Hell Hath No Fury

A new correspondent writes:

I am a Department Head for a large urban CC in a very small vocational program.
Seven years ago I hired a friend who was well qualified for the
Instructional Aide position (part of our FT faculty bargaining unit).
She came to me this week to let me know she is leaving at the
beginning of the Spring semester (January 11th).

As FT faculty we sign a contract that extends until August 31st. I am
also part of the FT unit and I work closely with the Administration.
My Dean is going over with the college's legal counsel if there is
any way we can stop her.

This is a busy time for our department. We are under review for our
national accreditation and since we are so small, losing her will be a
huge hit for our program.

But she is my friend, it is difficult for me to keep this from her but
my Dean has asked me to keep it quiet. She is also under the
impression that she will be able to teach for the college part time,
but again the administration along with myself are so upset with her
decision to leave it is unlikely she would be brought back as an
adjunct even if we need her. I feel an obligation to tell her but
again I am upset with her short notice decision.

What can a college do to someone who breaks their contract?

Any other thoughts would be appreciated.

I don't mean this to be flippant, but my knee-jerk response is "nothing." (That said, I'm neither a lawyer nor an HR person. I've actually put in a call to Evil HR Lady to see if she has something to say on this.) You can stop paying her when she stops working, and you can refuse to rehire her if you so desire -- though I personally think it makes you look petty -- but I don't think you can force her to work for you if she doesn't want to.

(As a manager of people, I can tell you that the last thing you want is an employee who doesn't want to be there. Even if it appears to solve an immediate crisis, the environment will become toxic quickly. She'll take every sick day, every vacation day, every personal day, every holiday, and every opportunity to exploit every little grievance and blind spot in the contract. She'll make your life miserable. After all, what are you going to do -- fire her? Then she gets what she wanted in the first place! Even if you 'win,' you lose.)

You mention 'short notice,' but I can't help but notice that she has given you at least two months. In any other industry, that would be considered generous.

My cc, like yours and like most others I've seen, issues annual contracts for employees (including tenured faculty, since their salaries change each year). The contracts typically renew sometime in the summer, to reflect the academic (as opposed to calendar) year. But it's not at all unusual for people in non-faculty roles to leave at any time of year. (When faculty leave, which is rare, it's usually in the summer.) This is true at all tiers of administration, right up to the top. If that weren't the case, there wouldn't be any administrative job ads in the Chronicle until about April.

In my neck of the academic woods -- and I'll admit, this may be different in the elite, monied tiers -- 'noncompete' clauses don't exist. If anything, shopping around for other offers is tacitly rewarded, to the extent that the only way to get a job 'reclassed' is to come in with a better offer.

It seems to me -- and I'm basing this only on what you've written -- that you and your administration are acting out of hurt, fear, and spite. You're upset that your friend is leaving just when your program needs her, and you're looking for legal ways to lash out at her to punish her.

Spite is a vice of the weak. As a manager, you have to be able to put it aside. She has found another path. You just have to accept that and find another way to fill your program's needs. This may be an opportunity to look at the definition or payscale of the job. Has it fallen too far behind the market? Have the program's needs changed such that a slightly different definition of the job would be more helpful? If so, now's the time to address that, when it doesn't involve changing the terms and conditions of employment of an incumbent employee. This is a chance to redefine the position to more closely match current and/or projected needs, and then to recruit some new talent.

My advice? Swallow your hurt, call off the lawyers, wish her well, and start thinking about the future. You'll save time and money, a friendship, and your program.

Wise and worldly readers -- your thoughts?

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

Death Valley

Although the very thought of it makes some academics blanch, I'm beginning to think that 'evidence-based management' could be really useful in solving some nagging academic problems.

As I understand it -- and I'm no expert -- 'evidence-based management' takes as a given that it's appropriate to look at statistical patterns that have emerged over time, and to use those as reality checks for future decisions. It's particularly helpful in testing long-held assumptions for which we somehow keep noticing exceptions.

Most colleges of any size have someone in the back corners of the administration whose title is something like "Institutional Researcher." (The really big places have entire offices devoted to IR.) It's a sort of locally-applied social science. I think I've found something to ask my local IR guru to check out.

It's an article of faith among certain faculty that certain time slots for class meetings generate wildly higher attrition than others. ("Death Valley" is the local term.) The late afternoon weekday sections of required Gen Ed courses -- English Composition, say -- are held to be the last to fill, and the first to shrink as students just vanish. The "Prime Time" sections -- basically late morning to early afternoon, Monday through Thursday -- fill first, and usually finish the semester with almost as many students as they started.

So my questions for the IR guru, and for faithful readers who may know of research in this area:

1. Do Death Valley classes actually have higher drop rates? If so, does the effect disappear for upper-level courses? (If it does, I could see a pragmatic argument for running Gen Eds in prime time, and upper-level courses in Death Valley. That's pretty close to what Proprietary U used to do.)

2. If the drop rates are actually higher, is that really a function of the well-documented "last in, first out" rule of registration? (That is, the students who decide to sign up for classes the day before the semester starts have much higher drop/fail rates than the students who sign up months in advance. This is true, presumably, for many reasons.) Or do the students who sign up for Death Valley early also have higher drop rates?

3. Can we predict, with some level of specificity, the degree to which we could expect higher drop rates? Do those students usually come back, or are they usually lost for good? (Do they disappear at higher rates than other students who drop?)

4. If the answer to 3 is an actual number -- or at least a relatively modest numerical range -- could we do a little cost-benefit action to see if adding 'spillover' sections in Death Valley actually makes fiscal sense over time? (If that strikes you as cold, do the analysis in terms of future academic success.) Would we be better off, in the aggregate, simply abandoning Death Valley and going to waitlists and/or more online and/or hybrid offerings, or is Death Valley the least bad option?

5. Other than registering later, do Death Valley students differ in meaningful ways from Prime Time students? Are any higher dropout numbers actually consistent with those factors, rather than the time slot per se? (If so, then moving them around wouldn't really solve anything.) Or are these really the same students, just with funny schedules?

6. Do the instructors who typically teach the Death Valley sections -- and it's usually the same cohort from year to year -- have higher drop rates in Prime Time? Is this an instructor effect written onto a timeslot?

Wise and worldly readers -- I'm asking for your help in a couple of ways.

1. Do you know of any good research on this? It isn't the area of my scholarly training, and I'm just a wee bit busy.

2. Can you think of other questions I should add to the list?

Thanks for your help! My IR guru will likely have me killed, but evidence-based answers to these questions might actually be useful, which is sort of the point.

Well, That Explains a Lot...

In the context of discussing ways to encourage her colleagues to try to reach students at different levels of demonstrated ability, Dr. Crazy inadvertently addressed a very different issue:

there are small changes that one can try to institute at a department level (somewhat under the radar) that increase the level of professorial engagement - like, for example, taking an administrative call for more transparent assessment as an opportunity to come up with assessment objectives that fall in line with hitting that lower third by framing it as "this is what all majors should come away from courses with the ability to do." This way, it's not an attack on specific individuals but rather the discussion becomes one of shared governance and about making the administration the enemy - not students, not other faculty members. (emphasis added)

It's worth rereading closely. “Taking an administrative call for more transparent assessment as an opportunity” -- that is, using the political space created by the administration – results in making the administration the enemy, as a strategic move.

You're welcome.

I have long held that much anti-administration grumbling is misplaced. It's an intellectually dishonest, but politically convenient, way to achieve other things. Much of it is not to be taken at face value.

In my naive, early days of deaning, I used to try to respond point-by-point to the accusations directed at me. In time, though, I realized that point-by-point was missing the point. There's a kabuki element to many of the complaints, a ritualistic assuming-of-the-moral-high-ground that trumps the actual content. That's why detailed explanations of exactly how the complaints were inaccurate, silly, or even slanderous didn't make them go away. In addressing what they were saying, I wasn't addressing what they were doing.

