Friday Fragments

The blogosphere has been atwitter (can I say that?) about the latest study showing the economic damage to students of leaving underperforming teachers in place.  Kevin Carey’s response strikes me as the most persuasive thus far.  In brief, he makes the point that choosing not to change is, itself, a choice.  Check it out.

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Sign on door of store downtown: “Saturday: noon to close.”  Seems a bit abstract...

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I had high hopes for Now You See It, by Cathy Davidson.  I’ve enjoyed her previous work, she writes well, and she has a great topic.  And parts of it were quite good.  (Her observation that students write better on their blogs than in their academic papers struck a chord; when I used to tutor in a writing center, I noticed that students who could write perfectly lucid notes or letters couldn’t write lucid papers.  In both cases, the issue is less “writing ability” per se than fluency in an unfamiliar genre.)  

Oddly enough for a book about “attention blindness,” though, Davidson doesn’t seem aware of the level of “look at me!” in her own writing.  She positions the book as a counterweight to claims of cultural decline, which is fine and good, but the anecdotes she strings together are all variations on “I met someone wonderful in a wonderful location, and heard something great, and then I went somewhere else and did the same thing!  Isn’t that great?”  By the time she devoted part of a chapter to her ex-husband’s Mom, it became a real struggle to keep reading.  I’m not sure what the writerly equivalent of “mugging for the camera” is, but that’s how it reads.  

Frustratingly, the Peripatetic Pollyanna stuff gets in the way of a nifty argument.  Davidson notes that we tend to see what we look for, and thereby to miss some promising possibilities.  Worse, we get so worked up with unnecessary anxieties about change that we fail to nurture new developments when they most need it.  Her history of cultural anxieties about “multitasking” is on-point, revealing, and witty; apparently, the hand-wringing over putting radios in cars in the early twentieth century rivaled the recent worries about cyber-distractions.  (The best moments in the book echo Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, which goes uncited.)  When she gets out of her own way, Davidson can be engaging and incisive.  Inside this often-annoying book is a brilliant kindle single screaming to get out.  I just wish she could have seen it.

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The big news out of CES this year was “ultrabooks.”  Aside from the cheesy name, these strike me as wildly wonderful if they cost about half of what they cost.  For what they cost, not so much.  

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Okay, this probably says more about me, but what SHOULD have been the big news out of CES was an actual replicator.  Yes, it’s version 1.0, but damn.  Give it a couple of iterations, and it could be a monster.  Draw a design, pour in the plastic, and presto, you have a prototype!  Add voice activation and a teakettle and I can do the full Picard.  (“Tea.  Earl Grey.  Hot.”)

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That last one may have been a bit of oversharing.

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I heard a rumor this week that Congress is considering making students who arrive at community college under the “ability to benefit” rules ineligible for financial aid.  (“Ability to benefit” allows students who don’t have a high school diploma or a GED a chance to test in.)  My first thought was that we can finally stop coddling all those independently wealthy high school dropouts.  Upon reflection, I guess the counterargument would be that they should get their GED’s first.  If Congress is willing and able to fund a robust GED preparation system -- adult basic education for all who need it -- then I withdraw my objection.  If not, I’m appalled.  

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Poetry, by The Girl:

We sit on benches
we sometimes use wrenches
from our gear boxes
‘cause we’re hard-workin’ foxes!

She was completing a workbook assignment that asked her to use plurals that end in “-es.”  I’d give full credit for that...

Growing Into the Role

If you had to apply for the job you have now, under current criteria, would you be qualified?

Would you have been qualified for each job along the way?

These questions hit me earlier this week as I was reviewing job descriptions for some positions we hope to post soon.  Over the years, the job descriptions have become ever more particular, and the drafts of the postings reflected that.  Since our postings typically separate “required” qualifications from “preferred” ones, over time, many of the “preferred” ones have made their way over to “required.”

In a way, that’s good.  Over time, we’ve become clearer on what the jobs actually entail, and have written descriptions and postings that reflect the background that we honestly think the right candidate would have.  Any candidate who actually meets every condition in the current draft should surely be capable of doing the job well.  But that person is probably looking for a job a level higher.

A tightly defined posting makes the first-cut screening easier, but it does so by rejecting some people who probably could have done the job quite well.  Do we really need five years experience, or would three years do for the right person?  If we require supervisory experience for first-level supervisors, how could staff in the area ever break through?

“Rigorous” and “rigid” can shade into each other if we aren’t careful.  

This is becoming more of an issue as the generation that built community colleges retires.  Years of minimal hiring and a certain amount of, um, how to say this politely, blocking of the pipeline, have left a thin bench.  Frequently, the younger folks simply don’t have the levels of experience of their predecessors, since their predecessors were hired early when the barriers to entry were far lower.  

That’s not a shot at anybody; it’s just a description of how things worked.  I noticed it when I left Proprietary U; the ad to replace me listed a level of experience that would have ruled me out as a candidate.  That wasn’t a backhanded criticism; it was just that they were trying to match the rules elsewhere.  Had they made that move a few years earlier, my career would have been very different.  Since plenty of other places already had, plenty of my cohort were shut out of the roles in which now they’re faulted for lack of experience.

Hiring for talent, rather than experience, brings some risk.  Talent is necessarily a judgment call, and frustrated applicants (or frustrated members of a search committee) who decide to get litigious or political can always claim that the judgment call in question was really motivated by something nefarious.  (Racism and/or excessive anti-racism are the usual favorites, but there are others.)  Bright-line rules -- even overly rigid ones -- hold up well in court.  The squishier the criteria, the harder they are to defend in a deposition.  

