Dear Hollywood,
Having recently struggled in vain to find something recent and watchable, I have some notes for you.
Please, for the love of God, no more productions about, or featuring, the following:
- medieval or renaissance anything
- hobbits, hobbitry, or anything that smells of hobbitry
- vampires and/or zombies
- “reboots”
- titles with roman numerals in them (except for Henry V or Richard III)
- dystopian futures, especially anything “post-apocalyptic”
- Michael Bay, or anything with slow-motion explosions
- 3-D
- superheroes
- Magic Pixie Dream Girls (Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel, Kirsten Dunst)
- black people as mystical guardian angels for white people
- bromances
- Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movies about misunderstood loners
- Mel Gibson in any way, shape, or form
- “reality” shows
- six impossibly attractive young people in New York City looking for love
- cop shows
- hospital shows
- lawyer shows
- Jim Belushi
Aha! I hear you saying. What does that leave? A few suggestions, not intended to be comprehensive:
- slapstick. Unapologetic silliness. (“Anchorman” was a nice example.)
- shows in which average-looking middle-aged people deal with life using wit and wisdom. (See “The Bob Newhart Show” for an example.)
- shows set in suburbs. Or in small cities that are not New York, L.A. Miami, Chicago, or Atlanta.
- comedies in which finding a boyfriend/girlfriend is not the point
- optimistic futures
Thanks.
Sincerely,
Dean Dad
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Thursday, June 07, 2012
Friday Fragments
Money magazine did an uncharacteristically good piece on how to choose a community college. It assumes a little more geographic mobility than is typically the case -- most people pick one within commuting distance of home -- but for people who have multiple practical options within driving distance, it may be useful.
Its “success rate” is more useful for intrastate comparisons than interstate ones, only because states with robust four-year college sectors tend to have a different student profile in the community colleges than states that don’t. (If you click on the “state” column and read down, it takes quite a while for anything in the Northeast to make an appearance.) But with the right grains of salt, it’s not a bad start.
---------
Well done, Ray Bradbury. Your work made my teen years just a little bit less awful.
---------
Our Comcast DVR died this week, taking with it a bunch of stored programs and our ability to watch tv at all for several days. With the efficiency characteristic of a monopoly, a “no service” call on Tuesday resulted in a promise of an appearance on Friday. Nice.
Matt Yglesias had a nice piece on why cable companies need to be regulated until there’s meaningful competition. In my town, as in most, the choices for home internet are the local cable monopoly or dialup. Which is to say, they have a real monopoly. And I don’t even want to talk about what they charge, or how unspeakably awful their customer service is.
If we had a real second option for broadband, I’d happily cut the cord on tv. But as long as the tv company also controls the internet pipe, we’re hosed. Fans of deregulation are invited to explain why Comcast should be left to its own rapacious devices.
---------
A big “thank you!” to Converge magazine for actually listening. Recently it posted an article listing 50 higher ed administrators worth following on Twitter. Notably, not a single one worked at a community college. In the comments, I let fly a bit of snark, and suggested that overlooking a sector with over 1100 campuses in the US was just a little absurd.
They listened, and followed up with an article listing community college folk worth following on Twitter. A few of them were entirely new to me, and I’ve enjoyed discovering some good new reads. Thanks!
----------
The news about the LinkedIn password breach was doubly annoying. At one level, it means that hackers probably now know the password that I’ve long forgotten. But more basically, it underscored the complete helplessness of people who use passwords.
As I see it, there are basically three options. One is to try to remember (or, worse, write down) a different password for every web function out there. With the proliferation of sites/apps requiring passwords, this is simply not tenable anymore. The second is to recycle passwords across sites. This has the virtue of relative simplicity, but it also brings vulnerability, since a breach of one site is effectively a breach of several more. The third is some sort of password locker service, in which you have just one password to rule them all. But that just seems to me to double down on the flaw of recycling passwords; if someone hacks your password locker, they have access to everything.
There must, must, must be a better way. Maybe Comcast can work on it during the several days it takes them to find a DVR.
--------
Actual quote from The Girl’s softball game, spoken by the opposing coach and directed at her left fielder: “Hey! No puppy-watching!”
I’ll be glad when the season’s over.
Its “success rate” is more useful for intrastate comparisons than interstate ones, only because states with robust four-year college sectors tend to have a different student profile in the community colleges than states that don’t. (If you click on the “state” column and read down, it takes quite a while for anything in the Northeast to make an appearance.) But with the right grains of salt, it’s not a bad start.
---------
Well done, Ray Bradbury. Your work made my teen years just a little bit less awful.
---------
Our Comcast DVR died this week, taking with it a bunch of stored programs and our ability to watch tv at all for several days. With the efficiency characteristic of a monopoly, a “no service” call on Tuesday resulted in a promise of an appearance on Friday. Nice.
Matt Yglesias had a nice piece on why cable companies need to be regulated until there’s meaningful competition. In my town, as in most, the choices for home internet are the local cable monopoly or dialup. Which is to say, they have a real monopoly. And I don’t even want to talk about what they charge, or how unspeakably awful their customer service is.
If we had a real second option for broadband, I’d happily cut the cord on tv. But as long as the tv company also controls the internet pipe, we’re hosed. Fans of deregulation are invited to explain why Comcast should be left to its own rapacious devices.
---------
A big “thank you!” to Converge magazine for actually listening. Recently it posted an article listing 50 higher ed administrators worth following on Twitter. Notably, not a single one worked at a community college. In the comments, I let fly a bit of snark, and suggested that overlooking a sector with over 1100 campuses in the US was just a little absurd.
They listened, and followed up with an article listing community college folk worth following on Twitter. A few of them were entirely new to me, and I’ve enjoyed discovering some good new reads. Thanks!
----------
The news about the LinkedIn password breach was doubly annoying. At one level, it means that hackers probably now know the password that I’ve long forgotten. But more basically, it underscored the complete helplessness of people who use passwords.
As I see it, there are basically three options. One is to try to remember (or, worse, write down) a different password for every web function out there. With the proliferation of sites/apps requiring passwords, this is simply not tenable anymore. The second is to recycle passwords across sites. This has the virtue of relative simplicity, but it also brings vulnerability, since a breach of one site is effectively a breach of several more. The third is some sort of password locker service, in which you have just one password to rule them all. But that just seems to me to double down on the flaw of recycling passwords; if someone hacks your password locker, they have access to everything.
There must, must, must be a better way. Maybe Comcast can work on it during the several days it takes them to find a DVR.
--------
Actual quote from The Girl’s softball game, spoken by the opposing coach and directed at her left fielder: “Hey! No puppy-watching!”
I’ll be glad when the season’s over.
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
"Need"
In response to yesterday’s post about what college should cost, several people answered by saying something like “just add up what you need to provide a good education and divide by the number of students.”
Which sounds reasonable enough, until you reflect on the word “need.”
Like freedom, need is a large word. It isn’t simple at all.
In the very short term, it’s fairly straightforward. We need to cover our “fixed” costs, and the varying-but-necessary costs like utilities and snow removal. (This winter we got a break on those, which was great, but which we can’t count on in any given year.) But over the long term, most of those could be changed. If we narrowed our curricular offerings, for example, many of the added costs of specialized facilities would fade away. Alternately, when we add new programs in high-cost areas, the bar moves up.
“Need” gets even fuzzier when you get away from direct instruction. Do we “need” a campus radio station? Men’s and women’s basketball teams? Do we “need” to pay adjuncts as much as full-timers on a pro-rated basis? Do we “need” to offer more financial aid? Do we “need” to grow our online offerings?
Different colleges answer those questions in different ways. In my experience -- and this varies somewhat by region -- community colleges tend to say ‘yes’ to basketball and ‘no’ to football. Flagship universities tend to say yes to both. Residential colleges “need” high-quality dorms and robust student life programs; community colleges generally don’t. Programmatic offerings vary by both the genre of the institution and local needs, so a program that’s a practical necessity in one part of a state might be puzzlingly irrelevant in another.
I’d argue that in general -- with exceptions, of course -- community colleges have erred on the side of parsimony. But I have an obvious bias there.
Of course, “need” can refer to students, too. This piece from the New York Times shows some pretty scary numbers about the economic prospects of today’s high school grads who don’t go to college. With the midcentury unionized factory jobs mostly gone -- whether to other countries or to technology -- or paying far less than they used to, and with no shortage of college grads for the “good” jobs that do exist, folks with only high school diplomas face some pretty bleak options. According to the article, among Americans who graduated high school between 2009 and 2011 and didn’t go to college, only 16 percent are employed full-time, and only another 22 percent are employed part-time. That’s absolutely staggering.