The more successful administrators I've seen have developed the ability to listen quietly and impassively while having invective hurled at them for extended periods at point-blank range. (Good cops do this, too.) I suspect this explains the exponentially higher turnover rate of administrators, as opposed to faculty. Even if you understand, cognitively, the organizational value of the 'lightning rod' function – Tom Wolfe called it the 'flak catcher' – there are still times you're just not in the mood. And the staggering unfairness of not being allowed to hit back ('retaliation') can get to be a bit much.

The shame of it all is that the rest of Dr. Crazy's post is actually quite good, and constructive, and exemplary of exactly the kind of dialogue that I'd hope faculty on my own campus would have (and sometimes do). It's just a little disheartening to read, and see, that the discursive space to have that dialogue rests on slandering those of us who actually make it possible.

Napster University?

According to IHE, the latest proposed extension of the Higher Education Act contains, among other things, a provision requiring that colleges and universities “develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property.”

Huh?

As near as I can figure, this means something like providing mandatory subscriptions to Napster and Netflix, presumably paid for by student fees. The logic seems to be that everybody knows that colleges are hotbeds of copyright violation, so it makes sense to require them to effectively tax their students individually for what amounts to restitution for the torts that we just know they – as a class – commit.

Of course, student fees are eligible for federal financial aid, so your tax dollars will go to help offset the fees charged to students to pay the studios for the music and movies that they download.

(This, in the context of a bill that otherwise tries to address the increasing cost of college. Bizarre.)

So my taxes will go to subsidize the student loan to cover the fee that allows Johnny Tasteless to download “My Humps” to his ipod. But funding for stem cell research? Now that's inappropriate!

I'm glad we have our priorities straight.

This is silly on so many levels I almost don't know where to begin.

I'll start with the obvious: it won't work. Most of the subscription-based music services use some kind of DRM software to make the music self-destruct if you don't keep paying the fee; in many cases, it also prevents burning to cd's. (Most of them also don't work with ipods – students would have to buy other mp3 players compatible with whatever service the college chooses.) Emusic is an exception, but it restricts itself to indie labels and puts strict monthly limits on how much you can download. Of course, students could get around those limits by peer-to-peer file sharing, but that defeats the purpose. Itunes has de-encrypted some of its music, but it still charges for each song a la carte, so a subscription model would be a radical departure.

On the next level up, there's the basic, incontrovertible fact that some students don't steal music. Under this law, they will be forced to subsidize those who (currently) do. The moral principle here eludes me.

Above that, there's the basic, incontrovertible fact that college costs have been increasing faster than inflation, putting a real squeeze on middle-class families. Adding mandatory Napster fees would simply make the cost spiral worse. As a percentage of tuition, mandatory Napster fees would be highest at the lowest-tuition colleges, and lowest at the highest-tuition colleges. It would be a mandatory regressive transfer payment, which pretty much epitomizes a Bad Idea.

Then there's the idea of mandatory extracurricular content. Imagine telling, say, a conservative Christian college that it must, as a matter of law, provide the means for students to download Marilyn Manson for free. This has “First Amendment Quagmire” written all over it.

From a college-infrastructure standpoint, this is a nightmare. If a student drops out, or drops to part-time status, does the college have to notify Napster? And who pays for the monumental increases in bandwidth to supply the demand unleashed when “all you can eat” is actually legal? If you sign up for a six-week summer course, do you get a six-week subscription? And was this really the idea behind Pell grants?

This was obviously a patronage-driven payoff to the recording industry. It has nothing to do with higher education as such, and it's a pretty radical departure from historical practice. (Does the publisher get a royalty every time a book is checked out from the public library?) But the state of our politics now is such that I have no confidence that an absurdity won't become law, especially if there's money behind it.

Call me a traditionalist, but I'd rather spend public aid to higher education on scientific research and faculty and libraries and tutoring and daycare and textbooks than on Napster. If Britney wants to sue someone for stealing her music, let her. I have my own work to do.

What Kind of Grader Are You?

A left coast correspondent writes (this is a long one):

We have had a kerfluffal blow up today at my CC. This morning our VP
of Student Services sent out the following email:

"I wanted you to be aware that we recently received a request for our
grading records under the Public Records Act. We have secured
direction both from our legal counsel as well as the [California]
Chancellor's Office as to our mandate to comply with the Act. The
requestor asked for the grades assigned by every faculty member,
sorted by term, from Fall 2003 to present, to include faculty name,
course name and number, and total grade distribution.

We sent the grade records to the requestor yesterday. They include
all evaluative grades (A-F) assigned by each faculty member, along
with non-evaluative grades such as "I" (incomplete), "W" (withdrawal),
"MW" (military withdrawal), "IP" (in progress) and "RD" (report
delayed) for fall 2003 through summer 2007. No student identification
information of any kind was included in the file.

While we are aware that this type of request has been made to many
other colleges and universities around the state, we do no know what
the requestor intends to do with information. I understand that this
might be very concerning to faculty and I want to assure you that we
sent only the information that we had legal obligation to provide.
The Academic Senate will be discussing the issue at an upcoming
meeting. I urge you to join the discussion and/or contact me if you
have any further questions or concerns."




Last year's President of Academic Senate posted this reply:

"Hi Everyone,

Actually, the Academic Senate has known about this for awhile and the
discussions have appeared in our minutes. This issue has also been
discussed at strategic council. The information, as far as I
understand, was not private information. It did not include any
identifying student information. The information released was really
information about us as instructors. How many A's do I give in my
Philosophy 6 class versus how many A's does Dr. H*** give in her
classes? What are the grade distributions? Do I give more A's with few
F's or am I a professor that has earned the name of "C Minus T***?"
It's that sort of information that was released. All data that
identified students had to be stripped out before the requested
information was released. My understanding also is that advising the
Academic Senate of this information is really a courtesy so that we
can let everyone know what is happening and have discussions about the
meaning of grades, the difficulty of assignments, grading rubrics,
etc. for the various instructors in our departments. In other words,
if a student signs up for my Philosophy 6 class and another student
signs up for Dr. H***'s Philosophy 6 class, is it fair that I give
three scantron exams while she requires three 20 page papers? (This is
a fictitious example. J ) What if she gives mostly C's with very few
A's while I give all A's? How do we work together collaboratively, as
a department, to ensure some kind of uniformity of assignments and
assessments?

Legally, there is nothing we can do about the release of the
information—again, as I understand it. This does however offer us an
invitation to discuss, in our departments, the meanings of grades and
the rigor of our assessments.

I don't' mean this message to minimize the apprehension caused by this
announcement. I am apprehensive and expect that my students will soon
tell me that a new website has listed me under the "sucks badly"
category. However, until the law changes, we may want to focus our
attention on how we can improve instruction across the curriculum.

Nope, no hot button issues here!

Back in the day, professors used to post student grades on their office doors at the end of the semester. Enterprising students could use that to suss out who graded 'tough' and who was easy. Not that I ever dreamed of doing such a thing.

Now, of course, FERPA prevents that. But Open Records Laws, on the other hand, treat aggregate grades (as opposed to individual ones) as public records, open to public scrutiny. So professors (at public colleges and universities, anyway) are in the position of having to guard individual grades closely, while having years' worth of data posted on the internet. It's not a contradiction, strictly speaking, but it's certainly an odd juxtaposition.

There have always been student grapevines about which professors are easier than others. That's not new at all. I recall being warned by dormmates at Snooty Liberal Arts College not to take a particular professor who was famous for giving nothing but B-minuses to all and sundry. (It was a point of pride that I took him and did better than that.) The difference is that now the grapevine will have access to actual data.