Beyond the legal issues, though, there’s the need for real mentoring.  Lean organizations often don’t have (or don’t think they have) the spare time and energy for meaningful mentoring in a new role.  It’s easier just to hire someone who’s already fully formed and good to go.  

But those folks are getting scarcer, and new perspectives are obviously necessary.  That means taking a deep breath, trusting some judgment calls, and hiring some talented people who may need a little time and help to grow into their new roles.

What If Colleges Ran Attack Ads?

The rise of Super PACs and the glorious display of democracy that is the Republican primary season got me thinking about attack ads in other contexts.  What if colleges ran attack ads?

Western State says it has a “tradition of excellence,” but is this excellent?  (shot of cafeteria food)  Or this?  (shot of long line at advising center)  Call Western State, and tell it what a craphole it is.

Taylor believed St. Somebody would help her get a good job.  How did that work out, Taylor?  (shot of Taylor with “are you kidding me?” expression -- camera pulls back to show her working the register at fast food place)  Would you like fries with that, or do you want a real degree?

With regional variations, it could get ugly.  A red-state version:

Dave and Jill entrusted their daughter’s education to Dead Guy College.  (picture of well-scrubbed nuclear family)  But some tenured radical there introduced her to women’s studies (dramatic music, reverse-polarity image of daughter)  Dead Guy College: Is it worth the risk?

Invariably, some smarty-pants types would launch viral attacks on youtube:

“I’m Mike.  This is Rob.  Say hi, Rob!  (Rob waves)  We’re gonna search for a parking space at Flagship U.  Here goes! (several minutes of fast-motion gonzo footage ensue, in which our heroes are repeatedly frustrated in their quest to park)  Wow!  Sure is a good thing I don’t have to get to class!  That’s because I take online classes at Nowhere U.”

I’d expect the elites to hit back with passive-aggressive snob appeal:

“(wasp-y baritone narrator) You could get an English degree from Midtier State.  You could.  You could make do with used cars, studio apartments, and your very own blog.  Sure you could.  Or, (stirring music swells) you could get serious. (handsome man smiles, climbs into Ferrari)”

Maybe we should stick with the optimistic autumnal stuff instead.

Rationing and Rationality

Apparently, a few California community colleges have taken to rationing seats.   Since their funding is entirely disconnected from their enrollments – astonishing, but true – the only way the colleges can make do on shrinking state allocations is to turn people away.  While most campuses have resorted  to the easy and time honored  “first come, first served” method of allocating seats, a couple campuses have started consciously rationing seats, giving priority to entering students and/or students identified as likeliest to graduate.

At the same time, IHE reports that at the meeting of the Council of Independent Colleges, a gathering of private nonprofit colleges across the country, the discussion centered around programmatic rationing on campus.  (I couldn’t help but notice that the story didn’t draw a single comment.)  One President mentioned telling her Board of Trustees that this is exactly the kind of exercise that garners votes of no confidence in presidents, as faculty circle the wagons to protect their (and their friends’) curricular turf.

I’ll register a mixed reaction to these stories, which strike me as basically the same story.  They’re both attempts to bring conscious thought to prioritizing the allocation of scarce resources.  In the former case, the scarce resources are seats for students in classes; in the latter, funding for faculty positions.  But at the end of the day, they’re really both about scarcity.

Off the top of my head, I can come up with several different ways to allocate scarce resources.  And let me be clear that I’m not celebrating the fact of scarcity, especially in the case of California.  I’m just assuming that scarcity will be a recurring condition, and it would make sense for colleges to decide consciously how they want to handle it.  Obviously, windfalls of resources that make difficult choices moot are always welcome and preferable, but sometimes they just aren’t in the offing.

One method is inertia.  Use “first come, first served” for student seats, attrition for programmatic cuts, and hope for the best.  This is the default method, and it’s by far the most common throughout higher ed.  The advantage of this method is that it’s politically easy, and it works well when the scarcity is mild and passing.

Another is pricing.  This is how economists usually recommend dealing with scarcity.  In the context of student seats, this would involve raising tuition and fee charges until demand falls naturally to the desired level.  From an institutional perspective, this has the added benefit of raising considerable revenue.

Pricing doesn’t work as well for allocating internal resources, though.  A close variation would look at the profit and loss generated by each program, and treat losses as costs.  Pick the programs that cost the institution the most – that is, the ones that lose the most money – and eliminate those.  The advantages of this method are that it offers the most bang for the buck, by definition, and it shifts the discussion from unanswerable questions (“which is more important, sociology or history?”) to easily answered ones.  The obvious disadvantages are twofold.   First, it tends to favor the students who have the most to spend.   Culturally, we’ve decided that that’s okay for private goods, like ipads or jet skis, but it’s not ideal for public goods.  Since higher ed partakes of both, it seems extreme to base the entire decision on one set of rules.  The other disadvantage is that it can easily lead to programmatic incoherence, faddism, and a loss of mission.  If we assume that students don’t always know what’s best for them – anathema to free market absolutists, but common sense to educators – then we have to assume that defaulting to the way students vote with their dollars is an abdication of professional responsibility.

Alternately, a college could make explicit, conscious decisions based on publicly announced criteria.  This could be done autocratically, through administrative dictat, or inclusively, through open discussion and debate.  (Obviously, I favor the latter, though I know that isn’t always easy.)  Either way, the college would have to decide – explicitly – what it considers most important (and by implication, what it considers less important).  It would have to spell out its rationale, and justify its rationality.

