These People Have Tenure

This actually happened.

I got a call from a tenured professor who was upset that she was being charged for destroying her college-issued laptop. She destroyed it by running it over with her car.

She. ran. it. over. with. her. car.

In what context would this even happen? Under what circumstances, other than sheer malice, would you actually run over your laptop with your car? How would the laptop get under the wheels in the first place? Did the car drive itself into the dining room, hop up onto the table, and accelerate?

I’m baffled.

I’ve spend the last few weeks going over this in my mind, again and again.

Did the laptop have a death wish? Was it struck with the ‘Darwin’ virus, causing it to grow legs? Maybe the laptop lost its will to live after a particularly insipid email?

The tenured professor insists that it is grossly unfair that she be charged. After all, the laptop was relatively old.

!!!

She has tenure, and I don’t. And I’m supposed to manage her.

I’ll just avoid her in the parking lot.

The Results Are In! (And They're Terrible!)

The results of the 2005 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest are in! (There's a link to it in my list of links.)

Try not to read them while eating. Bad things can happen.

Vindication! Or, Music and Nursing Revisited...

IHE reported today that, as I've been arguing in the posts about music and nursing, some disciplines really do cost more than others for colleges to run. (The article is here.)

Sweet, sweet vindication.

Doesn't help, really, but I'll take what I can get...

Public Service Announcement: Advice to Job Candidates from the Dean

Having gone through many searches over the last few years, I’ve developed a list of hints for job candidates (both faculty and administrative). If they seem obvious, you’re in good shape. If they don’t, PLEASE print them out, keep them, use them.

Proofread! There is simply no excuse for typos, poor grammar, or geographical howlers in a cover letter. (At my old school, also in the Northeast, we had a candidate who declared in the second paragraph of his cover letter that he never applies to schools in the Northeast. That was the end of that.) I’ve seen far too many Ph.D.’s send letters that look like they were written by distracted high schoolers.

Respond quickly. We are sometimes up against external deadlines of our own, and I’ve seen otherwise-viable candidates get rejected simply because they missed the window. (Corrolary: never, never, never take seriously the announced deadline. Always beat it by a wide margin. For reasons I’ll never understand, I’ve seen far too many committees jump the gun and simply lose patience with applications that arrive at the last minute.)

Don’t cop an attitude at the interview. You may, in your heart of hearts, think that my college is beneath you. I don’t, and the professors here don’t, either. We will not be intimidated. If you think you’re doing us a favor, don’t do us any favors.

Check the college website! If you couldn’t be bothered to do a little preliminary scoping, I get the message that you aren’t serious about working here. Ask questions that show that you’ve done your homework.

Don’t trash your previous employer. Even if everything you say is true (and it may well be), we’ll wonder if it just reflects a hyper-critical or high-maintenance personality. Even if you’re escaping a sinking ship, make clear that the attraction to the new position consists of more than ‘it’s not the old position.’

Keep it mind that, appearances notwithstanding, it’s not all about you. I’ve had interviews with intelligent, accomplished, charming, winsome candidates I couldn’t hire. At the end of the day, it’s about what the institution needs. If that’s you, great. If not, it’s not usually because of anything you could control. (Exceptions: if you commit the gaffes above. The cover letter gaffe will prevent you from even getting to the interview stage.)

Good luck!

Thoughts That Ran Through My Mind Last Night at 3:00 A.M., as The Girl’s Crying Jag Entered its Third Hour

- She’ll never sleep again
- I’ll never sleep again
- I hope The Boy doesn’t come in again to calm her down
- I’ll look like hell tomorrow
- When I meet with the Vice President
- To discuss personnel matters
- That require serious professional judgment
- And I look hung over.
- Maybe coffee will help
- What the (#(@&(($# is she CRYING about?
- The Wife is judging me
- for not going in there, again
- it didn’t work the first three times
- What the ((#)_@(#& is she CRYING about?
- Is that The Boy kicking my back?
- Oh, crap.
- Is she getting new teeth?
- Would it help if I knew the answer to that?
- *()^^^*&*^%^, I thought we were done with this.
- Won’t she just run out of gas soon?
- Even grad school was better than this.

This morning, I look like Reverend Jim, from Taxi.

I have no bleeping idea how single parents do it.

In Praise of Long Commutes

Since I took this job a few years after we bought our house, we had to make a decision whether to move or to stay. The commute is 35-40 minutes without traffic (i.e. on the way in), and close to an hour with traffic (i.e. on the way home).

At the time, we decided to stay put for a little while, and see how it goes. Now, when The Wife and I engage in one of our periodic episodes of house lust (“did you see the big deck on that one?”), the houses we have in mind are close to our current neighborhood. While they might be bigger, newer, or on quieter streets, they’d carry the same length of commute as I have now. (Since she stays home with the kids, there’s no counterbalancing commute on her side.)

Years ago, I wouldn’t have guessed this. One of the (only) joys of graduate school was living within walking distance of campus, so on days when I taught, I could roll out of bed, make myself presentable, walk to class, teach, walk home, and have lunch. It was eco-friendly, easy, and good exercise. I may have been poor, but dammit, I was virtuous.
Bin Laden didn’t make any money off me!

Now, I’m an ecological nightmare: a single-driver commuter over a significant distance. Gravity’s pull on me is stronger than it once was, and I spend a disturbing amount of time listening to satellite radio.

Yet, when scoping out new places to live, I don’t shorten the drive. Why?

Part of it is the ‘decompression’ function of the drive. At work, I’m at work. At home, with two young kids and a wife in desperate need of relief from two young kids, I’m at a different kind of work. In the car, I’m just cruising along, listening to the weird music I like and not thinking very hard.

But there’s more to it than that.

Lots of people at my college live fairly far from work, driven mostly by the mismatch between a public sector pay scale and Northeastern housing costs. But most of them live far away in a different direction than I do. (I have no idea why.) So when I’m puttering around town, it’s very unusual that I see anybody I work with. And I’ve come to the realization that I kind of like that.

In fact, the few times that I have run into someone at the grocery store or while walking downtown, it felt like an invasion. WorkWorld isn’t supposed to invade HomeWorld.

Usually, when I’m puttering around town in the warm weather months, I’m dressed like a grad student, with young children in tow. I’m not looking very deanly. My guard is down, and my neighbors just treat me as the nice guy next door. I don’t have to wear my game face. I’m just a suburban dad. (That’s the reason for the web address of this blog. It was originally entitled “confessions of a suburban dad,” until I realized that that sounded like it would be about seducing the babysitter or some such.)

