Wandering Eyes...

Nate Kreuter’s latest is well worth checking out.  It’s about the fear -- sometimes founded, sometimes not -- that people have when they look for other jobs that their current employer will hold it against them.

Academia has some pretty conflicted attitudes on this.  On one side, there’s a popular myth -- that may be true in some settings -- to the effect that “disloyalty” to an employer will be punished.  (This is one of the only areas in which graduate students have an advantage -- nobody takes umbrage when they go on the market.)  On the other side, many colleges and universities will only give pay raises as counteroffers.  If you buy the “loyalty” framework, then the only way to get ahead is to be disloyal, whether you mean it or you’re just looking to provoke a counteroffer.

Both strike me as dysfunctional.  

In my own unionized setting, there is no such thing as counteroffers for faculty positions.  Salaries are determined by a formula that’s spelled out in the contract.  While that can be frustrating at the point of recruitment, it does reduce the incentive to solicit offers just for the sake of soliciting offers.  If you receive a better offer, taking it or not is your call; I couldn’t respond if I wanted to.  We’ve lost some great people to better offers elsewhere, and that always hurts, but that’s the nature of the system.  That’s hardly universal, though.

I’ll say upfront that anyone who blames an adjunct for looking for full-time work is a jerk.  Wanting a living wage and health insurance is entirely rational, and to the extent that employers like the flexibility of adjunct faculty, they should realize that flexibility cuts two ways.  On the occasions that adjuncts in my areas have found full-time jobs elsewhere, I’ve just congratulated them and wished them well.  Piece rates are bad enough without asserting some kind of ownership.

But I really don’t see the ethical violation in anybody looking for other positions, either, even if they already have a full-time position.  Some people have survivor guilt about having full-time jobs in this market, but if you don’t like where you are, I don’t know who you’re helping by staying there.  It’s not a crime to want to be happy.

I’m more conflicted about the period after receiving an offer.  It’s fine to ask for a set time period to think the offer over, discuss it with a significant other, and so forth.  That’s standard, and it’s generally accepted to bargain a bit over the length of the waiting period if you’re waiting on another prospect to come in.  But saying “yes” to an offer and then backing out later -- especially if it’s significantly later -- can do real harm.  By that point, the college has turned away other applicants and has started making plans; leaving it in the lurch can leave a bitter taste.  

On the other hand, though, I’d be hard-pressed to explain why a change of heart shortly before starting is bad, but a change of heart shortly after starting is okay.  Viscerally, the two feel different, but I’d have trouble defending that perspective.

I like to think that service to the profession dictates that when someone gets a better offer, the polite thing to do is to take it as a compliment.  If someone else thinks that the person I hired at a middling salary is worth much more, well, I must have great taste in hiring.  

Wise and worldly readers, does it ever make sense to punish people just for looking?  As long as they aren’t neglecting their current job, I’m having a hard time seeing it.

Syllabus Bloat?

An alert reader sent me this piece by a professor complaining about syllabus bloat.  I had to smile in recognition.

In college, I don’t remember spending much time worrying about syllabi.  They’d typically be about a page, and would include the professor’s name, office number, office hours, the course title and number, sometimes a brief description of the topic of the course, a list of major (graded) assignments, some due dates, a list of required books, and maybe a late paper policy.  Many of them looked like they had been copied from copies from years before, and they may have.

In grad school, syllabi were even more bare-bones.  I remember one that was a half-page long, and students who had taken that professor before marveled that one existed at all.

Now, of course, syllabi are usually multiple pages, with much more mandated content.  Some of the new stuff is pretty unobjectionable -- email addresses are now standard, which seems reasonable to me -- but the new content often goes far beyond new versions of contact information.  If you were happy with the old version, the new version may seem cumbersome and unwieldy.  

Unfortunately for those of us who prefer brevity, there are actually good reasons for some of the expansion.  In other words, I don’t see the trend reversing unless and until we devise other ways to address the valid concerns that expanded syllabi address now.

As students have become more willing to challenge the grading judgments of professors -- and courts have become more willing to hear them -- it has become harder to fall back on the old “appeal to authority” as the answer to any challenge.  “Because I said so” doesn’t hold up in court. If a student comes forward with an allegation of some sort of irregularity in grading -- Susie got an extension but Johnny didn’t, say -- the first line of inquiry is the syllabus.  What rules did the professor set out at the beginning of the term?

From an administrative perspective, it’s usually pretty easy to defend anything that’s clearly stated, and not completely insane, on the syllabus.  If your syllabus says that you give four exams and count three, then that’s that.  If it says that late papers are penalized one letter grade per week, or that absences beyond the first three will result in set deductions, or that you drop the two lowest quizzes, then so be it.  When the ground rules are clearly stated and evenly applied, they’re easily defended from challenges.  

Things get trickier when the written terms are ambiguous or absent.  I can easily defend a determination that a student had more than three, or five, or eight absences.  I have a harder time defending a determination that her absences were “excessive,” if no other clarification is given.  Are two missed classes excessive?  Four?  What if your colleague in the same department allows five?  If a syllabus says that a professor “will” deduct points for lateness, that’s fine; if it says she “may” deduct points, I get nervous.  

The real nightmares are from rules improvised on the fly.  When a professor changes the rules of the course halfway through the semester, it’s much harder to defend, even if the changes are reasonable in themselves.  Sometimes that’s unavoidable, as when the original professor gets sick and someone else has to take over, but that tends to be the exception.  In practice, students tend not to contest deletions of assignments or extensions of deadlines, but they do contest additions.  

