was as I had filled out an availability form, been verbally told I was and reserved the time in my Fall schedule. No answer for a long time. Then a very terse email from the Dean saying "thanks for your interest in teaching at XXCC unfortunately we will be unable to offer you a class this Fall". There's no full timer who would teach this class, so that's not the issue.
Obviously they can hire who they like: our Union contract wouldn't give me seniority for another year. Having laid people off in my former life in the dreaded private sector, I understand that if they've decided to "go a different direction" there's no margin in explaining their reasons to me, as it only opens the door for me to argue. That being said, "thank you for your interest in teaching at XXCC", as if I was a new applicant, seems particularly cold since this is a Dean I had actually met and worked with. What's your take as a Dean? Are you a mean dean too?
Am I a mean dean, too? I’ll leave that to the folks who know me. Suffice it to say that there’s a difference between a person and a role.
Since there’s no contractual entitlement to a course, my best guess is that you got bumped. In many systems, full-timers whose courses don’t run can bump adjuncts with full sections. The idea is that the full-timer’s salary has to be covered somehow, so displacing the adjunct -- whose salary doesn’t have to be covered -- offsets some of the loss from the section that didn’t run. The bump may not have been direct, of course. Full-timer takes slot from senior adjunct, so senior adjunct bumps junior adjunct. In that scenario, even if they don’t have a full-timer who could have taught your course, the effect on you is the same as if they did.
If that’s the case, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that you weren’t told why. The goal would be preventing needless drama in the ranks. Better to be angry at the “mean dean” than to sow ill will among colleagues.
Of course, that’s just a guess. Any number of other factors could also have come into play. Someone’s schedule may have had to be adjusted for personal/confidential reasons -- medical or family, say -- and your course made sense, whether directly or indirectly. (There, too, you wouldn’t get the full story.) You don’t mention if there was a new full-time hire; if there was, that would also lead to a domino effect. There may have been another adjunct with a special expertise they desperately needed, and your course was the only way to give that person enough sections to seal the deal. Or, of course, there could always be something nefarious at play. But I’ve done enough of this over the years to report that actual nefariousness is far more rare than some people seem to think.
The more bothersome part of your message is that you were “verbally told” that the section was yours. Depending on “by whom,” and how explicitly, that doesn’t look great. “By whom” makes a tremendous difference. If you were promised by someone who has no authority to make a promise, then the promise is worthless. And there’s a meaningful difference between “we’re pencilling you in” and “the class is yours,” even though some folks conflate the two. The latter is a promise; the former is a hope.
One of the frustrations of administration is knowing facts that you aren’t allowed to share. I’ll give you one from my past. Professor X, who was full-time, had been diagnosed with lupus, and just couldn’t do early-morning sections anymore. She struggled valiantly, and didn’t want her colleagues to know. I adjusted her schedule, and an adjunct who expected an afternoon section was bumped without explanation. He assumed, naturally, that I was a rat and a fink, and let it be known.
I have lived that one personally. That’s the price of administration.
That said, there are better and worse ways of telling someone he won’t have a class. While some specifics can’t be shared, when you’re dealing with someone who has been around for a while and has done good work, it’s probably best not to go with the standard “thanks for applying” form letter.
I realize this may all sound like a series of technicalities. At a basic level, you were expecting some income that you aren’t going to get, and that sucks. I get that. But it’s entirely possible that someone acting in good faith could have done what you describe. If you want to figure out whether this was nefariousness or just a collision of imperatives, watch for patterns over time. A single case could be just about anything.
Good luck. I hope you’re able to find a way to replace the lost income.
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Retirement Waves
Academics of my generation probably harbor bitter memories of the mythical “great wave of retirements” that was going to open up all those faculty jobs. Apparently, in Illinois, that wave is finally happening. It’s driven by pension panic, rather than by normal demographic change, but a wave is a wave.
The press coverage focused largely on the pension issue, understandably enough, but I noticed this:
It’s hard to lose a lot of institutional memory in a short time, but retirements do allow for changes that would have been politically impossible without them.
In some cases, those changes are about resource allocation. That’s tough when retirements are in dribs and drabs, but it’s easier when they come in clusters. Staffing imbalances on the faculty side can arise over time for any number of reasons, though in my observation, the most common are shifts in student demand and the timing of when openings happen. If your department had retirements during good years, it got replacements; if it had retirements in bad years, it didn’t. (My own campus experimented with “cluster hiring” a few years ago, then was forced by state cuts to stop abruptly. As a result, some pretty striking imbalances took root.) When a significant number of vacancies develop at the same time, it’s possible to shift some positions to address imbalances.
On the administrative side, the issues are a bit different. We’re facing that now; some fairly aggressive shedding of positions over the last few years put off the day of reckoning for a while, but we’ve hit the limits of that. At this point, retirements need to be replaced. Deanships are typically much harder to fill than faculty positions, though, so having multiple openings at the same time is a scary prospect.