In the 90’s, I took a number of seminars in feminist theory. One of the ‘tropes’ (ah, memories…) of the time was breaking down the public/private distinction. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but I’ve come to treasure my own public/private distinction. I don’t want to have to be The Dean at the A&P. Too much work. I’m willing to be all kinds of professional at work, but at home, I’m too busy being a Dad to have to worry about that, too. The long commute affords the luxury of a kind of anonymity.

The next car will be a Prius (with satellite radio). My concession to ecology.

Summer Registration

I love the smell of registration in the morning…

Summer in-person registration is a different animal. The students (all too) frequently come with their parents, treating those of us working registration to a disturbing glimpse into family dynamics. (I once saw a mother slap her daughter on the head while the daughter was filling out her schedule. What are they thinking?) Some of the 18 year olds apparently have mistaken the college for a beach, judging by their clothes. Students let down their guard at summer registration, often using a disarming frankness in saying things like “I don’t want any hard classes,” “I’m usually too hung over for a morning class,” or “I’m just taking classes to stay on my parents’ health insurance.” (All true quotes, all said to my face.)

(Come to think of it, the last quote may be an argument against national health insurance. If we keep private health insurance too expensive for the young, unless they’re in school, they’ll go to school! Hmm…)

Faculty make a point of blowing off summer registration, but reserve the right to complain about any decisions made there. (My favorite, which wasn’t even a complaint: last Fall, one professor dropped by to thank me for stocking his classes that semester with good students. Apparently, I’m a game warden, and students are trout.)

This is when I get blamed for not being psychic. Why didn’t I know that we’d have a sudden groundswell of demand for Urdu, and why didn’t I know that Anthropology was suddenly going to flatline?

(A close variation on that is the emergency request to build a new lab. “All the bio sections are full. Can we add some?” Sure, I’ll just dip into the spare several million I keep around the office, draw up some blueprints, put it out to bid, clear the permits, break ground, process the change orders, hire the faculty, and have it all up and running in six weeks. No problem. Would you like the power of prophecy with that?)

It’s tricky, too, because we start making decisions about which sections to run and which to close. Since students stubbornly refuse to take the classes that would be most convenient for us, we have to trim our sails to what the market will bear. (Don’t try mixing metaphors like that at home.) Inevitably, that entails changing some faculty teaching schedules. Oh, the hue and cry! How could you possibly have me come in on Tuesdays? I never come in on Tuesdays! (Unspoken, but desired, answer: yeah, full-time jobs are like that.) You’re taking my course away from me! (what do you mean, your course?) Given how many of our classes are staffed by adjuncts, sometimes we have to base decisions on when the better adjuncts are likely to be available (and their schedules can get pretty idiosyncratic). That creates the odd dynamic of moving a full professor’s schedule around to make room for an adjunct. I can justify it on the grounds that it’s best for the students (and, for what we pay the adjuncts, we’re lucky if they show up at all), but the tenured types have long memories. I get accused of autocratic tendencies, since I didn’t run the decision by a committee first. (Of course, if I assembled a faculty committee in July, the ‘autocratic’ accusations would get even worse.)

This is also when the department chairs’ special pleading starts. Can we run this class with an enrollment of five? Sure, it’s small, but Professor Longdead is really looking forward to it, and his health isn’t what it used to be…

The advent of online teaching has complicated the picture, since relatively few faculty have tried it so far. If one of the regulars has to switch out, we frequently don’t have enough depth on the bench for a replacement. (And it’s tough to use adjuncts, since different schools use different web platforms – webCT, Blackboard, e-college, etc. -- and adjuncts can’t make it to training workshops.) Similarly with the half online, half in-class ‘hybrid’ courses – if someone with one of those classes gets switched out or disappears, staffing it at the last minute is a nightmare. It’s an entirely different preparation, even if the content is familiar.

Alas. If it were easy, anybody could do it…

Internal Candidates

IHE recently had a piece on "The Mystique of the Out of State Applicant." While it wasn't wrong, it missed some key points.

I’ve been involved with several searches recently – for both faculty and administrative positions – in which internal candidates went up against external candidates. It was awkward for all involved. The committee is faced with trying to be fair when there’s an obvious disparity of knowledge; simply put, we know the internal person better. We know when we have a winner, and when we don’t.

But that knowledge doesn’t solve the problem. Federal equal-employment and affirmative action guidelines force us to post openings and solicit applications from all qualified candidates, so even if we have a strongly positive impression of the favorite son, we still have to bring in all and sundry. No matter what we do, it’s awkward.

If the internal candidate is an obvious star, there’s a question of fairness to the outside candidates. How fair is it, really, to put people through the paces when the conclusion is effectively foregone? If the internal candidate is obviously weak, we face the awkwardness of the new person coming in with someone already here strongly resenting her. If the internal candidate is solid but not spectacular, there’s an element of both.

A strong argument against internal candidates, even strong ones, is that a pattern of hiring them can lead to false hope among the adjuncts (or lower-level administrators). In practice, some departments create quasi-positions for favorite adjuncts, hoping to put them first in line for a tenure-track opening. This system, which I call a farm team, strikes me as the worst of all possible worlds; it exploits the hell out of the favorite adjunct, creating false expectations, and it needlessly hamstrings future decisionmaking.

If we must deal with 'apprenticeships' at all, we do so in the context of graduate school. I don't buy the position that someone years out of graduate school still isn't ready for a real job. If that's true, we need to seriously revisit graduate education.

Another strong argument against internal candidates is the need to change a department’s culture. An adjunct who has been loyal to a stale pedagogy for many years may feel that a position is owed her, but the greater need of the department is for new blood. This isn’t as mercenary as it seems. If a baseball team has six first basemen and no shortstops, the last thing it needs is a seventh first baseman, even if he’s good. It isn’t only about the quality of the candidates. It's about the needs of the institution.

The argument for internal candidates, of course, is that you’re getting a known quantity. If someone has loyally served a program for many years, performing well and creating no drama, there’s value in that. It can be hard to tell from a day of interviewing whether someone from the outside will turn out to be a pain in the neck; with someone who has been around for years, you pretty much know.

It would be nice if we could establish some sort of ‘exception’ system for the stars, so we could at least spare innocent outside bystanders the effort of a Potemkin search. The problem, of course, is that every internal candidate would be an exception. It wouldn’t help.

Diversity is a real issue here, too (and not only in the legally approved sense of race or gender). If an entire department was hired within a few years of each other back in the 1970’s, and some of the loyal adjuncts have been hanging around since the 1980’s, I see an awfully strong diversity argument for bringing in some kid fresh out of grad school. Good luck getting that to hold up in court (they’d call it age discrimination), but it’s true. If nothing else, you’d bring in a new way of looking at things, a new set of contacts, and a new energy level. But we’re not allowed to look at that.