Of course, there’s a distinction between a syllabus for a given section and a generic syllabus for an entire course.  Ideally, the latter is devised by the entire department, and it gives room for customization.  The rule of thumb should be that the generic syllabus gives goals, and the specific syllabus gives means.  If the math department decides that fractions should be covered in the first developmental course, then the folks who teach the second one will assume that students have already had fractions.  If too many instructors at the first level decide to skip fractions, they’re setting up those students for failure.  Some level of agreement about content areas is necessary to make the sequence work.  (In my case, categories of what must be included in a syllabus are spelled out in the faculty union contract, but I know that’s not true everywhere.)

Where the boundary between generic and specific syllabi is can be a bit murky in practice, but the principle seems clear.  

Outcomes assessment adds another layer.  Again, here, the principle seems clear: students should know upfront what the goals of the course are.  How much specificity is needed to get the job done is a judgment call, but it’s hard to argue with the concept.  

I know it’s a pain to write them, but relatively detailed syllabi can save a world of time later.  If the policies about lateness, plagiarism, disruptive conduct, and the like are already spelled out, then backing them up is easy.  If the professor makes up policies on the fly, backing them up is a lot harder.  It may be inconvenient that we live in a world in which the old appeal to authority doesn’t work, but that ship has sailed.  Better to protect yourself upfront.

Friday Fragments

The kids (and TW) had a snow day earlier this week, so she took them sledding.  At one point, when she was standing on a sled, the sled went one way and she went another, with her knee sort of splitting the difference.

Yesterday was devoted to the doctor’s office and the pharmacy, and to avoiding stairs as much as possible.  

She’ll be okay -- it’s a bad sprain -- but there’s nothing like an abrupt loss of ability to shine a new light on a house’s layout.  As a shift of perspective, there’s value in it.  Of course, I say that as the one who isn’t in pain...

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The academic Twitterverse has been all about Moody’s “downgrade” of higher education.  There’s no shortage of snark -- this is the same Moody’s that applied AAA ratings to CDO’s that represented little more than nonsense on stilts -- but it’s hard to take issue with some of the underlying reasoning.  

As perverse as it may sound, though, the report actually gave me hope.  The report is a warning shot, and the danger of which we’re being warned is both real and severe.  In other words, it’s at least possible that the report will contribute to a badly-needed sense of urgency to make some fundamental changes.

There’s no shortage of clues that the current path is unsustainable.  Just this week, a small, tuition-driven private college in Minnesota -- the College of Visual Arts -- announced that it will close at the end of this semester.  The University of Phoenix is reducing campuses and staff.  Discount rates at many small privates are getting to the point where further tuition increases are simply futile.  The decades-long trend of adjunctification is nothing if not an effective admission that the underlying economic model is straining. Better to connect the dots now than to wait for the next round of casualties.

I just hope that in connecting those dots, we don’t forget to consider health care costs.  

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Okay, Netflix, you win.  I wrote off Netflix about six months ago, and really hadn’t missed it since.  But then it offered Freaks and Geeks on streaming.

TW and I were among the six or seven Americans who caught the show on its first run.  Most people who remember it at all -- the few, the proud -- remember it as the breakthrough moment for Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and James Franco.  But has there ever been a more fully realized young female character on television than Linda Cardellini’s Lindsay Weir?

Watching it now, the show holds up remarkably well.  I’m even more sympathetic to Lindsay’s Dad than I was the first time -- age has a way of sneaking up on you -- and the ambivalence of the characters still rings true.  Lindsay Weir is an utterly believable character: she’s exasperated by her parents, but she still loves them and doesn’t want to disappoint them.  She likes the bad boys, but not too bad, and she knows when they’re bluffing.  She’s both a quasi-burnout and a mathlete.  

After that show, I expected Linda Cardellini to be the breakout star.  She pops up in things from time to time, but she’s nowhere near the level of her male costars.  Watching the show now, I still think she should have been the breakout star.  

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Governor Patrick revealed his budget proposals for next year earlier this week.  I’ll set aside the higher education part for now and focus on the part I consider the single best idea to come from the state in years: a passenger rail line running from Springfield to Boston, via Worcester.

For folks who don’t know Massachusetts well, Springfield is about 90 miles due west of Boston, with Worcester in between.  They are the three largest cities in the state.  Right now, if you wanted to take a train from Springfield to Boston, you’d have to go down to New Haven, Connecticut, and switch.  That’s roughly the equivalent of flying from New York to Chicago via Atlanta.  It’s silly.

A direct line has all manner of virtues, not the least of which is avoiding gridlock on the Mass Pike into Boston.  (The last couple of times I’ve driven it, the last five miles took almost as long as the first 85.)  If they’re really smart, they’ll have it terminate someplace where you could catch the T.  (That’s how New Jersey Transit handles going into New York City; you can switch to almost anything in Penn Station.)  Add a stop at Logan, and something close to Fenway, and you have a winner.  

Based on what I saw in Jersey, too, a rail line should have highly salutary effects on the economies of the places it stops.  This is no small thing.

An economic development idea that benefits the entire state, gets cars off the road, and makes it easier to get around?  Yes, please.

Safety Nets

American Career Institutes, a for-profit higher ed chain that specialized in computer-based career-oriented majors, just closed abruptly.  It had campuses in Maryland and Massachusetts, including one in Springfield, which is HCC’s largest feeder city.  

The non-credit side of the college is taking a look at its offerings to see what it can provide to the students who were stranded.  If there’s a way to “teach out” a program so that they can walk away with something to show for their efforts, that could minimize the damage.

We provide a safety net when experiments fail.  Nobody else does that.  As such, we enable experiments to happen in the first place.  Only the public sector is capable of doing that reliably.

This is the glaring hole in American political discourse.  We talk about risk and safety as if they were somehow mutually exclusive.  We forget that safety can enable risk-taking.