Here too, multiple retirements can allow for rethinking the allocation of duties. The trick here is avoiding the Purple Unicorn Syndrome, in which you write a job description that could only be filled by someone as rare as a purple unicorn. In these days of reduced administration, when everyone is doing more than they used to, it’s easy to fall into that trap. When you combine much broader scopes of authority with a legalistic search process, finding good candidates who meet all the bullet points is a real challenge. When a search fails, then you have to scramble for some sort of interim solution, which can raise issues of its own.
This may all seem opportunistic, and there’s a sense in which it is. But it’s an opportunism borne of a lack of alternatives. On the administrative side, a thin bench puts limits on how adventurous you can get. On the faculty side, of course, tenure without mandatory retirement makes some people simply immovable. Cluster retirements are those rare moments when you can actually be strategic without running into one of those brick walls.
I hope Illinois uses this rare opportunity wisely. It’ll face a rough year, but if it plays its cards right, it could actually come out stronger. It may even finally create some opportunities for a couple of generations too long shut out to get work. Although the wave may have been generated by insipid fiscal management by the state, it may actually wind up being a blessing in disguise.
The press coverage focused largely on the pension issue, understandably enough, but I noticed this:
Wilson said the retirements were an opportunity to rethink strategic goals, and hire faculty more aligned to these goals, adding that firm plans would be in place by the end of summer. (Phyllis Wise, UIUC's chancellor, said during a recent visit to the offices of Inside Higher Ed that the faculty vacancies will be a chance to reconfigure and hire faculty members based on emerging needs of the university and students.)
It’s hard to lose a lot of institutional memory in a short time, but retirements do allow for changes that would have been politically impossible without them.
In some cases, those changes are about resource allocation. That’s tough when retirements are in dribs and drabs, but it’s easier when they come in clusters. Staffing imbalances on the faculty side can arise over time for any number of reasons, though in my observation, the most common are shifts in student demand and the timing of when openings happen. If your department had retirements during good years, it got replacements; if it had retirements in bad years, it didn’t. (My own campus experimented with “cluster hiring” a few years ago, then was forced by state cuts to stop abruptly. As a result, some pretty striking imbalances took root.) When a significant number of vacancies develop at the same time, it’s possible to shift some positions to address imbalances.
On the administrative side, the issues are a bit different. We’re facing that now; some fairly aggressive shedding of positions over the last few years put off the day of reckoning for a while, but we’ve hit the limits of that. At this point, retirements need to be replaced. Deanships are typically much harder to fill than faculty positions, though, so having multiple openings at the same time is a scary prospect.
Here too, multiple retirements can allow for rethinking the allocation of duties. The trick here is avoiding the Purple Unicorn Syndrome, in which you write a job description that could only be filled by someone as rare as a purple unicorn. In these days of reduced administration, when everyone is doing more than they used to, it’s easy to fall into that trap. When you combine much broader scopes of authority with a legalistic search process, finding good candidates who meet all the bullet points is a real challenge. When a search fails, then you have to scramble for some sort of interim solution, which can raise issues of its own.
This may all seem opportunistic, and there’s a sense in which it is. But it’s an opportunism borne of a lack of alternatives. On the administrative side, a thin bench puts limits on how adventurous you can get. On the faculty side, of course, tenure without mandatory retirement makes some people simply immovable. Cluster retirements are those rare moments when you can actually be strategic without running into one of those brick walls.
I hope Illinois uses this rare opportunity wisely. It’ll face a rough year, but if it plays its cards right, it could actually come out stronger. It may even finally create some opportunities for a couple of generations too long shut out to get work. Although the wave may have been generated by insipid fiscal management by the state, it may actually wind up being a blessing in disguise.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Ask the Administrator: The Doctor of Arts Degree
A new correspondent writes:
I’ll open by clarifying that I’m writing as a hiring manager at a community college; my perspective may be entirely inapplicable to other sectors of higher ed. (Folks with knowledge of how this would play at research universities or striving four-year colleges are welcome to share in the comments.)
At this level, a degree in rhet/comp is more employable than a degree in literature. The field makes more difference than the level. In other words, a Master’s in rhet/comp could easily beat a doctorate in literature. A doctorate in rhet/comp might help, but probably not as much as years of teaching experience at the community college level.
In my neck of the woods -- the Northeast -- doctorates are common enough that they don’t particularly stand out. If you picked up knowledge or skills in the program that set you apart, that’s great, but that’s separate from the credential itself.
It’s hardly news that English is a particularly difficult field, even with its ubiquity at the community college level. Even a late-posted, fairly pedestrian position gets applications well into three figures, of which dozens or more meet every stated requirement. A doctor of arts may be a point of distinction, but what might really set you apart would be -- for example -- special training in how to teach developmental classes. That may be dispiriting, depending on your angle to the universe, but it makes perfect sense when you consider the needs of the institution. Institutions hire to solve their own problems. If student success at the developmental level is an issue -- and it is at most community colleges -- then a hire who could help with that is attractive. Whether that means a doctorate or not is another question.
