A Missed Opportunity

The storm of the century of the week (thundersnow!) caused a snow day, so I had some unanticipated time for reading.  I devoured How to Run a College, by Brian Mitchell and W. Joseph King, in hopes that it would be useful.  

It wasn’t about what it said it was about.  Call it a missed opportunity.

Mitchell and King have both been presidents of private, residential, four-year universities.  Had the book been titled How to Run a Private, Residential, Four-Year College it might have fulfilled its goals fairly well.  Reading it from a community college perspective, it was a clear miss.

Mitchell and King start well, noting that “[t]he greatest challenge facing American higher education is how to professionalize governance.” (11)  They come down hard on trustees, whom they characterize as amateurs who often don’t understand the necessary ways of higher education. When shared governance fails, they argue, “the most likely cause is one group’s overstepping its boundary.” (13)  The board chair should be the border patrol: “the most important role of a board chair is to be a trusted, strategic partner of the president and senior staff. To do so, a chair must respect the lines of authority on a college campus.” (18)

All of which is true, as far as it goes.  A micromanaging Board can do untold damage, as can an arbitrary or vindictive chair.  But Mitchell and King stop there, as if the highest level of governance is the Board.

That’s where the private university backgrounds betray them.  Anyone in public higher education knows that Boards come from somewhere, whether from appointments by elected officials, or by direct election themselves.  In fact, in the age of performance-based funding, legislated curricular mandates, and an unprecedented level of prescriptiveness by legislatures, there’s an argument to be made that “shared” governance is now shared with elected officials, and, by extension, with the voters.  That requires a basic rethinking of shared governance which, in its classic form, assumes a self-contained institution within which decisionmaking is shared.

That may sound like a picky or technical distinction, but it makes a difference.  If a college is free to redefine its own mission, it has a certain amount of autonomy.  If it’s an arm of the state, or the county, it has much less. This week’s decisions by the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point to divest itself from the liberal arts can be seen as a time-release response to a direction set at the state level.  When a college is subject to the oversight not merely of trustees, but also of state (and sometimes county) politicians, its ability to control its own destiny is circumscribed.

The private university orientation of the authors also probably helps explain the complete absence of unions from the discussion of shared governance.  Unions can be good and bad, but they materially change the equation when it comes to decisionmaking. Eliding them from the analysis suggests that managers have far more agency than they often actually have.

The book’s public-college blind spot crops up repeatedly.  In a discussion of admissions -- in which I learned that students who don’t fall into the “athlete,” “legacy,” or “diversity” slots are called “over the transom,” which may be one of the more upsetting things I’ve seen in a while -- they claim that we’re seeing “a significant increase in attendance at community colleges” (39), which hasn’t been true since about 2010.  They follow with open concern-trolling, asking openly whether community colleges are capable of handling the “explosive growth possible with shifting demographics…” (40) To which I want to reply, bring on the explosive growth. Community college enrollments have been falling for years, and, as Nathan Grawe’s recent book suggests, are in danger of falling more in the next decade.  That isn’t a secret; you just have to check.

The book goes on to devote entire chapters, respectively, to intercollegiate athletics, residential life, and admissions as a form of marketing.  I’ll just say those made for quick reading.

In terms of solutions to the very real economic issues higher education faces, they come up with “collaboration,” giving the Five Colleges in Massachusetts and the Claremont Colleges in California as examples.  Both involve purchasing consortia and economies of scale across institutions. (The Claremont Colleges are all private; four of the Five Colleges are private, the fifth being UMass-Amherst.)

Which, again, is fine as far as it goes, but is a bit of old hat.  We know that. That has been part of the public college playbook for decades.  Some states -- Florida leaps to mind -- have knit together their public colleges into single systems for exactly that reason.  And nobody cites the Claremont Colleges or Amherst Colleges as exemplars of low cost. The proposed solution falls far short of the problem.

Whether Mitchell and King capture accurately the world from which they come, I’ll leave to readers who know that world better than I do.  But they don’t come close to fulfilling the promise of their title, or to helping us in the public sector handle the real and increasing challenges we face.  Yes, community colleges need good Boards that understand the boundaries of their jurisdiction. That’s true. But there’s so much more to discuss...

When Less Can Be More

Do you ever have the experience of seeing where somebody else appears stumped by a dilemma, and not knowing why, because the answer seems obvious?  