I was reminded of that a few days ago, in a discussion with a Canadian colleague.  We have similar senses of humor, so we got to talking about The Kids In The Hall, SCTV, and national styles of humor.  (For my money, “Brain Candy” is a neglected classic of dark, dark, dark comedy.)  She offered the theory that Canada punches above its weight culturally because its social safety net -- health care most conspicuously -- makes it possible for people to take chances on creative careers.  As a result, they get Holly Cole, and we’re left with Adam Sandler.  

It’s not a perfect theory -- we aren’t exactly saddled with a shortage of actors -- but it does address something I’ve seen before.  I’ve known plenty of people who stick with jobs they don’t particularly like specifically for the benefits, so their spouses could try startups.  Having one spouse ensure that nothing catastrophic happened made it possible for the other one to go out on a limb.  No benefits, no risk-taking.

Yes, there’s such a thing as too much security.  I had to smile at the article earlier this week that showed that college students whose parents pay their entire way get lower grades than students who work at least part-time.  If things are just a little too pat, it can be easy to get distracted.  

But even that security is often illusory.  Life tenure, for example, is only as secure as the institution that offers it.  Pensions are only as secure as the states that guarantee them want them to be.  At some point, risk as a fact of life will assert itself.  It can’t not.

So yes, we’ll help the students stranded by the latest for-profit to fold.  It’s what we do.  It may not be maximally efficient in isolation, but it’s the kind of thing that makes real progress possible.  Sometimes it’s worth connecting those dots explicitly.

Turning In to the Skid

Growing up in western New York, I learned to drive on snow.  Since I didn’t come from money, I learned to drive small cars on snow.  

Small cars are relatively light, and the snow and ice around Rochester could be impressive.  A small car braking on black ice is pretty much a hockey puck.  So to survive, I had to learn the counterintuitive truth that Northern drivers learn early: when you start to skid, turn in the direction of the skid.  You get control back much more quickly that way.  If you refuse to acknowledge the skid, or fight it, you lose control completely and crash.  

Correcting for climate, I was reminded of that when reading the latest from San Jose State.

Apparently, San Jose State University has contracted with Udacity to run credit-bearing basic algebra classes -- both developmental and college-level -- at a cost to students of $150.  

Some folks are already manning the battle stations.  My favorite, from the vice president of the San Jose State faculty union chapter:


“My personal opinion is that it’s not by accident that this is being announced at a time when most faculty are not on campus, but I have no evidence for that,” said Preston Rudy, a sociology professor at San Jose State who serves as vice president of the chapter.
(emphasis added)


It has to be sinister.  It just has to!  What other explanation could there possibly be?

And that’s where the conversation should start.  What other explanation could there be?  What’s the appeal?  

Cathy Davidson claimed earlier this week that “if we (profs) can be replaced by a computer screen, we should be.”  Her point was that it’s no longer plausible to argue that face-to-face instruction is clearly the only possible way to convey information.  If the best instruction that a college can offer is a sage on a stage lecturing to 300 freshmen, whom that sage will then duck afterwards to get back to writing, then it’s hard to argue that a video presentation would be markedly worse.  If anything, it may be better; at least with a video, you can play back parts you missed the first time.  And the cost advantage is not to be ignored, particularly when tuition and student loan burdens are the highest they have ever been, even after inflation.

Davidson is gracious enough not to say so, but the dirty little secret we all know is that the massive lecture was only ever an economic expedient; it was never a particularly effective way to teach.  Replacing one economic expedient with another, more effective one hardly constitutes an outrage.  

The limits of the traditional approach are particularly clear when we look at student pass rates in developmental and lower-level classes.  Nationally, there’s nothing unusual about a 50 percent fail rate for a developmental math class.  Early MOOCs have had even worse attrition rates, but that’s hardly an apples-to-apples comparison; most enrollees in the first wave of MOOCs had nothing at stake.  Motivation matters.  San Jose already ran its “circuits and electronics” course as a blended MOOC, and found that pass rates were actually higher than in the traditional class.  Whether the same will be true on the “lower” end of the curriculum isn’t obvious, but it isn’t preposterous, either.  And if it turns out to be higher, I’d like to hear the argument against it.

And here’s where I remembered what it felt like doing my first donut on an icy hill in Mom’s Ford Escort in 1985.  

If you read the earlier paragraph carefully, you’ll notice the word “blended.”  Students in the blended class did better than students in the traditional class.  They also did better than students in pure MOOCs.  

To the extent that results matter -- as opposed to tradition, politics, Luddism, or technophilia -- it looks like we get the best results when we turn into the skid.  When faculty use MOOCs as resources, rather than attack them as threats, students thrive.  MOOCs could offer one way to ‘flip the classroom,’ to move exposition outside so the people inside could focus on understanding, applying, and questioning.  They can free up faculty to work with students on the more interesting (and idiosyncratic) process of helping students internalize knowledge, come to grips with it, and sometimes even attack it.  

In a sense, I’m suggesting using MOOCs in ways similar to the ways professors have long used books.  They can be wonderful outside-of-class-time resources for introducing new material.  (They can also be wonderful in-class resources for closely guided analysis.)  But unlike books, they come with real-time data analytics, so they can be refined as they go.  And they’re a hell of a lot cheaper for students, which is no small thing.

TechCrunch opined yesterday that San Jose State’s move “spells the end of higher education as we know it.”  I suspect that higher education will outlast TechCrunch.  But the teaching side of higher education will only thrive if it’s able to turn into the skid and use the new resources to its advantage.  This is not the time to jam the brakes.  If we do, we’ll crash, and be replaced -- rightly -- by Davidson’s screens.  This is the time to use some unexpected momentum to get back on the track we should have been on in the first place.  

There’s Planning, and There’s Planning

I read somewhere that the mark of an educated mind is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time.  If that’s true, then I’m feeling particularly educated of late.

