Scenes from Home

A few nights ago we had rice-and-bean enchiladas for dinner. TB and TG were being poky about eating, with rice flying everywhere. In a fit of desperation, after The Wife had already decamped for the computer, I was seized by the spirit of song (to the tune of “We Will Rock You,” by Queen):

Eat your enchiladas and your beans

I'm getting tired of these dinner scenes

You've got sauce on your face

A big disgrace

Spitting your rice all over the place

(chorus)

We will

We will feed you

Though neither TB nor TG had ever heard the original, they laughed long and well (thereby sending more rice flying), and now it's a running gag.

For full effect, you have to do the da-da-DUMP percussion on the table. Now, they won't let me get through dinner without at least one chorus.

On Saturday TW and I went out to see “Music and Lyrics,” which I highly recommend. Grandma and Grandpa came over to watch TB and TG.

TB and TG stationed themselves by the front door (we have a storm door with a full-length window, so they could see the street) so they could see G&G's car as it drove up. After some whining by TB and TG about how they hated to wait, I decided to share with them the benefit of my various protest marches over the years. We got a chant going:

Who do we want?

Grandma and Grandpa!

When do we want them?

Now!

Start 'em young, I say.

TB and TG each get three books read to them before bed each night. (TW and I switch kids each night.) TB has taken a shine to a picture book about alligators and crocodiles, which was actually a gift from another dean at my cc whose son used to like books about reptiles. There's a page on which a pair of crocodiles fight over a carcass. When we got to that page, I ad-libbed (in nasally voices)

“I get to eat the dead body!”
“No, I do!”

The Boy laughed (and hiccuped) for a solid ten minutes. I actually had to put the book down for a while. There are few sounds more gratifying than a five-year-old laughing and hiccuping.

(TB approaches TG in the living room)

TB: (TG), pull my finger.

DD: HA!

TW: Now look what you've done.

DD: (dissolves in helpless laughter)

TB: I farted. (smiles)

TB and TG laugh at 'farted.' I laugh at 'pull my finger.' TW reflects on the value of graduate education.

TB: Dad, was Sesame Street on when you were a kid?

DD: Yup.

TB (incredulous): Really?

TB: I'm never gonna get married.

TW: Why not?

TB: Because that way, nobody can say anything about my farts!

Public Service Announcement

If you find yourself having to send an all-campus email announcing the death of a beloved campus figure the previous night, please delete the 'flashing yellow smiley face' emoticon from your email before sending.

Thank you.

Candid Evaluations

It's the time of year to rate faculty promotion applications. (“Promotion” here refers to moving from Associate to Full Professor, or in some cases, Assistant to Associate.) Through a series of political compromises worked out over the years, we've developed a relatively complicated series of steps that a given application has to move through. People with input include the applicant, a peer (chosen by the applicant), the department chair, a faculty union committee, the dean, and the VPAA. (Eventually, the President and Board have final say, but in practice they typically go with the VPAA's recommendation.)

We've also developed a relatively clear set of criteria, using fewer categories than in the past and insisting on more detail for each. (For example, we dropped “community service” as a category when we realized that nobody could define it, let alone explain how to judge or even verify it. One professor always wrote “paid my taxes” under community service. I admire the panache, if not the altruism.)

We've had multiple discussions with the faculty union about processes and criteria, so there aren't any surprises. (They were as happy to drop the “community service” category as we were!) We have a very experienced set of department chairs. You'd think this would be easy.

Ugh.

No self-respecting professor would choose a peer who would trash her. So these inputs become largely meaningless by virtue of being uniform. Everybody is perfect.

The department chairs, as a group, see much more harm than good in giving a less-than-glowing evaluation. There's some logic to their position: they have to live with the applicant, and they generally don't see the applications from other departments. As long as an applicant can put at least something in each category, it's tempting to say “ahh, what the hell,” call it good, and kick it upstairs. Multiply that dynamic by a couple of decades, and you get a weird self-defeating process in which broad participation actually results in centralized decision-making, since all that conflict aversion renders the vast majority of the input irrelevant. The VPAA became, by default, the designated bad guy, whose job it was to overturn all those lower-level recommendations.

(Full disclosure: the deans' responses have largely followed the same dynamic as the chairs'. By the time I got here, the process was improbably long, impressively expansive, and ultimately decided by one person.)

We're trying now to introduce some level of candor to the evaluation process. It's an ugly, uphill battle.

We have some basic structural reasons to avoid candor. An unsuccessful promotion applicant remains on the faculty, still with lifetime tenure. Some people have been denied more than once, and all that grudge-nursing can create some very unhappy corners of the college. In the absence of candor, too, an unsuccessful applicant may or may not have a clear sense of the reasons for denial. Tenure abhors a vaccum, though, so in the absence of real reasons, people invent reasons that make sense to them. These often involve ugly accusations of bias, or personal vendettas, or simply misplaced anger.

To make matters worse, we have no merit pay system, other than promotion 'bumps.' In the absence of a consequence for a good or bad review, the path of least resistance is grade inflation. Multiply that by a few decades, and what was born as a failure of nerve has gradually become an inalienable right. It's tough to introduce candor suddenly at the point of promotion, when routine reviews leading up to it have been uniformly glowing (even if only because they all are). It's even tougher to generate candor when the hostility it would engender is palpable and immediate, and the payoff long-term and abstract.

Finally, there's the “you first” problem. A reasonable department chair might calculate, correctly, that if she decides to bite the bullet and go for candor, and her colleagues in other departments don't, then she will generate all of the downside with none of the upside. Better to take the safe way out, and accede to grade inflation.

The faculty union wouldn't stand for merit pay, and we're reasonably sure that in this political climate, a strike would hurt the college more than any concessions we might win on individual issues would help. So we're pretty much caught in the parameters as they exist, perverse incentives and all. Getting smart people to act contrary to palpable incentives in the name of abstract rightness is an uphill battle.

Has your college found a way to do candid evaluations without sacrificing broad input?

Ask the Administrator: Adjuncts and Faculty Governance

A returning correspondent writes:

Should adjuncts attempt to participate at any level in the
administrative governance of their college or university? In many
cases they probably aren't even allowed to do so, since they are often
regarded as lower-status part-time employees that are deliberately
excluded from institutional governance. In other situations, they are
probably so busy manipulating multiple gigs that they just don't have
the time or energy to get involved in committee work. Nevertheless,
should an ambitious adjunct with a few good ideas and some extra time
on their hands take the plunge and attempt to get involved in academic
committee work at their college or university?

Since adjuncts can be fired (or, rather, "not renewed") for making
only the slightest waves, maybe it is a mistake for them to try and
get involved in controversial academic politics or contentious issues
such as the creation of new degree programs, making curriculum
changes, or introducing new courses. After all, these issues will
just eat up your time, you will invariably offend at least some of the
full-time faculty, you will probably antagonize the dean or the
department head, and people will wonder about your motives and will
think that you are acting above your station. As an ever-vulnerable
adjunct, the last thing you need is for faculty members or
administrators to be suspicious of you.

As an adjunct instructor, I have given some thought about this issue,
and have actually made a few tentative moves in the direction of
getting involved in working with academic committees at my school and
have even suggested the introduction of some new courses. However, I
have generally been rebuffed by the administration. Maybe it's
because my ideas aren't very good, but I suspect that the fact that I
am merely an adjunct may have something to do with it.

What do you and your readers think about this?

Nope, no can of worms here!

The letter raises several issues at varying levels of 'meta.'

I'll confess upfront that I'm not a big fan of 'faculty governance,' mostly because I have a hard time distinguishing it from 'conflict of interest.' The idea that people with lifetime tenure – that is, people without accountability – should have the power to feather their own nests in the name of a higher morality strikes me as absurd on its face. To my mind, with power should come accountability. If you want to have the power to make decisions, you should be accountable for the ones that go bad. That means, for example, losing your job if a major call goes wrong.

Also, if faculty governance actually means something, then faculty unionization makes no sense. You're either management or labor; not both. If you really run the place, then you're management. If you claim to run the place and you unionize to negotiate against it, I'd call that 'self-dealing.' It's a flagrant ethical violation, and of dubious legality. You can't have it both ways.