I had that on Tuesday reading this piece from the Hechinger report about teacher coaching.  Yes, it’s set in K-12 schools, but that seems incidental to the crux of the piece. It’s about the benefits to teachers and students when the teachers themselves have coaches who occasionally work with them to make their classes better.  Apparently, there’s a fairly noticeable improvement in the first year, with a rapid leveling-off after that. The payoff for students isn’t trivial: as the article notes, “[t]he increase in student achievement from coaching is on par with the gain researchers typically see from students of a veteran teacher with 5 to 10 years of experience compared to a novice teacher.”  That’s something.

The article presents the leveling-off after the first year as a bit of a mystery.  I’m not sure why. Herein, I propose my alternate explanation:

The first few times a coach observes a teacher, s/he is likely to notice the most glaring issues.  As those get addressed, or not, the coach will move down the list of steadily less important (or less changeable) issues.  Diminishing returns will set in.

I don’t see that as an argument against coaching, at all.  I see it as an argument against routine.

On my own campus, we have a group of faculty who are on call to provide non-evaluative peer observations for their colleagues, upon request.  I’ve sworn the group to secrecy as to who they’ve seen, but a few people who’ve been seen have volunteered testimony to the effect that it was remarkably useful for the small amount of time involved.  A peer watches one class, then talks to you about it afterwards for maybe a half hour. That’s it. In that time, a peer might make one or two suggestions that turn out to be useful. Fresh eyes on one side, and open ears on the other, can lead to something valuable.  But if the peer came back week after week, or new ones came back week after week, the feedback would quickly devolve from revelatory to desultory. It would have to.

The lesson for me is not that coaching is inherently good or bad.  It’s that a little bit is very good, but you hit diminishing returns quickly.  So the goal of any coaching approach should be to reach as many people as possible, even if only briefly.  And institutionally, it’s better to have a set of tools to switch out than to use the same few over and over again.  Just as with students, not everybody will respond to the same intervention the same way.

In the parable of the fox and the hedgehog, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.  This is where administrators need to be foxes. Any one solution, no matter how elegant, will take you only so far; you have to keep trying different things.  

Admittedly, this temperament made grad school a bit of a challenge; I would look into one school of thought, or follow one person, until diminishing returns set in and I would switch.  Some hedgehogs didn’t think much of that, and in retrospect, I can understand why. But to thine own self be true.

What looks like a mystery to a hedgehog is clear as day to a fox.  Do some coaching, then switch it up and do something else. The law of diminishing returns is unforgiving.

Control Groups and the Student Grapevine

On Monday I had a heartening discussion with a professor on campus about some promising practices to improve student retention that he had seen discussed at a recent conference.  I don’t want to betray any confidences, so I’ll just say that they sound potentially fruitful, but also labor-intensive. Absent a visit from the money fairy, if we were to try them, they’d have to be phased in slowly.

Which raises a question that I’m sure some wise and worldly readers have addressed at one point or another.  

A slow phase-in means that some students will receive a benefit that others won’t.  And, bless them, students talk to each other. I’d bet that some students who don’t get the benefit will hear from others who did, and will start asking questions.  “How come my friend got this and I didn’t?”

It’s a fair question, at one level, but it also threatens to throw a monkey wrench into an experiment.  

The student grapevine is a mixed blessing.  In some areas, I’m absolutely counting on it.  For instance, once OER adoption hits critical mass, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some students confront faculty who aren’t using it to ask why not.  At the very least, I’d expect to see students vote with their feet and populate sections with OER before filling other sections of the same course, thereby creating a sort of market pressure to keep costs down.  If you believe, as I do, that textbook costs are a barrier for many students, this kind of pressure can be positive.

In some areas, it’s both good and bad, but a fact of life.  Students have discussed favorite and least favorite professors forever.  There’s a well known website that starts with “rate…” that can be counted on to start faculty grumbling at the mention of its name, but the kind of information the website provides isn’t new.  The innovation is that what had been a sort of oral tradition has been written down and disseminated, but without the editorial care that we like to think usually attends publication.