Given that doctoral programs worthy of the name are long, draining, and expensive, I’d suggest looking first at Master’s programs in rhet/comp that would allow you to specialize in developmental areas, especially reading. That would probably get you most of the marketability of the longer program, but without giving up five to ten years of your life. And it would signal to prospective employers that you know what they’re dealing with, and that you would be handy to have around. That matters.
One admin’s opinion, anyway. I’d love to hear from any community college English folk out there on this one. Does this sound about right, or do things look different from where you are?
Good luck! I hope your eventual decision lands you where you want to be.
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I've been teaching college English as an adjunct for a few years (in addition to my full-time gig at a high school). I love teaching college and want to move into it full time. I have a BA and an MA in English right now. My question for you is, from a community college hiring perspective, is there more value in a PhD than a DA (doctor of arts)? I might get a DA in English, with a focus on composition, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy. I'm not looking to get a job at a big research institution. I'd love to work in a community college environment that values good teaching. So is this DA worth pursuing if I have that kind of end goal in mind?
I’ll open by clarifying that I’m writing as a hiring manager at a community college; my perspective may be entirely inapplicable to other sectors of higher ed. (Folks with knowledge of how this would play at research universities or striving four-year colleges are welcome to share in the comments.)
At this level, a degree in rhet/comp is more employable than a degree in literature. The field makes more difference than the level. In other words, a Master’s in rhet/comp could easily beat a doctorate in literature. A doctorate in rhet/comp might help, but probably not as much as years of teaching experience at the community college level.
In my neck of the woods -- the Northeast -- doctorates are common enough that they don’t particularly stand out. If you picked up knowledge or skills in the program that set you apart, that’s great, but that’s separate from the credential itself.
It’s hardly news that English is a particularly difficult field, even with its ubiquity at the community college level. Even a late-posted, fairly pedestrian position gets applications well into three figures, of which dozens or more meet every stated requirement. A doctor of arts may be a point of distinction, but what might really set you apart would be -- for example -- special training in how to teach developmental classes. That may be dispiriting, depending on your angle to the universe, but it makes perfect sense when you consider the needs of the institution. Institutions hire to solve their own problems. If student success at the developmental level is an issue -- and it is at most community colleges -- then a hire who could help with that is attractive. Whether that means a doctorate or not is another question.
Given that doctoral programs worthy of the name are long, draining, and expensive, I’d suggest looking first at Master’s programs in rhet/comp that would allow you to specialize in developmental areas, especially reading. That would probably get you most of the marketability of the longer program, but without giving up five to ten years of your life. And it would signal to prospective employers that you know what they’re dealing with, and that you would be handy to have around. That matters.
One admin’s opinion, anyway. I’d love to hear from any community college English folk out there on this one. Does this sound about right, or do things look different from where you are?
Good luck! I hope your eventual decision lands you where you want to be.
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Innovate! No, Crack Down! No, Wait...
In my perfect world, the “disruptive innovation” people and the “crack down on fraud” financial aid people would be locked in a room to fight it out, and nobody could pass any new rules until there was a clear winner.
In the meantime, we’re stuck with rules like this. Students in online programs will no longer be eligible for Pell coverage of living expenses. Pell grants could only be used to cover tuition, books, and fees.
The idea is to crack down on “Pell runners,” or fake students who enroll in programs with no intention of actually taking them, grab the Pell checks, and run. (I’m picturing “Logan’s Run” as I type this.) With an online program, the theory goes, it’s that much easier to commit fraud. But if there’s no money in the first place, then there’s nothing to steal.
This won’t affect high-cost online programs, since their tuition and fees already swallow the entirety of the Pell grant. They’ll mostly affect community colleges.
The whole enterprise makes my head hurt.
Yes, there is a real issue with Pell runners. Yes, that should be addressed. (I personally like the idea of staggering the payouts so a student couldn’t get the second half unless she had participated meaningfully in the first half of the semester.)
But a rule like this assumes a world other than the one that exists.
First and most obviously, most online students at community colleges don’t enroll in online programs. They enroll in majors, mixing traditional classes with online classes. Stereotypes aside, most of the online students aren’t purely online and logging in from other time zones; most of them are local, and are using online courses for scheduling convenience. The premise that students are either clearly onsite or clearly online is false.
But if a student on Pell is taking some online and some onsite, the compliance issues under the new rule are headache-inducing. I don’t even want to think about “hybrid” classes, which are part onsite and part online.
For the local student who takes some online courses as a way of building a friendlier schedule, the new rule may well amount to a strong incentive to stick with onsite classes. If the online class comes with a reduction in grant money, the onsite class suddenly gets a lot more attractive. As students vote with their feet, colleges are suddenly given a powerful disincentive to lean into the future and continue to innovate.
All of which, apparently, happened without anyone having given it much thought.