Seen in that light, what a college “needs” could be measured by how well it improves the life prospects of its students. If we use that measure -- still imperfect, but a good bit better than many other options -- then the argument for dramatic increases in subsidies (to keep tuition, and therefore student loans burdens, minimal) becomes much harder to refute. Graduating into a tough job market is bad enough; graduating into a tough job market with a heavy student loan burden is that much worse. (Of course, the worst scenario is dropping out with a heavy loan burden.) Keeping tuition down -- and doing what needs to be done to help students be more successful -- suddenly starts to look like a need. And you don’t get something for nothing.
And that’s before dealing with broader social “need.” Higher education levels correlate to lower divorce rates, lower rates of crime and violence, later childbearing, and all manner of broadly desirable outcomes for society as a whole. (One of the great ironies of American life is that the most politically conservative states have the highest divorce rates. Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage under governor Romney, has the lowest. Education is the key underlying variable.) To the extent that improving the life circumstances of American children is a need, making college (or even post-secondary certificate training) more accessible is a need.
So no, it isn’t as simple as just adding up expenses and dividing by students. The first need is to understand what we mean by need.
Which sounds reasonable enough, until you reflect on the word “need.”
Like freedom, need is a large word. It isn’t simple at all.
In the very short term, it’s fairly straightforward. We need to cover our “fixed” costs, and the varying-but-necessary costs like utilities and snow removal. (This winter we got a break on those, which was great, but which we can’t count on in any given year.) But over the long term, most of those could be changed. If we narrowed our curricular offerings, for example, many of the added costs of specialized facilities would fade away. Alternately, when we add new programs in high-cost areas, the bar moves up.
“Need” gets even fuzzier when you get away from direct instruction. Do we “need” a campus radio station? Men’s and women’s basketball teams? Do we “need” to pay adjuncts as much as full-timers on a pro-rated basis? Do we “need” to offer more financial aid? Do we “need” to grow our online offerings?
Different colleges answer those questions in different ways. In my experience -- and this varies somewhat by region -- community colleges tend to say ‘yes’ to basketball and ‘no’ to football. Flagship universities tend to say yes to both. Residential colleges “need” high-quality dorms and robust student life programs; community colleges generally don’t. Programmatic offerings vary by both the genre of the institution and local needs, so a program that’s a practical necessity in one part of a state might be puzzlingly irrelevant in another.
I’d argue that in general -- with exceptions, of course -- community colleges have erred on the side of parsimony. But I have an obvious bias there.
Of course, “need” can refer to students, too. This piece from the New York Times shows some pretty scary numbers about the economic prospects of today’s high school grads who don’t go to college. With the midcentury unionized factory jobs mostly gone -- whether to other countries or to technology -- or paying far less than they used to, and with no shortage of college grads for the “good” jobs that do exist, folks with only high school diplomas face some pretty bleak options. According to the article, among Americans who graduated high school between 2009 and 2011 and didn’t go to college, only 16 percent are employed full-time, and only another 22 percent are employed part-time. That’s absolutely staggering.
Seen in that light, what a college “needs” could be measured by how well it improves the life prospects of its students. If we use that measure -- still imperfect, but a good bit better than many other options -- then the argument for dramatic increases in subsidies (to keep tuition, and therefore student loans burdens, minimal) becomes much harder to refute. Graduating into a tough job market is bad enough; graduating into a tough job market with a heavy student loan burden is that much worse. (Of course, the worst scenario is dropping out with a heavy loan burden.) Keeping tuition down -- and doing what needs to be done to help students be more successful -- suddenly starts to look like a need. And you don’t get something for nothing.
And that’s before dealing with broader social “need.” Higher education levels correlate to lower divorce rates, lower rates of crime and violence, later childbearing, and all manner of broadly desirable outcomes for society as a whole. (One of the great ironies of American life is that the most politically conservative states have the highest divorce rates. Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage under governor Romney, has the lowest. Education is the key underlying variable.) To the extent that improving the life circumstances of American children is a need, making college (or even post-secondary certificate training) more accessible is a need.
So no, it isn’t as simple as just adding up expenses and dividing by students. The first need is to understand what we mean by need.
Tuesday, June 05, 2012
What Should a Year of College Cost?
What should a year of college cost?
We answer this question every single year, construing “should” in the narrow sense of “next year.” But after several years of awful hand-wringing over annual increases caused primarily by the collapse of state support, we’re starting to try to get a longer-term handle on it.
A realistic answer to that question can’t be “zero,” since that’s a non-starter politically. (I’m also not convinced that it would be the best answer on its own terms, but that’s another post.) And anything along the lines of “the value of college defies a price tag” isn’t helpful. I’m looking for an actual number of dollars per year. And that number should bear in mind the mission of a community college, which includes access for people who aren’t wealthy.
Without a target figure, we’re left with several unappealing options.
One option is to just go with last year’s number, plus a few percent. That’s the default option, and it manages to annoy everybody. With state support down, it doesn’t really allow for covering what we want to cover. It means annual negative headlines. It assumes that last year’s figure was essentially correct -- an assumption in its own right -- and over time, it starts to feel like a loss of agency. Worse, extrapolating over time -- as in Monday’s post -- suggests that it’s eventually unsustainable.
Alternately, we could tie our figure to a group of peer institutions. But that assumes that they have it right -- I suspect they don’t know any better than we do -- and “peer” is a relative term. It also means that we’re always using last year’s figures. Looking sideways at peers and backwards at previous years doesn’t seem like the best way to move forward.
Or we could just let the market settle the question. Charge as much as we think we can get away with, and let students tell us with their feet if we overshoot. As long as we don’t overshoot, this approach has the considerable virtue of not leaving money on the table. Ideally, that would give us the money to restore some of the cuts of the last few years, and to invest in quality.
But it would do violence to the “access” part of the mission of a community college, and it would build in a level of market instability that would make it impossible to make long-term commitments. (There’s a reason that for-profit corporations don’t have tenure.) It would also make it far easier for for-profit competitors to gain a foothold, since we’d lose a prime differentiator. Given that “what the market will bear” is a moving target, we’d have to become nimble in ways that most incumbent employees would reject out of hand.
Alternately, we could do our best imitation of the Tea Party and try to cut our way to greatness. If lower tuition is always better, and state support is dropping anyway, then the way forward is through sustained, aggressive cutting. Who really needs a math department, anyway?
But that only makes sense if you assume, like the Tea Party, that all public spending is waste. If you understand that much of it is actually beneficial, then this position quickly becomes insane. As someone who believes strongly that public higher education is a social good, I reject this position out of hand.
We could tie the cost of college to a percentage of local family income levels. That has the appeal of anchoring it in something concrete and external, and of carrying with it a built-in warning mechanism when it starts to get out of hand. But local family income levels are a moving target, and they’re wildly disparate across the state. They also don’t move nearly as quickly as many of our underlying costs do.
We could look at projected future earnings of graduates, but that necessarily involves tremendous guesswork. I’m just old enough to remember 401(k) calculators that assumed an annual 8 percent return. The last decade hasn’t quite worked out that way. Besides, if we took that as a guide, we’d have a powerful incentive to game the numbers by dropping programs in early childhood education and social work, and starting programs in, say, military contracting.
The mission would get lost, quickly.
So since I don’t have a clear sense of a figure, I’ll ask my wise and worldly readers. How much should a year of college cost?
We answer this question every single year, construing “should” in the narrow sense of “next year.” But after several years of awful hand-wringing over annual increases caused primarily by the collapse of state support, we’re starting to try to get a longer-term handle on it.
A realistic answer to that question can’t be “zero,” since that’s a non-starter politically. (I’m also not convinced that it would be the best answer on its own terms, but that’s another post.) And anything along the lines of “the value of college defies a price tag” isn’t helpful. I’m looking for an actual number of dollars per year. And that number should bear in mind the mission of a community college, which includes access for people who aren’t wealthy.
Without a target figure, we’re left with several unappealing options.
One option is to just go with last year’s number, plus a few percent. That’s the default option, and it manages to annoy everybody. With state support down, it doesn’t really allow for covering what we want to cover. It means annual negative headlines. It assumes that last year’s figure was essentially correct -- an assumption in its own right -- and over time, it starts to feel like a loss of agency. Worse, extrapolating over time -- as in Monday’s post -- suggests that it’s eventually unsustainable.