(For the record, my preferred approach would be to have a unionized faculty, and to let managers manage. There are other ways, and I'm not wedded to this point of view. But I do believe strongly that there's some pretty egregious role confusion in the current system, leading to some pretty egregious abuses of power. At least if a manager screws up, she can be fired.)

Your mention of the fear of giving offense is to the point, since it gives the lie to the usual “academic freedom” argument. If you have to hold your tongue for fear of offending those with tenure, I don't see much academic freedom there. As a smart woman once said, freedom is freedom for the one who thinks differently. Serious policy debate requires giving offense, at least some of the time. (Sometimes it even involves saying 'no.') If tenure means that everybody is stuck playing in the same sandbox forever, then the cost of giving offense may outweigh the good done by honest questioning, at least in the short term, so I'd expect to see honest questioning replaced by kabuki rituals of ego-stroking. Which is pretty much what happens.

(In fiscal terms, if faculty can set policy but aren't responsible for budgets, I'd expect to see staggeringly inefficient decisions made that would result in decades of higher-than-inflation tuition increases to feed the beast. Oh, wait...)

It gets even worse with tenure decisions. If tenured faculty have the first vote on tenure cases, which is the case at most four-year schools as far as I know, then we're vesting hiring decisions with people who aren't held to account for bad decisions. (That's before we even talk about inbred departments, sexism and racism, personality conflicts, and the other various mores of the shop.) The decision-makers – the tenured faculty – are essentially immune from consequence for their decisions, so they can do pretty much whatever they want (with a few basic legal exceptions). To my mind, hiring and firing are very basic management tasks. Let them rest with people who will be held accountable for them. Yes, some decisions would be arbitrary, but do we seriously believe that isn't true now? At least in my preferred system, the decision-maker would be accountable. The only thing worse than power is unaccountable power.

Harumph. Rant over, back to the question.

There are really two questions here. Is it in the best interests of a given adjunct to make waves in faculty governance, and should adjuncts be included? I'd say 'probably not' and 'probably,' respectively, and just acknowledge the contradiction. (It's one of those “you first” dilemmas. My favorite example of that was an article in The Onion a while back – the headline was something like “95% of Americans favor the increased use of mass transit by other people.” The article was filled with quotes like “if other people would take the train, the traffic on my commute would be a lot lighter.” While in principle it would be only fair to include adjuncts, the first adjuncts to step up would bear tremendous risk.)

If you're going to have faculty governance, based on the presumed special centrality of faculty to the academic enterprise, then I'd say adjuncts ought to be included. After all, adjuncts do a significant percentage (at some colleges, a majority) of the actual teaching; to exclude the majority of the workforce in the name of empowering the workers strikes me as self-defeating. If the claim by faculty to special powers does not rest on curricular expertise and/or student contact, I'd like to know what it is based on.

(I could imagine a claim based on being uniquely place-bound. Since faculty are the most likely to stick around forever, the argument might go, they should have the most say in how things are run. Again, the line between that and 'conflict of interest,' or even 'landed aristocracy,' is a bit thin. The reason they're the most likely to stick around is precisely that they're not accountable. Hell, if I can vote for the governor of a state after 30 days, and have it count as much as the vote of someone who has lived there for 30 years, I have a hard time seeing what makes senior tenured faculty special.)

If we take the existence of 'faculty governance' as given, then I'd say adjuncts should have a place at the table. (Alternately, in my preferred model, they'd have membership in the faculty union.) You're certainly right that many would choose to skip it, simply because of competing demands on their time (I'm reminded of Oscar Wilde's line about socialism: “I would have been a socialist, but I like to keep my evenings free”), but they should at least have the opportunity.

I'm almost afraid to ask, but...any thoughts on this one?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

The Scariest Word in the English Language, When Screamed By An Unusually Tall Five-Year Old Standing At the Foot of Your Mattress at 6 A.M.

......

"Cannonball!"

Ask the Administrator: How to Become a Dean

A polymath correspondent writes:

I'm writing today with a situation and a question. I'll start with my goal:
I eventually hope to obtain a deanship. I enjoy administrative work,
and like the challenges associated with moving students through the
system. I also love contemplating the larger issues in higher education. In terms of
education credentials, I recently finished my PhD (in the humanities).
I also have an MA (humanities), and a BS in a hard science. I have
taught part-time, while dissertating, at five institutions, and in front
of graduate, undergraduate, and adult education students. Currently I
advise students, through a dean's office, at a large Catholic university
in a major urban area. This brings me to you: Should I seek a
tenure-track job and hope to gain a deanship from that angle, or should
I continue in advising, slowly working my way up the administrative
side? I ask because it seems to me, in my limited observations (6-7
years), that deans are hired from the tenure-track ranks.

When I got my first real admin gig – an Associate Dean position – another Dean (who quickly became a good friend) dropped by my office with a benediction: “Congratulations, and may God have mercy on your soul.” It stuck with me. So good luck on your quest, and may God have mercy on your soul.

That said, it's important to make a distinction between different branches of college administration.

The side most faculty and professors are familiar with is the “academic” side. To become an academic dean, the traditional path is to go from full-time faculty, to department chair, to associate dean or dean. (Smaller schools often lack associate deans.) There are variations on that – some cc's have 'division chairs,' which are somewhere between a chair and a dean, who report directly to the VPAA or DAA. But the general rule is that you don't move up the ranks on the academic side without at least some full-time faculty experience.

(The exceptions are in very occupational areas, or when somebody is hugely famous and/or wealthy.)

The theory behind the pre-req, I think, is that the world looks different to faculty than it does to almost everybody else, and academic administrators need to be bilingual. On bad days, I sometimes wonder if my job title should be 'translator.' (As an aside, “contemplating the larger issues in higher education” is a very, very small part of the job. I do much more of that in the 20-30 minutes a day I spend writing blog entries than I do on the job.)

My predecessor in my current position didn't have a doctorate or full-time faculty experience. The faculty ate her for lunch. When I showed up with a doctorate, full-time faculty experience, and my own war stories from the classroom, it gave me a modicum of credibility (and the instincts to know which initiatives to simply kill in their cribs, since they'd fundamentally violate the culture of higher ed). I still get my share of static, some of it quite toxic, but at least they can't pull rank quite so easily.

However, the “academic” side is only one part of the picture.

Other major players include the non-credit side (community programs, continuing ed, occupational certificates, corporate training, etc.); the “business and finance” side (purchasing, buildings and grounds, security, accounting); the “student services/development” side (admissions, records and registration; counseling; athletics; financial aid); and the “development” side (fundraising). That's just at cc's; I'm sure that larger universities have additional areas to deal with issues unique to research grants (technology transfer, for example), and the inevitable diseconomies of scale.

Although faculty might be surprised to hear it, the folks who work in the non-academic areas often carve out very satisfying careers, fulfilling missions they believe in and enjoying working in a college setting. Most don't have faculty experience, but they don't need it.

It sounds to me like you're sort of straddling the divide between “academics” and “student development.” If you're aiming specifically at an academic dean position, you really need to find a tenure-track faculty position first. Assuming that happens, the plan of attack would be to get your feet on the ground by focusing on teaching and research for a while. As you gain credibility in those areas, step up and volunteer for the kind of service projects that most faculty shun like the plague. You'll quickly find yourself shortlisted for moving up, since most academics want nothing to do with administration, and won't be persuaded otherwise. (There are certainly fair and legitimate reasons for that, but sometimes I suspect it's a weird psychological corollary of what I've called the “good girl” syndrome.) Your interdisciplinary background can be a handicap in getting that first faculty role, but it can be a real asset in administration, since you'll already be less provincial than many of your peers.

If you could see yourself in a student development role, you can skip the faculty search altogether and try to find a niche there instead. Academic advisement is pretty much a dead end, but if you could get some experience directing projects – or, ideally, directing some sort of center – you could make yourself a lot more portable. This isn't just careerism; it takes more than just faculty to make a college run successfully. If you have the skills and the taste for one of those other roles, you can make a real contribution and still make a real living. No shame in that at all. In fact, at my cc, the VP for Student Development is probably the single smartest, savviest person on campus, and I don't think she has taught a day in her life. But her contributions absolutely make a difference in fulfilling the college's mission.

