What Gets Said, What Gets Heard

On Monday I met with some folks at Princeton to recruit post-exam graduate students to a mentored teaching experience at Brookdale.  The group was chipper and welcoming, and the discussion was positive.  But I was struck at the difference between what I meant to emphasize and what seemed to strike chords.

The program -- modeled on Paula Krebs’ and Vanessa Ryan’s groundbreaking work with the New England Cross-Sector Partnership -- is meant to give students at a research university some sense of the realities of working at a teaching-intensive institution.  It involves some structured group mentoring in the Fall, followed by adjuncting with individual mentoring in the Spring.  (It’s all predicated on the availability of sections, of course.)  The idea is to give our students access to people trained at the highest levels, and to give the grad students valuable experience that may (twirls handlebar mustache mischievously) win them over to the world of teaching-intensive colleges.

I went in with a brief overview of some of the gaps that students from R1 institutions sometimes have when they arrive at community colleges.  The upper-tier schools often don’t give opportunities for online teaching, for example, but online experience separates one candidate from another at this level.  They tend not to discuss Universal Design for Learning, or to spend much time on outcomes assessment, but those both matter here.  Sometimes they don’t give their grad students the chance to teach their own course before hitting the market, which puts those students at a serious disadvantage.

The group listened politely to those points, but really perked up at two asides that I didn’t even think to put in the handout.

One was the absence of a publication requirement for tenure.  

The other was the presence of a female majority among the faculty, deans, and cabinet.

I didn’t expect that.

I hadn’t put much focus on the tenure criteria, because the program doesn’t put them into tenure-track jobs.  We do full searches for those.  But they wanted to know, so I explained that the upside of a higher courseload is the absence of a publication requirement.  I had thought that was common knowledge, but it wasn’t.  For people with school-aged children, or plans for some, the prospect of being present with them during their summer vacations from school can hold real appeal.  I just didn’t realize how strongly that would resonate.  In retrospect, I probably should have.

The second was a throwaway line.  Someone mentioned that community colleges typically have female majorities among the students, as Brookdale does.  I mentioned that the female majority here extends through the faculty and administration, shrugging as I said it.  I thought it was a fun fact, like learning that there were five eclipses in 1678.  (True.)  But the aside really seemed to hit home for several people there.  I heard the word “refreshing” used several times.  I won’t reveal any names, so as not to cause issues, but I was struck by what seemed a palpable longing for a more welcoming environment.  I hope they don’t just take my word for it, but actually check it out.

Linkages like these don’t solve the issue of too few full-time teaching jobs, obviously.  But they can help to fill in a gap in graduate training.  The elite graduate schools tend to train for jobs at elite graduate schools.  That’s fine for the few who win those positions, but it can leave some very smart people relatively unemployable anywhere else.  For those who discovered that they love teaching more than they love research, positions at places like community colleges are discussed only in secret, if at all.  They shouldn’t be.  

I hope some of the graduate students follow through with applications, so we can get the first cohort going this Fall.  If nothing else, correcting some stereotypes and giving frustrated folks some new options can only help.  And if a few of them fall in love with the place, well, that’s good too.  You never know what’s going to resonate.

Fees for Low-Enrolled Classes

A new correspondent writes:

It’s that time of year when the budget heads to the budget committee for approval. The CFO of our community college is rightfully concerned with getting it as balanced as possible. In Oregon, like much of the country, our community college is facing declining enrollment (we think we’ve reached the nadir but who knows?). We’re also looking at a possible 15 – 20% statewide bump with the Oregon Promise free college program. Our particular college is a small rural CC with a large percentage of our community below the poverty line and we don’t anticipate a student increase of 20% in this parts.

In our previous fiscal biennium we drastically cut services and staff to make up a very large deficit. No-one wanted to repeat that this year even though we have more budget shortfalls looming.

The CFO came up with a plan.

Instead of canceling sections that didn’t meet our 12 student threshold, we would ask students in those low –enrolled sections if instead of canceling that section they would be willing to pay $150 to keep that section running. For example, we go to the 7 students enrolled in the class and propose to them before dropping the section: we’ll not drop this section but you have to pay $150 above regular tuition to keep it. The CFO figures this keeps students in classes that they wanted, and helps us minimize the number of sections which lose money for the college.

The CFO called it the low-enrollment class fee.