Alternately, we could tie our figure to a group of peer institutions. But that assumes that they have it right -- I suspect they don’t know any better than we do -- and “peer” is a relative term. It also means that we’re always using last year’s figures. Looking sideways at peers and backwards at previous years doesn’t seem like the best way to move forward.
Or we could just let the market settle the question. Charge as much as we think we can get away with, and let students tell us with their feet if we overshoot. As long as we don’t overshoot, this approach has the considerable virtue of not leaving money on the table. Ideally, that would give us the money to restore some of the cuts of the last few years, and to invest in quality.
But it would do violence to the “access” part of the mission of a community college, and it would build in a level of market instability that would make it impossible to make long-term commitments. (There’s a reason that for-profit corporations don’t have tenure.) It would also make it far easier for for-profit competitors to gain a foothold, since we’d lose a prime differentiator. Given that “what the market will bear” is a moving target, we’d have to become nimble in ways that most incumbent employees would reject out of hand.
Alternately, we could do our best imitation of the Tea Party and try to cut our way to greatness. If lower tuition is always better, and state support is dropping anyway, then the way forward is through sustained, aggressive cutting. Who really needs a math department, anyway?
But that only makes sense if you assume, like the Tea Party, that all public spending is waste. If you understand that much of it is actually beneficial, then this position quickly becomes insane. As someone who believes strongly that public higher education is a social good, I reject this position out of hand.
We could tie the cost of college to a percentage of local family income levels. That has the appeal of anchoring it in something concrete and external, and of carrying with it a built-in warning mechanism when it starts to get out of hand. But local family income levels are a moving target, and they’re wildly disparate across the state. They also don’t move nearly as quickly as many of our underlying costs do.
We could look at projected future earnings of graduates, but that necessarily involves tremendous guesswork. I’m just old enough to remember 401(k) calculators that assumed an annual 8 percent return. The last decade hasn’t quite worked out that way. Besides, if we took that as a guide, we’d have a powerful incentive to game the numbers by dropping programs in early childhood education and social work, and starting programs in, say, military contracting.
The mission would get lost, quickly.
So since I don’t have a clear sense of a figure, I’ll ask my wise and worldly readers. How much should a year of college cost?
Monday, June 04, 2012
Permission of Instructor
This one is a question for all the faculty out there.
When you teach a course for which the prerequisite is “permission of instructor,” on what do you base the decision to grant or withhold permission?
This came up last week in a conversation with a wonderful professor who suggested that a thorny issue could be solved with “permission of instructor.” I wasn’t sold. Let’s say that Jennifer gets into the class and Jana doesn’t. To make things interesting, let’s say that Jennifer is white and Jana is black, and that Jana alleges that her exclusion was based on race. In the absence of clear criteria, how do you rebut the accusation?
It’s an ugly scenario, and I didn’t enjoy raising it, but part of administration is anticipating stuff like that.
In legal proceedings, “how dare you question my judgment?” isn’t much of a defense. “How dare you question the faculty?” doesn’t work, either. You need to be able to show that a decision was based on something beyond personal whim. It doesn’t have to be the objectively “correct” decision, assuming such a thing existed, but it has to be defensible based on something you could articulate and show is relevant.
That’s why prerequisites are so handy. They’re easy to explain and to verify. The same holds for test scores, credits earned, and all the usual mechanisms. Those are all – admittedly – relatively blunt instruments, imperfect and impersonal. But they’re better than random chance – if you use them right – and they’re defensible in court.
Permission of instructor can work well enough when it involves an audition, say, or judgment of a portfolio. In those cases, you can point to a concrete basis for a professional judgment of quality. The judgments of quality don’t have to be “right,” but they have to be based on something.
My recurring nightmare involves a student showing a pattern of “permission” being granted along lines that suggest some sort of untoward favoritism. If Professor Newly Divorced just happens to stock his class entirely with pretty blondes, and some smart but excluded student raises a stink, things could get ugly fast. And rightly so.
This doesn’t strike me as an undue burden. A savvy (and well-meaning) professor could write down some criteria she might use for permission, and then stick to them in her decision-making. If challenged, as long as she can show that the criteria were reasonable and their use consistent, I don’t see a problem. But winging it based on “don’t you trust me?” isn’t gonna cut it. And if you think about it, that’s not necessarily bad.
When you teach a course for which the prerequisite is “permission of instructor,” on what do you base the decision to grant or withhold permission?
This came up last week in a conversation with a wonderful professor who suggested that a thorny issue could be solved with “permission of instructor.” I wasn’t sold. Let’s say that Jennifer gets into the class and Jana doesn’t. To make things interesting, let’s say that Jennifer is white and Jana is black, and that Jana alleges that her exclusion was based on race. In the absence of clear criteria, how do you rebut the accusation?
It’s an ugly scenario, and I didn’t enjoy raising it, but part of administration is anticipating stuff like that.
In legal proceedings, “how dare you question my judgment?” isn’t much of a defense. “How dare you question the faculty?” doesn’t work, either. You need to be able to show that a decision was based on something beyond personal whim. It doesn’t have to be the objectively “correct” decision, assuming such a thing existed, but it has to be defensible based on something you could articulate and show is relevant.
That’s why prerequisites are so handy. They’re easy to explain and to verify. The same holds for test scores, credits earned, and all the usual mechanisms. Those are all – admittedly – relatively blunt instruments, imperfect and impersonal. But they’re better than random chance – if you use them right – and they’re defensible in court.
Permission of instructor can work well enough when it involves an audition, say, or judgment of a portfolio. In those cases, you can point to a concrete basis for a professional judgment of quality. The judgments of quality don’t have to be “right,” but they have to be based on something.
My recurring nightmare involves a student showing a pattern of “permission” being granted along lines that suggest some sort of untoward favoritism. If Professor Newly Divorced just happens to stock his class entirely with pretty blondes, and some smart but excluded student raises a stink, things could get ugly fast. And rightly so.
This doesn’t strike me as an undue burden. A savvy (and well-meaning) professor could write down some criteria she might use for permission, and then stick to them in her decision-making. If challenged, as long as she can show that the criteria were reasonable and their use consistent, I don’t see a problem. But winging it based on “don’t you trust me?” isn’t gonna cut it. And if you think about it, that’s not necessarily bad.
Sunday, June 03, 2012
College in 18 Years
Here’s a toughie that many parents -- myself included -- face. How do you save up for college when the cost goes up anywhere from five to ten percent per year?
Investments aren’t earning anything close to that. Interest rates are historically low, which is great for borrowers but rough on savers. The stock market has returned approximately nothing, before fees, since TB was born in 2001. Bubbles come and go, but by definition, they generally aren’t great long-term investments. Our house is worth less than what we paid for it, though luckily we had enough of a down payment that we aren’t underwater. (Fates willing, I’m hoping to stick around here long enough that the current value won’t matter.) Salary increases aren’t automatic -- I’ve had exactly one since 2008 -- and they’re small when they happen.
A recent report took current costs and extrapolated, using fairly realistic higher-ed inflation figures and basic math. It came up with over $40,000 a year for public, in-state tuition 18 years from now, and over $90,000 for private non-profits. Granted, that’s a little misleading, since it doesn’t account for wage increases, but still; if salaries are going up maybe one percent a year, while tuition is going up five percent per year, the gap will widen quickly. And based on the last few years, I’d have to consider five percent increases a fairly conservative estimate. The public institutions have the same cost drivers as the privates, plus the added burdens of state cuts and unfunded mandates.
(There’s also the annoying disjuncture between percentages and base rates, as anyone in the community college world knows well. If we charge $5,000 a year and go up by $500, that’s a 10% increase -- what the hell are we thinking? If Nearby Private College charges $50,000 a year and goes up $2,000, then it only went up 4% -- what a paragon of fiscal virtue! Except that the paragon of virtue raised costs by four times as much as the wasteful public institution...)
Outside of higher education circles, this is a common topic of discussion. But among academics -- especially those who don’t work in financial aid offices -- it’s largely ignored. If anything, we can’t stop talking about cuts.
We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
A few predictions:
1. Outside of California, the first major wave of collapses will occur among the small, undistinguished, tuition-driven privates. I can understand paying premium tuition for a premium degree, but $90,000 x 4 for a nothing-special degree? The only way they could survive is with “discount rate” levels that would imperil their survival. I just don’t see it.