From a dean's perspective, there's actually something useful in knowing – with data – that Prof Jones grades much more easily than the rest of the Basketweaving department. It gives some context for the student evaluations. If a professor grades unusually easily, I'm inclined to discount positive student evaluations. If a professor is known for strictness, I'm inclined to cut some slack on student evaluations. Of course, if a professor can't even buy love with easy grading, then I can be pretty confident that there's an issue. And a professor who grades tough but still gets glowing reports is probably doing something right.

All of that said, I'd be wary of putting data out there that isn't normed by class. In other words, the grade distribution in a particular class may reflect the professor's grading, or it may reflect the location of that class in the curriculum. Remedial classes, for example, almost always have much higher 'fail' rates than upper-level electives, regardless of who teaches them. So a professor who teaches a lot of remedial and first-semester classes will look like a tougher grader, all else being equal, than a professor who teaches mostly courses for majors. (By the time you get to grad school, grading is pretty much reduced to 'A' or 'Not A.') Telling me that there's a higher fail rate in remedial math than in calculus doesn't tell me anything about the instructors or the relative rigor of the courses; it tells me that the only students who take calculus here are students who really mean it.

At Proprietary U, one of my least favorite tasks as an administrator was to come down hard on faculty whose drop/fail rates were “too high.” (I don't usually recommend foot-dragging, but when it came to that, I foot-dragged like it was going out of style, until I found another job.) The justification, to the extent there was one, was that professors were supposed to find ways to reach even the more challenging students. In practice, of course, it resulted in lots of extra credit and some very creative curving. I considered it a stupid and offensive application of data that, treated differently, could have been useful.

In the age of the internet, certain kinds of discretion and/or secrecy just aren't viable anymore. If the data will escape, I think the burden on higher ed is to come up with ways to frame it productively. Let the colleges beat the profiteers to the punch, and put the data out there in ways that reflect what we know to be true. I'd suggest lumping several years' worth of data into a single report, and reflecting standard deviations from course means, rather than raw grades as such. If there's a particular professor who is consistently, conspicuously above or below her peers who teach the same classes, then I know I have something to examine. (Higher grades could reflect easier grading, better teaching, or the luck of the draw.) As any experienced teacher can tell you, some classes are stronger than others, which is why I'd put out rolling averages that encompass several years at a pop. Looking at one of my sections doesn't tell you much; looking at every section I taught over several years just might.

In a perfect world, a professor who fell unknowingly into 'outlier' territory would take being singled out as a wake-up call. Of course, in a perfect world, students would be motivated solely by love of learning, nobody would need remediation, and it would only rain at night. More likely, I would expect to see considerable defensiveness, attempts at blame-shifting, flat-out denial, and the usual huffing and puffing. Still, I don't have a conceptual problem with holding professors to account for how they perform the grading aspect of their jobs, since I (and most students) consider it part of teaching. I'm just concerned that if we don't take ownership of this in a thoughtful way, others will, and they'll do it in the stupid and thoughtless ways we rightly fear.

Wise and worldly readers – what do you think?

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

Ask My Readers: Pluses and Minuses

Becky Hirta's recent post about grades got me thinking. My college doesn't give 'plus' or 'minus' semester grades – you can get a B, but not a B-plus or a B-minus. The topic comes up for discussion about once a year.

The argument for pluses and minuses is basically that they offer greater precision. There's some distance between a B-plus and a B-minus, but in our system, that difference is erased. By the same token, if a student is on the border between two letters, there's more at stake in the decision which way to go.

The argument against, as near as I can tell, is based on false precision. The greater the number of gradations, the harder it is to get it just right. There's also the persistent ambiguity of the C-minus.

Since this argument is raring up for its annual go-round on campus, I'd like to get my readers' perspectives. Does it make sense to go with pluses and minuses, or are we better off sticking with blunt, whole letters?

$100 Oil and Commuter Colleges

My cc, like most community colleges and many lower-tier four-year colleges, doesn't have dorms. Since it's located in suburbia, public transportation options are extremely limited and not very good. So most students, and almost all employees, drive. (A select few ride one of the rare buses.) We even refer to it as a commuter college.

Parking is an issue, which has always been true at every college known to man. But we've dealt with that forever, and have reached a sort of tolerable detente on it. I still think that anything tall and opaque (i.e. SUV's) should be segregated into a different lot, so the rest of us can actually see what's coming when we try to back out of our spaces, but that's another issue.

Now oil is coming close to $100 a barrel, which, sooner or later, is likely to trickle down to gasoline prices. (As I mentioned recently, I'm surprised that it really hasn't yet. But it will.) Some of that price runup is likely due to the monumental, world-historical idiocy of the Bush administration's foreign and fiscal policies, and may be remedied somewhat when we elect somebody worthy. But some of it, I think, is likely due to a combination of rising world demand for oil – especially in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) – and the much-slower pace of new discoveries. Whether oil came from dinosaurs or lava or both, we're pumping it faster than the planet is making it. Even a President who understands the concepts of 'wars of choice' and 'balanced budgets' and 'peace dividend' will have her work cut out for her.

In other words, even if we as a country stop sabotaging ourselves, we as a college face a fundamental, long-term challenge to our business model. We're built on cars.

We cater to students who have to work part-time at low-paying jobs to get through school. As the low-tuition option, we attract the folks to whom low tuition is the most salient. Transportation is a major cost for our students. They often drive older cars of suspect reliability, and find themselves at the mercy of whatever repairs need to be made. Their jobs pay crap, and car insurance – especially for young males – is staggeringly expensive.* If the price of gas continues to climb substantially, eventually I wouldn't be surprised to see some of these students cut back, or drop out entirely.

Online instruction has something to be said for it in this respect, since the cost advantage of telecommuting (as opposed to standard commuting) only climbs as the price of gas climbs. But very few students take all-online schedules; most use an online class or two as part of their mix, to make the job-school juggle easier. They're still driving to campus three or four days a week. Unless there's a really dramatic embrace of all-online education, I suspect that the transportation-cost gains from this will be minor. (Theoretically, we could also move everything to a half-online, half-classroom 'hybrid' format, and run all the classroom classes, say, on Mondays and Tuesdays. But at this point, students avoid hybrid classes like the plague.)

There's also the question of the relevance of geographically-defined service areas to online education. Community colleges have specific geographic areas they're designed to serve, which makes sense if you assume that everybody drives to campus. But if you can log on from anywhere, how much sense does a geographic distinction make? If we embrace a more thoroughgoing online approach, I'd expect to see the whole concept of 'service areas' start to fade. The political implications are staggering.

Dorms are the classic solution. Park everybody on campus, let them walk to class, and cars become irrelevant. At Snooty Liberal Arts College, I didn't have a car at all for all four years.

But that only works when the college is either highly urban, or extremely wealthy. In a setting in which most students work off-campus for money, parking them in dorms doesn't really solve the problem. Instead of being stranded off-campus, they'd be stranded on-campus.

Dorms also bring with them the infrastructure needs, and student-life issues, that drive up the costs of four-year schools. Keep students stuck on campus, and they'll start demanding climbing walls and football teams and the rest of it; the costs will follow.

Public transportation will not be a viable large-scale alternative in suburbia for the foreseeable future. The travel patterns just aren't linear enough.

To the extent that transportation costs are factored into financial aid awards, we may be able to offset a very small amount of the impact. But even that money has to come from somewhere.

Am I missing the obvious? Or are we staring down the barrel of a serious long-term problem?

*Every so often, somebody proposes removing 'liability' insurance from individual drivers and tacking it onto gasoline as a tax. This strikes me as absolutely brilliant, since it moves insurance from a fixed cost to a variable one. Taking the bus half the time would reduce your insurance cost by half; right now, it reduces it not at all. As my economist friends like to say, you have to get the incentives right.

Revenge of the Nerds

Apparently, there's a candy now called "Nerds." The Boy got some in his Halloween loot, and opened the box after dinner last night.

The following ensued.