When it comes to on-campus experiments, though, the grapevine can be a real problem.  Even answering the question of why a given student isn’t getting a benefit can contaminate the sample.  But stonewalling doesn’t make the question go away; it just opens up a vacuum in which other, more sinister or baroque, explanations can thrive.  People will try to make sense of the world given what they have to work with. As a kid, I was perplexed that the ancients would pick out five stars in the sky and declare confidently that it was an octopus playing a harp.  That kind of filling in of the blanks happens when blanks are left open.

I can’t be the first person to face this.  So, wise and worldly readers, I look to you.  Have you seen reasonably elegant ways to do control-group experiments with interventions on campus that don’t fall apart when someone from the group left out asks why?

A Wake-Up Call

I’m not a fan of scary movies generally.  I don’t seek out haunted houses.  I even look away during particularly vivid surgical scenes on tv.  The way I see it, reality can be frightening enough.  I don’t need my entertainment to be scary. Give me “slapstick” over “scary” any day of the week.

That said, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, by Nathan Grawe, is both terrifying and worth reading if you work in, or care about, higher education.  I actually gasped several times, which isn’t my usual response to monographs about demographics.  

Grawe is a demographer at Carleton College.  He has designed an index he calls the HEDI, or Higher Education Demand Index, looking at birthrates and various demographic indicators through 2029.  Drawing on data about rates of college attendance by race, income, region, parental education level, and a series of other factors, he issues some predictions about enrollments over the next decade or so.

The short version: community colleges are in trouble, and community colleges in the Northeast and Midwest are in very deep trouble.  And by 2026, nearly every non-elite institution is in trouble. (The Great Recession of 2008 triggered a sharp and abrupt drop in the birthrate that has lingered for years; 2008 plus 18 equals 2026.)

To be fair, Grawe doesn’t only focus on the two-year sector.  He predicts that elite four-year institutions will continue to thrive, and that a few near-elites may even be able to break into the top tier.  But the rest will suffer, and two-year colleges will suffer badly.  I’ll focus on the two-year sector, since that’s my beat.

Grawe notes, to his considerable credit, that some trends that seem to portend one thing by themselves can be canceled out by related trends.  For instance, much of the progress we’ve made in the last twenty years on reaching out to first-generation students will actually reduce the percentage of first-generation students in coming years, since their parents will have attended college.  The racial composition of college students will continue to shift, but with more college-educated parents among populations of color, the effect on enrollment will be less dramatic than a straight-line projection from current numbers would suggest.

However, for two-year colleges, that’s a mixed blessing.  Grawe notes that children whose parents have degrees are far more likely to attend four-year colleges right out of high school.  Moreover, the spread of the “high tuition, high aid” model tends to deter enrollment disproportionately among lower-income families.  To the extent that community colleges have been pushed in that direction by sustained underinvestment, they may be cutting off the enrollments they need.  

Grawe ends the book with a general admonition to college administrators to start getting ahead of these trends, lest our colleges be steamrolled by them.  Given that just last week a third New Jersey community college revealed that it’s in active conversation about folding itself into Rowan University, I find the warning timely.

Grawe notes, correctly, that selective four-year schools can compensate for declining populations by lowering their standards for entrance.  In practice, that tends to leave open-admission institutions absorbing more than their share of the demographic hit.  If a student who once would have been relegated to community college by default is now accepted at Midtier State, then the local community colleges suffers a double whammy: the market shrinks, and its share of the market shrinks, too.  Put differently, four-year schools are increasingly fishing in our pond.  We’re already seeing some of that.

As a reviewer, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t raise a few quibbles.  The first, and most basic, is that the book relies on bunch of maps, but it’s printed in grayscale.  I don’t usually mind grayscale, but in this very specific context, color would have made a material difference.  (So would size; some of the maps were so small that dots indicating cities blotted out entire states.)  Happily, the maps are available in color -- and magnifiable -- at Grawe’s website.  

More substantively, Grawe doesn’t distinguish between college attendance and college retention.  That’s an easy oversight if you work at Carleton, but a pretty basic one if you work at a community college.  Demographics can tell us a lot about the classes we can recruit, but they tell us a lot less about the classes we can retain.  If we could improve our Fall-to-Fall retention substantially, that could offset some of the recruitment drop.  