*headdesk*
Over the break, I read Chris Hayes’ new book, Twilight of the Elites. As history, it’s pretty weak -- if you want a better historical argument along similar lines, try Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites -- but it makes some good political points. The one that stuck with me after I put the book down was about “social distance.” In essence, Hayes argues that the daily world of the new “meritocratic” elites is so far removed from the daily world of regular people that they simply don’t understand each other. As a result, even well-meaning elites just get it wrong.
This seems like one of those cases. Well-meaning policy elites assume that programs come in two flavors -- onsite and online -- and that rules can be made accordingly. But they don’t. Most online courses are taken in the context of mixed programs, and most students who take online classes aren’t purely online students. That’s how it works. A rule change that would make perfect sense in the antiseptically clean world of people who have access to power makes no sense at all on the ground. Does a student who takes forty percent of his classes online suddenly have forty percent cheaper rent? (Hint: no.) Are colleges going to innovate if it means driving students away? (Hint: no.) Anyone on the ground would know that.
Innovation is sloppy and inefficient, especially in the early stages. Cracking down makes sense when the rules are clear. Doing both at the same time is a tall order in the best of times, even assuming that the rules got the details right. When they got them as wrong as this, it’s just a mess.
Go after the Pell runners, with my blessing. But don’t do it by boxing community colleges into the past. I refuse to die from an oversight.
In the meantime, we’re stuck with rules like this. Students in online programs will no longer be eligible for Pell coverage of living expenses. Pell grants could only be used to cover tuition, books, and fees.
The idea is to crack down on “Pell runners,” or fake students who enroll in programs with no intention of actually taking them, grab the Pell checks, and run. (I’m picturing “Logan’s Run” as I type this.) With an online program, the theory goes, it’s that much easier to commit fraud. But if there’s no money in the first place, then there’s nothing to steal.
This won’t affect high-cost online programs, since their tuition and fees already swallow the entirety of the Pell grant. They’ll mostly affect community colleges.
The whole enterprise makes my head hurt.
Yes, there is a real issue with Pell runners. Yes, that should be addressed. (I personally like the idea of staggering the payouts so a student couldn’t get the second half unless she had participated meaningfully in the first half of the semester.)
But a rule like this assumes a world other than the one that exists.
First and most obviously, most online students at community colleges don’t enroll in online programs. They enroll in majors, mixing traditional classes with online classes. Stereotypes aside, most of the online students aren’t purely online and logging in from other time zones; most of them are local, and are using online courses for scheduling convenience. The premise that students are either clearly onsite or clearly online is false.
But if a student on Pell is taking some online and some onsite, the compliance issues under the new rule are headache-inducing. I don’t even want to think about “hybrid” classes, which are part onsite and part online.
For the local student who takes some online courses as a way of building a friendlier schedule, the new rule may well amount to a strong incentive to stick with onsite classes. If the online class comes with a reduction in grant money, the onsite class suddenly gets a lot more attractive. As students vote with their feet, colleges are suddenly given a powerful disincentive to lean into the future and continue to innovate.
All of which, apparently, happened without anyone having given it much thought.
*headdesk*
Over the break, I read Chris Hayes’ new book, Twilight of the Elites. As history, it’s pretty weak -- if you want a better historical argument along similar lines, try Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites -- but it makes some good political points. The one that stuck with me after I put the book down was about “social distance.” In essence, Hayes argues that the daily world of the new “meritocratic” elites is so far removed from the daily world of regular people that they simply don’t understand each other. As a result, even well-meaning elites just get it wrong.
This seems like one of those cases. Well-meaning policy elites assume that programs come in two flavors -- onsite and online -- and that rules can be made accordingly. But they don’t. Most online courses are taken in the context of mixed programs, and most students who take online classes aren’t purely online students. That’s how it works. A rule change that would make perfect sense in the antiseptically clean world of people who have access to power makes no sense at all on the ground. Does a student who takes forty percent of his classes online suddenly have forty percent cheaper rent? (Hint: no.) Are colleges going to innovate if it means driving students away? (Hint: no.) Anyone on the ground would know that.
Innovation is sloppy and inefficient, especially in the early stages. Cracking down makes sense when the rules are clear. Doing both at the same time is a tall order in the best of times, even assuming that the rules got the details right. When they got them as wrong as this, it’s just a mess.
Go after the Pell runners, with my blessing. But don’t do it by boxing community colleges into the past. I refuse to die from an oversight.
Thursday, July 05, 2012
Friday Fragments
BREAKING: Community colleges are useful, and The New York Times is ON IT! It reduces them to vocational training centers, but it’s a start.
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The Atlantic has a slightly more thoughtful take on the survival of traditional campuses in the age of broadband. I’d amend as follows: the high end and the low end will be fine. The middle -- undistinguished, tuition-driven private colleges -- will have some ‘splainin’ to do.