Good luck.

Wise and worldly readers – especially those with unorthodox career paths – what do you think?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

Ask the Administrator: Calling All English Professors!

A de-lurking correspondent writes:

I'm currently a junior at a four-year university, and I'm an English major. I've been thinking about earning a MA in Teaching, with which I can teach high school English in my state. But I've always wanted to teach at the college level. I'm afraid of the intense pressure to publish research throughout graduate school and in the university setting, though--my interest is in creative writing, not in research, and I don't want to go through seven years of graduate school just so I can enter an extremely clogged job market. Someone recently mentioned to me that community college professors don't have the same amount of pressure to publish as their counterparts at traditional four-year colleges, but they still have the advantage of teaching in a college setting. What do you think? Is that a complete misrepresentation of community college faculty life? If so, how would you say that they actually differ?

There's a lot here. I'll offer a few thoughts, but I'm counting on readers in English departments to flesh out the picture in the comments.

To answer the direct question: it's true that professors at community colleges generally have higher teaching loads, and lower research obligations, than professors at four-year colleges. It's also true that 'four year colleges' come in many different flavors, from the Snooty Liberal Arts College to the struggling almost-open-admissions school, and the research/teaching balance varies across the spectrum. (Generally, the higher the prestige, the lower the teaching load and the higher the research requirement. Exceptions exist, but the rule of thumb is fairly accurate.) The academic expectations, academic preparation levels of students, and demographics of students vary wildly across colleges, so the climate at one four-year college will be dramatically different from one a few miles away. “Teaching in a college setting” can mean a lot of different things.

It's also true that expectations on faculty generally have ratcheted upward almost everywhere over the last two decades or so, and I don't see that reversing anytime soon.

All of that said, if your passion is creative writing, you might want to pause and rethink this. Although many cc's teach a section or two of creative writing, it would be extraordinary for a cc professor to make a full-time load teaching only creative writing, or even creative writing plus literature. The overwhelming majority of the teaching load for every cc English department I know is divided between remediation and composition; literature, creative writing, film, poetry, and the like comprise a relatively small – and bitterly fought over – corner of the teaching schedule. Teaching remediation and composition can be very rewarding, and heaven knows the need is there, but it's not creative writing. This is especially true when you're teaching five sections per semester, year after year.

Although I'm a sucker for movies about heroic teachers (and I'm still waiting for the movie about a heroic dean!), I think they do the profession a serious disservice. If you experience your job as martyrdom, you should find a different job. The best composition teachers don't do it as a 'service' or as 'paying dues;' they take honest joy in it. It's a very different enterprise than teaching a roomful of deadly earnest Sylvia-Plaths-with-ipods at Snooty U. I've known too many people – and I'm not totally innocent of this myself – who went into higher ed envisioning a life of tossing off bons mots in oak-paneled rooms to eager young minds, only to find themselves instead ekeing out a living teaching the same few basic intro courses over and over again to students whose real interest is elsewhere, at colleges whose real interest is elsewhere. It can lead to a certain bitterness that is far too common, and deeply unhealthy.

If you can see yourself finding the joy – not the social usefulness or the tolerability – in teaching intro to composition to future marketing majors who wouldn't know Judith Butler if she bit them, then by all means, check out the cc world. If not – if what you really want is a not-too-stressful day job to pay the bills while you crank out novels – this is probably not the route for you. It may once have been, but it isn't now, and it won't be for the foreseeable future.

I can't speak in any detail to teaching high school. There, to an even greater degree, I think you'll see tremendous variation from district to district, based mostly on housing segregation. Beyond that, I'll defer to readers who have actually taught in high schools.

Faithful readers in English departments, or who recognize their younger selves in the correspondent's letter, what do you think?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

Three Years

In a classic case of burying the lede, an IHE story headlining four-percent raises for college administrators (I wish...) mentioned halfway through, in passing, that the median time in office for Vice Presidents of Academic Affairs is three years. That's less than half as long as the median time in office for Presidents.

If you don't know academic org charts, at the typical smaller college, the VPAA is the Chief Academic Officer. In the absence of a Provost, she reports directly to the President of the college. In most cases, the VPAA is the second-in-command, much like a Provost would be at a larger school. (At some small schools, a “dean of academic affairs” serves a similar function.) At my college, department chairs report to deans, and deans report to the VPAA. Given how much of a President's time is spent on external issues – dealing with other colleges, industry, government, donors, etc. -- the VPAA is often, for all intents and purposes, the key figure for day-to-day internal operations. (This can vary depending on the balance of power between the VPAA and the VP for Business and Finance, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb.)

It's an inexact analogy, but the British government offers a useful comparison. Think of the President as the monarch, and the VPAA as the Prime Minister. The monarch is the most visible figure, but for most purposes, largely ceremonial. The Prime Minister actually gets stuff done, or doesn't. Prime Ministers generally don't last as long as monarchs. (The key difference is that the President picks the VPAA, but the monarch doesn't pick the Prime Minister.)

Three years is an astonishingly short time for the median VPAA, given the median time by the typical tenured professor. If the VPAA comes from outside the campus (as opposed to a dean moving up the ranks), it takes a good six months to a year just to learn the lay of the land. Even moving up the ranks wouldn't shave much off that, since the scope of jurisdiction at the VP level is so much wider; even an experienced dean would have to learn quite a bit, and quickly. (This happened at my college, where we had a twenty-year-veteran dean step in as interim VPAA for several months a few years ago while we searched for a new one. She commented that she had no idea how much she didn't know about the college until she did that.)

Frustratingly, the article doesn't go into the reasons for such high turnover in such a key office. Off the top of my head, I can imagine a few possibilities:

• Ascension to Presidencies. VPAA's or Provosts are still the most common sources for new Presidents.

• Burnout. As stressful as deaning is, those jobs are far worse. I have the relative luxury of being able to say “not my problem” about the non-credit side of the house, for example. VPAA's don't get to say that about much of anything.

• Changes in Presidencies. Given the importance of the VPAA role, it's not at all unusual for a new President to want to choose her own.

• Internal political conflicts. Given that one of the key constituencies for a VPAA is a group with tenure, and given that funding is perennially short, a VPAA worth her salt will inevitably piss off some people who have long memories and no intention of going anywhere. Over time, these add up. Like a team owner firing a coach when the players slump, a President facing a discontented faculty can always replace a VPAA.

• Performance. Sometimes people perform themselves out of a job. This one is self-explanatory.

• Counting error. “Interim” VPAA's are relatively common, but I'd suggest that counting them in the sample would be somewhat misleading. Of course, there's “interim” and then there's “interim.” Some “interims” truly have no designs on the job, and agree to take it on only reluctantly and as a service to the institution. Others use it as an audition period to get the job permanently. I'm not sure how to account for that. I've seen reluctant interims last for years while colleges frantically searched for somebody acceptable to all constituencies, who would actually take the job.

• Retirement. With the founding generation of community college leaders getting towards retirement age, this is becoming a larger factor than it once was.

Even granting some weight to each of those, and imagining that there are plenty more, three years is still a pretty striking figure. Given that each VPAA will have her own priorities, management style, strengths and weaknesses, and personal baggage, colleges must spend an inordinate amount of time in adjustment mode. And after sticking around through the life cycles of several VP's, I could imagine senior tenured faculty almost involuntarily adopting a “this too shall pass” attitude whenever a new one steps in. That kind of cynical detachment, or stationary inertia, is terribly destructive to the atmosphere of a campus, no matter how indulgent it might feel at a given moment.

Worse, rapid turnover of VP's makes it harder to find good ones. Would you uproot your family to take a job with such a high risk of ending quickly? I've heard complaints about the thinning of the candidate pool, most of which I wrote off to a combination of the kind of golden age nostalgia to which academics are particularly prone, and the lack of faculty hiring over the last twenty years (which leads to a lack of successors in the pipeline). Now I need to add 'volatility' to my list of explanations. Of course, to attract smart people to high-risk positions requires higher rewards. The executive salary picture is starting to clarify.