In a discussion about planning for the next several years, I realized that I’m stuck believing two very different ideas.  

On the one side, I accept that good forward-looking plans are relatively concrete, with measurable goals and specific ways of getting there from here.  That’s what distinguishes them from daydreams.  In “strategic plans” as such, they’re usually written as “we will increase graduation rates by x percent by year y, by using the following interventions.”  The prose is ghastly, but the idea is to tie budgeting to some sort of conscious purpose in a deliberate way.  At that level, it’s hard to object.  As dreary as they are to read, plans like these can prevent good intentions from coming to grief on the shoals of unconscious incrementalism.  Tying strategic planning to budgeting offers the prospect of actually putting money where it needs to go.  This is no small thing.

On the other, though, I’m increasingly convinced that the real issue is less about improving this percentage or that one by a few points, and more about recognizing and coming to terms with much larger changes in higher education.  Given the reality of Baumol’s cost disease and increasing political friction around student debt, how should we revisit the ways we use various online resources?  What would a competency-based system look like, as opposed to a credit hour system?  How can we change the academic calendar to help students be more successful?  

The problem is that in practice, the two ways of thinking tend to conflict.  (They don’t have to definitionally, but they tend to in practice.)  It’s hard to specify in advance concrete, measurable outcomes to such speculative questions.  You can’t nail down the future like that.  But time and energy spent on one set of questions typically takes time and energy away from the other.

I’ve heard that some tech companies -- 3M and Google, famously, but I’m sure there are others -- set aside time within certain employees’ workweeks for working on speculative projects.  (I think that’s where Google Docs came from.)  I’d love to have some sort of venue on campus for something like that, but it would be easy for it to fall prey to hobbyhorses.  To work, the discussion would have to be both relatively constrained in terms of topics -- the first ground rule would be “no nostalgia” -- and relatively open and rigorous in terms of treatment.  In other words, no “brainstorming” in the traditional sense -- people would have to be able to raise objections, poke holes, and refine.  

I’m not quite sure how to translate something like that to a community college setting.

Wise and worldly readers, has anyone seen this done well in a campus setting?  I’d love to get responses in the comments, but anyone who’d rather reply privately can email me at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.  This seems like the right moment, but I’m having a hell of a time figuring out the mechanics.  Any wisdom born of experience would be welcome.
I’d hate for our plans to miss tectonic shifts because we were too focused on things we could define, and measure, in advance.

Personification

There’s a great scene in the film version of The Grapes of Wrath that I don’t remember in the book.  A farmer is facing down a man on a bulldozer; the man on the bulldozer has been hired by the bank to repossess the farm, because the farmer has defaulted on a loan.  

The farmer pulls a rifle and points it at the man on the bulldozer, threatening to kill him if he gets any closer.  The man on the bulldozer objects that he’s just doing his job, he needs the job, and it’s not his fault that the loan is due; if he farmer shoots him, there will just be someone else the next day.  Deflated, the farmer asks plaintively “well, who do I shoot?”

I was reminded of that scene last week.  In the comments to the post about administrators as inkblot tests, someone mentioned that on campus, administrators are often taken as personifications of larger forces.  Since it’s impossible to attack those larger forces, some people use the nearest administrator as a sort of stand-in.  You can’t attack the recession, but you can take a dig at your dean.  

For as long as I’ve been doing this, I’m still not entirely used to that.  

In my early days of administration, I used to sort of distance myself from my role.  It didn’t work; if anything, it felt like bad faith.  I had to learn quickly that certain comments that were entirely fine in my faculty role were not fine in a dean’s role.  At the end of the day, if you’re the one writing somebody’s evaluation, then you need to own that.  You can’t do an evaluation ironically.

(This isn’t unique to administration, of course.  Grad students teaching their first classes, especially if they’re young, sometimes make a similar mistake.  If you’re the one assigning the grade, then you’re the authority figure, whether you feel like an imposter or not.  At some point, you need to make peace with that if you’re going to do it well.  And you’ll find that some students will have issues with anyone they consider an authority figure, no matter what you do.)

Being taken as the personification of some larger abstraction can be disorienting.  Most people don’t think of themselves that way -- it would be weird if they did -- and they don’t make their choices as conscious representatives of abstractions.  The shock is particularly strong when moving directly from a faculty role, in which there’s so much more autonomy.  In graduate school and then on faculty, there’s a tremendous premium on fine-grained distinctions.  After many years of that, it’s hard not to be put off by reductionist tirades against “the adminisTRAtion.”  Administrations consist of many moving parts, each with its own imperatives, and a host of different personalities.  They aren’t the Borg.  But some people won’t make the distinction.

You’ll also find yourself blamed personally for decisions made (or allegedly made) by your predecessors.  The trick is in not getting defensive before you know what actually happened.  That can be tough when you’re under attack, but it comes with the job.

I’m posting this not in a spirit of whining, but in a spirit of warning.  New admins are often blindsided by the abrupt shift in the ways people act towards them.  Some people just need a villain to hold their story together.  Knowing that you’re the villain ex officio can help, even if you never completely get used to it.

Friday Fragments

The book is out, and shipping!  

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Fearless prediction time: The City College of San Francisco will get some sort of extension -- possibly presented as “probationary” -- on its deadline to show improvement or lose accreditation.  Given the size of the college, and the political impact of a loss of accreditation (which would almost certainly lead to closure), I just don’t see the hammer falling in March.

Unfortunately, it appears that many of the folks who need to agree to drastic changes are making that same calculation, and foot-dragging as a result.   

The saving grace, perversely enough, may be rapidly declining enrollments.  It’s one thing to argue with an accreditor; it’s quite another to argue with the public.  Here’s hoping that sane minds prevail on campus and they get their stuff together before the death spiral becomes unstoppable.