The downside of the explicit approach is that it tends to generate wildly disproportionate outrage.  (Witness the excoriation SUNY Albany endured when it proposed eliminating a few departments last year.)  Cuts by attrition feel neutral, which can be politically useful; cuts by deliberate design, whether autocratic or democratic, necessarily involve targeting.  It’s unsurprising that the targeted take offense.

As much as I hate the idea of community colleges turning capable students away, I have to welcome the clarity that results from forcing a serious discussion about priorities.  If we can’t do everything -- the old “comprehensive” model -- then what should we do?  The answer will probably, and properly, vary from one setting to the next, but it strikes me as the right question.  And I’d rather answer it honestly -- even to the point of having to name who loses -- than keep defaulting to institutional inertia.  Democracy isn’t always pretty, but I’ll take it over denial.

Thoughts on "On Being Presidential"

Just in case my nerd cred needed any burnishing, I devoted part of the break to reading On Being Presidential, by Susan Resneck Pierce.  It’s about the challenges and rewards of being a college president, with some helpful hints for people considering the role.  Its major recommendations boil down to self-discipline (for presidents) and self-awareness (for colleges).  The difficulty of finding both of those at the same time says a lot.

Since the book doesn’t specify an institutional type within higher education, it’s hard to know how closely it reflects the realities facing presidents of community colleges.  Certainly most cc’s don’t deal with high-profile athletics or dorms, so those issues are mercifully absent.  They also don’t deal with denominational issues in the ways that religiously affiliated colleges do.  Historically, they haven’t done nearly as much private fundraising as other sectors, though that’s starting to change.  

On the other hand, cc’s as a sector are very much at the mercy of state (and sometimes federal or local) politics.  In that context, presidents have to be savvy about balancing the need to create a sense of urgency with the need not to seem too needy.  As with the private donors Pierce discusses, there’s certainly an “educate the legislator” role to play, but the issues around that can be much more complex, given that a single state can have many different campuses, each with its own local leadership.  

I devoured Pierce’s advice about setting a leadership climate.  Having worked under several different presidents in my career, I can attest that a few basic choices made upfront have substantial and unintended ripple effects.  Leaders who like to pit subordinates against each other, like Donald Trump, tend to generate all manner of unproductive internal politics.  When I was at Proprietary U, the president there enjoyed putting people on the spot, seemingly at random.  He’d actually stop people in the hallway and hit them with his question of the day.  (On any given day, he had one question.)  He seemed to think that he was keeping everyone on our toes; the actual effect was mostly just annoying.  

For me, the unintended highlight of the book was her observation that “[f]aculty, students, staff, and alumni all believe to varying degrees that they have primacy...”  It’s a pretty good description of administration generally, in fact.  Maintaining an upbeat equanimity in the face of such complicated, overlapping, and often conflicting demands -- without losing a coherent sense of self -- is the considerable challenge of being presidential.  

The undercurrent of the book is that the success or failure of a president is largely a matter of self-awareness at the point of selection.  A candidate needs enough self-awareness to pick the right opportunity, and not to oversell.  Similarly, a college needs to understand its own needs so it can select the right person.  When it doesn’t, it’s likely to fall under the spell of a charismatic leader who will generate unrealistic expectations.

Pierce rightly notes that the experiences people gain rising through the academic ranks --- faculty, department chair, dean, provost -- are increasingly poor fits for presidencies.  That has always been true at private colleges, but it’s becoming true at community colleges now, too.  In my daily role, I don’t spend much time fundraising, for example; as states and localities increasingly leave cc’s to fend for themselves, the fundraising role is becoming more important.   In light of that change and of the advancing age of presidents, colleges will have to start attending more intentionally to succession planning and leadership training.  Some will probably look outside academia, whether by choice or default, but that brings risks of its own.  (And as she correctly notes, there’s currently no well-known program training people from non-academic backgrounds for academic presidencies.)

She makes the point -- not unique to presidencies, I’ll add -- that “fit” is a very real issue.  Different colleges are at different points in their histories and have different needs; a candidate who gets shot down at one college could be very well-received at another.  From a candidate’s point of view, then, the important thing is not to try to be perfect, but to try to be a well-scrubbed version of what you actually are.  Give an accurate picture of what you have to offer, and trust that eventually a college will recognize its needs in you.  The best outcomes happen when candidates have the self-discipline not to try too hard to get the job.  

The most disheartening part of the book -- other than her repeated misuse of the term “fulsome” -- is the discussion of life in a fishbowl.  Presidents are conspicuous figures, and frequently people will consider their private lives fair game for judgment, informed or not.  That level of scrutiny is one of the most common cited reasons for vice presidents not pursuing presidencies.  Worse, the fishbowl effect often extends to family members.  It’s one thing to sign up for a role that brings scrutiny; it’s something else entirely to subject your family to it.  And having to “be presidential” 24/7 is a tall order for anyone; we all need the chance to be human from time to time.  

Self-awareness is neither common nor evenly distributed.  But it’s a worthwhile goal, well worth the occasional reminder.  Thanks to Pierce for spelling out the consequences for both individuals and institutions for not taking self-awareness seriously.