2. In California, the publics will start dropping first, and probably very soon. (By “very soon,” I mean within the next two or three years.) I remain hopeful that California is more of an outlier (albeit a huge one) than a harbinger.
3. After the first or second wave of collapses, we’ll start to see massive movement away from the four-year degree as the default model. Instead of the “many paths to one place” model that American higher education offers now, we’ll have a “many paths to many places” model. That will mean certificates and certifications of various sorts, and possibly two-year degrees. Although that will mean wrenching transitions for many of the providers that are built entirely around the four-year degree, on balance, it may not be an entirely bad thing. At least it may help with the burgeoning “dropouts with debt” problem.
4. Many of those alternative credentials will come from providers that don’t exist yet. We may start to see a return to in-house training by corporations, complete with “indentured servitude” provisions that prohibit taking the training and running.
5. People at the elite outposts of higher ed will be the last to know.
I’d love to be wrong on this. I’d love to be able to say, with a straight face, that we’ll get single-payer health care and progressive taxation after the next election, and all will be made right in the world. That would be nifty. But I just don’t see it. And I don’t see the typical American family coming anywhere close to saving up hundreds of thousands per kid, especially when investments are returning approximately nothing. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Trends that can’t be sustained, won’t be. One way or another, the current trend won’t be.
Investments aren’t earning anything close to that. Interest rates are historically low, which is great for borrowers but rough on savers. The stock market has returned approximately nothing, before fees, since TB was born in 2001. Bubbles come and go, but by definition, they generally aren’t great long-term investments. Our house is worth less than what we paid for it, though luckily we had enough of a down payment that we aren’t underwater. (Fates willing, I’m hoping to stick around here long enough that the current value won’t matter.) Salary increases aren’t automatic -- I’ve had exactly one since 2008 -- and they’re small when they happen.
A recent report took current costs and extrapolated, using fairly realistic higher-ed inflation figures and basic math. It came up with over $40,000 a year for public, in-state tuition 18 years from now, and over $90,000 for private non-profits. Granted, that’s a little misleading, since it doesn’t account for wage increases, but still; if salaries are going up maybe one percent a year, while tuition is going up five percent per year, the gap will widen quickly. And based on the last few years, I’d have to consider five percent increases a fairly conservative estimate. The public institutions have the same cost drivers as the privates, plus the added burdens of state cuts and unfunded mandates.
(There’s also the annoying disjuncture between percentages and base rates, as anyone in the community college world knows well. If we charge $5,000 a year and go up by $500, that’s a 10% increase -- what the hell are we thinking? If Nearby Private College charges $50,000 a year and goes up $2,000, then it only went up 4% -- what a paragon of fiscal virtue! Except that the paragon of virtue raised costs by four times as much as the wasteful public institution...)
Outside of higher education circles, this is a common topic of discussion. But among academics -- especially those who don’t work in financial aid offices -- it’s largely ignored. If anything, we can’t stop talking about cuts.
We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
A few predictions:
1. Outside of California, the first major wave of collapses will occur among the small, undistinguished, tuition-driven privates. I can understand paying premium tuition for a premium degree, but $90,000 x 4 for a nothing-special degree? The only way they could survive is with “discount rate” levels that would imperil their survival. I just don’t see it.
2. In California, the publics will start dropping first, and probably very soon. (By “very soon,” I mean within the next two or three years.) I remain hopeful that California is more of an outlier (albeit a huge one) than a harbinger.
3. After the first or second wave of collapses, we’ll start to see massive movement away from the four-year degree as the default model. Instead of the “many paths to one place” model that American higher education offers now, we’ll have a “many paths to many places” model. That will mean certificates and certifications of various sorts, and possibly two-year degrees. Although that will mean wrenching transitions for many of the providers that are built entirely around the four-year degree, on balance, it may not be an entirely bad thing. At least it may help with the burgeoning “dropouts with debt” problem.
4. Many of those alternative credentials will come from providers that don’t exist yet. We may start to see a return to in-house training by corporations, complete with “indentured servitude” provisions that prohibit taking the training and running.
5. People at the elite outposts of higher ed will be the last to know.
I’d love to be wrong on this. I’d love to be able to say, with a straight face, that we’ll get single-payer health care and progressive taxation after the next election, and all will be made right in the world. That would be nifty. But I just don’t see it. And I don’t see the typical American family coming anywhere close to saving up hundreds of thousands per kid, especially when investments are returning approximately nothing. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Trends that can’t be sustained, won’t be. One way or another, the current trend won’t be.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
High Tech, High Touch
We’re moving in two different directions, and only beginning to realize it.
On the one side, we’re moving to more online instruction and more automated or nearly automated processes. The idea is to both increase convenience for students -- especially those with jobs and/or families -- and to improve the economics of the college by increasing enrollments and cutting costs. By going high tech, we hope to get around some of the cost issues that bedevil us when we do what we’ve always done.
On the other side, we’re trying to improve the success rates of students generally -- and of students from underrepresented groups specifically -- by a panoply of “high touch” strategies. Intrusive advisement, mandatory orientation, learning communities, freshman interest groups, and mini-prep classes -- all of which we’re using -- have been shown to help, but do so through increased labor intensity per student. They’re expensive.
Each side makes sense on its own terms. It’s clear that we need to reach a sustainable budgetary equilibrium, and that we can’t count on the state stepping up to do it. And it’s also clear that the social justice side of our mission requires helping students succeed who might otherwise fail, and doing it without lowering standards.
It’s just hard to do both sides at the same time.
Community colleges have bifurcated missions already, trying to handle both academic transfer and workforce development. Now they’re also trying to be both more automated and more personalized. With less money.
To make the conflict concrete, take mandatory orientation. Both national research and our local numbers suggest that students who attend freshman orientation have higher pass rates than students who don’t. As long as orientation is voluntary, it’s hard to disentangle the extent to which that reflects the benefits of orientation, as opposed to a form of self-selection; it may just be that the more conscientious students show up for orientation, so what we’re really seeing is a proxy measure for conscientiousness.
On the theory that it’s worth a shot, we’re moving to making orientation mandatory for new students. The idea is that the students who most need the nudge will probably be the ones who most need the benefit. From a social justice perspective, it’s a no-brainer.
But it conflicts with the idea of lowering barriers to enrollment and serving students at a distance. If the cultural expectations of online students involve instant access, then making them jump through more hoops will violate those expectations. Even if the hoops are intended to be good for them.
I don’t think it’s quite at the level of flooring the accelerator and the brake at the same time, but sometimes it does get a bit jarring. The tension between high tech and high touch is increasing, and we’re only beginning to grasp the source of the confusion.
Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a college find a way to be both high tech and high touch that doesn’t require a bazillion dollar grant to pull off?
On the one side, we’re moving to more online instruction and more automated or nearly automated processes. The idea is to both increase convenience for students -- especially those with jobs and/or families -- and to improve the economics of the college by increasing enrollments and cutting costs. By going high tech, we hope to get around some of the cost issues that bedevil us when we do what we’ve always done.
On the other side, we’re trying to improve the success rates of students generally -- and of students from underrepresented groups specifically -- by a panoply of “high touch” strategies. Intrusive advisement, mandatory orientation, learning communities, freshman interest groups, and mini-prep classes -- all of which we’re using -- have been shown to help, but do so through increased labor intensity per student. They’re expensive.
Each side makes sense on its own terms. It’s clear that we need to reach a sustainable budgetary equilibrium, and that we can’t count on the state stepping up to do it. And it’s also clear that the social justice side of our mission requires helping students succeed who might otherwise fail, and doing it without lowering standards.
It’s just hard to do both sides at the same time.
Community colleges have bifurcated missions already, trying to handle both academic transfer and workforce development. Now they’re also trying to be both more automated and more personalized. With less money.
To make the conflict concrete, take mandatory orientation. Both national research and our local numbers suggest that students who attend freshman orientation have higher pass rates than students who don’t. As long as orientation is voluntary, it’s hard to disentangle the extent to which that reflects the benefits of orientation, as opposed to a form of self-selection; it may just be that the more conscientious students show up for orientation, so what we’re really seeing is a proxy measure for conscientiousness.
On the theory that it’s worth a shot, we’re moving to making orientation mandatory for new students. The idea is that the students who most need the nudge will probably be the ones who most need the benefit. From a social justice perspective, it’s a no-brainer.