TB: NERDS!

The Wife: (chuckle)

DD: Ouch.

TB: I like nerds!

The Wife and DD: (chuckle)

TB: Mmm. Nerds are sweet.

TW/DD: (snarfle)

(TB spills some.)

TB: Uh-oh! There's a nerd by The Girl!

TW: There certainly is.

DD: Harumph.

TW: How do you feel about that, DD?

DD: Exposed. I've been outed.

TB: Huh?

DD: Do you know what a nerd is?

TB: No.

DD: Good.

TW: Someday, you'll hear that there's a nerd by TG.

DD: She could do a lot worse.

TW (smiling wryly): Mmm-hmm...

Murder By Numbers

A new correspondent writes:

So here it is: I teach (adjunct) Anthropology and Cultural "Survey" at a local art college that awards a BA in Visual Communication. I taught Anthro. last semester, and it was well received by both students and faculty (they asked me back.) We have a new "academic advisor", who has decided that all syllabi will follow his "meta-chart", including course content, goals, learning objectives. The problem is...there is no Anthro. committee or other faculty. This advisor teaches Design, and has never taken an Anthro class in his life.

The meta-chart, which I am expected to use verbatum (sic) has verbage in it that is not only unprofessional (ie. misuse of anthro terms, etc.), but inaccurate, and (truth be told, badly written.) I cannot in good conscience...or professional ethic..use this stuff.

Briefly: I've been in this business for over 30 years. I have excellent degrees from (prestigious places). In other words, I've been around the academic block.

I have tried the diplomatic approach. So, I guess my question is..what would you do?

I feel your pain. I've recently been on a committee on which chemists have been opining about the content of history courses and vice versa. It ain't pretty.

I'd start by getting a sense of just how much clout this guy has, and just how much of what he suggests is actually binding. At PU, for example, faculty were mandated to include several different categories on syllabi, including such oddities as "Keys for Success." However, what we put in those categories was largely up to us. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something similar going on here, with mandated elements and discretionary elements mushed together in a well-meaning, if embarrassing, 'sample.'

One of the dirty little secrets of higher ed, as I'm sure you've noticed by now, is that words like 'mandatory' have different meanings. In some cases, 'mandatory' means just what it means in any other context. Sometimes, it's more of an opening bid, like a speed limit -- post 55 in hopes that most people won't go over 70. Sometimes it's honored in the breach, like when professors claim that attendance is mandatory but don't take attendance or give quizzes.

Sadly, there are also some folks out there who fundamentally misunderstand the quantitative turn, and mistake micromanagement for rigor. These are the folks who believe that there's no whole that can't be made greater by itemizing every little part. It's murder by numbers, like trying to analyze a joke. (For example, I've seen course outlines in which time allocations per topic show up as single percentage points. Absurd, yet distressingly common.) It sounds like your instructional designer is one of those. (For my money, the proper use of the quantitative turn is to look at major outputs, not minor inputs. Breaking down the minor inputs into smaller and smaller pieces is, at best, a distraction.)

In the short run, I'd try to gauge the size of the interstices. Does this guy actually have the full support of the people who actually hire you, or is he bluffing? Is there actually an expectation that you'll use every single word, or was he just trying to give examples of what the categories might look like? (That's my guess, but I could be wrong.) What would happen if you ignored the input? Does anybody check?

Worst case, your college is actually run by morons. If that's the case, then you can either work for morons, or leave.

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers -- have you found a productive way around something like this?

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

Letters Redux

An occasional correspondent writes:

After many years as a full-time faculty member at a community college, I have decided to apply for tenure track positions at four-year colleges. My question is about letters of recommendation. Who should I ask for letters? For several reasons, I do not want my current dean to know that I am "on the market," which means I can't ask him for a letter of recommendation. Are letters from faculty colleagues ok? What about former students? What are hiring committees looking for in letters of recommendation?

I've gone on record as opposing letters of recommendation generally. And as the recent blogfire over at Dr. Crazy's has demonstrated, there are still plenty of folks out there who are willing to punish people for looking. It's perverse, and thoughtless, and petty, but there it is.

In my experience with searches, letters never helped anybody. They hurt a few. The arms race of effusive praise has rendered them pretty much useless, except when you can read between the lines of faint praise. (There may be a limited exception to this for spanking-new Ph.D.'s emerging from the tutelage of Monster Superstar. At cc's, that's generally much irrelevant.) There's no training in how to write letters of recommendation, and there aren't any generally accepted industry standards (other than brevity). Fear of litigation – whether founded or unfounded – has fostered a bias toward leaving out anything distinctive. Inadvertent cultural bias can creep in easily, as in the case of international applicants coming from traditions in which praise is less effusive.

Worse, anybody beyond the 'first real job' stage is placed in a compromising position by asking for them. At least the newly-phudded are supposed to be looking. Once you've landed somewhere, though, asking for letters involves letting it be known that you are looking, which many people are more than willing to punish.

From this end of the desk, I've found more value in simply asking for a list of three references and contact information, and stipulating that they won't be contacted without the candidate's permission. Once the search committee has picked the top one or two people, then I contact those references to see if there are any red flags. (Again, praise is deeply discounted, but any criticism is taken very seriously.) So the references have no bearing until the very end, and then, only if something unexpected, bad, and relevant pops up. And the candidate doesn't have to give anybody a heads-up until the possibility of an offer materializing is substantial.

All of that said, some places continue – for whatever reason – to ask for actual letters.

I'd personally shy away from using former students as references. If you have some sort of useful statistical breakdown of student evaluations, and they're both comprehensible and flattering, go ahead and use that. But I'd assume that anybody with significant teaching experience has at least one student who liked her, so it would strike me as odd if you had to prove it.

You don't mention the 'tier' of four-year college to which you're applying, but I wouldn't be surprised if you ran into some snobbery about community colleges. Anything you could do to defuse that would be likely to help. Have you collaborated on projects with anybody at a four-year school? To the extent that you can do it, recruiting some writers from your 'target tier' or higher might help. Departmental colleagues are obviously great, but only if you can trust their discretion and/or the enlightened attitude on your campus. If you get the impression that anything you ask for can and will be used against you later, you might want to look someplace else.

I suspect that my wise and worldly readers have much to add on this one, so I'll throw it open. Wise and worldly readers: in my correspondent's shoes, who would you ask to write? And is there actually an argument for letters of recommendation, or should they be consigned to the dustbin of history?

Good luck!

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

Friday Fragments

• From the “Sometimes I Get Tired of Being Right” department: a few days ago I posted “How Chrysler stays in business is a complete mystery to me.” Yesterday, Chrysler announced another RIF of 12,000 jobs. Honestly, I wouldn't have minded being wrong on that one.

• Has anybody else noticed that the price of oil has doubled in the last year, but the price of gasoline hasn't changed much? You can “summer driving season” all you want, it still doesn't make sense. My hunch – and I really don't understand the situation well enough to say – is that we're in for some truly nasty gasoline price increases by this time next year. (Either that, or the price of oil is about to drop like a stone. I consider that unlikely.) I just can't make the math work any other way.

• On the bright side, judging by what The Boy and The Girl harvested in their trick-or-treating this year, people are getting a little smarter about halloween candy. More chocolate-based stuff, fewer Sugar Daddies and Sweet Tarts. This is all to the good. I'm old enough to remember the aged hippies of the 70's giving out those little boxes of raisins, and saying that they're “nature's candy.” Uh, no. That's why we had to invent 'raisinets.' It's all about the chocolate.

• If there's anything sweeter, or more hope-inspiring, than the sight of The Boy (as a basketball player) and his girlfriend (as Minnie Mouse) contentedly holding hands while they cross the street, well, I haven't seen it.

• Helpful photographic hint: if you're trying to get a bunch of 3 and 6 year olds to smile, just have them say “TB's Dad Smells Like Cheeeeeese!” They'll laugh for a solid five minutes.