The book measures college attendance, looking entirely at 18 year olds fresh out of high school.  That’s an important group, to be sure, but it’s not exhaustive.  It leaves out older students, which is a potential growth market; “some college, no degree” is a huge group.  But it also entirely leaves out dual enrollment, or students taking college classes while in high school.  That’s a large and growing cohort in the community college world, but it goes unmentioned in Grawe’s telling. If one outcome of growing income polarization and increased parental education is that more high school grads will go directly to four-year colleges, then community colleges would be well-advised to work diligently on reaching students still in high school.  And that’s exactly what’s happening: at most community colleges, the two areas of growth are online classes and dual enrollment.

As with any extrapolation from the present, there’s always the possibility of unforeseen interventions.  Grawe singles out Tennessee as a state likely to suffer reduced enrollments, but the wildly successful Free Community College program there has led to improvements in both enrollment and retention.  On the flip side, if Trump-era changes stick or intensify, four-year colleges that have come to rely on a steady stream of foreign students may find themselves hurting out of proportion to what local birthrates would predict.  And any given location can have location-specific changes.  For example, someone making predictions about Monmouth County in 2010 probably would have missed both Hurricane Sandy and the closure of the local military base.  A population decline was already under way, but that one-two punch accelerated it.

Still, caveats noted, Grawe is largely correct that enrollments follow populations of 18 year olds, and in most of the country, that trend is negative and soon to get very negative.  

The painfully obvious policy solution to that, of course, is to once again decouple operating funding from enrollment levels.  In most places, community colleges were designed with the idea in mind that tuition would be a smallish component of the budget, if they even had tuition at all.  (CUNY and the California cc’s were free for years.)  Over the last few decades, tuition has grown as a percentage of budget.  The damage from that was partly hidden by a demographic tailwind that pushed enrollment upwards even as tuition rose.  But the winds have shifted, and are about to intensify.  If we want the (smaller) next generation to be productive enough to support us as retirees -- and I think we do -- then we need to own the truth that the cost of educating them has to be shared.  Historically, it was; baby boomers paid a much lower tuition level, relative to income, than succeeding generations have.  We’ve clearly hit the limits of that shift; it’s time to move back.  

That would require a political change at least as dramatic as the demographic change that Grawe’s work foretells.  That’s the really scary part.  Denial is a hell of a drug, and far too many people either won’t believe or won’t care that disaster will strike until it does.  At that point, it’s too late.

Grawe’s book doesn’t have creatures from the deep, space aliens, or teenage vampires.  It’s scary because it relies on distinctly ordinary people to look up and make changes while there’s still time.  I don’t often say this of scary things, but check it out.

Thank You

I owe John Hetts a thank you for a well-timed reminder this week on Twitter.

Taking a recent report on the spread of multi-factor placement as a jumping-off point -- and noting that multi-factor placement is now used at a majority of community colleges across the country -- Hetts noted that a statistic like that would have been unthinkable five years ago.  

It’s a little bit like watching your kids grow.  On a day-to-day level, you barely notice it.  But a photo at 10 and a photo at 15 look unmistakably different.  You just have to step back a bit to see it.

Which is fitting, really.  Data and statistics across time and large sample sizes are a way of stepping back from what’s right in front of you, and noticing patterns that might not be obvious if you stand too close.  In this case, anecdote accomplishes something similar for folks who are often buried in data.

In my first community college administrative position, which I held from 2003 to 2008, I don’t recall ever hearing a single discussion about graduation rates, retention rates, or achievement gaps.  If you had asked me what the college’s graduation rate was, I couldn’t have told you.  And that wasn’t just me; those topics simply weren’t on the institutional radar.  We talked about money, and articulation agreements, and outcomes assessment, and there was no shortage of personalities and all that came with them, but we really didn’t look at institution-level student outcomes.  Outcomes assessment was confined to the classroom.

That seems bizarre now, but at the time, it was simply the way it was.  I remember attending a conference and hearing somebody ask whether we, in the audience, knew the longitudinal success rates of students who started out in remedial classes.  Not only didn’t I know, I had never even been asked the question before.  I remember being embarrassed at not knowing, but when I got back to campus, it just wasn’t a topic on the table.

It’s a different world now.  I’ve devoted entire faculty meetings to discussions of achievement gaps, and have made closing those gaps the central focus of the academic master plan.  And I’m not alone in that.  At this point, anyone in an academic administrative role at a community college should be well-versed in the basics of their local data.  