Friday Fragments, Chock-Full of Linky Goodness

The Boy got a 1254 piece (honest!) milennium falcon Lego kit for Christmas.  He disappeared into the basement at 2:00 on Christmas Day, and re-emerged six hours later with a fully built ship.  This, after having spent the morning assembling two smaller Lego spaceships.  Given that TB usually hates to be alone and almost never goes into the basement, this was pretty impressive.  At this pace, by the time he’s fourteen I expect he’ll have a fully functional Lego nuclear reactor going in the basement.  

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Kevin Carey’s piece on higher education in California is a must-read.  His discussion of the relative impact of budget cuts on the various sectors, compared to the relative attention each has received, tells you much of what makes American politics so frustrating.  Small cuts at the top generate national outrage; turning away tens of thousands of people at the bottom generates a shrug.

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The Girl continues to amaze with her preternatural poise.  At one point, just before Christmas, the following conversation ensued:

TG: I wonder if Santa and the Easter Bunny know each other.

DD: Probably.  I bet they share travel tips.

Grandma: They both have to cover the whole world in a day!

TG: Santa has a sleigh, but the Bunny just hops.

DD: How does the Bunny get across the ocean?  Those are some big hops.

(pause)

TG: Maybe he hops on a ship!

I thought that was a pretty elegant explanation.

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This piece details what happens when you shut people out from community colleges, like California is doing.  Simply put, many of the frustrated applicants turn to for-profits.  From a taxpayer’s perspective, this is penny wise and pound foolish.  The students will graduate (or not) with significantly higher student loan debts than they otherwise would have, and much of the cost of the inevitable defaults will fall on the taxpayers.  Others will simply skip higher education altogether.  Some will prosper anyway, but in the aggregate, the opportunity cost of missed productivity gains will snowball.  

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Just before the break, I had a reality check in the gym.  I was getting dressed after working out, as were a couple of other men.  One of them was a regular there.  I’d put him in his late sixties.  He’s big and blustery -- he talks in ALL CAPS -- and prone to conservative political rants.  He went off on a particularly spirited one, loudly opining that “we should just go down to DC and blow up the whole thing.”  I let him vent, having learned over time that there’s no point in engaging.  After he left, the other man, who looked twentysomething and probably Latino, looked at me and said matter-of-factly “if I said that, they’d put me in jail.”  It brought me up short, because he was right.  

There was a time when I would have disagreed.  Now, I really couldn’t.  It was a passing moment, but I haven’t been able to shake it off.  

Something has gone very wrong.

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This piece on banking is one of the more illuminating, and disturbing, that I’ve seen in a long time.  It basically argues that the opacity of the financial system is a feature, not a bug, and that too much transparency would destroy the entire economy.  The intimidating complexity of the system conveys a false sense of security, thereby encouraging people to take on systemically necessary levels of risk that they wouldn’t take if they actually knew what they were doing. Depending on your taste, you could read the banking system as Socrates’ “noble lie,” or you could compare it to Tinkerbell.  Or maybe the Easter Bunny, complaining about his taxes before hopping on a ship to St. Bart’s.

Writing in the Office

I’m working on the executive summary for an annual report on a major grant.  Much of the report involves importing budget numbers from wherever, and I have help with that, but the summary part is my own.

Which means I have to write in the office.

Intersession is the right time to do that, if it must be done.  The interruptions-per-hour are fewer, and with fewer classes running come fewer emergencies.  But it’s still difficult.

Some people deal with that by coming in on weekends, or staying into the wee hours of the evening.  But with my childcare obligations, that really isn’t an option.  (Besides, if I’m around, I’m found.)  Some people take extended writing assignments home, but between family time, any errands, the blog, and the book, I just don’t have much left in the tank by the time I finally get to it.

So I play distraction slalom, swerving from this distraction to that one without falling down.  Ideally.

Office writing lends itself well to emails, since they’re brief and usually either reactive or pro forma.  (“The meeting has been moved to room 240” isn’t terribly taxing.)  If I get interrupted in the middle of composing a three-sentence email, it usually isn’t too hard to reconstruct what I was doing.  (Exception: the dreaded “drafts” folder.  It serves the same function as the vegetable rotter drawer in the fridge.)  But if it’s an extended and detailed piece with serious money hanging in the balance, I can’t just write it on the corner of my mind.

The same thing held true in my faculty days.  I had always assumed that the office would be the perfect place to write, but it really wasn’t; there was just too much going on.  Students would drop by, colleagues would drop by, hallway conversations would linger...

In a real pinch, I could always just shut the door and keep everyone out for a while.  But I’m not wild about the message that sends, especially if I’m alone in there.  I’ll close the door if I’m discussing a sensitive topic with someone, but closing the door when it’s just me just feels self-indulgent.  I try to save that for the most extreme cases.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found tricks to make extended office writing easier?  

The Uses of January

I’m wondering if there are other productive ways of using January.

Like many, my college doesn’t start the Spring semester until after Martin Luther King day.  (This year, it’s actually the week after that.)  And the Fall semester ends before Christmas.  The college runs a smattering of intersession classes, and the popularity of that format is growing, but it’s a small fraction of a semester’s offerings.  I think there’s room for growth in intersession, and I’m happy to work on that, but I’m starting to wonder if there aren’t also other things to try.

(I’ll have to stipulate here that I’m writing in the context of a community college.  We don’t typically send large contingents to the MLA or AHA conferences, which I know absorb a good deal of oxygen in other places.  We usually send more faculty to TESOL than to the MLA.)

Has anyone out there experimented with running structured (but ungraded) review sessions in January?