In the business world, this is generally less of an issue, since turnover is much more rapid and jobs much more easily found. In truth, abundance would make this issue go away. But that’s not where we are.

Any thoughts out there?

Viewer Mail

I’ve received a number of thoughtful comments and emails recently. They’re good enough that they deserve a full response, rather than just a passing comment.

In response to my piece about shooting the hostage, Dictyranger astutely encapsulated the cross-purposes at which my college (and many community colleges) is working. We want to be low-tuition and high quality, open to all, with every program available to every student, without differential pricing by program, without plunging students into debt, without either flooding the market with graduates or leaving gaping holes in the labor supply, and without unduly burdening the taxpayers. No wonder we’re struggling!

As she points out, some schools abandon the low-tuition principle, some abandon the ‘every program’ principle, and some simply ignore the labor market (Ph.D. programs, I’m looking at you…). Assuming that the taxpayers aren’t exactly itching to pony up more money, and assuming that fundraising among alumni continues to lag (an annoying truth at the two-year level), my personal choice would be to abandon the goal of ‘comprehensiveness.’ I’ve made this argument before about midtier four-year schools; it’s only fair that I apply it to my own. Being all things to all people just isn’t tenable; better that we focus on the main goals, even if that means letting some of the smaller ‘nice to have’ programs fade away. Of course, implementing that is the hard part. The last time my college eliminated a program was in the 1980’s; the last time before that was never.

In response to my piece about a draft and its impact on colleges, RTO Trainer corrected a mistaken assumption of mine about stop-loss orders. Apparently, they can’t be repeated. He also asserted that a draft would require a complete retooling of the DOD, and would therefore be untenable. I’m not so sure. Yes, it would be politically unpopular, and yes, it would flood the forces with untrained and unwilling recruits. But I haven’t yet seen the Bush administration deterred from a bad idea simply because it was impractical.

Jo(e) mentioned that the teenagers in his/her world are obsessed with the possibility of a draft. A friend of mine recently asked me how I would react if, when he’s old enough, The Boy were to be drafted under similar circumstances. I didn’t sleep much that night.

Jubal Harshaw suggested using market mechanisms to fix the military recruitment shortage – if you pay them, they will come. Maybe. That’s already being tried, and it isn’t working yet. (It also, at least implicitly, worsens the class gap in military service, and relies on tax increases.) I think Jubal is on the right track, but I’d suggest a different angle. Using market logic, the younger generation simply isn’t buying the war. Perhaps we should stop producing it.

(And maybe, just maybe, if the military manpower shortage is so bad, we could stop kicking career soldiers out just for being gay. Just a thought…)

In response to the piece about The Girl’s birthday party, Russian Violets and The Wife left lovely comments. Thanks to both.

Honesty compels me to admit that Cold Spring Shops posted quite a snark about my piece on scheduling meetings in the summer. You make the call.

As always, thoughtful comments and emails are highly welcome. One of my purposes in blogging is to air out what ideas I have, and to glean ideas from other people. Feedback makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Go, Canada!

I heard this morning that Canada’s Senate passed a national same-sex marriage bill, which the Prime Minister will sign today in Ottawa. (I think I got those details right.)

Go, Canada!

Regular readers know that I value my wife and kids tremendously. I literally can’t imagine life without them. The Wife, who outclasses me on every level, is lovely, sane, incredibly smart, and a fantastic mom. I’m lucky to have found her, and lucky to have been able to marry her.

To be deprived of the right to marry the love of your life would be devastating.

Incredibly, in America, the sentence above marks me as an elitist blue-state liberal.

It’s common sense.

Elitism has nothing to do with anything. My support for gay marriage isn’t elitist; it’s humble. I don’t have the right or the power or the moral standing to decide with whom others should take comfort when the world is cold. The gay couples I know, and there are many, are couples. They do things like shop at Home Depot and complain about property taxes and have mixed success growing tomatoes.

To the extent that America notices, and can be inspired by example, the Canadian law gives this straight American hope. The contrast with our new Supreme Court nominee is striking, and saddening. Tonight, I tip a Molson’s in honor of our neighbor to the North.

Another Dad Moment

We had the big family gathering first-birthday party for The Girl last weekend. It went really well – any parent can tell you that watching a one-year-old try to eat cake is sheer glory – but it was also a little sad. To make room for her new stuff, The Wife and I had to go through some of her old toys and decide which to keep, which to give away, and which to toss. The Girl will be our last, so we can’t just store everything in the attic, like we did with The Boy. It’s hard to say goodbye to stuffed animals, teething toys, and the twirlin’-whirlin’-garden.

She’s a remarkably happy, even-tempered baby. She smiles easily (showing all six teeth!), and loves watching The Boy run his crazed-mongoose laps around the house.

We brought down a few of The Boy’s old toys from the attic, since The Girl is the right age to enjoy them now. One of them was a little dumptruck with a standing handle (like a shopping cart), to use like a walker. He used to love careening into the kitchen cabinets with it. Now the handle comes up to his knees.

(The pediatrician told us that The Boy is on track to be about six-four, but admitted that it’s a conservative estimate. He’s astonishingly tall for his age. I hope he gets his mother’s coordination.)

They’re great kids. The Boy can try us to our last nerves and beyond, but it’s not malicious – he’s just incredibly energetic, inquisitive, and well-spoken. High-maintenance, heaven knows, but for the right reasons. And The Girl is a sweetie, with an endearing cackle when she does something she’s not supposed to.

We’re very lucky. It’s nice to be reminded of that from time to time.

Disaster Recovery, and Disaster Recovery

My cousin’s fiancée (who is 35) is in Iraq now; one of my brother’s oldest friends (who is 31) has been deployed, and is due into Iraq this week.

The American military is lowering its entrance standards, and its recruiting targets, and it’s still falling short of its recruitment goals. My cousin’s fiancée has already been nailed with a stop-loss order, and the rumors are swirling that it won’t be the last. Meanwhile, the London bombings showed us that al-Queda recruitment is doing quite well.

In the absence of a sudden outbreak of common sense, I can’t help but wonder if a draft is the next step. As a college administrator, the shape of a draft is a very real issue.

Until the early 1970’s, students enrolled in college (or graduate school) were given draft deferments until they graduated. Not surprisingly, as the Vietnam war dragged on, college enrollments skyrocketed. The student deferment was eliminated on the grounds that it was elitist (as opposed to the demographically-representative volunteer army?).

In the absence of a student deferment, and depending on the size of the draft, we could face the decimation of our college. If the student deferment were to return, we could double our tuition and still have to beat back applicants at the door. Since we’re an open-admissions school, we would be the deferment of last resort. (Honestly, given a national network of low-tuition, open-admissions colleges, the ‘elitism’ argument strikes me as a bit threadbare. But then, I’m hardly impartial.)