But it conflicts with the idea of lowering barriers to enrollment and serving students at a distance. If the cultural expectations of online students involve instant access, then making them jump through more hoops will violate those expectations. Even if the hoops are intended to be good for them.
I don’t think it’s quite at the level of flooring the accelerator and the brake at the same time, but sometimes it does get a bit jarring. The tension between high tech and high touch is increasing, and we’re only beginning to grasp the source of the confusion.
Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a college find a way to be both high tech and high touch that doesn’t require a bazillion dollar grant to pull off?
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
When Mandates Attack
“But we didn’t mean that!”
Broad-brush rules have a way of generating unintended, and even unsupportable, consequences. Most of us know that intuitively when we talk about things like mandatory minimum sentencing, “zero tolerance” policies, or tax loopholes.
The same applies to colleges.
Apparently, California -- I almost feel bad for still picking on it, but sheesh -- has a rule that no more than 50 percent of a college’s budget can be used for “non-instructional” expenses. When combined with a catastrophic budget crunch, that means that colleges can’t hire nearly enough academic advisors to keep up with student demand. Advisors count as “non-instructional,” so hiring a new advisor requires hiring a new professor. If you can’t afford both, you can’t hire the advisor. So now certain community colleges there have over a thousand students per advisor.
This should have been predictable.
Non-instructional costs can include everything from IT and software -- a huge and growing category -- to physical plant, IR staff, financial aid staff, utility costs, library staff and databases, and, yes, administration. Many of these are far more expensive than they were ten years ago, and through nobody’s fault. IT expectations on campus are far beyond what they were ten years ago, both for online courses and for onsite instruction and operations. Gainful employment regs all by themselves require significant staff time, entirely uncompensated by the folks who passed the regs.
When the mandatory -- or effectively mandatory -- expenses grow, and the funding shrinks, the discretionary stuff takes a hit. In California’s case, that means academic advising.
At the root of broad-stroke mandates like the 50 percent rule is distrust of what would happen without the rule. In the absence of mandatory minimum sentencing, the argument goes, liberal judges will let criminals run free. Therefore, the judges must be made iirrelevant. In the absence of zero tolerance policies on drugs, students will shoot up in the hallways; better to force principals to crack down, even if it means giving a kid detention for a Tylenol. And in the absence of a hard budget line, academic administrators will obviously turn California into Vermont -- an all-adjunct faculty -- so they must be stopped.
But tying the hands of the people closer to the situation is not a serious answer. It gives rise to all manner of distortions, simply because they’re prevented from doing what needs to be done.
It’s pretty clear at this point that innovation is the only serious answer. And innovation requires room to move. Managers need to be free to manage, and to experiment. They need their hands untied.
“Aha!” I hear the collective blogosphere exclaim. “This is an administrative power grab, carried out under cover of emergency!” Well, discretion can be misused. As can hard rules. The core of the issue, in my mind, is “as opposed to what?” The status quo is clearly an outsized failure. The California death spiral, it seems to me, is beyond denial at this point. So we can make room to try different things -- some of which might actually work -- or we can just brace for impact.
The rule has to go. Administrations have to be free to try to save their colleges from the death spiral. Some will act wisely, some will not; some will succeed, some will not. But I’d rather take my chance on the discretion of local, invested people who actually understand the issues than die by a broad-stroke rule passed by people who know not what they do.
Broad-brush rules have a way of generating unintended, and even unsupportable, consequences. Most of us know that intuitively when we talk about things like mandatory minimum sentencing, “zero tolerance” policies, or tax loopholes.
The same applies to colleges.
Apparently, California -- I almost feel bad for still picking on it, but sheesh -- has a rule that no more than 50 percent of a college’s budget can be used for “non-instructional” expenses. When combined with a catastrophic budget crunch, that means that colleges can’t hire nearly enough academic advisors to keep up with student demand. Advisors count as “non-instructional,” so hiring a new advisor requires hiring a new professor. If you can’t afford both, you can’t hire the advisor. So now certain community colleges there have over a thousand students per advisor.
This should have been predictable.
Non-instructional costs can include everything from IT and software -- a huge and growing category -- to physical plant, IR staff, financial aid staff, utility costs, library staff and databases, and, yes, administration. Many of these are far more expensive than they were ten years ago, and through nobody’s fault. IT expectations on campus are far beyond what they were ten years ago, both for online courses and for onsite instruction and operations. Gainful employment regs all by themselves require significant staff time, entirely uncompensated by the folks who passed the regs.
When the mandatory -- or effectively mandatory -- expenses grow, and the funding shrinks, the discretionary stuff takes a hit. In California’s case, that means academic advising.
At the root of broad-stroke mandates like the 50 percent rule is distrust of what would happen without the rule. In the absence of mandatory minimum sentencing, the argument goes, liberal judges will let criminals run free. Therefore, the judges must be made iirrelevant. In the absence of zero tolerance policies on drugs, students will shoot up in the hallways; better to force principals to crack down, even if it means giving a kid detention for a Tylenol. And in the absence of a hard budget line, academic administrators will obviously turn California into Vermont -- an all-adjunct faculty -- so they must be stopped.
But tying the hands of the people closer to the situation is not a serious answer. It gives rise to all manner of distortions, simply because they’re prevented from doing what needs to be done.
It’s pretty clear at this point that innovation is the only serious answer. And innovation requires room to move. Managers need to be free to manage, and to experiment. They need their hands untied.
“Aha!” I hear the collective blogosphere exclaim. “This is an administrative power grab, carried out under cover of emergency!” Well, discretion can be misused. As can hard rules. The core of the issue, in my mind, is “as opposed to what?” The status quo is clearly an outsized failure. The California death spiral, it seems to me, is beyond denial at this point. So we can make room to try different things -- some of which might actually work -- or we can just brace for impact.
The rule has to go. Administrations have to be free to try to save their colleges from the death spiral. Some will act wisely, some will not; some will succeed, some will not. But I’d rather take my chance on the discretion of local, invested people who actually understand the issues than die by a broad-stroke rule passed by people who know not what they do.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Thoughts on Romney and Higher Ed
At least he’s not mandating creationism.
Mitt Romney’s plans for higher education thus far are silly, but not catastrophic. Already that puts him ahead of much of his party.
It was not always thus. There was once a time -- not all that long ago, really -- when Republicans took public higher education seriously. The SUNY system never had a better friend than Nelson Rockefeller, for example. The University of California system even survived two terms of Governor Ronald Reagan, despite occasional snipes about hippies.
And that makes sense. As conservatives, their burden involved squaring arbitrary economic outcomes with a general cultural sense of the value of fair play. Education offered a nice way to thread that political needle. The smart and driven kid who was born poor could work hard in a public system and work his way into the middle class and above. As long as that was true, those on top could plausibly claim that the overall system is fair, even if they just happen to be a whole lot wealthier than everyone else. As long as the economic hierarchy was at least open to something like meritocratic striving, those who were left out could be blamed for their own fate.
Over the past decade or so, though, Republicans -- as opposed to conservatives, which they are not any more in any meaningful sense -- have shifted their position. Now they’re openly hostile to higher education, except in for-profit form. Rick Santorum’s “what a snob!” comment, for all of its artlessness, pretty much encapsulated the id of the party in its current form. (The same could be said of Santorum generally.) Some of that is the lingering residue of hippie-bashing, but the recent surge in stridency can’t be explained that way. (I don’t recall a hippie resurgence in 2010.) I think it goes a little deeper than that.
The higher education landscape in its current form represents a direct disproof of the core of Republican ideology. That’s why they hate it so much. It reminds them of the conservatism they left behind.
According to Republican -- as opposed to conservative -- ideology, anything “public” is inferior to anything “private.” By definition, anything private is supposed to be more efficient, more responsive, and less prone to corruption. Anything public is presumed to be wasteful, sclerotic, and rotten to the core.
That’s a relatively new wrinkle in Republican thought. Back when it was a conservative party, it had a conservative’s respect for institutions. It’s hard to imagine now, but when Senator Bob Dole voted to support affirmative action in colleges and universities -- which he did -- he did so in the name of preserving them. The idea -- perfectly consistent with the conservatism that runs through Burke to Oakeshott -- was that institutions need to bend so they do not break. The classic understanding held that people are inherently flawed, impulsive, selfish, and vain, and that institutions were required to protect them from their own base impulses. Institutions taught restraint, which was necessary to allow a civic culture to co-exist with a predatory economy. This was the conservatism of noblesse oblige and civic endowments. It was the conservatism that sponsored cultural programming on PBS.