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I don’t know if the “flex degrees” that Wisconsin is rolling out will work, but they strike me as a promising start.  It appears that they’ll be focused more on competencies than on credits, which is a prerequisite to any meaningful progress.

I’m hopeful that this option, and others like it, become sufficiently popular that the Department of Education starts to get a little more willing to move on financial aid rules.  Right now, those are the greatest barriers to campus innovation.  Charge the Department of Ed with improving results, rather than preventing change, and we can get somewhere.  On, Wisconsin!

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Voice is data.  I don’t mind so much paying for monthly data use, but breaking out voice as its own separate item leaves a bad taste.  Why can’t it all just fall under data?  Verizon, I’m looking at youuu...

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This story about Pell grant restrictions struck me as inevitable.  Among the effects of reducing Pell grant eligibility are reduced enrollments by low-income people, increased reliance on loans (especially private ones that aren’t subject to federal limits), and increased time spent on working for pay, rather than studying.  

Historically, social mobility has been an antidote to the political effects of economic polarization.  When that mobility goes away, it’s harder to explain to a have-not why she shouldn’t resent the haves.  There was a time when conservatives understood this.  Nelson Rockefeller didn’t pour money into SUNY because he was a closet socialist; he poured money into SUNY to offer people who might otherwise have been threatening a stake in the system.

And yes, degrees do still help with mobility.  I noted with gratitude the latest study showing that while a degree isn’t any sort of guarantee, in the aggregate, you’re much better off economically having one than not having one.  That’s why recessions increase enrollments in community colleges.  (That, and the lower opportunity cost of enrolling when other opportunities are scarce.)  Folks on the ground know that education matters.

I’d rather have students work fewer hours for pay, have time to study, and graduate with less debt.  I just don’t see what’s so radical or threatening about that.

Lab Groups

In grad school, I openly envied my colleagues in the sciences.  It wasn’t the slightly higher stipends or the chance to play with cool toys, as real as both of those were.  It was the opportunity to work on a regular basis with a lab group.

In most of the humanities and social sciences, scholarly work is mostly conducted alone.  I remember being unpleasantly surprised at just how isolating graduate school could be.  Some of us routinely talked shop with each other, of course, but a combination of shared ignorance and misplaced competitiveness put limits on the usefulness of that.  

In contrast, the folks in the sciences had work groups handed to them, and they had to be able to work with each other.  When I visited my friend the chemical engineer out in California, I was immediately struck at how great it was that he and his labmates could take group coffee breaks in the middle of the afternoon.  (Later, a mathematician colleague told me that math is the process of turning coffee into theorems.  It sounded right to me.)

As an outsider, it would be easy to idealize the lab group.  As with any group of disparate, intelligent people, it can fall prey to any number of dysfunctions.  Someone is distracted, someone is a prima donna, someone gets ditzy at key moments, and egos are never entirely out of the picture; I get that.  But compared to the war of each against all that my own field took as normal, it seemed inviting.

At some level, I still carry the lab group ideal as my model of what a college could be.  At its best, it’s a group of intelligent people with different strengths working together on a shared project.  The project is experimental -- by definition -- and at the end of the day, the results of the project speak more loudly than anyone’s opinion.  Membership in the group can evolve as the needs of the task change.  Over time, the lab group makes real progress in solving the issue it has set for itself.  And all the while, the members of the group have each other to lean on.

It’s not a perfect model, but there’s a lot to be said for it.  The trick is in getting there.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a college (or company, for that matter) do a good job of moving to a “lab group” culture?  Is there anything in particular to be sure to avoid?

Burying the Lede

(Hat-tip to Sarah Pavlus for highlighting this one.)

Sometimes I remember that we academics read differently than most people.  

Bloomberg news yesterday ran a story about the University of Phoenix, in which it reported drops in quarterly earnings and share price as a function of a drop in enrollment.  The headline reflected net income and enrollment.  But the real news was buried in the fifth paragraph:

The company is also expecting to receive a draft report from its accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, said Gregory Cappelli, Apollo’s Chief Executive Officer, during a conference call with analysts and investors. He said the company believes it will be placed on notice, which would require follow-up reports and action.

Whoa.  In my world, that’s stop-the-presses news.  (Okay, I’m old.  What’s the internet version of stop the presses?)  The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association is planning to place the country’s largest for-profit college on notice?  And it’s likely enough that the CEO was comfortable revealing it on a conference call with investors?

That’s huge.  That’s way more interesting than this week’s share price.

Stock prices fluctuate; it’s what they do.  But a potential loss of accreditation -- which would come after “notice,” admittedly, but that’s what the “notice” is about -- would mean a loss of eligibility for Federal financial aid.  That’s the lifeblood of Phoenix’ operation.  It literally would not survive without students having access to that money.

The rest of the story returns to the stock price, which, to my mind, is a grand exercise in point-missing.  If Phoenix were to lose its accreditation, this week’s stock price would quickly become a memory.  

The story doesn’t give a reason for North Central’s prospective notice; we’ll have to wait for the folks who understand higher ed to get in there and find that out.  

In the for-profit world, the demarcation between the regionally accredited and the rest is effectively the demarcation between major and minor league.  The few who have attained regional accreditation aren’t shy about it; they treat it as validation, which, in a way, it is.  And it’s a hunting license of considerable import.  (That was why certain for-profits spent much of the early 2000’s buying the accreditations of failing nonprofits, essentially treating them as taxi medallions.  I’m told that the accreditors eventually clamped down on that, which is all to the good.)