• One of the unexpected consolations of middle age: at a certain point, hair loss finally defeats The Indomitable Cowlick. A little 'middle ground' might have been nice...

• The new car has a dashboard light that flashes – by design – whenever the ignition is off. This includes when the key is not in the ignition. It seems to me that if the key isn't in the ignition, I could default to the assumption that the car is, in fact, off. “Warning: The Car Is Not Hotwired.” Okaaaay...

• Sometimes I think my job should be renamed something like Calmer. For whatever reason, we have a fair number of otherwise-wonderful people here who can get a little tightly wound. When something goes askew you can just see the steam come out of their ears. This week I've had several occasions on which my primary value-add was helping some high performing but steaming people to exhale a bit, collect their thoughts, and see that the situation is actually not so bad. (Not perfect, but not so bad.) I don't know if this is more a reflection on my personality or the personalities around me, but it happened at my last employer, too. It's a fine line between “dean” and “shock absorber.” If 'metabolism' can be defined as 'the process of turning food into poop,' then my style of management can be defined as 'the process of turning stress into clarity.'

• Via Geeky Mom, news that a Federal court declared that bloggers have the legal standing of journalists. Very cool.

• One of the best parts of deaning is observing classes. When a class goes really well, it's a joy to behold. I've seen several winners recently, and it's hard to convey just how gratifying that is. Some professors who are relatively quiet outside of class absolutely light up when they get in front of a group. It's really a privilege to be able to see that.

• The Wife and I are actually going to our local high school's homecoming game tonight! This will be my first high school homecoming game since the Reagan administration. The cool thing about it this time is that I can go home with my date, and nobody can say boo about it...

Retreat!

(Or, In Which I Bash Other Administrators)

Careful readers will notice that, from time to time, I take the occasional potshot at some of the tenured types.

Today, in the interest of being fair and balanced, I frag some of my administrative colleagues. Specifically, those who insist on 'retreats.'

For those mercifully untouched by retreats, they're sort of like reeducation camps, except with air conditioning and flip charts.

The theory behind retreats, as near as I can figure, is that it's easy to miss the forest for the trees when you're at work, since you're mired in the quotidian muck. So by moving everybody off-site, hiring someone from the outside with Dynamic People Skills and absolutely no familiarity with the reality of the particular workplace, and making people tape oversize sheets of butcher paper on the wall, we can channel the spirit of Thoreau, except for all the nonconformity.

Proprietary U was a big believer in retreats, but it was also legendarily cheap. So the retreats happened at the low-end chain hotel a half mile away, often on Saturday mornings when the conference room rates were cheaper. Yes, attendance was mandatory.

They were spectacularly bad. The living envied the dead.

They were often led by some Muckety-Muck from Home Office, which, as near as we could tell, was on Pluto. (This was back when Pluto was still recognized for being a planet.) Although this was several years ago now, I can still remember a particularly representative exchange I had with a Muckety-Muck early in my deaning days:

MM: Of course, the way we'll really improve student success rates is through hiring better faculty.

DD: So you're lifting the hiring freeze?

Weirdly, I was considered the inappropriate one. Apparently, there's a taboo against introducing Objective F-ing Reality at a retreat.

(One of my finest moments at PU came at the end of a daylong on-campus Motivational Speaker Event, when my boss caught me in my office, skipping the Rope Exercise. (Don't ask.) He asked what I was doing in my office. I told him that since I got my doctorate, I don't do Rope Exercises. He knew me well enough at that point to drop it.)

As hellish as retreats are in a corporate setting, they're that much worse in higher ed.

For all their foibles, which I've noted from time to time, tenured faculty are -- on the whole -- intelligent, independent-minded sorts. That comes with costs -- God knows, that comes with costs -- but it's also essential to what they do. As much as I resent the sense of entitlement that some of them display about the most ridiculous things, like actually being asked for receipts for travel reimbursement, I also don't want to staff classes with cubicle drones. As scary as self-styled 'free agents' are, the ones who actually drink the Kool-Aid are that much scarier.

Dr. Crazy recently started a blogfire with a post about looking for another job when you already have one. Some trolls took offense, claiming that in a tight job market, it's selfish for the 'haves' not to content themselves with their lot. But she was right, and I'd be afraid of anyone who didn't understand why. These are jobs. That's all they are. They involve 'doing work' in exchange for 'pay and benefits.' (And yes, I get hostile at the ones who take the pay and benefits, but don't do the work.) They do not involve pledging your immortal soul, or suspending your better judgment, or altering your personality according to what some motivational speaker with Dynamic People Skills says. That's overreaching, and it's insulting.

The workplace isn't a family, or a cult, and it shouldn't be. (Arlie Hochschild has written a great book on this, called The Time Bind.) If I want my faculty to do their best work, I need to respect the fact that different people have different work styles. If the results are good, and have been achieved in ethical ways, who am I to complain that I wouldn't have done it that way?

My plea to administrators everywhere: faculty are already highly educated. They don't need to be re-educated. Do what needs to be done to forestall liability, but beyond that, back the hell off. Judge the results of their performance rigorously, but let them perform -- within ethical limits -- according to their own styles and personalities. Don't make Saturday morning meetings mandatory for anybody, ever. And don't ever, for any reason, pretend that Rope Exercises have anything to do with anything.

Gen Ed

IHE's story yesterday about a kerfuffle over Gen Ed reforms at the University of Kentucky convinced me that the issues are the same everywhere.

For those outside higher ed, “general education” refers to the classes that students have to take for graduation, but that don't count towards their major. For example, even chemistry majors have to take English composition, and even art majors have to take math. The idea is that anybody with a college degree should have the background of an educated person. It's what separates education from training.

Reforming Gen Ed is one of the hardest things to get done, bureaucratically. It's obviously important, since every matriculated student is affected. But it flies in the face of almost every organizing principle we have. A few obstacles, just off the top of my head:

1. Different configurations of Gen Ed requirements at the various 4-year schools to which our grads transfer. They love to nitpick, as a way to deny transfer credits, so we have to play it conservative here. No interdisciplinary freshman seminars, for example, since transfer courses have to fit neatly into disciplinary boxes.

2. Conflicting and/or ambiguous statewide requirements. These are legion, and uniquely demoralizing.

3. The widely-held doctrine of 'nullification.' I've written on this before.

4. Inter-departmental turf battles. Credits added to one category have to come from another, since the overall number of credits we can include in a degree are capped. So if we add a requirement in social science, we have to take one away from, say, humanities. Anybody who believes in the purity of faculty governance is invited to observe those meetings. They make town hall discussions over the location of a new halfway house seem civil.

5. Honestly and deeply held conflicting beliefs about what an educated person should know and/or should be able to do. These are often of long standing, and in direct conflict with the realities of 1-4.
   
   6. Requirements set by 'special' licensing/accrediting agencies in specific fields (i.e. Nursing)
   

7. Different degree 'types' (A.A.;A.S.;A.A.S.;A.F.A., etc.), and the extent to which degrees designed for one purpose gradually morph into different purposes over the years ('career' degrees with high rates of transfer; 'transfer' degrees that are often terminal).

Since my state doesn't have a tightly integrated system, different colleges have adopted different approaches over the years. Worse, it's not always clear when 'nullification' is actually an option, and when local control has to take a back seat to directives from the outside.

Internally, the faculty are divided into academic departments. Departmental ownership of program curricula works fairly well when it comes to the specialized courses in a discipline, but it doesn't work well with the gen ed part, since that crosses boundaries. In fact, there's no one arbiter of gen ed to adjudicate disputes, so decisions are often made based on interest-group politics.

Repeat that cycle a few times, and the veterans of those battles will do everything in their power to resist bringing up the subject again. The wounds are barely healed from the last round, even if the last round was decades ago.