We’re utterly unequipped for either scenario. Students getting drafted out of classes would wreak havoc in any number of ways; people enrolling just to get deferments would wreak havoc in others. We’ve had limited experience recently with students’ Guard units getting called up mid-semester, but that’s less disruptive because the numbers are smaller, and students signed up for the Guard.

It’s hard to do long-term planning with a variable this large just hanging out there. I assume that a draft would be politically unpopular, and I assume too that the politicians know that. That said, I wouldn’t put anything past these people.

Sometimes I’m glad The Boy is four.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that we’re able to extricate ourselves from Iraq with peace, honor, and justice, and that Anna and Wes will come home safe. But hope isn’t a policy. On campus, we refer to disaster-recovery plans in the context of power outages, floods, and computer crashes; this kind of disaster, we can’t plan for.

Brinksmanship, or Shooting the Hostage

There’s a scene in the movie Speed in which cop Jeff Daniels tries to teach cop Keanu Reeves how to handle a hostage situation. Keanu Reeves suggests shooting the hostage to simplify the situation (“isolate a variable,” as they said in algebra class). Jeff Daniels, horrified, gives up.

In response to my rant about how the nursing program is bleeding us dry, some folks emailed to suggest taking the Nursing program (or some other high-cost, high-profile, much-loved program) hostage. Loudly proclaim that, in the absence of a serious influx of cash from the state or the county, the beloved program dies. Sort of like when high schools in the Midwest threaten first to eliminate football.

Leaving aside the ethical issue (I actually think there’s nothing unethical about asking for support for programs that serve the public, or even for outlining the consequences of a lack of support), my fear is that the county or state would choose simply to shoot the hostage.

Community colleges (and most of the lower-tier, non-flagship state colleges) are in a tricky position. We provide badly needed services in an era in which the concept of a ‘public good’ has almost vanished, but our very usefulness and accessibility hurt our reputation (and therefore our ability to raise funds from other sources). Groucho Marx’ line about never joining a club that would accept him as a member has obvious implications for the public image of an open-admissions school. Yet, if we were to try to ‘raise our academic profile’ by appealing to the snootier sorts, we’d lose our reason to exist.

For reasons known only to them, big philanthropists prefer to give to organizations that don’t need it. Success breeds success, and they like to be associated with ‘excellence.’ Since we’re resolutely open to all comers, we don’t have the cachet of exclusivity. Since we focus on teaching, we don’t have the cachet of huge research grants or Nobel prize winners on the faculty. (At UC Berkeley, I once saw a parking space near a science building with a sign saying “Nobel Prize Winners Only.” Puh-leeze.) Our relative lack of cachet drives the philanthropists to the flagship state universities or the Ivies, which don’t need it.

(Thorstein Veblen nailed this over 100 years ago, in The Theory of the Leisure Class. He argued that people show wealth and power through ‘honorific waste,’ or what he also called ‘conspicuous consumption.’ Horses are higher-status pets than dogs because horses are both useless and costly to maintain. Therefore, only the wealthy can afford them. Ties convey status because you can’t work with your hands while wearing a tie. To my mind, this is still the single best description of the appeal of SUV’s -- their excess is precisely their appeal. It also explains why universities with large philosophy departments are more prestigious than community colleges with large nursing or criminal justice programs.)

Since we can’t raise money with philanthropy, we’re left to raise money by raising tuition, (which has natural limits, esp. with our population) or by pleading poverty to the county and state. Having done that for several decades now, we’ve fallen victim to the ‘boy who cried wolf’ syndrome. At this point, even when the wolf is real, we get tuned out.

Sometimes we’ve taken the opposite tack, making an ‘economic development’ argument, but economic development funding is devilishly cyclical, and we’re tenure-based. We can’t afford to pay full freight during the down cycles.

If the public were more attuned to the value of community colleges, the hostage strategy might work. But it isn’t, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Faced with the choice between higher taxes and pulling a Keanu, I think the public would shoot the hostage.

Actual Dinner Table Conversation

The Wife, The Boy, and The Girl went to a park yesterday afternoon. They narrated the experience last night.

The Wife: [The Boy] just laughed and laughed when [Another Boy] got his diaper changed.

The Boy: (laughing) I saw his winkle! (More laughing) It was the size of a PEANUT!! (Roar of laughter)

It starts early...

Summertime, and the Scheduling is Tricky...

Summer is a funny time to be an administrator. Faculty love nothing more than dashing by in baseball caps and shorts to wish me a nice break, followed by a theatrical ‘oops!’. But I am above resentment, having successfully repressed the urge to tell them what to do with their sunscreen. Mostly.

The tricky part of summer work is trying to put meetings together. Since academia is allergic to the concept of a single manager doing anything on his own intiative (that would be running the college like a business! Horrors! What’s next – tying pay to performance?), everything requires consultation and collaboration. In practice, everything requires meetings.

The logistics of assembling meetings are challenging enough during the academic year, when everyone’s calendar is full already. In the summer, simply finding days when everyone is in the state at the same time is tough. I recently got the summer schedule for one of the more important committees I’m on, and the list of who can attend when isn’t the same twice. On a day-to-day level, staggered vacations create a weirdly tense ‘hurry up and wait’ atmosphere; there’s plenty to get done, heaven knows, but most of it is impossible until some key players get back from wherever they are.

It’s not all bad. The parking lot is much less crowded, certainly, and so is the cafeteria. And the dress code loosens up a bit, which is nice. Still, it’s frustrating to sit in a sporadically air-conditioned office, staring at a long to-do list, knowing that most of it can’t be done because people with tenure and higher salaries than mine are spending this month at the beach.

July and August are definitely the worst. June has a flurry of end-of-the-fiscal-year activity, and the faculty who do teach summer classes teach them in June. July and August are just slow.

It could be worse, certainly. July and August are just when the entire concept of ‘faculty governance’ really crashes and burns. They can’t govern when they're not here.

Tenure: The Nuclear Option

With the Supreme Court up for grabs, and the conservatives looking likely to win the trifecta with their (admittedly well-executed) Br’er Rabbit strategy on Alberto Gonzalez, I’ve been thinking about the likely fallout for academia.

Picture a tenure-based, unionized, public college. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that it has chronic budget issues. (Hard to imagine, I know, but bear with me.) Imagine that a non-trivial faction of its tenured faculty are low performing, highly-paid pains in the neck. (Again, an obvious counterfactual, but let’s go with it.) Imagine that there are lots of good young Ph.D.’s out there looking for work. (Inconceivable, yes, but let’s try.) Imagine that the faculty contract is expiring, and the round of negotiations for the next contract is starting.