(It’s hard to remember now, but in the “culture wars” of the 1980’s, it was the conservatives who preached the virtues of the classics. Allan Bloom became a national figure on the strength of his advocacy of the old “from Plato to NATO” reading list. The conservatives were the partisans of “timeless truths.” They once understood their own roots. Now the closest they come to the classics is Ayn Rand, a sort of lobotomized Nietzsche.)
What’s gone now -- and badly missed -- is that sense of the value, and necessity, of restraint and of the institutions that teach it. The current Republican party has dumbed down its message to “private good, public bad,” and has largely even forgotten why. (On foreign policy, its message has become “war good, peace bad,” for much the same reason: it has mistaken restraint for weakness. And even within the military itself -- once the great exception to the rule about “public bad” -- this is the party that turned over power and resources to private contractors.)
Against that worldview, higher ed in its current form stands as a powerful rebuke. That’s why it drives them around the bend.
In direct contradiction to what their ideology would predict, public colleges, by and large, are cheaper than private ones. For-profit colleges are far more expensive than public colleges and universities, and have nowhere near the respect in the culture of their public competitors. Colleges that “social engineer” their entering classes without apology -- horror! -- do remarkably well at populating the elite, and maintaining the respect of the country as a whole. Community colleges, long the underfunded stepchildren of higher ed, prove repeatedly that a sense of social good and public mission can go a long way towards compensating for a severe lack of money. That’s not supposed to be possible.
Worse, in higher ed, having more money doesn’t always make you right. People who make forty thousand a year feel entitled to pass judgment on people who make hundreds of times more than that, citing nothing more exclusive than “evidence” or “truth.” Deference is given to the best argument, rather than to the highest authority; in the very best sense of the word, it’s irreverent.
And most of its employees -- adjuncts most spectacularly, but pretty much across the board -- forego higher incomes to work in it. For a party that worships wealth, that amounts to apostasy.
Mitt Romney is smarter than many of his compatriots, so he doesn’t go out of his way to attack empirical science, like Senator Santorum, or the very idea of humanistic study, like Governor Scott of Florida. But his policy proposals outlined so far -- see here for a nice summary -- encapsulate handily the failings of Republican thought on higher ed. He proposes getting rid of direct lending and putting banks back in as middlemen on student loans, hoping that nobody will notice that “privatization” of loans actually costs more. He upholds Full Sail University as exemplary, hoping nobody will notice that it’s more expensive, and less respected or successful, than its non-profit counterparts. He proposes deregulating for-profit higher education generally, as if its issues stemmed from too much restraint, as opposed to too little.
Every single one of those policies rests on a failure of Republican ideology to describe how the world works. That’s why he doesn’t like to talk about them much. When efficiency and privatization conflict, as they do in higher ed, we see what the party really values. At this stage of its development, it chooses privatization. And the bad conscience of knowing that privatization actually costs more drives them batty. It makes them angry. And knowing that we know drives them even battier.
The net effect of Romney’s proposals thus far would be to starve the inexpensive public sector and feed both banks and for-profit colleges with the proceeds. On any objective grounds, that’s ridiculous, and unworthy of respect. But by the standards of what the Republican party has allowed itself to become, well, it could be worse. In the meantime, I’ll hold out hope that the party eventually rediscovers its conservative roots. Some things are worth preserving. And if the Republicans would finally re-embrace conservatism, the Democrats could finally let it go, and we could finally have debates worth having.
Mitt Romney’s plans for higher education thus far are silly, but not catastrophic. Already that puts him ahead of much of his party.
It was not always thus. There was once a time -- not all that long ago, really -- when Republicans took public higher education seriously. The SUNY system never had a better friend than Nelson Rockefeller, for example. The University of California system even survived two terms of Governor Ronald Reagan, despite occasional snipes about hippies.
And that makes sense. As conservatives, their burden involved squaring arbitrary economic outcomes with a general cultural sense of the value of fair play. Education offered a nice way to thread that political needle. The smart and driven kid who was born poor could work hard in a public system and work his way into the middle class and above. As long as that was true, those on top could plausibly claim that the overall system is fair, even if they just happen to be a whole lot wealthier than everyone else. As long as the economic hierarchy was at least open to something like meritocratic striving, those who were left out could be blamed for their own fate.
Over the past decade or so, though, Republicans -- as opposed to conservatives, which they are not any more in any meaningful sense -- have shifted their position. Now they’re openly hostile to higher education, except in for-profit form. Rick Santorum’s “what a snob!” comment, for all of its artlessness, pretty much encapsulated the id of the party in its current form. (The same could be said of Santorum generally.) Some of that is the lingering residue of hippie-bashing, but the recent surge in stridency can’t be explained that way. (I don’t recall a hippie resurgence in 2010.) I think it goes a little deeper than that.
The higher education landscape in its current form represents a direct disproof of the core of Republican ideology. That’s why they hate it so much. It reminds them of the conservatism they left behind.
According to Republican -- as opposed to conservative -- ideology, anything “public” is inferior to anything “private.” By definition, anything private is supposed to be more efficient, more responsive, and less prone to corruption. Anything public is presumed to be wasteful, sclerotic, and rotten to the core.
That’s a relatively new wrinkle in Republican thought. Back when it was a conservative party, it had a conservative’s respect for institutions. It’s hard to imagine now, but when Senator Bob Dole voted to support affirmative action in colleges and universities -- which he did -- he did so in the name of preserving them. The idea -- perfectly consistent with the conservatism that runs through Burke to Oakeshott -- was that institutions need to bend so they do not break. The classic understanding held that people are inherently flawed, impulsive, selfish, and vain, and that institutions were required to protect them from their own base impulses. Institutions taught restraint, which was necessary to allow a civic culture to co-exist with a predatory economy. This was the conservatism of noblesse oblige and civic endowments. It was the conservatism that sponsored cultural programming on PBS.
(It’s hard to remember now, but in the “culture wars” of the 1980’s, it was the conservatives who preached the virtues of the classics. Allan Bloom became a national figure on the strength of his advocacy of the old “from Plato to NATO” reading list. The conservatives were the partisans of “timeless truths.” They once understood their own roots. Now the closest they come to the classics is Ayn Rand, a sort of lobotomized Nietzsche.)
What’s gone now -- and badly missed -- is that sense of the value, and necessity, of restraint and of the institutions that teach it. The current Republican party has dumbed down its message to “private good, public bad,” and has largely even forgotten why. (On foreign policy, its message has become “war good, peace bad,” for much the same reason: it has mistaken restraint for weakness. And even within the military itself -- once the great exception to the rule about “public bad” -- this is the party that turned over power and resources to private contractors.)
Against that worldview, higher ed in its current form stands as a powerful rebuke. That’s why it drives them around the bend.
In direct contradiction to what their ideology would predict, public colleges, by and large, are cheaper than private ones. For-profit colleges are far more expensive than public colleges and universities, and have nowhere near the respect in the culture of their public competitors. Colleges that “social engineer” their entering classes without apology -- horror! -- do remarkably well at populating the elite, and maintaining the respect of the country as a whole. Community colleges, long the underfunded stepchildren of higher ed, prove repeatedly that a sense of social good and public mission can go a long way towards compensating for a severe lack of money. That’s not supposed to be possible.
Worse, in higher ed, having more money doesn’t always make you right. People who make forty thousand a year feel entitled to pass judgment on people who make hundreds of times more than that, citing nothing more exclusive than “evidence” or “truth.” Deference is given to the best argument, rather than to the highest authority; in the very best sense of the word, it’s irreverent.
And most of its employees -- adjuncts most spectacularly, but pretty much across the board -- forego higher incomes to work in it. For a party that worships wealth, that amounts to apostasy.
Mitt Romney is smarter than many of his compatriots, so he doesn’t go out of his way to attack empirical science, like Senator Santorum, or the very idea of humanistic study, like Governor Scott of Florida. But his policy proposals outlined so far -- see here for a nice summary -- encapsulate handily the failings of Republican thought on higher ed. He proposes getting rid of direct lending and putting banks back in as middlemen on student loans, hoping that nobody will notice that “privatization” of loans actually costs more. He upholds Full Sail University as exemplary, hoping nobody will notice that it’s more expensive, and less respected or successful, than its non-profit counterparts. He proposes deregulating for-profit higher education generally, as if its issues stemmed from too much restraint, as opposed to too little.