Of course, knowing and doing remain two separate enterprises.  Multi-factor placement provides an easy example.  The idea behind it is that inaccurate remedial placement can do more harm than good, so finding ways to prevent students who don’t really need it from being placed into it is the right thing to do.  Placing students into remedial coursework based on a single test score, such as the Accuplacer, leads to a lot of wasted time and money, and some unnecessary attrition.  A given student can get a misleading score on a given day for a host of reasons.  Better to look at other factors, such as high school coursework and GPA.  Those indicate performance sustained over time.  And the folks who study these things -- including Mr. Hetts -- have found that previous performance in school is a better predictor of future performance in school than is a single standardized test.  That’s probably why selective colleges put more stock in high school performance than in the SAT.

The first time an idea like that is introduced on campus, though, the first response is typically some version of “but that’s watering down standards!”  The objection is based on the fallacy of false precision, but it carries emotional weight.  It can take a while for people to get past that.  That has been the work of the last several years.  It’s halting and uneven, and it occasionally falls prey to local political disputes based on other agendas.  But it’s happening.  The gradual accretion of evidence that comes from asking the right questions is becoming harder to ignore.  Now, apparently, a majority of community colleges has made the leap.  That’s wonderful news.

Reforms based on data can take frustratingly long to gain traction.  That’s especially true when the harm done by the incumbent system is proportionately greater among students of color, for whom the larger culture offers no shortage of alternate explanations.  But actual traction is starting to happen.  We’re slowly and unevenly getting to the point where these topics aren’t automatic conversation-stoppers.  That’s nowhere near enough, but it’s better than I’ve ever seen.

So thank you, John Hetts, for a well-timed reminder that we’re actually making headway.  We are, we should, and frankly, we have to.

The Award I’d Like to See

The AACC named its finalists for excellence awards this week.  I read the list, noting with pleasure that I know personally both of the presidents who are finalists for “best CEO/Board relationships.”  (They’re both great.)  But then I noticed the geographic distribution of nominees.

Going down the list, the nominees for the various awards come from:

Tennessee

Colorado

Texas

Wisconsin

Florida

Texas

Ohio

Illinois

Arizona

North Carolina

California

Michigan

Montana

Ohio

Texas

Maryland

Florida

Tennessee

Ohio

Nebraska

Alabama

Tennessee

North Carolina

With the arguable exception of one nominee from Maryland, the entire Northeast got skunked.  On the map of awardees, everything from Delaware and Pennsylvania northward and eastward could be marked “there be dragons.”

I doubt that it was a conscious snub; that’s not how these things typically work.  And I don’t deny the merits of any of the nominees.  But the pattern was striking.

At the same time, the Chronicle featured an article detailing the demographic challenges facing Maine specifically, and New England generally.  In a nutshell, it comes down to a declining number of 18 year olds.  The piece notes that the birthrate fell off a cliff in 2008, so the slow decline of 18 year olds should become a precipitous drop in 2026.  Add to the demographics the fact that this region tends to have highly unionized faculty and staff, and administrations are squeezed between inexorable trends and inflexible rules.

As I mentioned recently to a colleague from the South, only half-jokingly, her colleagues are playing the game on the “easy” setting.  We’re playing it on the “black diamond” setting.  

That’s not to deny that other states have challenges; certainly, Illinois should get full credit there.  But it’s also easier to excel when you aren’t fighting accelerating demographic headwinds and an abundance of private colleges.  Growth forgives many sins.

As a sector, we’re good at noticing how measures like graduation rates tend to favor institutions that screen out anybody high-risk.  But we don’t seem to apply that lesson to ourselves.  I’d like to see serious attention at AACC and the League to colleges that have coped well with negative demographic trends.  

So, the award I’d like to see: “Best Management of a Significant Enrollment and Funding Drop in a Collective Bargaining State.”  The winners of that one could really teach us something useful.

Your move, AACC...

Whose Skin? Which Game?

The hot policy topic around higher education right now is “risk-sharing,” or what sometimes gets called “skin in the game.”  It’s the idea that colleges should bear some of the risk for payback of student loans, so they’ll have an incentive to turn their back on risky students.  Sorry, I misspelled “do a better job.”  

I’ve mentioned before that for open-admission institutions, the concept is inherently silly.  We don’t control who shows up, and we don’t control access to student loans.  (We also don’t control recessions.)  Given those ground rules, “accountability” is merely punitive.

In discussion about a student today, though, I realized an even more basic objection.