My hunch is that the for-profits have peaked.  Their model brought certain efficiencies -- some thoughtful, some ruthless -- but ultimately couldn’t get past the same issues that plague traditional higher education.  Convenience and occupational relevance are valid selling points, but they’re relatively easily copied.  And it’s hard to compete on price when one sector is both taxed and unsubsidized while the other is subsidized and untaxed.  Now that many publics offer online programs with vocational relevance, and at much lower cost to students, I’d expect to see some panic in the for-profits.  And since for-profits have neither endowments nor appropriations to cushion the blow from lost tuition, the fall could be hard.

There’s much more to this story, and I look forward to seeing it unfold.  I just hope that future reports don’t bury the lede quite so egregiously.

Admins as Inkblot Tests

Over the break, I had a welcome chance to catch up on my reading.  Through the miracle of Twitter -- which I think of as an annotated bibliography that self-updates in real time -- I ran across these two articles, and couldn’t help noticing how they crash into each other.

The first, by Keith Kroll, is a pretty standard lament for the good old days by an English professor.  Surveying the rise of adjunct instruction and the decline in full-time faculty jobs, Kroll concludes that the issue boils down to political will.  He calls on faculty, and prospective faculty, to “push back.”  From reading his piece, you’d think that the only reason that we don’t have the academic job market of 1966 is that deans are foolishly caught up in faddish imitation of the private sector.  I was particularly struck at the portrayal of administrators as either feckless (“leave it alone”) or evil, focused on short term cost-cutting.

The second is a more forward-looking piece by Nathan Harden, who claims that the internet will do to higher ed what it did to the music industry.  Recorded music still exists -- in many ways, it’s far more available than it has ever been -- but its economic underpinnings have changed fundamentally.  Music consumers have more and better options than ever, but both musicians and what used to be called record companies have lost revenue. (Elsewhere, I’ve read that the new model is based entirely on speculation.  Neither Pandora nor Spotify is actually profitable, but they attract investment capital based on rapid growth.)  In this version, the key story is the shift of market power from producers to consumers.

In this version, administrators are painted as the foot-dragging guardians of the status quo, defending the economic rents derived from exclusivity.  

Both visions of administrators -- everybody knows that they’re bent on the destruction of tradition, and everybody knows that they’re unthinking guardians of tradition -- have just enough evidence to be plausible.  On the “bent on destruction” side, it’s easy to point to the shift towards adjunct faculty, and a sort of chronic cost-consciousness that results in saying “no” to plenty of otherwise good ideas.  On the “guardian of tradition” side, it’s easy to point to decades of faster-than-inflation tuition increases in both the private and public sectors, as well as to construction booms among the elites.  

But evidence for one discredits the other.  If administrators were actually market apparatchiks, why do they keep raising tuition faster than inflation?  (In the free market, it’s normal to compete on price.)  Alternately, if administrators are docents of tradition, why do they keep watering it down by converting full-time positions to part-time?

What both versions capture, if only half-consciously, is that the underlying structure of higher education is under strain. Decades of Baumol’s cost disease, economic polarization, and questionable political choices have led to a series of split-the-difference decisions.  But you can’t just “push back” against time-bound measures of productivity and expect to get anywhere.  Until the 1990’s, there was no serious alternative to traditional higher education, so it was able to thrive by default.  The for-profits mounted a threat for a while.  Now MOOCs are starting to threaten.  Unlike the for-profits, MOOCs have solved the productivity problem.

I don’t think the current cohort of MOOCs will be fatal -- as the New York Times acknowledged yesterday, nobody has yet figured out a business model for them -- but they are radically different from anything that has come before them.  In this context, it’s more helpful to see many administrators as neither feckless nor evil, but instead as doing the best they can to maintain a structure that’s becoming harder to maintain.  

In my perfect world, we’d get past calls for Restoration -- those never quite work out like they’re supposed to -- and instead work on innovation.  Rearguard actions don’t lead to victory, and I’m not interested in surrender.  We need to adapt.  The critique to make of administrators isn’t that they’re backwards-looking or slaves to the market; it’s that they need to confront more deliberately the forces that drive their decisions.  And that will take the collective intelligence of faculty, staff, and administrators, all working together.

Dropping by the MLA

Last Friday I had the chance to drop by the MLA conference for the first time ever.  In my faculty days, I used to attend APSA fairly regularly; now I can sometimes be found at the League for Innovation or the AACC.  The MLA was a new one.  But between an opportunity to participate in a bloggers’ panel in the Exhibit Hall Theater and an unusually accessible location, I couldn’t turn it down.

Some observations from a social scientist and administrator, walking among humanists:

- I was struck by the number of times that different people mentioned their own colleges, both public and private, making conscious efforts to recruit large numbers of wealthy, full-freight students from China.  (One even mentioned that Brazil is offering scholarships for its students to go abroad, so that’ll be the next wave.)  The conversations usually revolved around culture clashes and English fluency, but I couldn’t help but think about what it suggested about the fiscal sustainability of the current model.  Presumably, sooner or later, other countries will have their own higher ed infrastructures.  

- Nearly every laptop at MLA was an Apple.  Given all the talk of budget constraints and two-tier wage systems, that surprised me.

- The gender balance was a lot more female than APSA.  It was almost as female as CASE, though with much darker clothing.  Make of this what you will.

- Nametag-checking is alive and well.  I had a press pass, since I was there with IHE, so people didn’t quite know what to do with that.  When I dropped by a food court for lunch, a woman behind me in line asked about the different color of my tag.  (She was a presenter.)  When I said “press,” she recoiled, as if from a bad smell.

- Apparently, they haven’t quite gotten the hang of the “Exhibit Hall Theater” concept yet.  The EHT panels weren’t included in the version of the panel schedule that people actually use, so they were pretty lightly attended.  The IHE panel on career advice, was nearly empty, despite a topic that seemed like it would attract some interest.  On the bright side, the folks who were there had a great discussion.  