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I've been referring to the California public higher ed death spiral for some time now. Now comes word that the City College of San Francisco -- a community college of 90,000 students -- is on the brink of having its accreditation revoked, effectively killing it by rendering its students ineligible for financial aid. A local report indicates that a couple of other California colleges -- Cuesta and the College of the Redwoods -- are also on the brink. Remarkably, the major issue at CCSF seems to be an administration that's spread entirely too thin.
if you click through to the actual report -- which calls itself confidential, so read very quietly -- you quickly notice a theme of administrative thinness and turnover combined with a culture of faculty largely ignoring the administration. That's dysfunctional in the best of times, but potentially fatal in the worst of them. I suspect some sort of last-minute deal will come through with an extension and double-secret probation, since 90,000 students is an astronomical number, but still. As bankers like to say, when the tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked.
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Flipboard, for the Kindle Fire, is incredibly useful. Why was I not notified of this? In a semi-related development, I’m putting Google on notice that I’ll consider an Android phone -- as opposed to an e-reader with goodies -- as soon as they actually make up their minds. They keep coming out with new versions, but all the phones run old ones. Now, with Jelly Bean, they’re finally acknowledging that apps stutter? Really?
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Dear EdD Students: The Next Great Project involves figuring out how to address the gender gap among students over age 25. Among 18 year olds, the gender gap in community college enrollments is tiny, but it increases quickly with age. By about 25, it’s overwhelming, and it just increases after that. Anyone who can figure out how to reach men over 25 will be hailed as a national hero. There’s a fantabulous dissertation waiting to be written. I’m just sayin’.
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Program Note: The gang will be doing the annual summer trip next week -- no meetings for me! -- so I’ll be on a blog break, too. The blog will return on Monday, July 16.
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The Atlantic has a slightly more thoughtful take on the survival of traditional campuses in the age of broadband. I’d amend as follows: the high end and the low end will be fine. The middle -- undistinguished, tuition-driven private colleges -- will have some ‘splainin’ to do.
--------
I've been referring to the California public higher ed death spiral for some time now. Now comes word that the City College of San Francisco -- a community college of 90,000 students -- is on the brink of having its accreditation revoked, effectively killing it by rendering its students ineligible for financial aid. A local report indicates that a couple of other California colleges -- Cuesta and the College of the Redwoods -- are also on the brink. Remarkably, the major issue at CCSF seems to be an administration that's spread entirely too thin.
if you click through to the actual report -- which calls itself confidential, so read very quietly -- you quickly notice a theme of administrative thinness and turnover combined with a culture of faculty largely ignoring the administration. That's dysfunctional in the best of times, but potentially fatal in the worst of them. I suspect some sort of last-minute deal will come through with an extension and double-secret probation, since 90,000 students is an astronomical number, but still. As bankers like to say, when the tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked.
--------
Flipboard, for the Kindle Fire, is incredibly useful. Why was I not notified of this? In a semi-related development, I’m putting Google on notice that I’ll consider an Android phone -- as opposed to an e-reader with goodies -- as soon as they actually make up their minds. They keep coming out with new versions, but all the phones run old ones. Now, with Jelly Bean, they’re finally acknowledging that apps stutter? Really?
--------
Dear EdD Students: The Next Great Project involves figuring out how to address the gender gap among students over age 25. Among 18 year olds, the gender gap in community college enrollments is tiny, but it increases quickly with age. By about 25, it’s overwhelming, and it just increases after that. Anyone who can figure out how to reach men over 25 will be hailed as a national hero. There’s a fantabulous dissertation waiting to be written. I’m just sayin’.
-------
Program Note: The gang will be doing the annual summer trip next week -- no meetings for me! -- so I’ll be on a blog break, too. The blog will return on Monday, July 16.
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
Summer Meetings
July being July, meetings take on a different tone than they have during the rest of the year.
The biggest change is the attendance. Very few faculty are around, obviously, but even staff and administrators concentrate their vacation weeks around this time. That makes perfect sense; the kids are out of school, there’s less going on at work (and therefore less of an overwhelming pile to confront when you return), and taking significant time in, say, November is pretty much out of the question. Even June is still pretty busy, since the fiscal year closes at the end of June and the first summer session is the busiest.
But for most of July and even early August, attendance at any given meeting is a bit of a crapshoot. Scheduling meetings to get critical mass in place requires a sort of hopscotch.
I’ve noticed that along with the looser dress code and the spottier attendance comes a more freewheeling approach to agendas. The meetings aren’t any shorter, but the agendas are, and the remaining time is filled with digressions that are alternately useful and, well, not. The conversations become more open-ended, which requires a different frame of mind.
The upside is that you can sometimes find the reasons behind the ideas. This is the time of year most likely to lead to the “aha!” moment when a side comment suddenly casts a previous position in a new light. When the discussion doesn’t have to move as promptly from item B to item C, there’s time to ask the “why are we doing this anyway?” questions. There’s real value in that, even if only about half the people who could benefit from it are actually in the room.
It’s also the time of the year when I can finally read all those reports. Good God, the reports. People who haven’t done administrative roles in the era of electronic communication don’t appreciate the sheer volume of reading that has to be done. It’s a very different kind of reading than I did in grad school, or when prepping to teach a class. (For one thing, the acronym count is a lot higher.) In olden times, firing off multiple copies of long, detailed reports required effort and photocopying expense, which at least motivated some level of selectivity. But with email attachments, anyone can send infinite prose to everyone.