A modest proposal for colleges and universities doing VPAA searches: offer renewable multi-year contracts. Hire carefully, but give the new hires the modicum of security to take the risks they need to take. Otherwise, the alternative is to continue unproductive churn at the top, and unproductive cynicism in the tenured ranks.

Ask the Administrator: House Calls

A long-suffering correspondent writes:

I am an adjunct instructor in the General Education department of
Proprietary Art School in Large City. Recently, our
management has gotten very uptight about student attrition rates,
almost certainly because if students start disappearing the bottom
line of the school will be adversely affected. The department head
(probably responding to pressure from above) now requires that all
faculty members contact poorly-performing or non-attending students at
home, hopefully inducing them to start coming to class again and to
try doing the work. We have to turn in weekly reports showing that we
have done this.

I am fearful that I could be walking into a legal minefield if I
complied with this. This school has a rather draconian
non-fraternization policy, and a few years ago a high corporate
executive actually came by and told us that we shouldn't talk to a
student out of class time for any reason whatsoever--even to the
extent if we happen to get on the same public transportation in which
a student was riding, we had to immediately get off. This is
certainly melodramatically excessive, but I am concerned that if I
called 19-year old Hottie at home to ask why she hasn't been coming to
my class I could be faced with an irate father or a jealous boyfriend
demanding my head on a platter, lest they sue the school into
insolvency.

There are also privacy issues to be considered--If a family member
answers the phone and asks why I want to talk to 19-year old Hottie, I
have to be careful that I don't mention anything about her academic
record.

Am I worried too much, or is there a real danger of stepping on a landmine here?

This brings back memories.

At Proprietary U, preventing or reducing student attrition was an obsession. (You're right about the reasons – a returning student is, among other things, a repeat customer.) “Intrusive advisement” was the favored approach. Students who didn't show up were to be called, cajoled, nagged, or whatever it took to get them back. The idea was to hector them into discovering why they wanted to go to college.

It rarely worked.

I never liked the approach, and very carefully positioned myself to avoid actually having to do it. Still, at one point PU actually had an office with three people and a director (I know, directors are people too...) devoted entirely to mailing attendance notices, calling vanished students, etc. I used to hang out with one of the people who worked there. She reported that fewer than half of the student phone numbers in the system were actually connected to anything. Whether the numbers were straight-up false, or the students just weren't that stable, was a matter of some speculation. Email addresses were even worse. A surprising percentage of them were obscene (“hotslut69@...”), and almost none of them produced responses of any kind. We used to joke that letters from PU were delivered by Pony Express.

The faculty, for their part, were supposed to keep rigorous track of student attendance, and 'reach out' to students whose attendance was spotty. The academic in me always considered that a form of pandering, and assumed that rewarding indifference would produce more of it. Still, it was the order of the day.

Intrusive advisement and FERPA stand in some tension with each other. As I understand FERPA, you can't leave messages on voicemail saying “we're noticed you haven't been to school in a week,” since you can't be certain who's listening to the voicemail. That said, experience tells me that if you don't leave messages, you might as well not call.

Intrusive advisement and your overly-paranoid 'non-fraternization' policy are in even worse conflict. I've never been one to go out drinking with students, but I'd say 'hi' if I ran into them in public.

I'm thinking it might be worthwhile to address these conflicts – carefully, of course – with the management at your college. What would they have you do when you get a voicemail, or when you reach a student and the student gives you waaaay too much information, or when you get the student's parent or spouse? I'm guessing that the 'non-fraternization' policy was drawn up at one time, in response to one incident, and the outreach policy was drawn up separately. You might need to connect the dots for them. Tactfully, of course. Don't do it on voicemail.

Worldly readers – your thoughts?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

Thinking Bloggers

As regular readers know, I don't usually do memes, but it would be ungracious to pass up this one. Another Damned Medievalist named me a thinking blogger, which tickles me to no end. (The award is given to blogs that provoke thought.) It's nice to be noticed.

One of the rules of being named a thinking blogger is that you're supposed to name five others. Some obvious candidates have already been tagged, and it seems like I always point to the same three or four people. (How many times can I say nice things about tiny cat pants before it becomes just silly?) So in the spirit of calling attention to folks who've earned more than they get, my nominees, in alphabetical order:

1. Aspazia. I discovered her only recently, but quickly became a fan. Her meditation on the issues particular to female professors actually provoked a small cascade of responses, of which mine was one. She did one recently on undergraduate hookup habits in which she noticed that, for many of her students, it's more about projecting an image (“look at the caliber of hottie I can get!”) than any actual hedonism. It sounds right, but it's incredibly disturbing; anybody who can pull off that fine-tuned an insight regularly is someone I'll read faithfully.

2. Cold Spring Shops. My back-and-forth with this Midwestern economist didn't start well – I remember being called a “true REMF,” which isn't nice at all – but when you skip the model train entries, he's usually interesting. There's a particular kind of conservative who can usually be counted on to at least make you think more carefully about your positions, even if you wind up staying where you are. Being reminded of other points of view in a thoughtful and honest way keeps me honest, which is a real service.

3. Evil HR Lady. Aside from one of the cooler titles in blogging, Evil HR Lady brings some really valuable perspective from the HR office. As with academic administrators, HR folks are frequently speculated about, but rarely heard from. She does a great job of outlining what the world looks like when you actually care about things like lawsuits. She also takes questions, which I find endearing. Her politics are not mine, from what little I've sussed out, but she's always interesting and frequently funny. Check her out.

4. Lesboprof. I know Lesboprof IRL, so this may be slightly unfair, but a hell of a writer is a hell of a writer, old friend or not.. Her recent piece on Ted Haggard skipped the easy snark and went to a level both more thoughtful and more humane than any other piece I've seen. Knowing her, it's not surprising, but you don't have to know her to enjoy her stuff. Her post on cursing inspired my own, and I have a note to do one on her 'epiphanies' entry. Good stuff.

5. Oso Raro. (“Slaves of Academe”) I know what you're thinking – sheesh, another gay lefty academic of color? -- but his illustrated essays are always worth checking out. His style is an interesting blend of arch and self-deprecating, which isn't an easy balance. His essays are sort of like palimpsests, with jokey/clever links and wise insights. Highly recommended.

Once more into the blog...

Ask the Administrator: Thoughts on Unions

Another California correspondent writes:

The faculty of the California State University system are threatening to
strike. What does it mean about us as professional faculty that we are
willing to do this? I once heard the president of our University speak very
bitterly about our union to a group of CEOs. He had worked at a college
without a faculty union before coming to my University and much preferred
working without a union - he said it kept things more "professional". I
suspect it made his job easier to not have a union to deal with. That
said, it's tempting to see the union folk as a bunch of obstructionist
parasites as they do little most of the time except add another layer of
complexity to our already dankly labyrinthine bureaucracy. Whether or not
we get a new contract, the union still gets their dues.

I'm not sure if I would give up instructional time if my union were to
strike but I would like to get a pay increase. Is there a better way to
work through these issues? If so, what is it?

My original response to this was an extended meditation on the role of unions in academic life. It quickly got away from the actual question and become something of a rant, so I'll put that response in the 'revise and repost' files and try to actually answer the question that was asked.

I've managed both unionized and non-unionized faculty. In fact, I've really done the extremes: the unionized group gets standard raises across the board – no merit component whatsoever – and the non-unionized group had annual reviews that determined their raises. (I also worked as faculty in the non-unionized setting.) I've also participated in actual contract negotiations at my current college, hammering out the terms of the next several years.

And I'll concede upfront that I don't live in California, and don't know the issues specific to this dispute.

All of that said, I've found that the basic concerns of unions and the basic concerns of (sane) management (I'll leave aside the question of insane management, since, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, every crazy manager is crazy in his own way) are fundamentally different. Broadly speaking, unions think in terms of minimums, worst-case scenarios, protection, security, and equality among members. (Non-members are routinely shafted; I was a little surprised at the faculty union's unconcealed indifference to the rate of adjunct pay, though in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have been.) They assume that every professor is hardworking and virtuous, and every manager a self-dealing fink of the first water. Management thinks in terms of initiatives, flexibility, responsiveness, and always – always – the low-performing 'clubhouse lawyer' who will exploit every possible loophole and procedure to feather his own nest.