I’m thinking particularly of courses that move in progressive sequences, like math.  A student who limped across the finish line in, say, basic algebra may harbor a lingering doubt about being fully prepared for intermediate or college algebra.  (Names change, but you get the idea.)  For the student who escaped the Fall with a low passing grade and some lingering doubts, I’m wondering if a January catchup/review session might help them stay on track in the Spring.

(Alternately, for the student who failed but came close in the Fall, I could envision an intensive review leading to a second shot at a final exam in January.  The benefit would be that the student wouldn’t lose an entire semester by retaking the course in the Spring.)

It’s a variation on the “summer bridge” idea, but somewhat looser.  Rather than a graded course -- which requires a certain number of hours, a set of assignments, and all the usual trappings -- a noncredit review could be adjusted to meet demonstrated student need.  If you only need, say, eight hours of review to get up to speed, good for you.  

The academic in me likes the idea of using the otherwise-fallow January session to increase time on task.  Having students who struggle with a subject get some time to focus intently on it seems like a pretty low-risk strategy, especially if the students aren’t charged for it.  Worst case, they’re no better off than when they started.  Best case, they move from “doomed” to “back on track.”  

The devil, of course, is in the details.  

Pay actually isn’t the major issue; our faculty contract sets out an hourly rate for intersession work.  If the reviews became hugely popular, the cost could become a problem, but I’d hope we’d get at least some of it back in improved student retention (and therefore tuition revenue).  

The question that jumps out at me, not having tried something like this on any major scale, is customization.  Assuming that different students have different weaknesses, maintaining some sort of customization while scaling up could be a challenge.  Presumably, technology could help to some degree, but I’d expect to see real limits on that, at least for now.

So a question for my wise and worldly readers: have you seen a relatively informal, but still successful, January review system?  If so, how did it work?  Anything constructive would be appreciated.

Progress and Cycles

As a writer, I’m a little jealous of the folks who write business books.  Most of them only need one idea to generate hundreds of pages.  I have to generate five ideas a week just to blog!

That said, every so often one of those business books actually has something useful to say.  Over the break I read The Progress Principle, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, and I have to admit that it unintentionally shed some useful light on academia.

The one idea of this book is that the feeling of “progress,” even when small, is a powerful motivator.  People who achieve little victories are far more likely to stay engaged with what they’re doing and put forth solid effort than people who don’t get those victories.  The major advice of the book was to structure work (and management) to recognize the value of small victories, and to encourage a sense of forward motion whenever possible.

And then I thought about semesters.

It’s hard to get a sense of progress as a teacher when you have to start all over again every few months.  Just when the students are starting to get the hang of it, they leave, and you have to face a fresh crop that puts you right back where you started.

That may be one of the major differences in faculty work between a community college and a research university.  Research projects can take years, and they typically have little victories along the way.  To the extent that your focus is on research, that sense of progress may not be terribly endangered by the semester schedule.  But if your job is focused on teaching, then your entire work world resets every few months.  Over the course of years, the sense of eternal recurrence can easily swamp any feelings of progress.  Add to that a hostile external climate – by which I mean chronic and worsening funding issues – and I could see where a certain snarky helplessness could quickly become a sort of cultural default mode.

I grew up in a town with a minor league baseball team, which I followed faithfully for years.  Following a minor league team is a very different enterprise than following a big league team.  In the bigs, you hope that your team stomps everybody else and that the players on your team improve.  In the minors, though, there’s a natural limit to that.  When a player gets too good, he gets called up.  Minor league playoffs are often terribly distorted by late-season callups; a team that played brilliantly in the early part of the year may be a materially different team by the end, since its best players got called up in the meantime.  In the minors, you couldn’t get too attached to any one star, since the better the star, the briefer the stay.  It was a more complex, and frustrating, style of fandom.

Teaching on the semester cycle can be a little like that.  Just when the students really start to shine, they move on, and you start all over again.  Everybody knows that going in, of course, but it still makes it harder to draw satisfaction over time.

The way I handled it as a fan was to separate the team from the players.  (As Jerry Seinfeld later put it, I rooted for the shirts.)  I’m hopeful that some faculty are able to do that.  Experiments in curriculum and instruction can take years to play out.  In some ways, that’s a bug, but it may also be a feature.  Getting some sort of temporal orientation beyond the semesterly reset may help replace some of the frustration or sense of futility with a sense of legible progress.

The book didn’t focus on academia, and I don’t know if the authors would accept my reading or not.  But it seems like a deliberate focus at the cc level on pedagogical and curricular experiments over time could pay off not only in the straightforward ways intended, but also in a greater sense of felt progress and continuity over time.

Wise and worldly readers, especially those with heavier teaching loads: how do you handle the lack of a sense of progress that attends the semesterly reset?

A Wish List for 2012

1.  The Girl actually -- and I am not making this up -- asked for her two front teeth for Christmas.  As she put it, utterly deadpan, missing her front teeth “makes it hard to eat apples.”  I thought she had a pretty good point.

2. Some successful hires at the college.

3. A year without hurricanes, earthquakes, microbursts, extended blackouts...

4. The state finally figures out that “workforce development” includes sending students on for bachelor’s degrees, and some funding follows.

5. We finally get real, viable competition among internet providers.  Actual choice.

6. The Boy gets at least another year of relative immunity to the inevitable cruelties of early adolescence.

7. President Obama remembers that he’s a Democrat.  He forgets sometimes.

8. My wise and worldly readers have a wonderful year.  

Program note: the blog will take a brief break, returning on Tuesday, January 3.  See you in 2012!