(Weirdly, in retrospect, this structural flaw didn't exist at Proprietary U. There, there was a single Gen Ed department, which owned the Gen Ed part of all the other curricula. At the time, I didn't realize how unusual that was. While there were certainly issues, the jurisdictional lines in this sense were clear.)

The shame of it is that Gen Ed is, in many ways, the most important part of what we do. It's what students in disparate programs have in common, and it's where (we hope) students hone some of the 'softer' skills that will serve them long after their field-specific training has become obsolete, or has been superseded by subsequent, higher-level training. (I used to tell my techies at PU that their technical skills would get them hired, but their communication skills would get them promoted.) This is the stuff that employers constantly complain is lacking in their new hires. (They don't complain enough to hire English majors and give them the technical training, but they complain nevertheless.) Critical thinking, clear writing, and effective speaking don't go out of style.

I'm just struck at how hard it is to get at our central mission, given the way we're organized.

Wise and worldly readers -- has your college found an effective and honest way to deal with changes to its Gen Ed?

Baby Got (Hatch)Back: An Automotive Snark

Last week, car shopping went abruptly from "I should think about that" to "I need to do this right now," so I've spent way too much time lately at dealerships and on car websites.

Apparently, someone passed a law saying that all car salespeople must be male. Over the past week, I've dealt with I don't know how many salespeople, and they've been a multiracial, multiethnic group of young men. The demographics are pretty much the same as a minor league baseball team. I have no explanation for this.

I thought car shopping would be easy enough. I had my Consumer Reports at the ready, and I knew the parameters I had in mind. Cost is a real issue, given that the whole family is on one academic paycheck, so the cooler, more expensive cars were out of the question. Reliability is key, as is mileage; I consider money spent on gas or repairs to be money wasted. I don't do SUV's. And most important of all, it had to have enough headroom in the backseat to accommodate tall children. Still, I figured, with car companies desperate for customers, how hard could it possibly be?

Yuck yuck yuck.

I didn't get the memo, but it seems that, at some point, the car companies collectively decided that anybody who wants rear seat headroom should just buy an SUV or minivan and be done with it. Cars – by which I mean, “not trucks” -- have incredibly short back seats these days. It seems that the trend of higher bodies has collided with the trend of aerodynamic shapes to squeeze backseat headroom.

Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra, Ford Fusion, Ford Focus, Mazda 3 – no backseat headroom in any of them.

The Honda Fit has headroom, but awful rear-seat crash test ratings, so I ruled that out, too.

The Scion xD has headroom, but it's butt-ugly, gets terrible mileage, and has one of the shorter windshields I've ever seen – it's like the thing is squinting. I sort of like 'visibility.' I use it every single day. No, thanks.

I've had lousy luck with Toytoas – I've buried two of them – and Corollas just make me sad, so that was out. (The Prius was out of my price range, anyway.) And I won't do Dodge or Chevy, just because I don't enjoy spending time in repair shops. (How Chrysler stays in business is a complete mystery to me. A few years ago I rented a Sebring, and couldn't believe the overall crappiness. My brother in law bought a Dodge truck new three years ago. At 50,000 miles, the transmission went. His mechanic told him they're notorious for that. Amazing. They're like big American Yugos, without the charm.)

After burying two Toyotas bought used in my grad school days, each having consumed several years' worth of repair shop intensive care, I have an allergy to the concept of buying 'used.' There's just something comforting in the concept of a warranty. I know that, say, a used Camry wouldn't have been an unreasonable option, but I'm just not there psychologically. Twice burned, real shy. Besides, with the two greatest kids in the world, I'd like the most current safety features I can get.

So, my latest in an ongoing series of hints I like to drop for the Big Three automakers: some of us have tall children, and don't want SUV's. Hint freakin' hint. Produce something decent -- reliable, safe, efficient, not-butt-ugly -- and you'll own this demographic.

Or you can keep producing unreliable, squat, poorly-engineered pieces of crap, and try to make up the difference with union concessions. Your call.

Also, I'm fairly sure that equal opportunity laws apply to car salespeople. I'm just sayin'. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that it's not actually technically illegal to have women on your sales team. Whether it would help, I don't know, but I'm guessing that the overall level of cluelessness might be a little less bad. ("I don't know about antilock brakes, but check out the CD changer!") Worth a shot, anyway.

And then there's Idiot Feature Creep. When did sunroofs become moonroofs? And why do about half the cars out there suddenly have them? I didn't get that memo, either. Little known fact: when they put in a sun/moonroof, you lose about an inch of headroom. When there isn't enough to start with, that's a big deal. Clearly, this is a conspiracy of short people. They're getting back at the rest of us for those high shelves at Barnes and Noble, or maybe that Randy Newman song.

So after all these years, and all this research, and all this looking, I'm back into the hatchback habit of my grad school years. Back to the egg. As The Wife puts it, I'm returning to my roots. All because the ()#%)# car companies haven't grasped that some of us have tall kids.

Confidential to the Ford Motor Company: Seriously, are you guys even trying anymore?

Print 'Em and Ship 'Em

A new correspondent writes:

Why do community colleges mail catalogs to everyone? It seems like a lot of expense for something that's unlikely to generate a lot of new students.

This is a very live issue on my campus. It's a tough one, because beliefs are held strongly, and almost entirely without evidence.

Most community colleges that I know of produce several different types of publications for public consumption. The most common are

1. Catalogs

2. Course Schedules

3. Flyers

Catalogs usually cover multiple years (two seems to be the local standard), and they include full course descriptions, every imaginable policy, requirements for every major, campus maps, and just about everything except the actual days and times that classes meet. Catalogs take a full year to produce, since they're legally binding and remarkably comprehensive. That means, among other things, that they're already partially obsolete the minute they arrive on campus, and become progressively more so over their run. (Most colleges run up-to-date versions of the catalog on their websites.)

Course schedules typically cover a single semester or season (in the case of the summer, which may contain multiple sessions). They don't contain full course descriptions or major requirements, but they do include days, times, and locations of class meetings. There, too, the printed schedule is usually pretty buggy, and savvy students know that if they want the real information, they should look online.

(This is also where that mysterious creature, Professor STAFF, can be found. It's code for “adjunct.”)

Flyers are usually supersized postcards announcing a single event (an open house, say) or a new program. Flyers are much cheaper to produce and mail, but necessarily light on content.

There's a tension, really, between the need for marketing and the need for informing.

In classic conflict-avoidant fashion, we split the difference and mail the course schedule to every household in our service area, but only make the print catalog available on campus or by request. (Anybody can access it online.) The thinking is that the printing and shipping costs for that large a catalog run would be prohibitive, and it would be silly to re-mail the same thing every semester for two years. But the course schedule is smaller and it changes every semester, so we use that as a de facto marketing tool.

Of course, if you look at them, you'll notice that the catalog – which takes a little effort to find – is actually a much slicker marketing piece than the schedule, which is ugly, detailed, and everywhere.

My guess is that over time, we'll move away from thick paper publications and bulk mailings, and more towards online information. It's easier to update, the marginal cost of adding readers is close to zero, and the savings in printing and postage would be surprisingly substantial. I could envision a flyer each semester announcing that next semester's course schedule is online, giving the web address, and leaving it at that. A postcard is much cheaper to print and mail than a course schedule is, and much less likely to be riddled with errors.

We haven't tried it yet, though, since there's still no way of knowing what percentage of our target population won't look online. I suspect the percentage is small and shrinking, but when you're scraping for enrollment as it is, every little bit hurts. Given enough data, we could do a cost-benefit on it, but the cost of getting the data is itself prohibitive.

I'll ask my readers. Wise and worldly readers – has your college abandoned the detailed mailings in favor of putting the catalog and schedule entirely online? If so, has it worked? Did anything happen that nobody anticipated? Any real-world guidance you could offer would be much appreciated.