AS you might imagine, a vigorous campus-wide debate ensued. Faculty wasn’t crazy about teaching to a possible section of 4 or 5 students (we all realized that not all students would buy into the extra fee –thus reducing our scenario from 7 students to, say, 4 or 5.) Student services saw extra work in trying to keep those sections open, contacting the low-enrolled students, etc. and not necessary saving student services time and effort in not dropping sections as purported by the CFO. The student government, at the behest of the CFO, did a survey which found most students didn’t mind the extra fee, but they also didn’t mind an across the board tuition hike (the survey also found that only 14% of students were affected by dropped sections.) The leadership team - CFO, CAO, IT Chief, and president - were so divided they didn’t provide any definitive direction.

Some of us (the CAO included) found the proposal as going against the mission of community colleges – education opportunities for all in our community – as this low-enrolled fee would hit hardest those who couldn’t adjust their work or life schedules to enroll in a different section.

All of us applauded the CFO for creative thinking. Some thought he was overreaching his responsibilities. The board, after another vigorous board meeting, eventually voted for increased fees and raising tuition across the board. That’s what will go forward as a recommendation to the budget committee.

I write to you because of your last post asking about state and local funding. What do you think of this strategy of low enrollment fees?  

I have to admit I’ve never heard that one before.

From an institutional perspective, it’s both brilliant and horrible.  The genius of it is that it accurately reflects institutional costs.  Smaller classes are more expensive to run; charging more for them helps to offset that.  Whether the actual dollar figure is right or not, I’ll leave to your CFO, but I get the concept.

And from a student’s perspective, it could look like a premium service.  Regular classes cost x, but first-class classes (?) cost x plus y.  In return, the students are likely to expect more attention and feedback, in much the same way that first-class passengers on a flight expect to board first and get better snacks.  

That said, though, the horrible outweighs the brilliant, at least for me.  

At the implementation level, for instance, it could be a bear.  We typically report attendance as of the tenth day of the semester, which means that for a class on the borderline, students wouldn’t know the cost until they’d been in it for two weeks.  At that point, their entire financial aid package might have to be redone, which is not a simple or quick process.  For students who are paying their own way, they may or may not face an additional, unexpected cost two weeks into the term, at which point it’s too late to pick up another class.  That’s a significant gamble. The add/drop period could get considerably weirder.  I’d also worry about incentives; for a class near the cutoff, you’ve essentially created a financial incentive for students to get other students to sign up, even if only for a week.  Students will figure that out in about a nanosecond, and at least some of them can be expected to act on it.  At that point, you’re creating churn for the sake of churn.  Given that “performance funding” punishes churn, that could turn out to be a self-inflicted wound.

I’d also expect to see pushback from the disciplines that tend to run the larger classes that have historically cross-subsidized the smaller ones.  Intro to Psych sections typically run full and relatively large by local standards, and they don’t require labs. The profits those sections generate help offset the losses from smaller classes, whether in the upper levels of Psych or, more typically, in allied health, studio art, or languages.  Faculty on each side of that exchange typically believe that they’re getting the short end of the stick -- the Psych faculty complain about having the most students, while the faculty in other fields mutter quietly about multiple-choice tests -- but there’s typically a relatively even distribution of dissatisfaction.  We have lab fees for certain courses, but those are generally understood to cover “consumables” -- lab specimens, chemicals, etc. -- rather than labor.  

But if the smaller ones start pulling their own weight economically, I could see the larger ones starting to question why they have to run so big.  If the burden of the small-class subsidy has shifted from the Psych department to the students, I would expect the Psych department to start pressing for relief.  That could quickly consume any economic gain, thereby defeating the purpose.

One could argue, of course, that smaller classes all around will benefit the students, and will pay off over time in better success rates, even if at higher cost to students.  But if you want to move closer to the old “private liberal arts college” model, which is essentially what that is, then you’re going to have to come to grips with the economics of that model.  Judging by the economic precarity of most small private liberal arts colleges outside the top twenty or so, I’d be wary of emulating that model.  The tuition-driven ones are riding the ragged edge of disaster.  The affluent ones are fine, but they have endowments and fundraising capacities far beyond what any community college could reasonably expect, especially if they’re starting from a low base.

If you’re comfortable with increasing student costs in order to drive higher quality, I’d go with the much simpler and more straightforward route of increasing tuition.  If the headline number is politically prohibitive, I’d follow the airlines and hide the increase in mandated fees.  (“Oh, you have luggage?  That’s extra!”)  Premium charges for small classes would be culturally foreign, and would create both back-office nightmares and severe political consequences.  A straightforward tuition increase is much easier to implement, and more transparent.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is there a better way?  Could small class premiums actually work?

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

Shameless Plug

My podcast debut!  I’m the guest on this week’s episode of “Higher Ed Social.”  We touch on blogging, work/life balance, feminism, pseudonyms, shared governance, and more. The audio is a little spotty, probably because of the vagaries of Skype, but it’s listenable. And it’s probably the only time you’ll see my name and “jogging” in the same title.