Let's Play...Spot the Contradiction!

It’s time for another round of every administrator’s favorite game, “Spot the Contradiction.” See if you can isolate the double bind that drives good people around the freakin’ bend. First, there’s MIT’s move into open, free credentialing. According to the press release, the idea is to enable not only individuals, but entire institutions, to avail themselves of MIT’s subject matter expertise without shouldering the cost. It nicely combines a response to the Occupy movement’s concern with student loans with a nod to MIT’s historical status as a land grant university. Presumably, an enterprising college could choose to honor MIT’s certificates, and could even use its online offerings in lieu of traditional onsite or homegrown instruction. Those of us who want to give our students access to the very best, but who need to keep an eye on costs, suddenly have a new, exciting option. The very same week, AFT-FACE published this post arguing for an "instructional loss ratio" whereby institutions that receive federal student aid are required to devote a certain percentage of their budget to instructional services and support, including full-time faculty, counselors, advisors, and other key academic staff. The idea, cribbed from health care reform, is to cap “non-instructional” expenses as a percentage of overall costs. Presumably, given the source of the idea, the beneficiaries would be faculty. When you understand the appeal of both ideas, and yet see the contradiction, then you are ready for the exciting world of academic administration. Cost control is obviously necessary. And the adjunct trend is obviously objectionable. But the adjunct trend is motivated primarily by...wait for it...cost control. The MIT model lays the groundwork for replacing underpaid instruction with completely unpaid instruction. As a cost control measure, it’s brilliant. But as a labor measure, it’s objectionable in the extreme. Welcome to my world. The external pressures for cost control are chronic and increasing. And the internal pressures to increase spending are chronic and increasing. Navigating between the dog and the fire hydrant is the task of the academic administrator. Sometimes, we can get grants. But grants bring strings, and reporting requirements, and project managers, and expiration dates. Increasingly, they also bring “non-supplanting” requirements -- you can’t use the money for things you’d usually use money for -- and “sustainability” requirements, in which you pledge to keep using your own money for those things you wouldn’t use your own money for once the grant expires. And that’s assuming the grant programs haven’t been desiccated in the first place. Santa, you know what I’d like for Christmas? An operating budget that lets me actually pay for enough full-time employees to get the work done that needs to get done, without having to hire a brand-spankin’-new project manager for every couple hundred thousand. That would be nifty. If that won’t fit under the tree, then maybe at least a return to the levels of, say, 2008. Until then, I’ll just try to stop noticing the contradiction.

&#(^&# New Interface

Dear Readers, I'm sorry for the hiccups on this page this week. The new Blogger interface is giving me fits. (Among other things, it's eating my formatting.) I hope to get back to some semblance of readability soon.

Free, If You Can Get It

Is a free textbook a good deal? It depends. Textbook costs are a real issue for students at many community colleges. For the intro to biology sequence, for example, the textbook and lab manual combine to cost over three hundred dollars. That’s pretty close to the tuition and fees for the course. For students who are paying their own way, or who work at minimum wage jobs to get through college, that’s real money. Multiply that by several courses over a few semesters, and the impact on, say, loan burdens is no small thing. Some universities are experimenting now with programs to encourage faculty to draw their course materials from free online resources. The idea is to help offset costs for students and, more cynically, to make tuition increases easier to swallow. After all, from a student’s perspective, total cost is the key issue. If a student saves a few hundred bucks on books, a slightly larger than usual tuition increase suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. If a college can shift money from publishers to itself, why not? The devil is in the details. Most of the examples I’ve seen rely on electronic resources. E-books, databases, and even selected websites (i.e. Khan Academy) can often fill in for paper textbooks. But they all require internet access on a device with a big enough screen. We can’t always assume that. We have computer labs on campus, but they’re frequently full. We have wifi on campus, more or less, but it still requires that the student provide the device. And when students are off campus, the cost of internet access falls on them. Given that students often do their reading and homework off campus, this is a major issue. Mobile broadband seems like one possible solution, but in these parts, the coverage is spotty and maddeningly inconsistent. (Annoyingly, only one carrier has good enough coverage here to be a viable option, and even that one is flawed.) Dead-tree books have the clear advantage of portability. A book that’s readable in the library is also readable in the cafeteria, on the bus, or at home, and at no additional cost. It doesn’t require the student to invest in infrastructure beyond a backpack and maybe a lamp. Electronic resources aren’t quite there yet, at least for commuter schools. (I suppose a residential college could make this work, given enough connectivity on campus. But that’s not my world.) Which means that the cost savings offered by electronic resources are predicated on an already-existing investment. If you already have, say, an ipad, and you already have wifi at home, then the savings are real. If you don’t, they aren’t. (ADA compliance remains an issue with cheaper delivery systems. I don’t know if the Nook is ADA compliant, but I’m told that the Kindle still isn’t. Ipads are, but they cost much more.) None of this strikes me as necessarily permanent. If mobile broadband coverage finally hits a critical level of ubiquity and reliability, then I could imagine some sort of leasing program for ipads with 3G (or, ideally, 4G) connectivity. But we aren’t there yet. For now, freebies are only free if you can afford them.