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

Ask My Readers: Grad School Admissions

An assiduous undergraduate correspondent writes:

Is it actually encouraged to email prospective advisors at the schools to which you will be applying? What do you send them-just an email, a copy of your thesis? Should your current faculty be sending introductory emails on your behalf to colleagues who you can then follow up with? Are there any good blogs that focus on getting into grad school, as opposed to the end of grad school life? How much do grades and scores actually matter in grad school admissions (I know, there are so many different schools, etc. Maybe confine answers to the social sciences and humanities?)? Do faculty at prospective grad schools actually want to read your work? Do they actually want to meet with you when you visit the school?

First, my generic warning for anybody considering grad school in an evergreen discipline: for the love of all that is holy and good, don't do it! (For the longer version of this warning, see here.)

That said, one of the perks of working at an open-admissions college is that we don't deal with the angst of people trying to psych out the admissions process. It's pretty transparent: if you meet the basic requirements, you're in. Grad school is not – and should not be – like that.

The downside is that I have precious little wisdom to share on the etiquette of grad school admissions. Luckily, I have the Best Readers Ever, so I'll throw this one open to the readers who have experience working in or on graduate admissions. Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?

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

Bad Job, But Not Malpractice

Sherman Dorn has a thoughtful post up about the difficulties institutions have in dealing with faculty instructional practices that aren't quite enough to get someone fired, but that do result in lousy teaching and valid student complaints. As his post points out – it's worth reading in the original – most of the 'official' policies and procedures deal only with the 'bright line' issues, like “thou shalt not sexually harass thy students.” Issues that aren't as obvious as that one often slip between policies, so deans and such often have to make up responses on the spot.

This is a very real issue.

Any time I'm confronted with a novel situation, I have to balance the uniqueness of the situation with the likelihood that any decision I make will be cited as “past practice” in some future argument. The conflict between 'solving the immediate issue' and 'setting a dangerous precedent' is chronic, and frustrating, and, at some level, inescapable. But a more developed set of policies that would at least put tighter boundaries around no-man's-land would certainly reduce my headaches.

I'll give a purely hypothetical example that would never ever happen at my current college where everybody is practically perfect in every way.

Professor X, who has tenure, routinely takes six weeks to grade papers. By the time the students get their midterm papers back, the 'drop' deadline has already passed. Students who had no idea how they were doing in the class didn't find out they were in trouble until it was too late to escape.

I ask Professor X to return the papers in a more timely fashion. He screams “academic freedom,” threatens to file grievance #478, and storms out of my office spreading rumors about me and farm animals.

Or, I ask the chair of X's department to have that conversation. The chair balks, asking what good it will do, since Prof. X has tenure. I say we have to try. A week later, the chair reports trying, failure, and grievance #479. Now, not only is Prof. X on the warpath, but the chair is feeling put-upon, too.

Or, I tell the students to suck it up.

From my perspective, none of these is acceptable.

In the fantasy world in which some people live, it would be possible to 'coach' Prof. X to better performance. In the presence of renewable contracts and merit raises, that could actually be done, with raises and/or renewal contingent on improved performance. But with tenure, and without merit pay, there isn't much in the way of leverage for dealing with offenses that fall below the level of termination. If Prof. X doesn't feel like listening, I can't make him.

This is where I think Dorn's proposal of more rigorous peer review falls flat. What incentive would a peer have to take on somebody disagreeable? Depending on the mechanism of the review, the peer might not know about the slow-motion grading, since, in practice, peer review often consists of a single class observation. Even if the peer actually did know, and actually did have the integrity and intestinal fortitude to say so, any peer fault-finding – by definition – won't be much more than he said/she said. At which point we're right back where we started.

To make matters worse, suppose that the accusation is of repeated, lengthy digressions that have nothing to do with the subject matter. I'll take politics out of it, and stipulate that the digressions are about the professor's favorite football team. Suppose that it's a chemistry class, and the professor spends more time on the Green Bay Packers than on chemistry.

Will a single class visit catch that? Almost certainly not – anybody competent can behave for an hour, just as anybody can obey the speed limit when the police car is in the rear view. Will the politically aggrieved catch it? Not likely – it's not a hot-button issue. Is it an abuse of the classroom? Yup.

It's tough, because there's no 'bright line' rule about digressions (and there probably can't be). I'd guess that anybody who has taught for any length of time has gone off on something unrelated at least once. I'll even concede that a little of that, carefully and sparingly done, can serve a purpose. So Prof. X here will claim that he hasn't said anything obscene or harassing – which is true – and that he's not the first to digress, which is also true. How do I show that my threshold, which isn't even quantitative, is reasonable? And what do I say to the students, who complain that Prof. X rushes through the material at the end to make up for the time he wasted?

Invoking “professionalism” or “individual responsibility” doesn't get the job done; if Prof. X had any of either, these issues wouldn't arise in the first place.

Rather than making this post #480 in my ongoing series on the evils of tenure, I'll ask for solutions within a tenure-based system. How would you handle the tenured professor who would rather discuss Brett Favre than his course's subject matter?

Charity and Sustainability

I don't usually do followup posts, but this topic seems to need one.

In higher ed, there's no such thing as fundraising. Instead, there's 'development,' or, in more sophisticated quarters, 'institutional advancement.'

Traditionally, community colleges haven't done much in the way of courting donors. Instead, we've been funded mostly by state and/or local governments, and tuition. (In California, they banned tuition per se, so instead they call it 'fees.') As a result, we've been able to stay pretty clearly focused on the two biggest tasks at hand -- workforce development and transfer preparation -- and to keep our costs under relative control, compared to the rest of higher ed.

(Check out this piece on a study of rising tuition rates. Nationally, the 'true cost' of attending a cc went up a little over three percent last year, which isn't wildly out of line with inflation. The same cannot be said of four-year colleges and universities.)

In my more cynical moments, I think there's a correlation between increased reliance on private philanthropy (or development, or advancement) and high rates of tuition increase. The connection, I think, comes from the attention deficit disorder that targeted philanthropy brings.

Philanthropic giving is cyclical, or tidal, or even random. It fluctuates with external events, the poignancy of available stories (and the identity of the folks to whom the stories happen -- diseases that befall Senators' grandchildren tend to get pretty good funding), the win-loss record of the higher-profile sports teams, political scandals, PR scandals, and probably sunspots. Big Donors like to make Big Splashes, and you don't make a big splash by contributing operating funds for ongoing concerns. They like the concept of 'seed money,' which ties up future operating funds indefinitely.

While the Big Donors go spreading their seed, we make decisions based on what we expect will be sustainable over the long term. Unsurprisingly, after decades of that difference, the cost spread between cc's and four-year schools is widening, even as the quality gap is narrowing or, in some cases, inverting. We make decisions based mostly on what we think will still make sense in ten years. Other schools -- I'm not naming any names here, you know who you are -- make decisions based on the Big Donor's tastes. When the Big Donor has gone to that development office in the sky, though, his legacy is still around, making demands on the operating budget. The college responds in two ways: raise tuition to cover the short term, and court even more donors. This time will be different! And the spiral continues.

I'm concerned that with public sector support for higher ed falling by the wayside, the cc's will fall into some of the same traps as the four-year colleges. He who pays the piper calls the tune; if we start courting donors in a serious way, then we have to start courting donors in a serious way.

None of this is meant to disparage donors. They give voluntarily, and I'm grateful for it. Charity arises from many impulses, some of them genuinely admirable. And it would be silly to deny that real good has been done, and will be done.

But there's no substitute for sustainable, predictable operating funding. That's what makes really successful programs (and reasonably successful cost control) possible over the long term. To the extent that we're being pushed away from predictable -- by which I mean public -- support, and towards philanthropic funding, I'm concerned that we'll start making some of the same mistakes I've seen elsewhere. The tuition gap will start closing, to nobody's benefit. We'll try to make up the difference by beefing up our development office. Then, in a few years, we'll have to answer some very angry questions about out-of-control tuition increases. You heard it here first.