Every single one of those policies rests on a failure of Republican ideology to describe how the world works. That’s why he doesn’t like to talk about them much. When efficiency and privatization conflict, as they do in higher ed, we see what the party really values. At this stage of its development, it chooses privatization. And the bad conscience of knowing that privatization actually costs more drives them batty. It makes them angry. And knowing that we know drives them even battier.
The net effect of Romney’s proposals thus far would be to starve the inexpensive public sector and feed both banks and for-profit colleges with the proceeds. On any objective grounds, that’s ridiculous, and unworthy of respect. But by the standards of what the Republican party has allowed itself to become, well, it could be worse. In the meantime, I’ll hold out hope that the party eventually rediscovers its conservative roots. Some things are worth preserving. And if the Republicans would finally re-embrace conservatism, the Democrats could finally let it go, and we could finally have debates worth having.
Monday, May 28, 2012
The Boy at 11
The Boy turned 11 this weekend.
I remember day one. He was born tall for his age; he was the biggest kid in the nursery. He’s still tall for his age, and well on his way to being tall for any age. (He’s five foot five, and growing pretty much every time I turn around. I shudder to think what the adolescent growth spurt will bring.) We still have photos of me holding him in my lap in the hospital, reading him The Runaway Bunny. By the time he was three, we had to hide books under the couch just to get him to do anything else.
He’s a gentle giant. By the standards of an 11 year old, he’s courtly to his sister, and I’m proud that he doesn’t do a lot of the knucklehead crap with girls that his peers do. He plays baseball and basketball and likes to win, but can lose with dignity. He loves Lego League and placed fifth in the town spelling bee. He assembles complicated Lego kits in record time, reads a couple of novels a week, and has announced his intention to attend MIT to become a civil engineer.
I have to admit having been a little scared to try raising a boy. I wasn’t good at most of boy culture as a kid, and I hated the idea of passing my blind spots on to some innocent child. But TB isn’t mini-me; he’s his own person, much more fully realized than I was at that age.
Right now we’re in that glorious bridge phase between labor-intensive young childhood and drama-laden teen years. He’s capable of mowing the lawn, and it hasn’t occurred to him yet to rebel over it. Mom and Dad are still smart and worth listening to. “Having a girlfriend” is still as much an accusation as an aspiration. I know there’s a time limit on that, but I’m trying to enjoy it while it’s here. There’s plenty of time for the other stuff later.
Happy birthday, TB. And enjoy the new Lego kit.
I remember day one. He was born tall for his age; he was the biggest kid in the nursery. He’s still tall for his age, and well on his way to being tall for any age. (He’s five foot five, and growing pretty much every time I turn around. I shudder to think what the adolescent growth spurt will bring.) We still have photos of me holding him in my lap in the hospital, reading him The Runaway Bunny. By the time he was three, we had to hide books under the couch just to get him to do anything else.
He’s a gentle giant. By the standards of an 11 year old, he’s courtly to his sister, and I’m proud that he doesn’t do a lot of the knucklehead crap with girls that his peers do. He plays baseball and basketball and likes to win, but can lose with dignity. He loves Lego League and placed fifth in the town spelling bee. He assembles complicated Lego kits in record time, reads a couple of novels a week, and has announced his intention to attend MIT to become a civil engineer.
I have to admit having been a little scared to try raising a boy. I wasn’t good at most of boy culture as a kid, and I hated the idea of passing my blind spots on to some innocent child. But TB isn’t mini-me; he’s his own person, much more fully realized than I was at that age.
Right now we’re in that glorious bridge phase between labor-intensive young childhood and drama-laden teen years. He’s capable of mowing the lawn, and it hasn’t occurred to him yet to rebel over it. Mom and Dad are still smart and worth listening to. “Having a girlfriend” is still as much an accusation as an aspiration. I know there’s a time limit on that, but I’m trying to enjoy it while it’s here. There’s plenty of time for the other stuff later.
Happy birthday, TB. And enjoy the new Lego kit.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Friday Fragments
If you haven’t seen Tom Bailey’s piece on the Connecticut remediation law, check it out. He’s the head of the Community College Research Center at Columbia, of which I’m a huge fan, and it’s his response to Connecticut’s proposed law to restrict remediation in community colleges to a single semester.
He suggests -- and I strongly agree -- that rather than a blunt instrument like a law, Connecticut would be better off prodding colleges to experiment with different ways to improve student success and solve the problem of the remedial death march. A host of experiments across the state, with assessment measures built in from the outset, would be much likelier to lead to healthy results.
---------
In our house, we have a strict “no whining” rule. If there’s something you don’t like, you either do something about it or you learn to live with it.
The Wife has decided to apply that same rule to our town, with amazing results.
The public school TG attends has taken some budget cuts over the last few years, and has not been able to invest in classroom technology at the pace it would like. Townwide, the response has been a collective shrug, with some occasional snark.
TW spent the last few months putting together a 5k family run/walk to raise money for technology in our local public elementary school. The run/walk happened last Sunday, and it was a MONSTER hit. They had over 100 runners, and another 100+ walkers, and it looks like the final tally (with sponsorships and raffle proceeds) will be over $20,000. For a first time, that’s pretty darn good.
The weather cooperated, her team was amazing, and just about everything went right. (I walked with TB and TG, and also worked the registration table with TW.) Her team was united and highly functional, the mayor and sponsors were visibly impressed, and now the school will be outfitted several years faster than it would have been otherwise. The Girl will benefit, of course, but so will every other student in the school.
It was wonderful to be able to say to the kids that this is how you do it. When something is important to you, like their schools are, and you see a problem, you put on your big kid pants and do something about it. Well done, TW!
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According to the Harvard Business Review, being boring can actually be an important leadership trait.
I win!
The idea is that charismatic leadership can become a distraction from the mission of the institution, and maintaining charisma over time can be draining. But leaders who are content to subsume their personal stuff to the larger mission can keep everyone focused on the right things. Sounds right to me...
--------
No matter how long I do this, abrupt resignations always catch me off guard.
--------
Why does everything technological get cheaper except mobile internet?
He suggests -- and I strongly agree -- that rather than a blunt instrument like a law, Connecticut would be better off prodding colleges to experiment with different ways to improve student success and solve the problem of the remedial death march. A host of experiments across the state, with assessment measures built in from the outset, would be much likelier to lead to healthy results.
---------
In our house, we have a strict “no whining” rule. If there’s something you don’t like, you either do something about it or you learn to live with it.
The Wife has decided to apply that same rule to our town, with amazing results.
The public school TG attends has taken some budget cuts over the last few years, and has not been able to invest in classroom technology at the pace it would like. Townwide, the response has been a collective shrug, with some occasional snark.
TW spent the last few months putting together a 5k family run/walk to raise money for technology in our local public elementary school. The run/walk happened last Sunday, and it was a MONSTER hit. They had over 100 runners, and another 100+ walkers, and it looks like the final tally (with sponsorships and raffle proceeds) will be over $20,000. For a first time, that’s pretty darn good.
The weather cooperated, her team was amazing, and just about everything went right. (I walked with TB and TG, and also worked the registration table with TW.) Her team was united and highly functional, the mayor and sponsors were visibly impressed, and now the school will be outfitted several years faster than it would have been otherwise. The Girl will benefit, of course, but so will every other student in the school.
It was wonderful to be able to say to the kids that this is how you do it. When something is important to you, like their schools are, and you see a problem, you put on your big kid pants and do something about it. Well done, TW!
--------
According to the Harvard Business Review, being boring can actually be an important leadership trait.
I win!
The idea is that charismatic leadership can become a distraction from the mission of the institution, and maintaining charisma over time can be draining. But leaders who are content to subsume their personal stuff to the larger mission can keep everyone focused on the right things. Sounds right to me...
--------
No matter how long I do this, abrupt resignations always catch me off guard.
--------
Why does everything technological get cheaper except mobile internet?
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
One for the Guidance Counselors
Dear Guidance Counselors,
This is the time of year when panicked seniors who either didn’t get into the colleges they wanted, or can’t afford the colleges they wanted, are looking for options.
Some will take a “gap year,” which is a nice gig if you can get it. Some will join the military. Some will go to work. And some just won’t know what to do.