Gift Cultures

I don’t think of myself as Scrooge, but this time of year the endless questions around “secret Santas” and informal gift exchange always crop up. Lesboprof’s take is particularly thoughtful. Having worked in a few different places, I’ve noticed that cultural expectations around gift exchange are strongly local. Rules that seem inviolate in one place would seem utterly strange in another; the folks who move from one to the other are expected to just know. I’m not a fan of expected cross-rank gift-giving. Having worked in a place where it was effectively mandatory, I saw it as an ethical time bomb and a constant headache. How much gift is appropriate? If you receive a gift, are you obliged to reciprocate? What else does a gift imply? (Gifts to the person who does your annual evaluation strike me as obviously thorny.) And it’s hard not to notice that strict reciprocity in gift expectations fails to account for different salaries. The folks on the bottom wind up getting hurt by that. Larger cultural issues obviously intrude, too. Not everybody is Christian, and not everybody celebrates holidays at this time of year. (I’m told, too, that Chanukah isn’t nearly as central to Judaism as Christmas is to Christianity. Apparently, Passover is a much more important occasion than Chanukah.) Those who don’t shouldn’t be coerced into playing along, and/or subtly punished for not. That should be obvious, but the whole “put the Christ back in Christmas” movement has overlaid a layer of reactionary politics on the entire question. In this climate, opting out or playing it low-key can be taken as the equivalent of open hostility. (Similar issues arise around Christmas decorations. At a public institution, it’s fair to assume that some of the taxpayers whose money is being used don’t celebrate Christmas. But there’s always someone who insists on going over the top to make some sort of point about a perceived hostility to religion. I grant without argument that the issue may play differently at a religiously-affiliated college.) Some places have adopted the wonderful strategy of organizing gift-giving for some local charity, and/or for scholarships for deserving students. That way, people who would like to give have a constructive venue for doing it, and those who would rather opt out have the choice. Locating the beneficiaries outside of the workplace does wonders for the ethical issues, and restores some healthy progressivity to the impact. But some folks just can’t be content with that. The new-manager’s dilemma is in confronting long-entrenched practices that really don’t make sense. The first person to interrupt the circuit of cross-rank gifts is often considered the jerk, even if most people silently breathe a sigh of relief. (Actually, that’s a pretty good description of administration generally.) And getting the persecuted true believer to take it down a notch is always a risky endeavor. Wise and worldly readers, have you found productive ways to redirect gift cultures gone horribly awry? Alternately, have you found successful ways to get the most militant over-the-top decorators to tone it down without causing a huge issue?

What Do You Mean, I’m Not Graduating?

It’s the end of the semester, which means it’s time for some students to figure out that they’ve taken the “wrong” courses for their programs.

This happens every single year.

When it happened at Proprietary U, I couldn’t really blame the students. PU had an odd habit of changing requirements annually, if not faster than that, so it was easy to lose track. (It wasn’t unusual to have three different versions of a curriculum running simultaneously. The scheduling headaches were awful.) Worse, Home Office used to change the requirements without paying attention to total credit hours. The ADHD culture led to all manner of confusion, with the students ultimately paying for it.

Here, that’s less of an issue. Curricula change much more slowly, and there’s no issue of people in one state making rules for people in another without looking at the relevant regs. But still, every year, some students profess themselves shocked to discover that whatever lineup of classes they chose didn’t add up to a program.

In my first few months of administration, I was surprised every time the question came up. Now, not so much.

Typically, confusion arises from any of several sources.

1. Curricular change. That’s still relevant when you have a student who started many years ago, took some time off, and returned, with the requirements having changed while she was away.

2. Inattention to advisement. “My advisor never told me” frequently translates to “I wasn’t paying attention when my advisor told me.”

3. Inattentive advisors. Yes, sometimes advisors get it wrong. The most frustrating cases are the ones in which they get defensive and try to explain that they’re actually right.

4. Procrastination. Some students will try to put off their math classes until the last possible moment, not noticing that they’ve placed into developmental courses. That means that instead of just needing the one class, they need a sequence of classes that can’t be taken together. There’s no elegant way out of this, once it happens.

5. Changing majors. Courses that counted towards the first major may or may not count towards the second. Students don’t always catch that, though.

6. Scheduling. This is usually the easiest to work around, assuming you aren’t in California. Sometimes a student will need a social science elective on a Tuesday night, but we don’t have one she hasn’t already taken on a Tuesday. In consultation with advisors, they can usually find an acceptable substitute. (For a business major, does “Early Modern History” seem like a viable substitute for “The Middle Ages?” I took the position that it did.) If they play their cards right, we just fill out “course substitution forms” and call it good. Of course, the substitutions have to be academically defensible. One literature elective for another is typically fine, but I’ve shot down requests to substitute literature for engineering.

Where this approach falls flat is where students can’t get anything resembling anything they need. In a case like California’s, in which colleges have waitlists thousands deep, there’s often no reasonable substitution available. Happily, that’s not my world.

My free advice to students and prospective students out there is to keep a checklist of course requirements from your very first semester forward. When you see your academic advisor, bring the checklist and go through it. It’s sooooo much easier to make adjustments to courses you haven’t taken yet than it is to find funding for an extra semester to make up for that one requirement you somehow missed.

And for the love of all that’s good, don’t put off your math. It won’t get any easier.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen other ways that students wind up with courses that don’t quite add up to a program?

Attendance

I’ve never really come to terms with taking attendance in college classes. Maybe it’s me.