Campus Radio Stations and Newspapers

Many colleges -- including many community colleges -- have their own radio stations and campus newspapers.  The newspapers almost always feature student writers and editors; the radio stations feature varying degrees of student involvement.  (Nothing against the more professionally-run ones, but I find something endearing about the stations in which students learn their craft on the air.)  Some campuses have their own television stations, often on public access cable.

Thirty years ago, these were burgeoning, vibrant industries.  Students were learning not just the “gen ed” skills of communication and organization, but also some actual job skills.  A student could put together a portfolio of articles, or an audition tape, and try to break in.  

Venues like those gave the verbally-inclined a playground.  

Now, of course, newspapers and radio have fallen on hard times.  Both are declining industries, and I wouldn’t suggest to a student that either makes a good target field.  (And yes, I’ll acknowledge that the same could be said for tenure-track jobs in liberal arts fields.)  Television is more of a mixed bag, but local news in smaller markets -- often the first gig a new graduate could get -- is increasingly struggling.  

The old liberal-arts arguments for campus radio stations and newspapers still apply.  But as college radio stations and newspapers start to look less like vocational prep and more like campus literary magazines or plays, I’m wondering if we’re missing an opportunity.

What’s the 2016 version of a college radio station or a newspaper?  

Or, to be more open-minded, what currently-relevant venues could colleges foster to give students the same kinds of benefits that the old newspapers and radio stations did?

At their best, newspapers and radio stations allow not only for the production of content, but for real camaraderie.  They allow individual autonomy and moments to shine, but they also require significant cooperation.  They have identities beyond the participants at any given moment.  That helps attract and keep audiences, and also provides parameters against which students can strain productively.  They’re organizations, with everything that entails.

Podcasting is one option, but podcasts tend to be relatively individual pursuits.  (Jesse Thorn, of Bullseye, does a nationally-respected one from his room.)  They offer the venue for expression, but not necessarily an organizational identity.  And because they’re recorded, they lack the serendipity of live radio.  

On the journalistic side, it’s even harder to say.  The entire field seems to be suffering: within just the last week or so, Mashable and Salon both announced layoffs.  The struggles of print are old news, but now even some well-known digital brands are downsizing.  Ideally, I’d love to give students a venue that’s both creative and vocationally relevant, but in journalism, the latter is getting harder to find.

We could just ignore those changes and go on our merry way, treating college media like, say, intramurals.  But I think we could do better.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is there a viable update for the campus radio station and newspaper?  Have you seen something that made sense?  

Discussions that Didn’t Happen

I admit that I didn’t catch every panel or discussion at AACC.  With concurrent panels, those pesky laws of physics kept getting in the way.  That said, I was struck by some discussions that didn’t happen, or at least didn’t happen conspicuously.

The most striking was the near-total absence of discussion about the idea of free community college.  It’s all the rage in the civilian world, but barely mentioned here.  Even in the give-and-take between Donna Brazile and Cal Thomas on opening night, it barely registered.  I expected at least some effort to address it.

State and local funding strategies were mentioned, in passing, but mostly treated like discussion of the weather.  Yes, it’s cold, but what can you do?  I’d like to know what we can do.  What have people done that has worked, either to slow the decline or, ideally, to reverse it?  Context matters, obviously, but some lessons may be transferable.

Relatedly, and for the umpteenth year in a row, I didn’t hear any discussion of the most intelligent or least harmful ways to cut budgets.  I understand the reticence; it’s easy for angry people to portray “if you must cut, here’s the best way” as “you’re advocating cuts.”  But cuts are a fact of life for many of us, and having some sort of research base to fall back on would be helpful.  In terms of the research, we’re largely flying blind.

I continue to wonder when someone will do some research or present some successes on bringing adult men back to college.  Every place I’ve been, the gender skew among students over age 22 has been strongly female.  Among 18 and 19 year olds, the gender split is about even.  But among the older students, it’s mostly women, and by a large margin.  If we don’t get the guys by about age 20, we don’t get them.  I can imagine some possibilities -- better-paying gigs that don’t require degrees raise the opportunity cost of returning to school, say, and incarceration rates are disparate -- but those are guesses.  And from a practical standpoint, I’d love to hear from colleges that have found ways to get the guys back.

Developmental education has received a great deal of attention, and rightly so.  It raises both pedagogical and policy issues, and colleges and researchers all over the country have devoted useful attention to it.  But I can’t say the same about ESL.  At least at this level, it mostly goes unmentioned.  And that’s a shame, because it’s a tremendously important service to a large population.  I’d love to see some thoughtful attention paid to it.