Most students attend more than one college.  Many attend several.  Transfer is normal; “churn,” or transferring more than once, is common.  

Take “Lisandra.”  She starts at St. Someone College, and leaves within the first semester because she feels like it just isn’t the right fit.  She comes home and attends Nearby Community College for a couple of semesters to save money and get her confidence back.  Before graduating, she transfers on to Compass Direction State, where she finishes her bachelor’s.  She borrows money for all three schools.

Which school should be held accountable for her post-graduation results?  

Lisandra is fictitious, but her path is common.  Any serious proposal for risk-sharing would have to be able to answer the question.  

If St. Someone is on the hook, it might rightly object that it’s unreasonable to pin four years’ worth of loans on it for less than one semester of attendance.  Nearby CC might object that it charged far less than the other two places, so its contribution to the debt was far smaller, and she’s not an NCC alum.  Compass Direction State might well claim credit for her eventual degree, but a good chunk of Lisandra’s credits weren’t from there.  (Nationally, about half of bachelor’s degree holders have significant community college credits.)  

One could propose pro-rating, but that wouldn’t work, either.  Recall that Lisandra left St. Somewhere before finishing a semester.  Unless it’s progressive enough to have compressed courses within the term, that means she left without any credits.  That would let St. Somewhere entirely off the hook, despite its contribution to her debt.  That doesn’t seem right.

And as any community college administrator can tell you, credits don’t always transfer.  Suppose she took 50 credits at NCC before transferring to CDS, but CDS only accepted 39 of those credits.  (By national standards, that’s actually pretty good.)  Should NCC be on the hook for 50 credits, or 39?  What happens to the 11 orphaned credits?  

Again, any serious proposal for risk-sharing needs to be able to answer these questions easily and clearly.  I have not seen that, even once.

And that’s before getting into, say, AP credits, credits by examination, remedial credits, or ESL.  All of which are commonplace.

So, my question for proponents of “risk sharing” is based on Lisandra’s story.  You want skin in the game?  Whose skin?  Which game?

Procrastination, Good and Bad

Someone emailed me this week with a question about procrastination in administrative roles.  It got me thinking.

From what I've read, written, and lived, I see several different forms of procrastination (granting upfront that there may be more):

- The "I don't want to deal with this problem" kind.  This is completely unproductive, and often makes things worse.  The experience of failure actually helps with this, though; once you've face-planted a couple of times and still lived to tell the tale,you realize that "the worst that can happen" may not be so bad.  At that point, you might as well just rip off the band-aid and be done with it.  

- The "my brain needs to process this" kind.  This requires a certain confidence, self-awareness, and the ability to reflect.  Occasionally, when things are coming at me way too quickly, I make a conscious decision to put something aside for a day or several in order to let the cognitive dust settle.  Sometimes a breakthrough comes when I'm walking the dog or folding towels.  Leaving space for that to happen can be useful, if that's actually what's happening.  Be aware, though, that to external observers, what you perceive as “letting the dust settle” may resemble “not doing a damn thing.”  With time-sensitive issues, there’s no guarantee that the breakthrough will meet the deadline, either.

- The "program already in progress" kind.  Some problems take care of themselves, if given the chance.  I've even seen this in conversations, when someone comes in complaining, then gradually solves the complaint for herself while speaking.  Alternately, sometimes a course of action depends on something external happening (or not) and there's not much to do about it until then.  As a former manager of mine once told me, "don't just do something; stand there!"  There are times when that works.  (This version an also be expressed negatively as the “maybe it will go away” kind.)

- The "I forgot that I put that aside" kind.  I'll admit having done this myself.  Sometimes if a task falls low on the to-do list for a while, it sort of falls off.  It isn't so much procrastination as forgetfulness, but from the outside, they can look the same.  The danger of this one is that it sneaks up on you.  Holiday shopping often falls into this category.

I remember being awed, in my first days of administration, when I watched my boss keep his cool during somebody’s angry meltdown and respond to a pointed question with “let me get back to you on that.”  In the heat of a moment, it can be difficult to see the more reasonable third alternative to a dilemma; buying time can sometimes allow for clearer perception and, ideally, a better answer.

The key difference between useful and destructive procrastination is strategy.  Are you delaying out of a general sense of “I don’t wanna,” or is there reason to believe that delay will actually lead to a better result?  