Yes, there are good pragmatic, and even academic , reasons to take attendance. Financial aid rules require noting a “last date of attendance” for students on aid who drop classes; you can only get that right if you bothered taking attendance. (“Dunno – maybe Octoberish?” won’t fly.) Financial aid is important enough to both colleges and students that one does not dismiss this lightly.

Attendance obviously matters for any class involving group work. If half the group doesn’t show up on a given day, that leaves those who did show up in a bad spot. (That’s especially true if you have stable groups over time, as in the case of group presentations.)

There’s also a reasonable argument to the effect that showing up for class on time is analogous to showing up for work on time. Yes, some workplaces are more flexible than they once were, but even that has limits. (In my observation, the flexibility is usually in exchange for more work – the old “you can work any sixty hours a week you want.”) We teach by what we do; if we want to graduate the kind of students who can be depended on, the argument goes, we need to inculcate the habits of promptness in the course of what we do. That means requiring students to show up for class.

More recently I’ve been confronted with arguments from social justice. This argument relies on data showing that attendance in class correlates strongly with passing grades – one of the great “no shit” findings of social science – and suggests that “attendance optional” policies wind up defaulting to pass rates that correlate too closely to economic class. If we want to raise the chances of the least advantaged, this argument goes, we have to push a bit. That means requiring everyone to show up.

I can concede some truth in each of those, but somehow, it still just doesn’t feel right. (Full disclosure: I have the same misgivings about “college success” courses.) At some level, especially outside of group-based courses, I can’t help but think of class as a resource that students are given access to in order to succeed at their courses. Students who take advantage of that resource will tend to do better than those who don’t. Figuring that out is part of the process. If some student is a gifted autodidact, I can’t help but shrug and say more power to him.

My ambivalence is compounded by online classes. What exactly does ‘attendance’ mean in the context of an asynchronous online course? It’s getting harder not to notice that the trend towards more prescriptive attendance policies for onsite classes is occurring at the same time as the explosion of online classes, for which there isn’t even a place to be.

Of course, attendance policies carry with them the inevitable haggling over “excused” absences. In my teaching days, I hated that haggling enough that I just banned it; instead, I gave the students a set number of “cuts” they could have without penalty, and I counted the top three out of four tests. My argument to them was that in any given workplace, nearly everybody got some level of benefit of the doubt, but that it was finite; miss too much, even for good reasons, and people just get tired of hearing it. The great relief of online courses, paradoxically enough, is that they curtail the perceived need for surveillance (i.e. excuse verification) even more; either you got the work done or you didn’t.

This may wind up being one of those cases in which I just have to swallow my own misgivings and roll with larger pragmatic considerations. (Certainly I have no intention of messing with Title IV.) But it still doesn’t sit right.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found a way to satisfy the need for Last Date of Attendance and suchlike without getting too infantilizing? Is there a better way?

Ask the Administrator: Easy Online Collaboration

I love this question. A longtime reader writes:

I was chatting with a colleague yesterday. As we talked, a common theme emerged: neither of us has found a way to do the following
1) Easily and collaboratively share and revise documents or other materials on our college’s content management system
2) Easily and collaboratively share and revise documents or other materials on our college’s course management system (or on other open-source course management systems used on campus) e.g create a moodle course for a particular committee or task force and use this as a space to get some collaborative work done on a project.
3) Easily and collaboratively share and revise documents or other materials on an independent webspace such as a blog.
As this came to light in our conversation we also expressed the same argument: the ability to easily and collaboratively share and revise documents and materials is one of the key things that we need to do on campus in order to effectively and strategically get things done. Whether it be a new project involving faculty collaboration on the development of a new course or the writing of a program review report within an instructional department, sending back drafts and forth with changes tracked ain’t cutting it. Yet, say, uploading a google doc to a campus webpage is clunky and doesn’t work for all faculty based on my experience. Likewise, while we’ve been experimenting with the use of moodle and other systems for this type of collaboration, we haven’t yet found one which is satisfactory.
Have you or anyone else out there figured out a simple and effective way to do this type of collaborative authorship which has been, at least to an extent, institutionalized at your college?
Also, side note—I think that our need for this is somewhat specific to academia. For example, my husband works in the corporate world. His schedule allows the flexibility to schedule meetings to talk about drafts of presentations, documents, etc. Especially for folks who are teaching a full load of courses, scheduling a time where schedules don’t clash can be incredibly challenging. Unfortunately, in my estimation, this would then have a more pronounced effect on the ability of faculty who are primarily teaching to collaborative discuss or address issues connected to teaching and learning. Without an easily usable virtual space for dialogue and discussion, it is really hard to move forward with these types of projects because it’s often not possible to find a time to meet.

I don’t have a quick answer, but I need one.

On my campus, we’ve had many of the same issues. Venues like blogger require either openness to the world or a level of password/username specificity that quickly becomes clunky. Moodle seems more labor-intensive than a simple task warrants, especially for people who aren’t already teaching online. Google sites aren’t awful, but they’re pretty basic. It’s possible to ‘share’ google docs, but the functionality is pretty limited. I’ve heard people swear by wikis, but they’ve never really caught on locally.

I’ve seen potentially interesting collaborations die on the vine because nobody wants to learn an entirely new platform. (One of them memorably involved sending “yams” to each other. Seriously? Yams?) Given the half-life of social media platforms, the learning curve needs to be short or people just won’t bother. And it needs to be both reasonably secure and not a pain in the neck.

Wise and worldly readers, I seek your counsel. Is there a tool that lends itself to the kinds of online collaborations that faculty at teaching-intensive places actually need to do?

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