On a personal note, I had the personally unprecedented experience of sitting in the audience during the q-and-a of one panel and hearing a questioner quote an entire paragraph from my blog, apparently without knowing I was there.  She quoted it approvingly, which was nice, but I can’t deny that it felt just a little awkward.  Not bad, of course -- what writer doesn’t like having readers? -- but awkward.

And finally, major kudos to Brookdale’s own Sameerah Wahab, who was recognized by PTK as one of the top twenty community college students in the country.  And she has younger siblings!  I foresee some recruitment efforts…

Back to the ranch.  Here’s hoping next year’s discussions pick up on some of this year’s loose threads.

I Hope This Was Useless

I did my usual panel-hopping at AACC on Monday, but one panel was so much more moving and potentially important than the others that it’s getting the entire post to itself.  I hope it will prove to be useless, but I fear that it won’t.

Rita Cavin is the former interim president of Umpqua Community College, in Oregon.  She was in office on October 1, 2015, when the mass shooting happened there.  She discussed the aftermath, and offered lessons in preparation for other colleges.

There’s typically a certain level of ambient noise at panels.  It’s not bad or distracting, but it’s there.  When she spoke, the noise was notable for its absence.  We were riveted.  I caught myself tearing up a few times, which is unusual for me; when I looked around, I noticed plenty of others doing the same.  It’s just too easy to imagine it happening anywhere.

I can’t really do justice to her presentation, though I typed as fast as I could.  Some takeaways:

• Morbidly enough, the first week or so after the event is the “honeymoon.”  That’s when sympathy is highest.  It ends with the last funeral.

• Language matters.  The college decided to refer to the victims as “the Umpqua Nine.”  That number specifically excluded the killer, who also died.
• They called him the “killer,” rather than the “shooter.”  Shooters could be hunters or target shooters.  This was a killer.
• They had to designate an area on campus to keep the flowers, teddy bears, and various other tokens of sympathy that arrived.
• Before raising the flag from half-mast, they had a bagpipe ceremony to mark the occasion.  You don’t want people to see a raised flag as a slap in the face.
• You don’t have access to a crime scene.  That means employees couldn’t get their purses, car keys, or various other belongings for a week.

Mary Spilde, the president of Lane Community College, followed with a discussion of the support that Lane and other community colleges offered in the immediate aftermath.

• Umpqua is on a quarter system, so it happened on the fourth day of class.  It does financial aid reporting based on the fifth day.  They needed help communicating with the Feds to get waivers.
• Statewide coordinating bodies of community college administrators -- yes, they exist -- can become valuable resources when the local administration is overwhelmed.  They had to perform what Spilde called a “dance” of respecting the authority of the local leaders while still making sure that key decisions got made when they had to.  And as Spilde noted, nobody is at their best in the wake of incredible trauma.
• Counselors were necessary for nearly everybody.  

Anne Marie Levis spoke about her role managing crisis communications.  Her emphasis was on the importance of diverting press -- who could seem intrusive and even aggressive -- from everyone else on campus so they could get back to normal as quickly as possible.  She and the president made a strategic decision to forego any invitations to enter into the national debate about guns, on the probably-correct assumption that it would become a distraction.  Rather than allowing Umpqua to become a talking point for one side or the other, they focused entirely on getting back to work.

I don’t recall ever seeing a q-and-a period that combined as much participation with as much respect.  In response to one question, Spilde noted that it’s crucial to do drills frequently, because as soon as the “honeymoon” passes, people will start looking for someone to blame.  If you haven’t run drills in a while, you’ll become the villain.  The panel was divided on whether to do drills when students are present.  On one side, it would be the most thorough and accurate preparation.  On the other, it could be traumatizing in itself.  (Cavin mentioned that the students who had experience with guns were the first to recognize the sounds of gunshots as gunshots.  They were the first to urge people to take cover.  A point as subtle as that one suggests that steering clear of the political debate was the right call.)

Cavin noted, too, that it’s easy to forget to help the helpers.  She noted that the leaders of student government stepped up in amazing ways, but that their needs for counseling weren’t immediately recognized.  

In my perfect world, we wouldn’t need to know any of this.  But we might, and probably without warning.  My thanks to Rita Cavin, Mary Spilde, and Anne Marie Levis for sharing some of the hardest-won wisdom I’ve heard.

Live from the Basement: Reporting from the AACC

I’m at the American Association of Community Colleges conference in Chicago, where the official theme this year is “Camelot.”  Seriously.  It’s on the program.  