Plowing through the attachments is a very specific kind of reading. I still haven’t mastered reading long documents on screens, so I wind up printing out most of them -- go ahead and laugh, Gen Y -- and reading first for action items and financial impact. (In grad school, the question was “what does this work assume?” When teaching, it was either “how can I teach this?” or “what grade should this get?” Now it’s “and you want me to do...what?”) The trick is in doing that without succumbing to a corrosive cynicism.
This kind of reading also has to be interruptible. Even in July, the idea of having a couple of uninterrupted hours to plow through an 80 page report is just otherworldly. When I moved into administration, I had to learn to be interruptible without getting overly crabby or forgetting what I was doing. (It’s still a work in progress...) In July, the uninterrupted chunks are longer, but still finite. So now that 80 page report gets read in three sittings instead of six, which is something.
Come late August, everyone will be back, and we’ll be back in “GET IT DONE NOW” mode. For the next six weeks or so, though, it’ll be nice to be able to take the occasional step back, let some alternatives to the usual suspects have some floor time, and make headway against the email attachments.
The biggest change is the attendance. Very few faculty are around, obviously, but even staff and administrators concentrate their vacation weeks around this time. That makes perfect sense; the kids are out of school, there’s less going on at work (and therefore less of an overwhelming pile to confront when you return), and taking significant time in, say, November is pretty much out of the question. Even June is still pretty busy, since the fiscal year closes at the end of June and the first summer session is the busiest.
But for most of July and even early August, attendance at any given meeting is a bit of a crapshoot. Scheduling meetings to get critical mass in place requires a sort of hopscotch.
I’ve noticed that along with the looser dress code and the spottier attendance comes a more freewheeling approach to agendas. The meetings aren’t any shorter, but the agendas are, and the remaining time is filled with digressions that are alternately useful and, well, not. The conversations become more open-ended, which requires a different frame of mind.
The upside is that you can sometimes find the reasons behind the ideas. This is the time of year most likely to lead to the “aha!” moment when a side comment suddenly casts a previous position in a new light. When the discussion doesn’t have to move as promptly from item B to item C, there’s time to ask the “why are we doing this anyway?” questions. There’s real value in that, even if only about half the people who could benefit from it are actually in the room.
It’s also the time of the year when I can finally read all those reports. Good God, the reports. People who haven’t done administrative roles in the era of electronic communication don’t appreciate the sheer volume of reading that has to be done. It’s a very different kind of reading than I did in grad school, or when prepping to teach a class. (For one thing, the acronym count is a lot higher.) In olden times, firing off multiple copies of long, detailed reports required effort and photocopying expense, which at least motivated some level of selectivity. But with email attachments, anyone can send infinite prose to everyone.
Plowing through the attachments is a very specific kind of reading. I still haven’t mastered reading long documents on screens, so I wind up printing out most of them -- go ahead and laugh, Gen Y -- and reading first for action items and financial impact. (In grad school, the question was “what does this work assume?” When teaching, it was either “how can I teach this?” or “what grade should this get?” Now it’s “and you want me to do...what?”) The trick is in doing that without succumbing to a corrosive cynicism.
This kind of reading also has to be interruptible. Even in July, the idea of having a couple of uninterrupted hours to plow through an 80 page report is just otherworldly. When I moved into administration, I had to learn to be interruptible without getting overly crabby or forgetting what I was doing. (It’s still a work in progress...) In July, the uninterrupted chunks are longer, but still finite. So now that 80 page report gets read in three sittings instead of six, which is something.
Come late August, everyone will be back, and we’ll be back in “GET IT DONE NOW” mode. For the next six weeks or so, though, it’ll be nice to be able to take the occasional step back, let some alternatives to the usual suspects have some floor time, and make headway against the email attachments.
Monday, July 02, 2012
Forgotten Regions
Last week I had a passing conversation with a counterpart from another, more rural, part of my state. She mentioned that the big political issue on her campus is trying to get some sort of mobile broadband coverage on campus. None of the big four telecoms -- soon to become three, I’m guessing -- want to be bothered, since the population density just isn’t there, and the area isn’t terribly affluent. The students and faculty are increasingly upset, since mobile devices are all the rage now, but mobile devices without internet access are basically paperweights.
It was the first I had heard of it, even though I’m also in a relatively forgotten section of my state. Mine is just a little bit less forgotten, apparently.
It’s a familiar feeling. Community colleges struggle with this in the higher ed world. Jeff Selingo’s piece last week tracing the tuition spiral in higher education to luxurious facilities, for example, had nothing to do with community colleges, though the distinction wasn’t made. To the extent that community college tuition increases in response to cuts in state aid are lumped in with private university tuition increases to pay for climbing walls, we all get a little bit dumber.