Put differently, the union will assume that the faculty are doing their job just fine, and simply need to be protected from management (and paid better). Management will assume that a non-trivial number of faculty are loafing, and are exploiting bureaucratic loopholes and lags to escape actually doing their jobs at a reasonable level.

From my office, I have no issue with unions negotiating pay (broadly defined) and benefits. Honestly, setting 'merit increase' levels for every professor every year is incredibly stressful, since the 'winners' don't stay grateful, but the 'losers' milk their resentment eternally. No matter how obviously-right the reasoning, nobody likes to be told that he's getting a smaller raise than his officemate, because his officemate was more productive that year. (I never phrased it in directly comparative terms, but the faculty grapevine is fast and indiscreet.) To stave off the inevitable grade inflation, we sometimes had to set quotas for each performance level, which led to some really awful decisions.

In practice, too, someone who got a less-than-glowing review and a less-than-maximum raise was far likelier to take it as a personal affront than as constructive criticism. Allegations of favoritism, often mutually contradictory, flew fast and furious. When raises are contractual and across-the-board, the issue is out of my hands, and I (and the faculty) can focus on other things.

Where I and every manager I know takes issue with unions is in the protection they offer the bottom, say, five or ten percent. These are the parasites who exploit every opportunity to coast at the taxpayer's expense. (They're often 'victim bullies,' in C.K. Gunsalus' wonderful formulation.) In a rational organization, they'd be terminated and that would be that. But tenure protects them, and the combination of tenure with unions makes them all-but-bulletproof. These are the folks most faculty try their best not to notice, but managers spend most of our time dealing with. The difference in degree to which the two camps notice this group, I think, explains a great deal of the difference in attitudes towards unions (and tenure).

From my (admittedly idiosyncratic) perspective, I'd gladly trade relative generosity on pay and benefits for a greater ability to zero in on the few worst cases. Take out the tapeworms, and the entire system will work better. I've never heard a union even propose such a deal, but I'm guessing it would succeed.

Between the still-extant protections of tenure and the body of employment law that has developed since, say, 1970, the usual bugaboo of 'arbitrary and centralized power' has become largely theoretical. (This doesn't apply in certain cases, such as the ability of religious colleges to discriminate against, say, homosexuals or persons of different faiths. But that's another issue altogether.)

In terms of tactics, I'm not an organizer, but my suspicion is that the broader the base of membership, the more effective the union will be. At universities, for example, a faculty union that included T.A.'s might have more clout than one that didn't. I'm not a big fan of strikes, obviously, since they leave students out in the lurch, but a union that can't bring itself to strike is probably a union that won't win much. It's simply the nature of the beast.

Good luck with the current dispute. I hope you can settle without striking, at least.

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

Ask the Administrator: Different Prices for Different Majors

A new correspondent writes:

The Faculty Senate here has gone on record as opposing a proposal to base student tuition and fees on the academic program under which they (students) seek their degree.

The Senate gives 4 reasons for opposing differential tuition (I paraphrase those reasons here).

1) We don’t want to encourage or force students to choose among academic programs for economic rather than for educational reasons.
2) We don’t want to add the new layer of administrative bureaucracy that would probably accompany differential tuition.
3) We don’t want to add another layer of complexity to students’ academic decisions.
4) We don’t want to quantify the difference among academic programs in dollar terms. This would “demean faculty and students.”

I know you’ve written on similar topics in the past. Any reaction to this set of arguments?

I've addressed the topic before in the context of cc's, back when I was a wet-behind-the-ears blogger. The correspondent was writing from a comprehensive university, though, and included several arguments against differential pricing, so a fresh look seems in order.

First, some background. There is ample precedent for lab fees or materials fees, which add to student costs in some areas and not in others. (Intro to Chemistry usually has a fee; Intro to Sociology usually doesn't.) Textbook costs also vary by discipline – typically, the physical sciences get badly hosed, but the folks taking “intro to the novel” get off light. Financial aid is based on demonstrated need, so students with more need can (ideally) get more aid. And it's absolutely true that different majors cost the college different amounts, depending on such variables as class size, facilities, liability, materials, and the going rate for instructors. “Chalk and talk” classes are usually profit centers, which are used to offset the losses taken on, say, Nursing clinicals.

It's also true that employability varies considerably by major, though not often as predictably as students think. (A few years ago, CIS grads could write their own tickets. Now, those tickets had better be to Bangalore.)

To address the Senate's arguments, in order, as presented here:

• Students already make program choices based on perceived economics. Only now, the economics are largely prospective – what will get me the best job? To assume that passionate intellectual curiosity is the dominant guiding factor for most students is to live in a dream world.

• “Administrative complexity.” Phooey. This is easier than lab fees. Any college that can handle lab fees can handle this.

• “Layer of complexity.” Huh? I'll assume this is a restated version of reason 1.

• “It's demeaning.” I think this is the real objection for which the others are mostly face-savers.

A while back, when I wrote about the U of Florida's plan (since scuttled) to reduce its number of graduate students in English (a plan I supported), several commenters responded that yes, they should take fewer students, but they shouldn't cut the budget, since budgets are symbolic and that would send a negative message.

The objection was so breathtakingly stupid that I didn't even bother responding to it. Budgets are more than symbolic. They buy stuff. If you need less stuff, your budget should be cut, so areas that need more can buy more. If that wounds your fragile ego, you need a thicker skin.

Colleges and universities currently go to great lengths to hide different costs of different programs through a series of behind-the-scenes cross-subsidies. (If you think that doesn't involve administrative costs, I want what you're smoking.) The problem, of course, is that there's never quite enough money to go around. The 'cash cow' departments know the score, and frequently become hotbeds of discontent and union leadership. The 'fiscal sinkhole' departments also know the score, but argue – with some justification – that the costs of doing business are the costs of doing business.

In most other industries, prices usually bear some relation to the cost of production, at least on the low end. If the producer can't get a price that makes production worthwhile, it stops producing. (If they can go way higher, of course, they do.) Colleges and universities generally don't operate by that logic. We run programs on which we know we'll lose money, out of a sense of mission. Then we scurry behind the scenes to minimize the damage.

I'd like to see what would happen if a college set different prices by major, to reflect (broadly) their actual costs. (Since tuition doesn't cover the full budget of most institutions, it would have to be done on a percentage basis. Let tuition cover, say, 50 percent of the cost of instruction of any given major.) My guess is that students would sort somewhat differently than they do now, but I'm not sure just how. (The social scientist in me sees it as a nifty experiment.) It may be that the areas that are currently objecting on the grounds of feeling devalued would actually experience enrollment booms, since students who just need a degree – and don't much care what it's in – would presumably take the cheaper majors. Econ 101 teaches us that anything underpriced will be overused, so it may be that adjusting prices to reflect costs would actually be a boon for the liberal arts and a bane for the boutique majors.

In fact, the most reasonable objection I could see to this rests on a recognition that some of the majors most likely to lose enrollment would be the ones that the country needs the most. Raising tuition for Nursing would only exacerbate the shortage of nurses, for example. But that strikes me as an argument for a more robust financial aid system (and/or more robust philanthropy), rather than an argument for continuing to milk the liberal arts cash cow. We have a better shot at getting the funding right if we can get the costs right, which involves getting the prices right. I say, give it a shot.

Wise and worldly readers – your thoughts?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

Ask the Administrator: Money, Retirement, and HR

An occasional correspondent writes:

After landing a full time tenure track job, I was eager to begin managing my income in the most savvy way possible. However, after six months on the job I’m somewhat perplexed by the lack of information and/or confusing information I’ve been given by various staff at my college and my colleagues. When I went to my initial HR orientation meeting, the parameters of our excellent retirement fund were not really touched on so I made it a point to visit the relevant website, talk to folks through the retirement fund and learn what I needed to know. First problem solved. When I asked folks in HR and payroll regarding the feasibility of beginning an additional retirement savings plan such as a 403 (b) I was given some extremely sketchy information which was included on a one paged list of plans that I could contact on my own to find out more information. However both HR and payroll implied that I should “get my finance person” to do the research for me and that this was not the sort of task to be approached by the autonomous faculty person. As I don’t “have a finance person” I began researching the plans on my own. I did contact our payroll department a few times to ask follow up questions and been more or less rebuffed. Is this lack of information common or have I just landed at a somewhat oblique and unhelpful school? I have no doubt that I’ll eventually finalize my 403b selection and make a good decision, but I’m just wondering if it’s supposed to be this hard to try to be a responsible person and save as much of my salary as I can. Shouldn't the college be shoving this sort of information down our throats?