The self-awareness piece is often the trickiest.  Nobody is at her best all the time.  Knowing when you’re just not in a position to make a good decision takes some trial and error, but once you know your own “check engine” lights, they’re worth watching.  When I can feel myself leaning towards a bad decision out of fatigue or spite, I’ve learned it’s best to step away and regain my bearings first.  The cost of a slight delay is far less than the cost of a stupid decision.

Even if you’re buying time for the right reasons, though, be aware that the rumor mill abhors a vacuum.  It will fill the silence with alternative explanations, many of which will be far more salacious or malicious than the truth.  Why people feel the need to do that isn’t entirely clear, but enough of them do that it isn’t surprising.  Choose those moments carefully.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found effective ways of getting around the bad kind of procrastination?  Have you found other ways of using the good kind well?

Civic Engagement as a High-Impact Practice

As both a parent of teenagers and an educator, I’ve been both appalled and impressed over the past week.  The massacre in Parkland was horrifying, both in itself and in context of a long string of mass killings in schools, colleges, theaters, concerts, and other public venues.  But the response of the students there -- their poise, purpose, and moral force -- in confronting political leaders has been absolutely heartening.

Katherine Wheatle, from IHEP, hit the nail on the head on Twitter.  She asked whether protests and student activism will be recognized as “high-impact practices” in student engagement research.

Perfect.

In higher ed research, “high-impact practices” are proven ways to get students more involved in their education.  Examples include first-year seminars, common readings, writing-intensive courses, collaborative projects, service learning, internships, and capstone projects.  The common thread throughout that diverse list is an emphasis on moving students from a passive mode to an active one, and connecting course content to something larger.

The kind of political engagement the Parkland students are doing fits the bill.

It reminds me of an exercise I used to use in American Government classes.  The students had to write letters to an elected official who represented them, whether at the local, state, or national level.  The deadline was relatively early in the term.  They got extra credit if they brought in a written response.  I remember many of them being shocked that they got responses, and in some cases, the responses involved concrete actions.  Being acknowledged was empowering.  

These students, though, have taken it to another level.  They’ve been remarkably adept at confronting political figures on camera.  I was impressed at the teenager who went toe-to-toe with Marco Rubio in front of a full auditorium and a live national television audience.  Say what you will about their respective political positions, but that student was obviously both engaged and markedly well-spoken.  In some cases, the students have been so well-spoken that political opponents have charged that they were actors.

Nope.  They were trained debaters.

According to the Miami Herald, “every public high school and middle school in [Broward] county has a debate program, along with more than two dozen elementary schools.”  In fact, many of the high school students had worked on gun control debates this past Fall.  

If anyone doubted the relevance of training in debate and extemporaneous speaking, this should settle the argument.  The students are running circles around adults who speak publicly for a living.  (And that’s not to mention their mastery of social media…)

As the father of a debater, and a frequent judge in Jersey Shore Debate League tournaments, I can attest that poise on stage is a learnable skill.  I’ve seen remarkable progress, even by middle school students.  Students who could barely stand in front of the room in their first tournament lay waste to the opposition by their fourth.  The teams at the tournaments have a refreshing gender balance, and they’re typically more diverse than the schools from which they come.  My only disappointment is that they’re small segments of their schools, and most schools don’t have them at all.  

Debate involves overcoming stage fright, making arguments with evidence, mastering rhetoric, and thinking on your feet.  These are _exactly_ the skills that enable effective civic engagement.  

The Parkland students are combining years of training with obvious moral capital and a clear sense of purpose.  They will not be taken lightly, and should not be.  They are taking their roles as citizens, even before they’re allowed to vote.  I don’t think they’ll stop at 18.

They’ve given me hope in a dark time.  Is political engagement a high-impact practice?  Absolutely.  And kudos to them for showing us how it’s done.

Optimism or Gallows Humor? You Make the Call…

Wednesday was uncharacteristically hot for a Northeastern state in February.  A few of the classrooms actually become uncomfortably hot, and we couldn’t turn on the air conditioning because the college had previously decided -- reasonably -- that February should be a good time to take the cooling towers offline to repair them.  

It seemed like a safe bet.