- If you have an active Twitter presence, it’s fun to see avatars come to life in three dimensions.  In person, my colleague Lee Skallerup Bessette looks a lot like someone I went to high school with; I had to remind myself repeatedly not to call her “Kim.”  

- I attended a panel on “alt-ac” careers that was as interesting for its tone as for its content.  I went in expecting the usual angry admin-bashing and self-righteous invocations of imagined Golden Ages, but that really didn’t happen.  Instead, the panelists stressed -- correctly, in my view -- the range of possibilities for people who are willing to break from the script.  (Brian Croxall captured it nicely with his phrase “the transmission of possibility.”  Someone else referred to “future-proofing” the Ph.D. by supplementing the traditional research skills with skills around technology, budgeting, and even management.)  The common denominator among the various panelists was that things that had started as side projects were frequently what opened the next door.  I had to smile when someone started a sentence with “I know we all like to hate on admins, but...” -- for the first time in recent memory, I heard public acknowledgement that having administrators with real academic backgrounds can make a positive difference.  

- Obviously, there was a great deal of talk about frustrated adjunct or short-term faculty.  It was at the relatively early “consciousness-raising” stage -- lots of anecdote, almost no analysis -- but it’s a start.  At some point, I’d love to see some of these very smart people get beyond “moral suasion” as a strategy and actually look at the institutional drivers behind the trend.  (See the aforementioned rich students recruited from China.) But if the prior discussion simply didn’t exist -- which I’m told was largely the case -- then this is the start of progress.

- Despite the new focus on adjunct and labor issues, the conference had remarkably light representation from community colleges.  It also did relatively little on composition courses, and almost nothing on developmental courses. Some of that is probably a function of travel budgets -- at this level, they’re a bit spare -- and some probably reflects an informal division of labor with the CCCC.  But still, if they want an accurate picture of the institutional realities within which many of the labor issues occur, they might want to open things up a bit.

- Of course, a major function of conferences is catching up with friends and meeting new people.  I enjoyed meeting Lee, Mary Churchill, Nate Kreuter, and Serena Golden from IHE, and catching up with Scott Jaschik.  It was also refreshing to get to spend some time with my college friend Vic, who has built a formidable alt-ac career of her own.  As with the alt-ac panelists, her pattern has been a side project on job A leading to job B.  When the route up the middle is blocked, there’s no shame in a well-executed end run.  It’s a hell of a lot more fun than just hitting the wall repeatedly.  

Friday Fragments

See you in the exhibit hall theater at MLA 13 Friday at 1:30!  IHE bloggers Mary Churchill, Nate Kreuter, and I will be on the “Career Advice” panel.  I’ll offer tips for job candidates who are considering community colleges.  Any readers in the Boston area are welcome to stop by and say hi.

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Sometimes Santa hits it out of the park.

The Girl got a tent that she can put on her bed.  She immediately set up a shelf of books along one side, brought in a battery-powered lantern, and started reading.  Since Christmas, she has kept the tent up on her bed, and she has read in it every night.  I’ve even managed to squeeze in there a couple of times to read with her.  I don’t know what it is about reading and forts, but it still works.  Well played, Santa.

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Mom’s surgery went well, which was a huge relief.   My brother and I were able to tag-team staying with her, so she always had help.  In the waiting room, I got to catch up on my daytime television, which strengthened my conviction that daytime television is some sort of punishment.  Did you know Kathie Lee is still on the air?  Amazing.

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Score one for Texas.  Apparently, it’s going to provide a financial literacy class for high school students to prepare them for the college decision.  The devil is in the details, of course, but the idea makes a heap of sense.  

In my perfect world, we’d have some sort of “life economics” class in college that would teach students about amortization, and insurance, and co-pays, and compound interest, and all that good stuff.  Personal finance could make a good hook for a sociology class, say, or as part of a course on civic engagement.  The idea would be that someone who is constantly in thrall to immediate material necessity isn’t capable of taking the long view and engaging well with the larger society.  Therefore, it’s important to equip students with the knowledge to get necessity under enough control that they can have some sort of agency.  As Hegel put it, freedom is the insight into necessity; what better place to develop insight than college?

Even if this isn’t quite at that level, though, it’s a good concept.  Here’s hoping it works...

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Probably as a result of her voracious reading, TG has discovered that you can make anything sound foreboding or mysterious by appending “or is it?” (or some close variation) at the end of almost any declarative sentence.

“Dave opened the package.  Or did he?”

Now she’s doing it at dinner.  “I passed the ketchup.  Or did I?”  She can even raise her eyebrows with a theatrical flourish.

Future teachers of TG, you’re welcome.

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After his tirade this week, I officially take back every critical thing I’ve ever said about Chris Christie.  He won me over with his correct observation that when natural disasters have struck other parts of the country, Congress was quick with help.  But when the Northeast got hit, suddenly everything stopped.  It has been over nine weeks since Sandy hit, and still Congress hasn’t bothered even trying to pass aid.  

The Republicans have become an increasingly regional party, dominant in parts of the South and mountain states, but almost entirely absent in the Northeast and on the West coast.  Sometimes their regional prejudice comes out -- as in Sarah Palin’s famous quip about being in a “pro-America part of the country,” or in Mitt Romney’s claim of Michigan as his home state, even after spending four years as governor of Massachusetts -- but it’s usually just rhetorical.  Now it’s doing active harm.  

Red states get help, and blue states drown?  No.  Not okay.  The Northeast paid its share when Katrina struck, and when Ike struck, and did so without hesitation; it’s time to reciprocate.  

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According to IHE’s in/out list, I’m both “out” and “in.”  I’m Schrodinger’s Matt!

Data and Craft

I still remember the terror and thrill of having my own class to teach for the first time.