The administration makes the union an offer it can’t accept. (“Mandatory calisthenics at 7:00 a.m. every day, no pay raise, and every office computer will play the alma mater when you log on.”) The union tells the administration to perform an anatomical impossibility. The administration shows good faith by compromising a little (“Okay, 7:30. Sheesh, there’s no pleasing you people!”). The union goes on strike.

Here’s the good part.

With a rock-solid right-wing Supreme Court, and with the PATCO precedent on its side, the administration hires “permanent replacements” for all striking faculty. Presto, change-o, budget problems solved, low performers purged, faculty renewed with new blood. The tenured faculty are suddenly unemployed, the young freeway flyers jump at the chance for full-time employment, and budgetary equilibrium has been restored. With Republican appointees throughout the judiciary, and a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the union stands about as much chance of winning as Harold Stassen.

This could actually happen (not the Stassen part).

Admittedly, it would take a pretty confident administration to try it, with a Board of Trustees willing to endure some pretty serious flak, but it could work. And if it works once, in just one place, the legal precedent would be set.

Your thoughts?...

A First Birthday Wish, for The Girl

May I always at least approximate the father you deserve.

Happy Birthday.

Thoughts on the Anti-Blogging Movement

A recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed brought a specifically academic voice to the nascent anti-blogging movement. The piece, a pseudonymously-written airing of a search committee’s dirty laundry, is a warning against the airing of a workplace’s dirty laundry.

So there’s that.

The AP had a lengthy story this morning making many of the same points, although not just in an academic context. The argument, such as it was, boiled down to “blogs can be used for bad things, so best to avoid them altogether.”

Following that logic, of course, job seekers (and holders) should also avoid use of the telephone, the word processor, email, and their own voice, since these could also be used for nefarious purposes. Indeed, best not to form any human attachments whatsoever, since, in the logic of the piece in the Chronicle, they might lead to non-peer-reviewed activities.

Leave aside the breathtaking lack of logic or history in the argument. From a legal perspective, we’re being told that free speech is a luxury available only to the tenured. Which, from a legal perspective, is a lie.

Public institutions, such as state universities, state colleges, and community colleges, are bound by the first and fourteenth amendments. For hiring committees in any of these settings to use extracurricular speech against anybody is a violation of federal law. Blogging is covered by freedom of the press. It’s as simple as that.

The anti-blogging argument is so absurd on its face that the only reasonable response is something close to psychoanalysis. Given that the argument has no merit whatsoever on its own terms, why is it so prevalent? What felt need does it meet?

I think the gist of the anti-blogging anxiety comes from the displacement of the gatekeepers. What makes blogging different from, say, publishing a pseudonymous airing of dirty laundry in the Chronicle is that the Chronicle has editors. It has people to say ‘no,’ people to make sure that the only speech that gets through is speech that doesn’t threaten anybody important. In that sense, the best analogy for bloggers might be the pamphleteers of the Revolutionary era. Just as King George wanted to shut down the seditious pamphleteers, the folks who control the means of (dissemination of) intellectual production want to shut down the seditious bloggers. After all, given free access to an audience, unfiltered, people might say objectionable things! We can’t have that! (Maybe I should change my nom de web from ‘Dean Dad’ to ‘Publius,’ or ‘Federal Farmer.’ Nah.)

Free speech is under enough assault from the Patriot Act as it is; we certainly don’t need to give the movement the intellectual cover of academia. In fact, if academia loses free speech, it loses its uniqueness and becomes simply a really low-paid P.R. firm for the existing order. No thanks.

I blog anonymously to protect the innocent, not out of guilt or shame. Around family, I brag about blogging a great deal. It has allowed me to develop (in bite-size chunks) a more nuanced sense of the academy and my own position in it, and has put me in touch with some extraordinary people. (I'd hire Bitch, Ph.D. in a minute, if I knew who she was...) If some nobody who doesn’t understand the Constitution objects to that, well, that’s really their problem.

Blog On!

More on Music, Nursing, and Why We're Going Broke

Thanks to everyone who commented on the last entry! Working in the trenches, I forget that from the outside, it might not be clear why (say) we’d lose so much on every nursing student.

It’s easiest to answer by a comparison. Compare, say, a section of Nursing 1 to a section of General (or “Intro to”) Psychology (one of the most popular courses we teach). Nursing 1 requires a student/teacher ratio of no more than 12:1 (and works better below that), a dedicated room, and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of capital equipment (which, luckily for us, can be amortized over each section we teach). So for 12 (or fewer) tuitions, we have to cover equipment overhead, room overhead (specialized labs can’t really be used for any other purpose, so they sit empty when a particular class isn’t meeting), and instructor salary. (Nursing is devilishly hard to adjunct out, for both labor-market and accreditation reasons, so we pay full fare.)

General Psychology, as we teach it, easily runs with a student/teacher ratio of 35:1. (Our flagship state university runs it at 300:1!) It can run in any general-purpose classroom, and requires no special equipment. It’s also easier to adjunct out. So we take in more revenue per section (more students means more tuition), and spend much less to do it (no specialized equipment, any room will do, instructors can be paid at adjunct rate). In the trade, we call these the ‘chalk and talk’ classes, and they help us pay the bills.

In a perfect world, we have enough demand for the ‘chalk and talk’ classes that the profit can cover the losses we incur in the specialized programs. The entire college is set up on the presumption that this will be true. When demand for the specialized programs is relatively modest, it works fairly well.

What’s killing us now is that demand for the specialized programs has skyrocketed, while demand for the ‘chalk and talk’ classes has plateaued, or even dropped a bit. To make matters worse, the pace of technological change in the specialized programs is accelerating, so we get less time to amortize the cost of equipment than we used to.

My colleagues in the specialized program areas like to point out that students in nursing (or engineering, or radiography, or photography) also take some ‘gen ed’ classes (meaning some ‘chalk and talk’ classics, like freshman composition). That’s true, but that was true in the past, as well. That’s part of the baseline. When student demand shifts towards the specialized majors, our overall costs go up.

Most community colleges in the U.S. were founded in the 1960’s. At that point, many of the expensive technological advances in specialized areas hadn’t happened yet. (Some fields didn’t even exist yet in anything resembling their current form, like IT.) The bulk of the teaching was of the chalk-and-talk variety, which is cheap. Since then, we’ve had to keep up with technological advances, but we’ve had to do it with declining public subsidies and low tuition. (All the headlines about skyrocketing tuition refer to the elite schools – community colleges are still quite cheap.) It’s getting harder.

Certainly, new revenue streams would help. To be fair, a few local hospitals do some limited cost-sharing with us, and it helps. But the scale of it is nowhere near enough to make up the difference.