The kickoff awards ceremony revealed more than it intended.  Nothing against any individual recipient, but it’s hard not to notice that there’s a cluster of about ten people who give each other awards over and over again.  A few weeks ago, the League gave an award to the head of the AACC.  On Saturday, the chair of the AACC gave an award to the departing leader of the League.  It’s getting a bit...circular.

Which is too bad, because good ideas can come from other places and people if you’re willing to listen.

Kay McClenney and Walter Bumphus led a cast of thousands on a Sunday morning panel on guided pathways that was alternately enlightening and frustrating.  Any Kay McClenney panel is worth attending, and this one was, too, but it led to the same vague sense of inner and outer circles that the round-robin awards did.

The theme -- more than worthy -- was how best to do guided pathways at scale.  In other words, how can colleges provide clearer guidance to students without falling into the trap of “boutique” programs that achieve great results only for the very small number of students lucky enough to be in them?  Each panelist had a set of recommendations, some of which made tremendous sense.  I was particularly taken with the idea of doing class scheduling a year or two at a time, rather than semester-by-semester.  In theory, if you have enough students do plans far enough in advance, you could have a better sense of how many sections of what you’ll need, and when.  It’s a lot of detail work, but it’s important detail work, and it could generate real efficiency gains.  I’m taking that one back with me.  Karen Stout, from Achieving the Dream, mentioned a software package called IPASS that sounds like it integrates academic planning with course scheduling two years out; if I got that right, it could be incredibly useful.

But the frustrations were real.  I heard too many references to resources far beyond what we could reasonably expect to see, and too many references to flexibilities that don’t, and won’t, exist in my world.  (Buyouts?)  When new resources are mostly available on a competitive basis, they tend to go to the colleges that least need them.  That’s not malicious, necessarily -- if you’re trying to prove a concept, you’d choose the people likeliest to prove the concept -- but it tends to mean that if you aren’t in the circle, you’re very much out of it.  

Put differently, if the AACC and others would like to see Pathways at scale, it should support colleges at scale.  Going back repeatedly to the same couple dozen doesn’t do much for the rest of us.  The concept is proved; we need help with implementation.  

Paradoxically, the panelists actually backed that up, without meaning to.  Several of them noted that making serious progress on pathways is the work of -- depending on who spoke -- from five to nine years.  It’s not a quick fix, and it can’t be done off the corner of someone’s desk.  Setting aside significant resources for that many years, in a context of declining enrollment and flat or declining public funding, is an enormous challenge.  It requires help.  

The theme of inner circles and outer circles was brought home most clearly, though, by the Generation X panel, featuring JoAlice Blondin, Amy Goings, and Tim Stokes.  The panel was relegated to a narrow, partitioned room on the side of a basement.  It was standing room only, yes, but that’s because there were only two rows of chairs (and one couch brought in by an enterprising X’er).  It was a little striking to see marginalization taken so literally.

Still, the discussion gave at least some hope.  I noticed themes common among the X’ers that still seem to strike Boomers as odd: building isn’t always good; concern for work/life balance is valid and not just for women; ceremony is often overrated; technology matters; experimentation requires mistakes; and change is a matter of existential urgency.  To me, these are all no-brainers, but I’ve had multiple -- seriously, many multiples of -- cases of acting on one of those and getting back some variation on “shocked and appalled.”  When a generation is largely skipped over, its common sense is skipped over, too.  And that’s a loss, because its common sense is largely correct.  In fact, one could argue that we’d be in better shape as a sector if we heeded it more.

One panelist mentioned that even the theme of the convention -- “Camelot” -- reflects a generational perspective.  That word may have resonance with Boomers, but it really doesn’t with the rest of us.  If anything, it connotes an illusion.  Camelot fell; utopias fail.  We don’t have time for utopias.  The tasks are urgent.  Maybe a bit less time watching the same ten people give awards to each other and a bit more time addressing real challenges might help.  It’s time to bring the next generation up from the basement.  

Co-Deans?

Apparently Case Western Reserve University Law School thinks it has found a way to make co-deans work.  It appears to be a sort of job-sharing, except that both of them work full-time.

I don't know either of them personally, and I don't have any inside knowledge of that school.  If they say it works for them, I'll take them at their word.  But I don't buy the structure for one minute.

Deans are, among other things, supervisors.  They give direction (sorta), allocate resources, and evaluate faculty and staff.  Doing that well requires a level of consistency that can challenge a smart and thoughtful person.  Ensuring that two smart and thoughtful people are that consistent both individually and together is a remarkably labor-intensive and fragile undertaking.   Even in the best case, it's the sort of thing that works until it very much doesn't.