The Charity Shakedown

A long-suffering correspondent writes:

My SLAC employer conducts an annual United Way fundraising drive. Earlier this fall, a letter was sent over the university president's signature to every employee (faculty of all levels and staff) expressing the president's hopes for generous employee support of the fall UW campaign.

The university has now initiated the "asking" phase of the UW campaign. At the beginning of this phase, each university employee was sent a packet of printed material promoting various incentives for donating and a UW donation form that suggests that an employee's "fair share" donation equates to 1% of her/his salary.

The United Way contribution form discloses that roughly 12.6% of donations received go to UW's fundraising and administrative costs; the form asserts that this percentage reflects an "efficient" use of donor funds. I disagree and have chosen for years to contribute directly to the local non-profit I support; in my mind, 100% of my money going to my non-profit's operations is far better than 87.4%.

My institution does not offer any matching funds for employee contributions to charities, whether or not such contributions are made through United Way.

While my personal financial contributions to charity are less than the 1% suggested by the United Way, my unpaid volunteer service to the community in the last year is the equivalent of more than 19% of my full-time work hours. I volunteer this time in addition to working three paying side jobs to pay down my debt and maintain my relatively modest standard of living.

It rankles me that my institution uses pressure tactics to solicit money from us employees every year. Although agencies supported through United Way provide valuable and important services in our community, I'm already giving back.

I wonder what your readers think... should I continue to write "$0.00" and return my UW form every year, write a note to the UW campaign coordinator or an administrator justifying my non-giving, challenge the president's annual letters as pressure tactics, ...?

There are far more important issues to tackle on campus (better pay, more generous & flexible leave policies, work schedules less bound to rigid assembly-line modalities, etc.) ... should this one simply be left to run its course?

I've seen worse than this, actually. You don't mention any actual or implied consequence befalling those who don't participate.

I'm not usually one to recommend passivity and foot-dragging, but this seems like the perfect test case. I wouldn't fire off a poison pen letter – that would make you the bad guy – but would simply, politely, decline to participate. My guess is that nothing will happen, except that you'll get to decide what to do with your money.

Phrases like “worthy cause” have different meanings to different people, and rightly so. I generally prefer to target my giving to organizations that are trying to effect change, as opposed to the more traditional 'charities.' (That costs me some serious tax deductions, but c'est la vie.) That's not to deny that charities, as such, do some serious good, or that advocacy groups have their own issues; it's just to say that nobody can do everything, so we make our choices.

What makes me uneasy is when the folks at the top of an organization decide to put the organization's stamp on certain causes and, by extension, not on others. Implying that employee contributions are expected is that much worse.

One of the dirty little secrets of administration, actually, is that you are routinely expected to attend a battery of fundraisers (paying for tickets out of your own pocket). Attendance is also de rigeur at faculty retirement parties, with every attendee paying fifty bucks or so for the restaurant and gift. That doesn't sound like much, but do several back-to-back along with a couple of fundraisers and it adds up.

These usually hit around December – just in time for Christmas shopping, and why don't academics get year-end bonuses, anyway? -- and May.

The logic of the fundraisers, I think, is that we can't really expect other people to contribute to the college if we aren't willing to pony up ourselves. Which is fine, but the folks we're hitting up are typically far, far wealthier than we'll ever be. There's also the issue of just how 'voluntary' these contributions actually are. For certain employees, they're mandatory in all but name.

I've written before on my skepticism towards mandatory community service, so I'll just say here that there's something to be said for doing good without calling attention to it.

Wise and worldly readers – have you seen a particularly egregious charity shakedown? Have you found a graceful way around it?

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

Cover Letters for Admin Jobs

A longtime correspondent writes:

Okay, so everyone and their brother/sister/mama has done a post on cover letters for academic jobs. I have not seen a post on cover letters for admin jobs. I remember you talking to someone about how to prepare for the interview, but nothing on what makes an admin cover letter different from an academic job letter. And I am so new, I feel a little out of my element.

So, what do you think?

Full disclosure: I've applied for more admin jobs than I've received. However, I've been on several admin search committees, so there's at least a modicum of comparative perspective there.

In my observation, the industry standard seems to be four or five pages, single spaced, with spaces skipped between paragraphs. (Readers outside of higher ed: pick up your jaws off the floor. Higher ed is a quirky industry, with its own folkways. We need a Penelope Trunk or Evil HR Lady of higher ed.)

Search committees frequently do a first screen using a rubric, assigning point values to the various categories they included in the original position description. The way to work that is to address, at some point, every single criterion (including the merely 'preferred') listed in the position description. (Hint: don't just go by the ad. Go to the college's website, click on 'HR' or 'employment,' and find the actual position description, which is almost certainly longer than the ad by an order of magnitude. That will include the criteria the search committee is likely to use.) This can also save you time, if the position description includes criteria that you just don't meet, no matter how charitably interpreted.

If it were up to me, colleges would be relatively sparse in listing their desiderata, the better to allow cherry-picking from across institutional types, and the inclusion of some new perspectives. Of course, if it were up to me, a lot of things would be different. As it is, you'll frequently find criteria like “must have experience in a collective bargaining environment.” If you only go by the ad, you might not see that, and might not think to include it on your own. But it matters. It matters for the rubric, but it's also true that managing with a union is different from managing without one, and that folks who may be perfectly capable in the latter environment could get eaten alive in the former. In the absence of good performance measures, experience is better than nothing.

To the extent that you can show actual performance measures (and they flatter you), do it. If you took direction of a program and grew it, give the percentages or numbers by which it grew. (Be aware, though, that most educated people are at least a little skeptical of percentages: a program that went from one student to two experienced 100 percent growth, but is hardly a success.) In the context of R1's, I'd imagine that success at grantsmanship would count here, but I'll have to confess being out of my element in that neck of the woods. Any readers who know that stuff well are invited to comment. Look for quantifiable measures of success that you can explain in a sentence or less.

The letters I've seen succeed typically tell us relatively little about the candidate, and a great deal about the candidate's achievements. Don't do the 'inspirational life story' thing – it smacks of narcissism. (For reasons I don't understand, prospective faculty fall back on that all the time. I have never – not once, not ever – seen it work.) Instead, address problems you have solved.

To the extent that you know the dilemmas the institution is facing, it's good to address those. (To be fair, unless it's a place you currently work or where you have close friends, this could be hard to come by.) Does it need a change agent, or has it just gone through a wrenching change and it's looking for a consensus-builder? Does it need to increase enrollments, or is it bursting at the seams and struggling with managing growth? (The latter is much more fun.) Is it trying to change its mission and/or profile? (If so, expect the usual resistance from the usual entrenched suspects.) Are the demographics of its service area changing in important ways?

The paradox of job applications is that even though they're initiated by the applicants, and a tremendous amount of judging is directed at the applicants, they're not really about the applicants. This is especially true at the admin level, where there's rarely time to allow someone to grow into a role. (I've never not heard someone say at an interview for an admin position that the winning candidate will have to “hit the ground running.”) They're hiring to solve what they perceive as a problem. To the extent that you can suss out how they define the problem, you'll be able either to present yourself as the solution, or direct your time and energy elsewhere.

Finally, and it's embarrassing to have to say this, proofread the damn letter. I mean, really. I've been on cabinet-level search committees on which we've received letters that made me wince. I remember one that was entirely right-justified, so the left margin would start pretty much wherever. Why would an intelligent, educated person do that? (And this was when we still received hardcopy, so it wasn't a matter of our system chewing it up.) That application was DOA. Don't include salary requirements – there's time for that later. The point of the letter is to get you an interview. That's all.

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers – what do you think?

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