I’ve also tried to discretely and politely ask some of my new colleagues about their saving strategies and I’ve basically encountered divergent responses. Either it seems like people can’t afford to put any additional money away so they can’t provide any advice or experience or they look at me as though I must be some crazed capitalist captain of industry in the making who is only asking these questions because I have a break between meeting with contacts at my conflict diamond mine in South Africa and my sweatshop in Mexico. I guess this leads me to my second question. Without engaging in hugely problematic stereotypes do you think, based on the responses I’ve encountered, these are the most common attitudes towards cc faculty regarding retirement savings? It seems like a problem to me to think that our great retirement plan, however great it is, will do *all* the work we need it to do to retire happily someday. What gives with faculty attitudes towards saving?

It's a neat question, since it directly contradicts what I've seen. As regular readers know, the f-t faculty at my cc is quite senior, with most within a few years of retirement. TIAA-CREF balances are very popular topics of conversation.

At both my current college and my previous one, HR does/did a good job of organizing workshops for financial planning for retirement. (I don't think either college assumed that anybody had a finance person. I kind of like that, though. "We have people for that sort of thing...") In fact, the HR department here actually puts together an oversize grid detailing the various investment options for retirement accounts, including fees for each.

I'm neither an economist nor a financial advisor. That said, I don't think you need to be either to make basically sound decisions about retirement. (Sometimes I think the best fifteen bucks I ever spent was on Personal Finance for Dummies.) If you accept a few premises from the outset -- free money is good, fees are bad, and the market is both unpredictable and merciless -- several clear decisions follow. (My theory is go with low-fee index funds, put in at least enough to get the employer match, and hope for the best. I offer no guarantees.)

At Proprietary U, we had 401(k)'s instead of 403(b)'s, but the concept was similar. I recall sitting down at lunch with one of my favorite colleagues there and explaining to him why it made sense to at least contribute enough to get the full employer match. "Free money," I think, was the key phrase. At my cc, enrollment in a retirement savings account is actually mandatory, though you get to choose which account.

Certainly there are larger issues here as well. For example, at my cc, as at many colleges and companies, 'defined benefit' pension plans are not available to anybody hired after a certain date. (I didn't have the option, for example.) The idea is to shift the risk from the employer to the employee. Rumor has it that the market crash of 2000/2001 delayed several pending retirements, since folks who were planning on a big payout suddenly couldn't get it. Andrew Hacker's recent book details what he calls 'the great risk shift,' but it's nothing that anybody observant wouldn't have spotted by now. The upside of the great risk shift is that it enhances employee mobility. Under the old defined benefit system, if my job search took me to, say, California, I'd lose the years towards a pension here. Under the new system, my money moves with me. Tenured faculty, as a group, aren't the most mobile people in the world, but it's worth keeping in mind.

(There's also the ever-present adjunct issue, since they don't typically accrue retirement benefits. As risk shifts go, the trend towards increasing adjunct percentages is a doozy.)

All of that said, there is a weird culture around money-talk in academe. It's a funny blend of moral indignation, bad conscience, shock at the gap between length of training and actual salaries, and a vague sense that, as a 'called' profession, we aren't supposed to focus on such things.

I reject those assumptions wholeheartedly.

If my blog has an underlying theme, it's that academics are employees and colleges are employers. The sooner we can move away from moralistic posturing, denial of basic economic reality, a sense that we're too pure for this world, and guilt over the fact that we're economic actors just like everybody else, the healthier we'll be. One of the real contributions of the proprietary schools to the discourse around higher ed has been to strip away much of the romanticism and to call attention, unapologetically, to the economic foundations of what we're doing.

Are you unsatisfied with the paltry pay from adjuncting? Stop adjuncting. Walk away. There are other jobs. Are you unsatisfied with the pay and/or benefits at your current college? Look for another employer. It's okay. It's not 'disloyal,' or 'corporate,' or 'mercenary' -- it's basic self-preservation, which is everybody's right. Is it fair? Sometimes not, but just getting indignant about it won't change anything.

Part of the burden of being a progressive in today's America is that you have to be able to think along multiple tracks at once. At the systemic level, it's absolutely fine to advocate for national health care, a daycare system worthy of our kids, fully-funded public education, etc. But you also have to take care of yourself and your family. If your HR department is doing a crappy job of apprising you of your options, then by all means do a little background research for yourself. (If they think that you shouldn't worry your pretty little head about money, then you have a terrible HR department.) I've found, too, that most mutual fund companies are more than happy to shower you with information for the asking. You need to know how to filter it, but the basics are fairly simple.

Why is your college being so obtuse? I have no idea. It may be fear that anything that could be construed as 'advice' could come back to haunt them if it doesn't work. It may be that some key administrators simply aren't very bright. It may be that key people were trained under the old 'defined benefit' system, and just never learned the new way. Whatever it is, though, don't make their problem yours.

Loyal readers in blogland -- does your college/employer do a decent job helping you decipher retirement benefits? And what's your read of the weird academic reticence around money matters?

Have a question? Ask the administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

Access, Success, and Roach Motels

An alert reader sent me a link to a report ("Rules of the Game," by Nancy Shulock and Colleen Moore, published by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy) by two higher-ed researchers at Cal State-Sacramento, which examined some of the barriers to degree completion for students in California's community colleges. The gist of the report is that the cc's there have lowered barriers to enrollment, but have inadvertently developed barriers to degree completion. According to the report, cc's have become educational versions of roach motels -- you can check in, but you can't check out. It concludes with a series of recommendations for improving degree completion rates. The reader wanted to know, in light of the report, where to direct philanthropic funding to do the most good.

The report is more balanced than the headlines and title might lead you to believe. It's not just another predictable right-wing screed making any possible excuse to blame taxes and the public sector for everything from dandruff to the decline of Western Civilization. It actually opens up the black box and looks at the specifics of operations, which is to be commended. I agree with some parts and not with others, but it's serious and it asks some of the right questions.

(Strikingly, one question is does not ask is the caliber of the California public high schools. From what I've heard, Prop 13 set in motion a long, painful decline that is making itself felt at every level. Poor high school preparation is absolutely a barrier to college completion. But that's another discussion, and I'll admit upfront that I don't live in California.)

First, kudos to the authors for recognizing upfront that a substantial portion of cc students, even those in credit-bearing courses, have no intention of pursuing degrees. A substantial portion of the enrollments in art classes at my cc are adult students who are either retired or spouse-supported, most of whom already have degrees well above the Associate's level, taking art classes for the sheer love of art. We also have substantial numbers of retirees in philosophy and literature classes, exploring the enduring questions of life simply because they find them interesting. (They also show up in foreign language classes, usually the year before taking a trip.) These students don't graduate, but I don't consider that an institutional failure. To their credit, the authors of the report distinguish degree-seeking from non-degree-seeking, and focus solely on the barriers for degree-seeking students.

According to the report, several rules and practices have developed independently over the years that have the cumulative, and unintended, effect of making it harder for students to complete their studies successfully. One that the authors focus on is funding based on enrollment, rather than graduations. By their lights, funding based on 'asses in classes' creates perverse incentives, such as a tendency to look the other way when students violate prerequisites, or to allow students to enroll late, right up to the 'report' date. Students who take classes for which they aren't prepared, especially if they first show up two weeks into the semester, are F's waiting to happen. (“Last in, first out” was the rule of thumb at Proprietary U.) The authors propose instead basing funding on the number of graduates.