(The hospitals argue, correctly, that they’re being squeezed by the managed care companies. What if we confiscated some of the managed care companies’ windfall profits, and poured that into the service-provider pipeline? Make sure the colleges can cover the cost of educating nurses, raise nurses’ pay, and put the money where it actually does some good? Hmm…)

I’ve written in the past about differential tuition for different majors. While the specialized programs do assess some ‘lab fees,’ the lab fees come nowhere near making up the difference in the cost to the college. In theory, we could decide to stop cross-subsidizing, and charge tuition for each program based on its costs. Psych would get cheaper, and Nursing much more expensive. While I’m broadly sympathetic to this, on the grounds that it would provide a more sustainable revenue stream to the colleges (independent of legislative whims), it’s hard to get around the fact that it would almost certainly reduce demand for the nursing program in a time when we have a shortage of nurses. It’s that pesky ‘mission’ again. If we ‘ran the college like a business,’ it might be an option. But we don’t, because that’s not our purpose. It’s about the music, man; we serve the public good, even at considerable (and rising) cost to ourselves. Keeping a program like Nursing artificially cheap is a way of providing access to upward mobility for students who struggle even to pay what tuition we do charge. (It also prevents an already bad nursing shortage from getting even worse, and thereby driving health care costs even higher.)

Raising nurses’ pay might provide the incentive to make the tuition premium seem worthwhile, but that’s not in our power. We control tuition; we don’t control the salaries that hospitals pay.

On the Bush tax cuts: a quick check of the historical record shows that the tax cuts were sold, initially, on the premise that it was immoral for the government to run a surplus (“it’s your money!”). Give Bush full credit on this one: he solved the ‘what to do with the surplus' issue very quickly. In fact, by the end of Clinton’s second term, economists were worrying about deflation as a consequence of a rapidly dwindling national debt. Suffice to say, we don’t worry about that anymore.

When the recession kicked in (which, in fairness, would have happened under President Gore, too), Bush switched rationales, suddenly becoming a regressive Keynesian. (He later pulled a similar bait-and-switch with the Iraq war. Remember WMD’s?) Bush pushed through tax cuts that take effect in 2007, 2008, and 2009 on the (sudden) argument that they would solve the recession of 2001.

Puh-leeze. The cuts, which really do skew towards the wealthy, have nothing to do with the state of the economy at any given time. They’re motivated by a belief that, in the words of Grover Norquist, the morally right thing to do is to ‘starve the beast.’ (He also had a charming line about ‘drowning it in the bathtub.’) If you disagree, show me the set of circumstances under which Bush would agree to raise taxes. During a boom, to stave off inflation? Nope – he argued for cuts during the Clinton boom. During a recession, to stimulate consumption on the lower end? Nope – he argued for cuts during the recession of 2001. If the cuts had anything to do with economic stimulation, Bush’s support for them would change when the economy did. His support for tax cuts is ideological, not pragmatic. That’s why he’s so willing to change his arguments. He’s a true believer, which negates the need for true facts.

But enough of that. Macroeconomic and political arguments can be found anywhere; my contribution, to the extent I make one, comes from a focus on community colleges specifically.

The long and the short of it is that without a serious change in the prevailing political winds, we won’t be able to count on public subsidies catching up to public needs. If the government kicked in the difference when demand for nursing went up, in recognition that nursing education is truly a public good, the entire issue for us would go away. But I don’t see that happening.

Sorry for such a long post – this topic really touches a nerve for me. If anyone out there has any ideas that might help, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE share them!

It Used To Be About the Music, Man...

A few years ago, I was hopelessly addicted to Behind the Music. Every episode was the same – rags-to-riches, followed by sin, fall, and redemption. Music, sex, and drugs; why it went off the air is beyond me. One of the clichés (and there were so many!) was that at some point in each episode, a disgruntled band member would be seen in archival footage, complaining to the lead singer that “It used to be about the music, man.” Upon achieving success, the band lost sight of its muse, indulged in most of the deadly sins, and lived like 70’s Elvis. Perfidy, conflict, and (worst of all!) weight gain ensued. Rehab, redemption, and comeback (often in Branson) by the end of the hour.

Although academia is a good bit less colorful (and less well funded!), there’s a similar dynamic here. Public colleges and universities were usually founded (or absorbed by the state) to serve some sort of larger public purpose. This is especially true of community colleges, where the mission is more focused than at the ‘comprehensive’ midtier colleges and universities. The particular purpose varied from college to college – many were started to train teachers, others focused on agriculture and technology, and others developed specialties in lower-pay professions, like training police officers or nurses. As public institutions, they had to keep it cheap in the beginning (hence all the cinderblock), and funding increases over the years have, predictably, fallen behind the pace of technological advance in the areas in which we’re supposed to train students.

Most of the community colleges in my state (and I know my state isn’t unique in this) are facing a conflict between the public purpose for which they were founded, and their own needs for institutional survival. It used to be about the music, man…

Nursing is the clearest example. There’s a terrible nursing shortage in this state (and across the country), and we’re the single largest producer of new nurses in our area. Providing a steady supply of well-trained nurses is a valuable public function; nurses are socially useful, they often come from the ranks of the marginally-employed, and the demand isn’t likely to fade away anytime soon. When we take a struggling single mom who works at Jiffy Lube and train her as a nurse, we improve her life, as well as the quality of life for everyone in our area. Everybody wins, except…

We lose a staggering amount of money on every nursing student we educate.

In flush times (such as they were), we could eat the loss. When the state was taking in more tax receipts than it knew what to do with, we had enough of a cushion that we could absorb the losses and still maintain the rest of the college tolerably well. Moreover, in flush times, demand for nursing programs is relatively low, since other (less strenuous) options for making ends meet are available.

Since Bush took office and the economy tanked, though, demand for the nursing program has skyrocketed, and our state funding has been dead flat for several years.

So we have a conflict: we can expand our nursing capacity to meet the expressed public need (and the hospitals are strongly in favor of that), or we can pay our bills.

In the early stages of the conflict, we go after the low-hanging fruit: adjunct-out the positions of liberal arts faculty when they retire, and pour the savings into the gaping maw of the nursing program. Cut out-of-state travel, make the office holiday party potluck, that sort of thing. This buys you a year, maybe two.

We’re past that. You can only adjunct-out so far before you begin to see a tailspin in quality (and a consequent jump in student attrition), and I suspect that, in many departments, we’ve taken that strategy just about as far as we can. Food and toner budgets just don’t add up to much, and there are certain costs of doing business that you just can’t skimp. (“Who needs snow removal? Abraham Lincoln used to walk to school…”)

(Annoyingly, health care also bites us on the other end: annual double-digit percentage increases in health insurance costs chew up the budget like Pac-Man run amok.)