Whoever said April is the cruelest month was wrong.  February is.  It’s the time of year when it feels like it has always been winter, it will always be winter, and the sun will never come back.  It doesn’t have a major holiday to distract you from the cold.  Sometime around early February is when I feel like winter has made its point and can leave anytime now, thank you very much.  

So a weirdly warm and sunny day in February means finding excuses to go outside.  

People who know me know that I walk faster than most people.  But I’ll admit a certain lack of urgency when walking between buildings on Wednesday.  It was just too glorious not to pause for a moment and take it all in.

Students, characteristically, adapted to the heat in milliseconds.  I saw one young man in a t-shirt, khaki shorts, and boat shoes.  In New Jersey, in February.  I don’t know his name, but I salute him.  

The moment that gave me pause, though, came when I overheard a couple of young people I assume were students chatting outside the student center.  One of them said:

“Global warming really takes the edge off February.”

I couldn’t decide if it was optimism or gallows humor.  Maybe a little of each.  And I could see a basis for both.

Yes, the idea of weather getting progressively weirder over time is scary.  My own area got hit hard by Hurricane Sandy a few years ago, so this isn’t an abstract proposition.  But a beautiful day in February is a beautiful day in February, even if it suggests something disturbing.  Guilty pleasures are still pleasures.

Hugging? Really?

If you live long enough, some of your quirks wind up being vindicated.  

Coming from a long line of Swedes, my family wasn’t particularly huggy.  The first time I heard the expression “God’s Frozen People” I laughed out of recognition.  Growing up in very Italian areas, a mode of being that was considered appropriate at home sometimes got read as aloof or standoffish when out in the world.  It wasn’t; it was respectful distance.  But that didn’t always translate.

In college the Scandinavian way was fine; I went to college in New England, in a pretty WASP-y place.  A certain distance wasn’t considered weird.  In grad school, though, it often was.  Older male professors often liked to greet people with the arm around the shoulder from behind, or the solid back-slap.  Every single time someone did that, I bristled.  It wasn’t threatening, exactly, and certainly not in a sexual way, but it still felt inappropriate.  It was like claiming ownership.  I didn’t care for it, which actually annoyed a few of them.  I respect others’ boundaries, and prefer that they respect mine.  Fair is fair.

Finally, the culture is starting to catch up.  Sweet, sweet vindication is mine…

IHE’s story about college presidents greeting people with hugs, and sometimes hugging them against their will, struck a chord.  

In work settings, a certain distance is often appropriate.  I see that as part of a larger philosophy of what should come with positional authority.  Positional authority -- workplace power, if you prefer -- should be understood as entrusted.  It’s about the institution, not the person, and the point of the authority is to help the institution meet its goals. Holding a position of authority involves being entrusted with power for certain kinds of purposes.  Using it for other purposes is violating that trust.  

In collective bargaining negotiations about ten years ago, I had a revealing colloquy with a professor.  The issue at hand was the “community service” expectation in the contract.  She suggested having each professor prepare a lengthy portfolio for the administration to review, encompassing all of the community service work they had done.  Her line, which I remember to this day, was “don’t you want to know the whole person?”  I surprised her with a “no,” saying that it’s not up to me to judge the whole person.  My job was to evaluate job performance.  The rest of a professor’s life wasn’t any of my business, as long as it didn’t interfere at work.  She looked surprised, and perplexed, but I think the basic stance makes sense.

(The point of that is to allow space for a personal life, not to sacrifice a personal life to work.)

I wouldn’t support some sort of blanket ban on hugging, obviously.  Some people have known each other forever, and there’s a context of a much thicker relationship.  And sometimes awful things happen.  I remember people hugging and crying in the hallways on 9/11, for instance.  In moments like that, it makes sense to loosen certain rules for a bit.

But those moments should be understood as exceptions.  Because the feeling of being claimed against your will -- even if the other person doesn’t consciously realize that’s what’s happening -- is degrading.  It shouldn’t be a part of work.  And that’s without even addressing the sexual side to it, which I’ve been spared but many people, especially women, haven’t.  That is not okay.

My advice to presidents?  Handshakes are fine.  In exceptional cases, hugs from the front can be appropriate, but be attuned to any sign that this isn’t an exceptional case.  And don’t sneak up on people and grab them from behind, ever.  Just don’t.  

If you aren’t sure, err on the side of respect.  It may lead to a few awkward moments, but over time, it wears well.  You don’t even have to be Swedish to appreciate it.