I agree with the enumeration of perverse incentives, but not with the proposed solution. It's a cute idea, but it would do more harm than good. First and most obviously, the pressure to inflate grades would increase significantly. Second, as any decent student of education can tell you, the single best predictor of educational 'success' is family income. Over time, the cc's in the more affluent areas would hog most of the resources, and the cc's in the least affluent would be starved. (The authors recognize this danger, but propose extra compensation for 'disadvantaged' students who graduate. I don't even want to think about the data-keeping implications of that...) Over time, cc's would look more like their counterparts in the private sector, at the expense of their reason to exist. Although they don't make the connection, the authors note that the likelihood of degree completion declines as the age of first enrollment rises. Over time, a college faced with funding based on graduates would be well-advised to shut down or marginalize its programs for adult students, and to focus more narrowly on 18 year olds. It isn't hard to bring down the average age of your student body – hell, it's happening naturally in many places – but it would be counter to the 'access' part of the cc mission.

The authors make a much more compelling recommendation about spending. Simply put, they note that even as colleges have come under more scrutiny for outcomes, they've been given less autonomy for how to attain those outcomes. They cite a rule particular to California that mandates a set percentage of any college's budget that must go for faculty salaries. If you're in a high-financial-aid district, you don't have the option of hiring more financial aid officers. If you need more academic support staff (say, for the ever-growing learning-disability services area), you have to cannibalize other parts of your operations budget to do it.

Many reformers want higher ed to stop counting inputs and start measuring outputs – a good college is one where plenty of learning takes place, however many books are in the library. That's fine, but to do that a college needs the freedom to use its resources where it sees the most payoff. Public sector money comes with ever-increasing numbers of strings attached, supposedly in the name of accountability to taxpayers. But in practice, they mostly just add cost.

(To connect some dots that the authors didn't, I'll just add that tenure is the mother of all strings. When you have an enrollment dip in a highly-tenured area, you bleed money. That's happening now in our IT and engineering areas.)

Solutions come in many flavors, but for simplicity, I'll divide them into the political and the economic.

The political solutions would involve fixing the K-12 system, addressing our immigration policies in a serious and intelligent way, mandating statewide articulation and transferability of credits (ideally with common course numbers), lifting some of the silly and counterproductive rules on spending, and finally addressing the manifold costs of tenure in a serious way. Oh, and universal, single-payer national health care would help, too. Piece of cake.

The economic solutions are smaller-scale, but probably easier to carry out. To the extent that cc's cultivate philanthropy (and I'll admit that as a sector, we've come late to that party), we need to stop thinking in terms of scholarships and/or buildings, and start thinking in terms of operating funds.

Scholarships generally don't help, since tuition is such a small portion of our overall budgets. (This is particularly true in California.) For all intents and purposes, we lose money on every student. Scholarships enable us to lose even more.

(I'll make an exception here for the kind of merit scholarships recently unveiled in Tennessee and Virginia. Those bring low-cost, high-retention students whose parents are politically influential.)

The other popular flavor of philanthropy – bricks and sticks – is also of limited usefulness. Yes, it's great to have all the classrooms we need, cutting-edge labs, etc. No argument there. But the political dynamics are such that we're likelier to get money for 'capital' expenses than for 'operating.' So it's easier for us to get money for a new building than to get money for professors to teach in it. On my own campus, we're finally wrapping up a hellaciously expensive renovation, even as we continue to replace retiring faculty with adjuncts. It's very frustrating.

If you're looking to target philanthropy where it would do the most good, I'd suggest finding ways for the money to supplement or otherwise address 'operating' budgets.

Ways to do that might include:

• A fund for buyouts for senior tenured faculty. Since tenure doesn't come with an expiration date, many colleges are stuck with allocations of manpower that made sense twenty or thirty years ago but don't make sense now. Given that salaries are largely determined by seniority, replacing a very senior cohort with a bunch of new hires results in significant savings. Buyouts are very hard to sell politically, but if they're from private money, that's a non-issue. I'll leave it to the lawyers to figure out the details of this one.

• Endowed professorships. This would be particularly useful in states that set minimum percentages of budgets for faculty salaries. If you can pick up some of those salaries, that would free up reciprocal amounts for other crying needs.

• Travel funds. Many colleges have Centers for Teaching Excellence, or something along those lines, that provide travel support for faculty to do professional development. At most schools, as far as I know, that money comes from operating budgets. If you endow that, you free up operating monies to go elsewhere.

• Technology and/or library funds. Again, these usually come out of operating budgets. To the extent you can displace some of these costs, the gains to the college would be considerable.

Anyway, those measures would be a good start. Wise and patient readers – any other ideas out there?

The Grownup Table

There's nothing like seeing your kids play with your brother's newborn.

They're a full-fledged generation now. The next wave of our family.

The trip was hell – both kids got carsick (TB several times), traffic was insane, and apparently nobody in the greater District of Columbia owns a snow shovel. Whomever designed the street layout around DC needs to be severely beaten about the head and face.

But it was worth it.

Little One was even cuter than in her pictures. She has that new-baby smell, and that way of burrowing in your neck when you hold her. She loves to be held facing outward, so she can see the world. She's also got a pretty good left jab. The Boy was especially taken with her. (The Girl was more interested in the cats.) We got some great pictures of the three kids together.

Having done the new-parent thing recently enough to remember, my group stayed in a hotel. Asking badly sleep-deprived new parents to host an entire brood for a weekend would be cruel and unusual. (I also had visions of a crying baby waking TG, who would then wake TB, and so on, in a domino effect of sleep deprivation.) It was lovely to feel like a real grownup, shepherding my kids to see their new cousin.

Talking to my brother father-to-father was different, too. He gets it now. He understood before, but he gets it now.

We're the grownup table now. The kids' table is starting to fill out.

I know this isn't really news to anyone else, but there's something just a little clarifying about seeing the next generation of the family smiling at you on the couch, laughing at fart noises.

Ask the Administrator: Preparing CC Faculty

(I'll be incommunicado on Monday, so this will serve as Monday's post)

A faithful reader and occasional commenter writes:

I am the grad director of a humanities department at a large state university with a terminal master's program. We have a small but thriving MA program: a few students go on to high school teaching, and a few go into PhD programs. The majority of our students are non-traditional, i.e. when the come to us they are already in the neighborhood of 40 and have done other things in their lives. Like most non-traditional students they are usually bursting at the seams with enthusiasm, and they are a joy to teach and direct.

Now, if the best of these students can get into a PhD program, and can finish it, their odds on the regular academic job market will be seriously limited by their age and other factors of snobbery. I have held up community college teaching as a viable option to them, as I have several friends who do it and love it (when I myself taught at a school with a 4/4 or 5/5 load I was far more productive). I do not know, however, what I should do with these student to prepare them to teach community college. Is a PhD preferred these days, or will a solid master's do it? They will all graduate with experience as independent teachers in a school with almost no undergraduate admissions standards (i.e. they will have taught students just like those at community colleges). Should their studies be more broad than one would get in a traditional MA program?

I'll speak to the Northeast, since that's the region I know. The answer may be different in the Midwest or the South; I'll have to leave it to my readers to comment on those. It will also vary by discipline.

Since you're in a 'humanities' field, I'll focus on that. When we have openings in fields like English or History, we have a strong preference for Ph.D's or late-stage ABD's. (Of course, “the dissertation is almost finished” is right up there with “the check is in the mail,” but hope springs eternal.) Part of it is a sense that somebody with a doctorate has shown extra dedication to the field; part of it is that we market ourselves as having a faculty as academically strong as most of the school to which our grads transfer; and part of it is a cross between snob appeal and 'why not?'.

It may be hard to believe that a college with a 5/5 load would attract a strong pool of doctorally-qualified candidates, but we do. The academic job market in the humanities has been so bad for so long that we get some very impressive people.

Breadth of study can be helpful. Smaller cc's often (by necessity) need people who can teach in multiple disciplines – political science and history, or sociology and psychology, or English and ESL. When the staffing is thin, specialization is an unaffordable luxury. For reasons I can't pinpoint, the magic threshold for being able to pick up another discipline is usually 24 graduate credit hours. So for some smaller schools, someone with a Master's in, say, psychology, might be better served picking up some additional credits in sociology than in psychology. (Typically, it works best when the positions are closely related. Combining English and ESL is likelier to pay off than combining English and Chemistry.)