In my own state, a recent initiative reflecting tensions in the 800 pound gorilla that dominates state politics has led to all manner of angst out here in the provinces. That sort of thing happens frequently enough that people out here just roll our eyes. It even happens in national elections. If you’re in a swing state, you’ll see plenty of attention; if you’re in a state everyone agrees is either dark red or dark blue, you almost wouldn’t know there’s an election going on.
Just yesterday, IHE noted that a judge has blocked implementation of the new “gainful employment” regulations for vocational programs. (I had fun imagining the headline in The Onion: “Gainful Employment Unnecessary, Rules Judge With Lifetime Job.”) From the way the article is written, you’d think the ruling only affected for-profit colleges It doesn’t; the gainful employment regs applied as well to vocationally-oriented certificates and degrees at community colleges. That’s actually a big deal for us, since it required a level of data-gathering that we had never done before, and didn’t supply any funding with which to do it. (It also promised data of remarkably little relevance. The majority of our students are on “full Pell,” meaning that they’re entirely grant-funded. They don’t take out student loans. Therefore, the median debt is zero. What that reveals about the content or value of the programs, I’m at a loss to say.) Worse, many students accumulate certificates on the way to degrees, often not even bothering to apply for the certificates until they learn, at graduation, that they’ve picked them up. That makes gibberish out of completion rates. Outside of community college administrators, though, that was largely unknown, and to the extent that it was known, it was poorly understood. We dodged a bullet on a technicality. I’ll take it, of course -- I don’t have a habit of questioning reprieves, whether for Obamacare or for implementing asinine regs -- but it still doesn’t inspire confidence.
In a more perfect world, the blind spots would rotate, and every dog would have its day. (I know, I know, those metaphors don’t go together. Just roll with it.) The whole idea behind pluralism is that you might lose this round, but you’ll get another shot, so just stay in the game.
But when you’re in a spot that gets overlooked over and over again, that perspective gets a little hard to swallow. We in forgotten regions sometimes get a little tired of being forgotten. If Richard Florida is right and the world is getting spikier, those of us in the shadows of the spikes had better get used to it. Bleah..
Program note: I’ll be doing the 4th with the family, so no post tomorrow. Happy Fourth of July!
It was the first I had heard of it, even though I’m also in a relatively forgotten section of my state. Mine is just a little bit less forgotten, apparently.
It’s a familiar feeling. Community colleges struggle with this in the higher ed world. Jeff Selingo’s piece last week tracing the tuition spiral in higher education to luxurious facilities, for example, had nothing to do with community colleges, though the distinction wasn’t made. To the extent that community college tuition increases in response to cuts in state aid are lumped in with private university tuition increases to pay for climbing walls, we all get a little bit dumber.
In my own state, a recent initiative reflecting tensions in the 800 pound gorilla that dominates state politics has led to all manner of angst out here in the provinces. That sort of thing happens frequently enough that people out here just roll our eyes. It even happens in national elections. If you’re in a swing state, you’ll see plenty of attention; if you’re in a state everyone agrees is either dark red or dark blue, you almost wouldn’t know there’s an election going on.
Just yesterday, IHE noted that a judge has blocked implementation of the new “gainful employment” regulations for vocational programs. (I had fun imagining the headline in The Onion: “Gainful Employment Unnecessary, Rules Judge With Lifetime Job.”) From the way the article is written, you’d think the ruling only affected for-profit colleges It doesn’t; the gainful employment regs applied as well to vocationally-oriented certificates and degrees at community colleges. That’s actually a big deal for us, since it required a level of data-gathering that we had never done before, and didn’t supply any funding with which to do it. (It also promised data of remarkably little relevance. The majority of our students are on “full Pell,” meaning that they’re entirely grant-funded. They don’t take out student loans. Therefore, the median debt is zero. What that reveals about the content or value of the programs, I’m at a loss to say.) Worse, many students accumulate certificates on the way to degrees, often not even bothering to apply for the certificates until they learn, at graduation, that they’ve picked them up. That makes gibberish out of completion rates. Outside of community college administrators, though, that was largely unknown, and to the extent that it was known, it was poorly understood. We dodged a bullet on a technicality. I’ll take it, of course -- I don’t have a habit of questioning reprieves, whether for Obamacare or for implementing asinine regs -- but it still doesn’t inspire confidence.
In a more perfect world, the blind spots would rotate, and every dog would have its day. (I know, I know, those metaphors don’t go together. Just roll with it.) The whole idea behind pluralism is that you might lose this round, but you’ll get another shot, so just stay in the game.
But when you’re in a spot that gets overlooked over and over again, that perspective gets a little hard to swallow. We in forgotten regions sometimes get a little tired of being forgotten. If Richard Florida is right and the world is getting spikier, those of us in the shadows of the spikes had better get used to it. Bleah..
Program note: I’ll be doing the 4th with the family, so no post tomorrow. Happy Fourth of July!
Sunday, July 01, 2012
Ask the Administrator: Is a Directorship a Dead End?