That's not unique to deans, either.  I'm no fan of long term co-directors, co-chairs, or even "dotted line" reporting relationships.  If you have two bosses and they aren't in sync, how do you know what to prioritize?  As one of two supervisors, what do you do if your estimate of someone's performance is significantly different than your counterpart's?  The potential for political shenanigans -- intended or accidental -- is too high.  And all of the intensive extra communication required to prevent disaster amounts to a deadweight cost.

These objections don't necessarily apply to ad hoc teams for short term projects.  Team teaching can work, for instance, and co-chairs are the norm for institutional self-study teams.  But in both cases, two major criteria hold.  It's a project, rather than a full-time job, and it's time-bound.  The semester ends, the report gets written.  Under those conditions, the downsides of power sharing may be worth the gain.  But on an open ended, full time basis?  No.

Finally, of course, there's the financial argument.  Paying two deans to do one job is a waste of scarce resources.  I'm not usually a fan of "administrative bloat" arguments, but in this case, I'd have to concede the point.

My fearless prediction, guaranteed or your money back: this won't catch on.  It's a disaster waiting to happen, and an expensive disaster at that.  No, thanks.

Ask the Administrator: The Panopticon is Frequently Stupid

A longtime reader writes:

Our university has recently had a slight decline in enrollments, and the administration thinks the sky is falling. (A few years ago, we were supposed to curb our enrollments: the sky was falling over that, too.) We've all been given marching orders to boost enrollments, complete with the barely veiled threat "we must to choose whether to grow or to shrink". So, my department has recently gone through a lengthy process to devise new sexier first year courses. Since all of our first-year courses are team-taught, and additionally have to be theoretically capable of being team taught by more than one team, the negotiations are protracted and delicate. We've also been told to offer a summer course. So, fine, we've been through this process.

When our Head of Programme went to submit the paperwork to actually get the new courses approved, however, she was told we can't add a new upper-division course without deleting an existing course. The summer course was to have been an upper-division course - but we don't have any courses to delete. We've had some new hires, the new hires understandably want their own permanent upper division courses. We're supposed to teach more without introducing new courses - in an institutional setting where "different sections of the same course" doesn't exist. From the faculty point of view, it's nonsensical: teach more, but don't teach more.

The really interesting thing, though, and the thing that I'm really writing to ask about, is the "you can't add a new course without deleting an existing course" rule. Nobody seems to know why that rule exists. In today's staff meeting, our head of programme reported that she's asked three different administrators for an explanation of that rule, and has been told "I don't know what that rule is for," "I don't know what that rule is for," and "ah, it's because having lots of courses on the books gives the impression that the university costs are higher, but since that impression is mistaken, the rule is actually very stupid." So, even though the sky is falling over low enrollments, the administration is preventing my department from implementing the changes the administration itself demanded, because of a rule whose rationale no administrator cannot explain.

Do you have (1) any speculations on what that rule is for, but more importantly (2) any explanation for the dogged and persistent defence of a rule that nobody can justify?  I mean, is there perhaps a secret reason nobody will tell us? or ... well, any possible insight you can offer?  

The institutional setting is different from my own, but I recognize the habit of mind.  A few thoughts, before I ask my wise and worldly readers to suggest what I’ve missed.

Some rules live well beyond their purpose due to risk aversion or fear of forceful (difficult) personalities.  If Otto in the registrar’s office is a real bear, and he has some weirdly powerful attachment to this rule, then it may live for years because nobody wants to challenge Otto.  Sometimes rules like that survive even after Otto retires, because with time, it has acquired the status of local legend.  

From the outside, those rules can look silly.  From the inside, they can be incredibly difficult to change.

I’ve seen some variations on that in different settings.  In one, a local myth had developed to the effect that the state had a “health and wellness” gen ed requirement.  It didn’t, but the department that taught the course (and used the FTE’s to justify its budget) liked to claim that it did.  I discovered the bluff by accident, earning the enduring enmity of the chair.  At another, a rule about running courses on an experimental basis (i.e. before formal approval by curriculum committee) was written based on publishing deadlines for the (paper) catalog.  When the catalog moved entirely online, people continued to follow the old rule, even though it led to some bizarre outcomes.  A rule that made sense in one setting outlived that setting before anyone noticed.

In this case, though, I’d guess it’s a matter of “optics.”  That’s the management word for “appearances.”  Having too many courses on the books can look, to the casual observer, like the college isn’t serious about cost control.  If it’s facing economic pressures anyway -- and most are -- then a savvy manager will try to avoid painting a target on herself.  People on the outside will pass confident and loud judgments based on single-glance impressions.  Their judgments may be factually wrong, but they’re often consequential.  Get burned that way a few times, and you develop a sense of the kinds of signals that are likely to be destructively misconstrued.  