We’ve hit the point where most of our academic decisions are predicated on profitability. If a new program looks likely to turn a profit, that will help us feed the beast. If not, well, sorry.

This, at a nonprofit. It used to be about the music, man…

Historically, demand for nursing programs (and health profession programs more broadly) has been cyclical. We’re a tenure-based institution. That means that if we expand to meet the need at the peak of the cycle, we’re left with costly, unused overhang when the cycle contracts. When we mention this to outside agencies (hospitals, politicians), they usually mutter something about ‘flexibility,’ then quickly change the subject.

So we muddle through, expanding the program more than we can afford but less than the hospitals want, turning some good students away, and hollowing out everything else to pay for it. Meanwhile, just to pay the bills, we raise tuition by more than our mission suggests is a good idea.

Redemption? I don’t know how. A Democratic administration would be nice, since we’d stop blowing money on tax cuts for the rich and wars of choice and start spending it on infrastructure and services, but I’m not holding my breath. A sudden outburst of philanthropy would help, but every time we cut the top marginal tax rate, we reduce the incentive for charitable giving by reducing the value of the tax deduction. (I have never, never, heard this point made in national political debate, but it’s mathematically irrefutable.) An economic boom would help, but at this point we’d probably just spend the revenues on another war.

Maybe we could take on corporate sponsorships, like baseball stadiums. The Coca-Cola Community College seems unlikely to work, though, since as soon as some tenured professor said something controversial somewhere, the sponsor would pull the plug.

I don’t know what the community college equivalent of Branson is, and I hope not to find out. It used to be about the music, man…

Uh, Thanks...

Conversation in the car last night, on the way back from a cousin's birthday party:

The Wife (rubbing her forehead): I have a terrible headache.

The Boy (chipper): I don't!

Sifting Unto Truth

The vacation was great, but I returned to the predictably impressive backlogs of email. The post-vacation email sift is always dispiriting. Some of it is easy to discard without reading: the usual spam, out-of-the-office notices, traffic alerts, etc. The dreary part is the urgent-but-not-important stuff that needs to be done Right Now, dated the middle of last week.

Every day brings some of that, but the post-vacation mail sort concentrates the process, bringing a deadening weight to something that’s usually tolerated via small doses.

Getting a week’s worth in one sitting is unnervingly clarifying. I hadn’t quite faced how much of the day-to-day part of the job consists of nudging people to do stuff that they don’t want to do (and that I know they don’t want to do). It’s particularly bad over the summer, when many department chairs decide that they’re really faculty for summer purposes.

The close variation on that is the dreaded carbon copy (remember carbons?). Email makes cc’ing people much too easy, and as a dean, I’m treated to a steady flurry of cc’s of heated email exchanges between verbal combatants (student-faculty, adjunct-chair, faculty-chair, etc.). Usually, they wait until the conflict has reached a certain level before one of the combatants starts to cc me; at that point, I get a copy of everything. My job is to read backwards, try to reconstruct just what the bleep they’re actually talking about (with the first volley of messages sucked into the ether), and then try to remember to take whatever action seemed appropriate (which is often either nothing at all, or a request for clarification, which generates yet more emails). It’s sort of an electronic palimpsest, except that it gets longer even as I read. Even more tedious is the thoughtful combatant who cc’d me, the VP, and the President. At that point, guessing whether it’s even appropriate to respond (and thereby, implicitly, to preempt my superiors) adds another level of complexity. As a result, occasionally, nobody responds. It’s the easy fly ball dropping between frozen outfielders. If you want a response, address your message accordingly.

One day at a time, it isn’t so bad; a week in a sitting ain’t for the fainthearted.

I’m constantly amazed at how many faculty haven’t mastered the idiom of email. While it’s true that email is remarkably fast to arrive, like speech, it’s also permanent, like memos. Too many don’t grasp the second point, and just fire away in email, with cc’s to all and sundry. As a student of human behavior, some of it is quite revealing, but as a manager, it’s just a pain. Note to young faculty out there: if you’re engaged in an email battle with anybody, remember that what you write can (and will) be quoted later.

I used to wait until the first day back in the office before trying to sift, but found that just sorting through the paperwork and dealing with drop-bys makes the sift take too long, and I wind up feeling overwhelmed and forgetting half of what I read. So I get a jump on the email from home, even at the cost of killing the vacation buzz, just so I won’t be blindsided the first day back. It’s not ideal, but I haven’t found the ideal yet.


Denial mechanisms are important. I hadn’t even realized that I used time-spacing as a way to not notice just how much of my work is dreary. Now I’m down one denial mechanism. Bummer.

Maybe if I wear sunscreen to the office the first day back, the smell will let me believe that I’m still on the sand. Hmm...

The Boy Waxes Philosophical

The Boy, towards the end of our sojourn:

"You know what I don't like about sleeping? It takes too long."

Parents of four-year-old boys out there, raise your droopy lids in solidarity!

Gone Fishin'

We're spending the last week of June exploring the limits of sunscreen. No purchase requisitions to sign, no internet to check, no nothin'.

Like the late-night guys do, I'll run a 'best of blog' for the week. Some of my faves that I posted before anyone knew I was here include:

Use It or Lose It

Adjunct Nation

Registration, Speed Limits, and Whining

Class Observations

Also, check out the links. Tiny Cat Pants is always worth reading, and the indefatigable Danigirl is an inspiration.

See ya in July!

The Dean's Interview

Today I’m interviewing a few candidates for faculty positions. They’ve already run the gauntlet within their respective departments, and the departments have identified them as their top choices.

I’ll assume that the departments have vetted them appropriately for content knowledge and ability to teach the relevant courses. My job is to explain the institutional realities of the college, and, in the words of my VP, to try to sniff any personal weirdness.

The Dean’s interview is a very different animal from the faculty search committee interview. When a candidate goes before a departmental search committee, s/he is probably one of six or seven to make it that far. If a candidate gets the call to meet the dean, s/he is probably one of two or three. When going before the department, the candidate is trying to stand out; when meeting the dean, the candidate is trying to fit in. Put differently, the search committee looks for something to like; I look for red flags.

At a community college, big red flags would include an inability to stop talking about one’s advisor or research (that screams “I won’t be happy here”); a focus on possibilities for release time (that screams “I want to teach as little as possible,” death at a teaching institution); a superior attitude (why does anyone – anyone – think this will ever work?); or a massive blind spot about the realities of students at an open-admissions college. (I’d actually favor someone who had taught at Midtier State over someone whose entire teaching experience was at Ivy U, just because I couldn’t be confident that the Ivy U teacher could handle underprepared students.)