A new correspondent writes:
I’ll start by acknowledging that context matters -- which is to say, any given college may or may not fit industry norms. And kudos on being willing to admit when your interests have shitfted; that isn’t always easy, especially when in a setting where nobody else’s have.
It sounds like you’re in a pretty good spot, actually. For many of us, making the jump from full-time faculty into administration involved choosing to work without a safety net. You mention having the option of returning to teaching any time you want to, which is a great and rare luxury. That takes a lot of the downside risk out of trying.
“Director” positions don’t have to be dead ends. They’re typically one step “below” an associate dean or a dean -- on my campus, we don’t have associate deans -- and they usually have narrower scopes of control. (For example, an admissions director might report to a dean of students or a vice president for student affairs.)
In your case, since you’re coming from the faculty side but your ambitions are on the student affairs side, you’ll have to work to overcome suspicions that you’re “settling,” or that you were moved as an alternative to being fired. (It’s been known to happen.) Accepting and working well at a role like “director of transfer” could give you that credibility, as well as the direct experience that could give you a more informed perspective when you do start moving up the ladder, which may well involve changing institutions. Although your direct work will be mostly with the more academic side of student affairs, you’ll be rubbing shoulders with folks in admissions, financial aid, and the like. That kind of exposure is very difficult to get on a sustained basis from the academic side of the college. Take advantage of it; you’ll need it to be effective in a deanship later.
After all, if it turns out to be a mistake, you can always move back. That’s a real plus.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Is this a workable plan, or is she setting herself up to be marooned?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Vitals > Ph.D., English/literature; associate professor at community college; eight months from tenure; 45 years-old Past careers > various corporate and government experience (16 years), much of it as a manager or department director. I've served as an interim administrator in a writing program. Current work > full-time teaching, coordinator of academic advising, coordinator of special projects (advising, student services programming). "Director of Academic Advising" is the job title that would truly reflect the work I do as a fac coordinator, an admin position that has been on hold due to budget/dept re-org for two years. Career goals > assistant dean (student affairs/services) in three+ years; I would like to end career as a dean or vice president -- at this time, remaining in the community college system is appealing. Personal > moving to NYC in three or so years, need to be marketable. I've sent out a few apps to dip my toe in, haven't garnered any interviews for student services/affairs jobs. I could also stay here and commute by train, but a job in NYC metro area/northern NJ is a saner option. Situation/THE BIG QUESTION > anticipate no openings for at least 10+ years at the assistant dean level at current CC (everyone is about my age and people tend to stay forever and ever). I've been offered the position of director of transfer services -- I like the work of the position and am (I think) prepared to take it on. But, I don't know if a director position is a "step down" from the direction I want to move OR if it's a first and good step toward my goals. I'm not worried about a prestigious job title, I want to make a smart move in looking to be on the market in several years. I know 45 isn't "old," or so I'm told, but I'm terrified of making a mistake that derails my plans/mobility. Etc > salary would work out, though I'll need to teach one course a semester. I can return to current faculty position at any time. I worked 8am-5pm for almost two decades prior to college, I do worry about losing my (relative) freedom but usually put in 70 hours+ with grading; I actually find the life of a faculty member lonely and often miss the daily office environ. But still . . . Misc Rambling > I always thought I'd be an academic dean (and I probably would be within two years at my current place, I'm an "heir apparent") and it's been tough to admit that my passions now lie elsewhere. I thought I'd be delirious with joy when I accomplished faculty promo, tenure, and had an academic dean job on the horizon . . . ah, the ironies of life!
I’ll start by acknowledging that context matters -- which is to say, any given college may or may not fit industry norms. And kudos on being willing to admit when your interests have shitfted; that isn’t always easy, especially when in a setting where nobody else’s have.
It sounds like you’re in a pretty good spot, actually. For many of us, making the jump from full-time faculty into administration involved choosing to work without a safety net. You mention having the option of returning to teaching any time you want to, which is a great and rare luxury. That takes a lot of the downside risk out of trying.
“Director” positions don’t have to be dead ends. They’re typically one step “below” an associate dean or a dean -- on my campus, we don’t have associate deans -- and they usually have narrower scopes of control. (For example, an admissions director might report to a dean of students or a vice president for student affairs.)
In your case, since you’re coming from the faculty side but your ambitions are on the student affairs side, you’ll have to work to overcome suspicions that you’re “settling,” or that you were moved as an alternative to being fired. (It’s been known to happen.) Accepting and working well at a role like “director of transfer” could give you that credibility, as well as the direct experience that could give you a more informed perspective when you do start moving up the ladder, which may well involve changing institutions. Although your direct work will be mostly with the more academic side of student affairs, you’ll be rubbing shoulders with folks in admissions, financial aid, and the like. That kind of exposure is very difficult to get on a sustained basis from the academic side of the college. Take advantage of it; you’ll need it to be effective in a deanship later.
After all, if it turns out to be a mistake, you can always move back. That’s a real plus.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Is this a workable plan, or is she setting herself up to be marooned?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
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