It didn’t pay much -- this was graduate school, after all -- but the autonomy was wonderful.  When I closed the classroom door, it was just me and the students.  The course had goals of its own, of course -- anyone teaching Intro to American Government has to go through “Congress is divided into the House and the Senate” whether they want to or not -- but how I got there, and how I framed much of the content, was really my call.  I went through a painful, if inevitable, bit of trial and error, but eventually found my stride.

After far too many years of being on the other side of the desk, and then a few years of t.a.’ing for some people whose styles and choices, um, let’s go with “were not my own,” I relished having the chance to do things the way I thought they should be done.  When they worked, it was gratifying beyond belief; when they didn’t, at least I had the autonomy to make a change on the fly.  That mattered.

(In administration, sometimes I miss that autonomy.  In administration, the constraints are greater, and successes tend to be partial, collaborative, and often indirect.  There’s nothing quite like the rush of a class that really nailed it.  The closest I get to that now is when a blog post really nails it.)

I thought again about that experience yesterday as I read about an appealing new project that proposes using carefully crafted analytics to improve student learning outcomes.  There’s nothing inherently sinister or silly about using documented, aggregate results to drive improvements; in most fields, that would be considered common sense.  In fact, there’s a perfectly intelligent argument to be made to the effect that evidence-driven reform is one of the most promising avenues we have for raising student achievement.  I’ve made that argument myself before, and still believe it.

But to someone in the classroom to whom autonomy is a major benefit of the job, evidence-driven reform can look an awful lot like someone else telling you what to do.  If you’re sufficiently pessimistic, it can even look like de-skilling the faculty.  Even if you don’t see it as a stalking horse for a shift from artisinal to mass production of education, it can still feel intrusive.  And to be fair, much of it is in the early stages, in which it may not be as precise as one would like.

The trick, which I’m still struggling with, is to find ways for faculty to be able to make those findings their own.  If they can draw benefit from the information without surrendering their autonomy -- a key source of new experiments anyway -- then we’ll be where we should be. In the best of all possible worlds, this kind of information would be a resource to be used for improvement.  But right now, it’s often rejected out of hand in favor of personal observation and an appeal to authority.  

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a use of analytics or evidence-driven reform on campus that didn’t raise hackles?  If so, how did it work?  (Alternately, have you seen a de-hackling process that worked?)  Anything useful is welcome...

Barriers to Entry

My fellow IHE blogger, Lee Skallerup-Bessette, got a bit of a discussion going on Twitter over the break when she posted a real estate listing for an abandoned college campus.  In the context of adjunct activism, she proposed pulling people together to buy the campus and start their own college.

Two thoughts.

First, yes, I like the idea of trying something new from scratch.  I disagree that the first step is buying a campus, especially one that has already failed; I’d suggest coming up with the business plan first, and then deciding on a facility (or not).  But the entrepreneurial spirit strikes me as healthy and welcome.  Given the issues facing traditional institutions, it seems like a great time to try something different.

Second, though, the barriers to entry in higher ed are among the highest in any industry.  I suspect this may explain a lot.

On the employment side, of course, the primary barrier to entry is graduate school.  By consistently raising the bar on future faculty, we keep many interested people out.  We refer to the process as “having standards,” which is both true and not.  Progressively raising the barriers to entry benefits the incumbents.

But what’s unique to higher ed is the barrier to entry on the institutional side.  It’s harder to start a new college than it is to start a new law firm, medical office, store, or really just about anything.  

On the institutional side, the main barriers are accreditation and state licensing.  

Both have valid reasons.  If we assume that unscrupulous people aren’t above setting up cheesy little operations to scam money -- shocking, I know -- then it makes sense to have some sort of seal of approval that the general public can use when trying to decide whether a given college is legit.  Accreditation isn’t a perfect process, but it does serve to ensure that a given institution actually is what it says it is.  When people often aren’t in a position to make that judgment for themselves, that’s a real service.

Accreditation has become a de facto requirement for financial aid eligibility, which is a de facto requirement for a college to make a go of it.  Getting accreditation requires showing not only that a college has strong faculty and curriculum, but also that it has effective outcomes assessment, student services, financial aid, fiscal planning, fiscal resources, information technology resources, long-term planning, and more.  (City College of San Francisco, has recently discovered just how serious this actually is.) Every single one of those comes with costs, and every single one must be in place at an acceptable level before accreditation will be awarded.  In other words, anyone opening a new college had better have not only a chunk of capital for startup, but a chunk of capital to lose money for the first several years of operation.  

MOOCs and various online alternatives are trying to disaggregate the bundle of services that a college provides.  I’ve been surprised and impressed by the speed with which they’ve moved.  But at this point, they’re still very much supplemental to accredited education.  They’ve found ways to ally with existing institutions -- critics might say, to feed off existing institutions -- but they haven’t found ways to handle accreditation themselves.

In most industries, the barriers to entry for new entrepreneurs are much lower than in higher ed.  Yes, individual faculty can ply their skills in a number of places, and many have sidelines as consultants in various fields (or as adjuncts elsewhere).  But it’s much harder to set up a new college than to set up, say, a new store or a new law firm.  Starting small really isn’t an option; the resources required to attain critical mass are so substantial that very few interested people can do it.

Higher education needs to experiment with various institutional structures if it wants to thrive in the next few decades.  In practical terms, that means finding ways to make it easier for new actors to hang out shingles.  As long as most of higher ed consists of “mature” institutions, the sector as a whole will behave accordingly.  It’s more difficult -- possible, yes, but much harder -- for an institution with decades of obligations to make significant changes than it is for a newcomer.  If we want a badly-needed infusion of new ideas, energy, and approaches, we need a host of new institutions with the ability to try new things.  

We need it to be possible for Lee and her allies to start their own college.  I still wouldn’t recommend buying the campus, though.