Another way to look at it: the search committee looks for merit and/or quality, where the dean looks for the needs of the institution. Beyond a certain level of competence, additional brilliance in research just isn’t that important here. I look for people who actually want to be at a teaching institution, and who know what that means. If they’re settling, I’m not interested.

Back in my faculty days, I imagined that deans would be on the lookout for political viewpoints, sexual identity, etc. At least for me, those fall firmly under “who cares?”. I’m on the lookout for folks who will dodge academic advisement at registration time, who will whine constantly about the teaching load, who will pick up stakes and move within a year or two, or who just can’t play well with others.

Is that banal and corporate? I don’t think so; these criteria only come into play with the finalists, who have already (presumably) demonstrated intellectual liveliness and the ability to teach. One of my chairs reported that one of their interviewees, whom he described as “a really nice guy,” made several egregious errors of fact in his teaching demo. That was all we needed to kick him off the list.

My concern is that full-time lines are rare birds, and people who get them tend to keep them for 30 years or more. A bad hire is a lingering pain for a long, long time. A terrible one can be fired quickly enough, but in this climate, it’s not a given that we keep the position. Faculty work in close quarters with each other for years on end; a whiny prima donna, no matter how strong academically, just isn’t worth it. (We don’t have that many, but the ones we do have suck up far more than their share of the local oxygen.)

I don’t mind politics different from my own (at least, not in this context); I don’t care about sex lives or union activism or tattoos. But if a candidate can’t convince me that this would be a happy home, we’re on to the next candidate.

Etiquette

Yesterday, as I was walking back to my office, minding my own business, I was coming closer to an English professor talking to a student in the hallway. The professor is a lesbian in her 40’s, and the student was young and male. As I approached, unnoticed by either, he lifted his shirt up to his neck to show her an impressive sunburn.

What, exactly, is the etiquette in this situation?

“You’re barking up the wrong tree, son.”

“That’s appropriate.”

“Tummy rubs are against college policy.”

Or perhaps a simple slap upside the head?

Since I didn’t really have time to think about it, I just walked up beside her, said “I didn’t see that,” and walked on. She burst out laughing, and the student lowered his shirt, so I think it was in the ballpark. Still, they don’t teach you this in dean school.

Corrolary: if she had been straight, would such a light treatment have been appropriate?

Summer school brings its own set of joys…

Happy Birthday to Blog

It’s been a year. In the coming year: less talk, more rock. No, that doesn’t make sense. Maybe less despair, more angst. No, I’m too old for angst. Less ennui, more neurosis? Nah. Less irony, more rhyme? Less links, more thinks? (so much for rhyming) Less adjectives, more nouns?

Threatening Not to Quit

One of the recurring office-worker-bee fantasies in our culture is the flamboyant resignation. “Take this job and shove it!” American Beauty had the best fantasy-resignation ever, but we’ve all seen them (and dreamed about them) – the delicious moment of telling the idiot boss just what he can do with his reports, watching him squirm as you recount in salacious detail every little indignity you suffered at his wretched little hands...

I think academia is the only industry in which the fantasy works the other way. It’s the only industry in which the workers stick it to the boss by threatening not to quit.

Between seniority-based salaries, lifetime tenure, no retirement age, and budget squeezes, the only breathing room that opens up in academic budgets comes from retirements. Retirements are voluntary, since federal judges with lifetime appointments decreed it so, so all that managers can do is hope to get enough in a given year to make up this year’s shortfall.

Tenured faculty figured this out some time ago, so one of their favorite games is to float the possibility of retiring, just to see the look on the dean’s face. I’ve actually had conversations with senior faculty in which they’ve tried to use the carrot of their own retirement to negotiate something with me.

As a manager, this is supremely frustrating. I’d love to call the bluff – “there’s the door, you know how to use it” – but I can’t. If they decide they want to stay, they can, indefinitely. Some of them, I’m convinced, stay just out of spite. (This year I had one who actually admitted that he was waiting out the previous academic VP. The VP finally left, so he did, too.) So I do the best I can, which is to try to maintain a poker face while inwardly doing three math problems – how much lower would the replacement’s salary be, how likely am I to be able to hire a replacement at all (as opposed to still more adjuncts), and what’s the likelihood I’m being lied to? (Typical answers: 50k, 50/50, and 50/50.)

Someday, if I’m caught in just the right mood, I’ll respond with “you don’t have the guts.” That will probably be the day of my forced retirement...

Exhaustion

Being a parent means being more tired after a day off than before it.

Adjuncts in the Boonies, Revisited

A long-suffering adjunct at a rural community college dropped me a line to suggest a refinement to my fewer-adjuncts-in-rural-areas theory. At her school, apparently, there is a persistently high adjunct ratio, fed by a nearby Rural State U. The monocultural yield is bad enough that accreditors actually mentioned it in their last report, but it’s not bad enough yet for her college to actually recruit more full-timers to offset it.

My previous school had a version of that. It was literally one mile from Flagship State, so most of the liberal arts faculty hailed from Flagship State. There were enough different disciplines represented that it didn’t get too inbred, but it was noticeable. (I’m sure Flagship State would blanch at the suggestion that it was a ‘feeder,’ but it was.)

So, a possible refinement to the theory: colleges in rural areas that don’t have a major ‘feeder’ graduate university nearby will have fewer adjuncts.

Any thoughts?

Heading Inland

For Father’s Day Weekend, The Wife, The Boy, The Girl, and I are stuffing ourselves, the playpen, the high chair, the bottles, the formula, and all the young-child trappings into our compact car for a seven-hour (plus stops) drive (each way!) inland, to see my Dad.

Dad still lives in the county I grew up in. I call it The Land That Time Forgot; it’s one of those areas that peaked about 40 years ago, and just can’t break out of its decline. It will be the first time he will meet The Girl, so it’s a pretty important trip.

Fourteen hours roundtrip, through the boonies, with two young children, in a small car. What can possibly go wrong?...

Dad Vanity

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

Why? Why?

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

Dad Vanity strikes again.

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

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

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

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

Letters of Recommendation, Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Email Address

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

Thanks!

A System Nobody Would Design

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

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

!!!!!!

So I do, which occasions another denial.

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

By any objective standard, this is insane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peer Review, Small Audiences, and The Incredible Shrinking Guilds

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

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

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

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

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

Well, okay, but has it worked?

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

What would a Freakonomics or Moneyball of academia look like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freshman Seminars and the Tyranny of Transfer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping the Line Warm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the Land?

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Blog, Perchance to Meme...

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

The list:

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

My responses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tagging: Harvey, Danigirl, and timna.

From Gold Brick to Golden Parachute

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

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

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

Solidarity, brother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breathtaking. Absolutely breathtaking.