For example, I’ve endured discussions at a couple of colleges around having “too many programs.”  Many of the programs in question were simply different combinations of existing courses; closing them would have made literally zero difference to the budget.  But if you’re predisposed to hear an explanation like that as an “excuse,” mere facts won’t stop you.  A rule like the one you cite is a way to avoid attracting destructive, if confident, judgments.

Back in my grad school days, we were taught about the panopticon as a model of the exercise of power.  Foucault used the panopticon -- a guard tower in the center of a prison with one-way mirrors all around -- to illustrate the point that if you don’t know when you’re being watched, you start to watch yourself.  Power enlists the self as a subject of discipline, in both senses of both words.

But what we didn’t cover back then is that the panopticon is frequently stupid.  Just because you’re being watched doesn’t mean the watchers are getting it right, or know what they’re seeing.  Surveillance is as susceptible to illusion as anything else.  And as with optical illusions, those misunderstandings aren’t random.  They tend to follow patterns.  If you know that, and you know that certain signals tend to set off false alarms among the watchers, it may be worth avoiding those signals.  

So for what it’s worth, my guess is that your administration is trying to shield your university from unhelpful critique by managing the optics.  To those who know the actual details of the operation, that can seem silly, and in some ways, it is.  But if you think of it as a sort of political etiquette, it can pay off in other ways.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is there another, better explanation?

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

Fun With Aging

A few days ago the whole family was watching tv together when someone onscreen made a reference to the Cold War.  The Girl, 11, asked “how did THAT start?”

The best I could come up with in the moment was “it’s a long story.”  I’m not proud of that.

When I was her age, and even through high school and into college, the Cold War was a very real thing.  It was just a background condition of life.  Yes, it was starting to look a bit shopworn towards the end, but it still held power in the culture.  (If it didn’t, Rocky IV wouldn’t have resonated the way it did.)  When the American hockey team beat the Russians in Lake Placid, it felt important.  Cheesy pop hits of the 80’s were often Cold War allegories: “Shout,” by Tears for Fears, was about ICBM’s, and Sting hoped the Russians loved their children, too.  

It’s hard to convey now what it felt like then.  But to The Girl, I might as well be describing Periclean Athens.  

Aging is like that.  My lived reality is her ancient history.  

Doing the math makes it even worse.  Mathematically, the 80’s are as distant from now as the 50’s were from the 80’s.  Of course, the math can’t be right, because that’s just preposterous.

Sigh.

The math gets even worse when you figure out how old certain authority figures in your life were at given moments.  When Mom was the age I am now, I was in grad school.  That can’t possibly be right, but that’s what the math says.  

Aging has some downsides that are hard to ignore.  Aside from the whole “hurtling headlong toward death” thing, there are the noises one’s knees make in the morning, and the way that small print decides to get fuzzy at random moments.  There are the losses of people who were important in your life, whether through death or just through sort of wandering off.  Popular culture loses its coherence and becomes much more fragmentary and arbitrary, though (mercifully) also far less important.  The Boy, who is fourteen, is sometimes taken aback that I don’t recognize this song or that one.  I explained that at a certain age, you’ve earned the right to not give a single, solitary &*)&^ about Fetty Wap or Justin Bieber.  And I choose to exercise that right.

But getting older also has some real upsides.

The big one is pattern recognition.  It becomes easier to spot personality types and to predict behavior.  You learn the difference among implacable opposition, give-me-some-time-first opposition, and ritualistic opposition.  You recognize cycles.  You learn viscerally that time has a way of juggling priorities, and that it will again.  You get some distance on yourself, and either beat yourself up or, if you’re lucky, cut yourself some slack.  You start to see dynamics develop, and have a quick sense of “I know how this ends.”  That saves all kinds of trouble.  And you learn that rejection is survivable.  That’s a big one.

You get a better sense of yourself, which is nice.  And you get better at sorting out the things that won’t change from the things that will.  History suddenly seems a lot more accessible, since it’s easier to picture actual human beings, flaws and all, in different settings.  

The Girl is beside herself about this year’s election.  In her young life, it’s the first one in which she could actually follow arguments and land on her own opinions.  I share her fascination with it -- that poli sci doctorate came from somewhere -- but not her panic.  I remember that panic, but I don’t have it now.  Concern, yes.  Panic, no.  I don’t miss it.

Where the Cold War came from is a long story.  It’s all a long story.  But the plotlines gradually become clearer, even if the type gets harder to read.

Communicating When You Don’t Know

Like much of the East Coast, we’ve been hit recently with heavy winds and their attendant damage.  On Monday the campus actually lost power for about an hour in the early afternoon as crews worked on repairing a couple of poles near campus that trees had taken down.