More generally, from a cc hiring standpoint, you've either taught at a cc before or you haven't. The culture of a cc is palpably different from the culture of even a lower-tier four-year school. That's not to say that you don't face similar challenges there, but some cc teaching experience goes a long way. I'd encourage your students who are interested to pick up an adjunct course or two at a nearby cc and see how/if they like it.

(At my current college, according to a story I've heard from several reliable independent sources, one dean quit after a single day. This was sometime in the 1980's. I learned that on my second day at work, when several people greeted me with a fairly surprised “you came back!” That was just a little unsettling.)

I wouldn't necessarily advise older grad students to consider cc's out of fear of age discrimination. That could happen anywhere. The reason to teach at a cc is that you want to. If I get the impression that a candidate is 'settling,' that candidate is done.

Sorry to fall back on 'it depends,' but it really does. The one really solid piece of advice I can give with confidence is to have them try a few courses at local cc's to see if this is the setting for them. If not, there's not much point in arranging a career around it.

Worldly and sophisticated readers – your thoughts?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

Ask the Administrator: Retention Vote

An occasional commenter writes:

This is my first year on our college Rank, Salary, and Tenure (RST) committee. Everything seems to be going pretty smoothly, except for one probationary faculty member, who seems to be on the rocks. This is his third year, and he's already had three previous reviews, each of which has indicated serious problems with his classroom performance. His responses have been mostly denial and blame shifting, with a healthy dose of paranoia. (You know, "I can only conclude that people within my department are out to get me, because they're jealous." That sort of thing.)

So what's the problem? Recommend a terminal contract, and sing a few verses of "So Long, It's Been Good to Know Ya." Well, the problem is that his department voted to renew his contract. We're not sure exactly what they were thinking. They definitely still have strong concerns about him, so it's not a matter of everything being all better now. Perhaps they want to give him one last chance. Perhaps they are just afraid of confrontation, and want us to be the bad guys.

Anyway, there is serious talk on the RST committee -- particularly from the continuing members, who went through all of this last year -- of reversing the department's recommendation. I'm of two minds. On the one hand, the department knows him best, and if they think he should get a chance, why should I say otherwise? On the other hand, it's pretty clear to me that he isn't going to fit in, either in the department or in the University as a whole. I think this relationship is beyond saving. I don't see any particular effort to improve, and so I can't see him getting tenure. Offering him another contract is simply wasting his time, not to mention being unfair to the students who will have him in class for the extra year. So, do you have any words of sage advice?

Although the org chart at my cc is different, I've seen the same basic problem -- those in the trenches are conflict-averse, so they pretend that all is well and secretly hope/fear that folks at higher levels will/won't do the dirty work for them.

I can understand your sense that 'the department knows best,' but I'll flip it around. If that's really true, why have an RST committee at all? There's no more effective way to make yourself irrelevant than to take 'conflict aversion' as your guiding principle.

I've made myself the bad guy a few times, and endured quite a bit of internal political crap for my troubles. But it was the right thing to do, and those are the moments I can point to when I wonder if I'm really adding any value. If not for me, they would have kept Amiable Idiot, and would never have hired Rising Star.

I'm increasingly convinced that 'faculty governance' and 'collegiality' are contradictory. True governance involves saying 'No' a lot. I've never -- not once -- seen a faculty 'peer' evaluation that wasn't over-the-top effusive. As a result, faculty peer evaluations carry absolutely no weight. If the faculty as a group wanted to reclaim the weight of these things, they'd have to bite the bullet in particular cases and call out mediocrity (or worse) when they see it. I'm not holding my breath. The basic, glaring, fundamental conflict of interest is simply too strong.

It's not fun to recommend adverse employment action. (It's even less fun to deliver the news personally.) But if you care about the students, the college, other job applicants, and the profession as a whole, you gotta do what you gotta do. I'd be worried about the mental health of anybody who actually reveled in these tasks, but you can't shirk every unpleasant task and still expect to be taken seriously when other tough decisions have to be made.

My only caveat, and it's a real one, is that you mention that this is your first year on the committee. Not knowing your college and its culture, it's entirely possible that the RST there was long ago relegated to 'ceremonial' status, with the real decision being made elsewhere. If that's the case, and being a hero wouldn't accomplish anything anyway, then it may not be worth the trouble. You'll have to judge the lay of the land to know whether this is relevant or not.

Sagacious and worldly readers – what do you think?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

Snow Day Blogules

Fragments jotted down while playing with the kids...

- Brushes with Fame, no. 1: Sen. Chris Dodd, D-CT. I met Senator Dodd at a fundraiser several years ago. A family friend introduced us. He said to me – this is absolutely true, and I remember it well -- “where's the bar?”

- Brushes with Fame, no. 2: Henry Rollins. I met HR during my halcyon days as a college radio dj. He and I had an extended, and quite pleasant, conversation in which we discussed our mutual love of Miles Davis' Theme from Jack Johnson. He also told me about a time John Lee Hooker tried to pick up his girlfriend.

- Quoth The Girl, beaming proudly: “I wipe mine boogers with mine sock!”

- Every girlfriend I ever had for long enough to use the term 'girlfriend' was left-handed. The Wife, too, is left-handed. I attribute this to a semi-conscious desire for my future male progeny to be left-handed, since left-handed pitchers don't even have to be good to make the big bucks. The Boy is right-handed. God has a sense of humor.

- I'm thinking of starting an internet petition to the companies that make clothes for toddlers and young children. “We, the undersigned, beseech you to please, for the love of all that is good, make the neckholes big enough that you can take the shirt off the kid without inflicting major cranial trauma.” Kids' heads are proportionately larger, relative to their bodies, than adults'. You'd think shirtmakers would have figured that out by now. We don't even try turtlenecks anymore.

• Although I've never seen a study specifically on this, I bet that Midwestern Scandinavians make lousy therapists. “Have you considered whining less, and perhaps walking it off?”

• My simple, two-part plan to improve 24:

  • Teach Chloe a second facial expression.

  • More Nadia. Much more Nadia. Much, much more Nadia.

• I recently reread Straight Man, by Richard Russo. The money quote, from page 357 : “A liberal arts dean in a good mood is a potentially dangerous thing. It suggests a world different from the one we know.” I laughed out loud.

• The Boy didn't believe me when I told him that when I was growing up, we only got four channels on the tv. Once I finally convinced him it was true, which it was, he responded: “You must have used the computer a lot, then.” I am now officially old.

Valentine's Day

Sometimes I feel guilty mentioning The Wife in my blog. (Her pseudonym reflects what my grandfather used to call my grandmother, to the amusement of both. It also fits nicely with “The Boy” and “The Girl.”) I worry that she comes off in my writing as little more than a foil. She's much more than that. It's hard to do her justice in prose.

There's a Liz Phair lyric that comes close: “cool, tall, vulnerable, and luscious.” She's complicated: a girly girl who isn't above South Park, an MBA who chose to stay home with the kids once she could, a good apolitical Irish Catholic girl with a spotless condo who married a skeptical lefty Unitarian Scandinavian slob living in a grad student ghetto. She went to a college where the two official religions were Catholicism and basketball – not necessarily in that order – and she married me, who is completely hopeless at both.

She puts up with a lot. Her memory for names, birthdays, gifts, clothes, dates, pictures, and the details of social life is astonishing. Mine is, um, well, I mean well. She simply doesn't age, which I find both inexplicable (two kids!) and kind of cool. She tolerates my perverse pleasure in making The Boy laugh so hard at dinner that he spits food. (The same holds true when he's swishing water after brushing his teeth.) She tolerates my bizarre tastes – I think she'll get time off purgatory for every weird-ass jazz concert I've dragged her to – and should win some sort of 'good sport' award for enduring the geek/twin-language conversations my brother and I have.

She's a great Mom. After a few days at home, I have to either get out or commit mass murder. She's been there for several years now, and the kids are great. That ain't easy.

She's also smokin' hot. Nothing wrong with that, I say. Nothing at all.

Happy Valentine's, honey.