The outage itself was out of our control; the utility company did the repairs it when it could.  But it created quite the management dilemma on campus.

For a while, we had no idea how long the outage would last.  Not knowing made it difficult to recommend courses of action on campus.  A ten-minute outage warrants a “don’t worry about it” message.  A ten-hour outage warrants a “go home” message.  An outage of wildly indeterminate duration merits...what, exactly?

And that’s without addressing methods of getting messages out when phones, wifi, and computers are down.  Yes, we could delegate some informal Paul Reveres, but sending someone through the hallways like a town crier requires a short, pithy message.  The medium doesn’t lend itself to nuance.  “Hear ye, hear ye, we’ll tell you something when we know it” doesn’t really work.

I hadn’t realized just how much we relied on electricity.  At home, running water doesn’t need electricity, for example.  But on campus, it does; we have electric eyes to activate the faucets in the bathroom sinks, and even the toilets use electric flushers.  Most bathrooms have electric hand dryers, rather than towel dispensers.  It doesn’t matter until it does.

Some classes were able to go about their business relatively undisturbed.  If you had a chalk-and-talk class in a room with decent-sized windows, you could roll up the shades and keep going, and people did.  Others didn’t have the option, whether because of windowless rooms, the use of electronic gadgetry in instruction, or both.  Luckily the temperature was relatively reasonable, so we weren’t either freezing or wilting.  

The power came back shortly after the mid-afternoon classes started, which was a huge relief.  But it raised a question that I’m hoping my wise and worldly readers can help me answer.

What’s the best way to communicate when you don’t know the message, and electronic means are down?

A Real Choice

If you haven’t seen Tim Burke’s latest, check it out.

Budgets look different at the Swarthmores of the world than at most community colleges.  That said, his recent piece on budgets holds true for both.  It’s about the use of strategic ignorance around budgeting to avoid confronting unpleasant realities.  

It got me thinking about some of the choices that tight budgets force.  Honest discussions of those choices would cut across the usual battle lines, which may be part of the reason that honest discussions are so rare.

To take an obvious case, and one that Burke alludes to: we know that smaller class sizes are generally better for students, as long as you have critical mass.  (A public speaking class with one student isn’t ideal.)  And we know that in the aggregate, students who have more full-time professors are likelier to complete than students who have large numbers of adjunct professors.

But I’ve never seen a serious attempt to weigh one against the other.  In other words, assuming that you could afford one but not both, which is better?  Is it better to have more and smaller sections, at the cost of more adjuncts, or is it better to keep the full-time percentage high, even at the cost of larger classes?

I could imagine either being true, but the key word there is “imagine.”  The ideas aren’t usually presented against each other in public discussion, but they’re directly opposed when developing budgets.  Given limited money, on which is it better to spend?  Dodging the question means leaving it to others to decide.  

I’ve seen people do somersaults to avoid answering questions like those.  “Cut administration instead” sounds good until you look at the actual savings -- nowhere close to what’s needed -- and the work that doesn’t go away when the people do.  It also assumes a level of bloat or growth that simply doesn’t exist in this sector.  It’s an evasion rather than an answer.

We could jack up tuition, but that comes with costs, too.  At a really basic level, tuition increases put more of a burden on students, many of whom are already struggling.  They also tend to annoy the elected officials at the county and state levels who decide on our operating support; jack up tuition too much, and they’re likely to respond with offsetting decreases.  High tuition flies in the face of the mission of a community college; Swarthmore is immune to that, but we’re not.  And at some point, elasticity of demand is likely to set in -- raise tuition too much, and you stop raising revenue, either because you’re giving more back in financial aid or you’re getting fewer students.  Plenty of private colleges have maxed out on tuition as a revenue source, judging by their discount rates.

And that’s before even mentioning the rate of increase of health insurance costs, which have the same effect on the budget that termites have on a house.  Any serious proposal for more full-time employees -- faculty, staff, or admin -- needs to account for that.

Culturally, there’s a tendency in higher ed to deny the concept of opportunity cost.  Instead, it’s easier to behave as if budgetary constraints are either imaginary or a symptom of not trying hard enough.  But they’re real, even in states that aren’t quite as far gone as, say, Illinois.  We’ve coped through a combination of wishful thinking, denial, buying time, and infighting.  I’d rather try a strategy of coming to grips with reality, even if that sometimes means having some awkward conversations.

So, I’ll start.  Has anyone seen actual data contrasting the “smaller sections with more adjuncts” strategy to the “larger sections with more full-timers?”  If so, how did it turn out?  And if not, are there any enterprising higher ed doctoral students out there looking for a topic?