According to this story in Reuters, college dropouts do just as badly in the labor market now as people who never attended college. But two-year graduates do far, far better. It’s much better to do two years at a two year college and emerge with a degree than to do two years at a four year college and emerge with nothing. Cheaper, too.
Which means that for the student who’s panicking, community college can make a lot of sense.
Every time a guidance counselor asks a student “are you looking at two year schools or four year schools,” my teeth grind. For many students, “or” is the wrong word. “And” is the best choice. Go to the two year school first. Get the Gen Eds done cheaply and in small classes. Build a record of college success. Keep the loan balances low.
If the student wants to transfer on from there, that avenue is open. (Admittedly, California is becoming an exception, but still.) Upon transfer, the student will have only two years of the higher tuition to pay, but can still graduate with a four-year degree. But if that’s not going to happen -- if the student’s life is such that a four-year commitment just isn’t in the cards -- then it’s far better to have a degree to show for two years of work than to just drop out.
Which makes sense, if you think about it. To an employer, a two-year degree at least indicates the discipline and ability to complete a program. (Even if the student intended to transfer and didn’t, the degree still indicates success.) Dropping out without anything to show for it doesn’t accomplish quite the same thing.
The community college offers the safer option. If two years is all the student can do, it offers “graduate” status, as opposed to “dropout” status. If the student goes past the two years, she does so with a lighter debt burden. This is not to be dismissed lightly.
I know some high schools like to brag about the percentage of their graduates who go directly to four-year colleges, and some of them even exert internal pressure not to mess with those numbers. But thinking of two-year degrees as terminal is often mistaken. They can be, but they frequently aren’t. And allowing the panicky student to keep her options open on the cheap is nothing to apologize for.
Good luck, counselors. If you doubt the wisdom of any of this, just check the numbers on unemployment rates for two-year grads as opposed to college dropouts, or student loan burdens, or average earnings for high school grads. It’s all there.
Hoping to see many of your charges soon,
Dean Dad
This is the time of year when panicked seniors who either didn’t get into the colleges they wanted, or can’t afford the colleges they wanted, are looking for options.
Some will take a “gap year,” which is a nice gig if you can get it. Some will join the military. Some will go to work. And some just won’t know what to do.
According to this story in Reuters, college dropouts do just as badly in the labor market now as people who never attended college. But two-year graduates do far, far better. It’s much better to do two years at a two year college and emerge with a degree than to do two years at a four year college and emerge with nothing. Cheaper, too.
Which means that for the student who’s panicking, community college can make a lot of sense.
Every time a guidance counselor asks a student “are you looking at two year schools or four year schools,” my teeth grind. For many students, “or” is the wrong word. “And” is the best choice. Go to the two year school first. Get the Gen Eds done cheaply and in small classes. Build a record of college success. Keep the loan balances low.
If the student wants to transfer on from there, that avenue is open. (Admittedly, California is becoming an exception, but still.) Upon transfer, the student will have only two years of the higher tuition to pay, but can still graduate with a four-year degree. But if that’s not going to happen -- if the student’s life is such that a four-year commitment just isn’t in the cards -- then it’s far better to have a degree to show for two years of work than to just drop out.
Which makes sense, if you think about it. To an employer, a two-year degree at least indicates the discipline and ability to complete a program. (Even if the student intended to transfer and didn’t, the degree still indicates success.) Dropping out without anything to show for it doesn’t accomplish quite the same thing.
The community college offers the safer option. If two years is all the student can do, it offers “graduate” status, as opposed to “dropout” status. If the student goes past the two years, she does so with a lighter debt burden. This is not to be dismissed lightly.
I know some high schools like to brag about the percentage of their graduates who go directly to four-year colleges, and some of them even exert internal pressure not to mess with those numbers. But thinking of two-year degrees as terminal is often mistaken. They can be, but they frequently aren’t. And allowing the panicky student to keep her options open on the cheap is nothing to apologize for.
Good luck, counselors. If you doubt the wisdom of any of this, just check the numbers on unemployment rates for two-year grads as opposed to college dropouts, or student loan burdens, or average earnings for high school grads. It’s all there.
Hoping to see many of your charges soon,
Dean Dad
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Grant Math
How is it that a multimillion dollar grant offered to an underfunded community college system can make a minimal difference on the ground? The answer is in the math.
Let’s say the headline reads “Small State Community College Gets $15 Million for Job Training.”
First, the state takes its cut; let’s say a third. That leaves $10 million.
Then the award is divided among the various campuses. To keep the math simple, let’s say there are ten. That means $1 million per campus.
But that’s misleading; it’s a total figure over a set of years. Let’s say it’s a four year grant. At that point, you have $250,000 per year. (For reasons I’ll never understand, this is how the media insist on reporting union contracts. “A nine percent raise over three years” sounds a lot bigger than “annual three percent raises for three years.” People grab the “nine percent” number and get righteously mad. It’s not helpful.)
As a condition of receiving the grant, each campus had to hire a project manager. Figure a salary of $60,000, with another $15,000 for benefits. Assume a small fraction -- let’s say another $15,000 -- for indirect costs of administration, such as grants compliance, IR time, office space, and the like. So now you’re down to $160,000 per year for four years.
You hire a full-time person -- $50,000 plus $12,000 for benefits -- and a part-time assistant, making maybe $20,000. Now you’re down to $78,000. Subtract travel, office equipment, and the like, and you’re probably somewhere around $70,000.
That’s assuming no major technical equipment purchases, proprietary software, or licensing fees. (Admittedly, it’s also assuming that everyone is hired on day one, which typically isn’t the case. There’s usually some breakage there.)
And that’s how a $15 million grant lands with a relative fizzle.
Meanwhile, the faculty are upset at “administrative bloat,” as if the grant money used to hire the project manager and full-timer would otherwise have been available for them. The Feds are upset that you didn’t “move the needle,” and they respond with ever-more-taxing reporting requirements (requiring more IR time and clerical support). And cynics point to the whole mess and conclude that the issue is that some people just aren’t college material.
*headdesk*
A few suggestions:
1. An incremental increase in operating funding is more efficient than another grant. That’s because the incremental increase in operating funding doesn’t require all-new hires; people who are already there can manage it. If you don’t want administrative bloat, don’t require a new project manager for each new increment.
2. If you must go the grant route, the best way to do it would be to harness people who are already there. Fund course reassignments, travel, subscriptions, and meetings. Build the capacities of the people who will still be there when the grant expires. (The expiration dates that come with “soft money” make good hiring a real challenge.) Ideally, use the grant to buy time so that people can develop projects, rather than requiring them to develop projects to get the funding. It’s still possible to build in accountability measures, but if you leave enough flexibility for people to make adjustments to their methods when the results dictate, then you’ll eventually get better and more sustainable results.
3. Remember the importance of local control. The more prescriptive the grant, the less likely you are to get significant local support. Again, operating funding is ideal, but if the money must be separate, use it to empower the people who are already there -- and will still be there later -- to achieve goals in their own ways. The grant can -- should -- have goals, but it shouldn’t dictate means. Projects work best when people put their hearts and souls into them, and they’re likelier to do that when the projects were their idea.
4. Let’s have some honesty in the public relations. So many grants have promised the moon and stars over the years that a certain cynicism has set in. Let’s stop lumping multi-year appropriations into single headline numbers, pretending that the equivalent of one percent of a budget will be transformative, and declaring every grant a roaring success.
5. Kill the “supplanting” rule. Many federal grants come with a stipulation that the money is to be used to “supplement, not supplant.” In other words, you aren’t supposed to use grant money to pay for things you otherwise would have paid for with your own money. It’s supposed to be used only for extras. As external funding has moved from operations to grants, we’ve been able to pay for extras but compelled to hollow out the core at the same time. This is madness. And when you combine the “no supplanting” rule with a “sustainability” requirement -- a promise to keep doing those extras after the grant expires -- it becomes madness on stilts.
None of this is to denigrate the intentions of grants, or the real achievements they enable. It’s just to say that if we’re really serious about getting bang for the buck, the first thing to do -- without which we’re just kidding ourselves -- is to support operating budgets. Without that, we’re trapped in the cruel realities of grant math.
Let’s say the headline reads “Small State Community College Gets $15 Million for Job Training.”
First, the state takes its cut; let’s say a third. That leaves $10 million.
Then the award is divided among the various campuses. To keep the math simple, let’s say there are ten. That means $1 million per campus.
But that’s misleading; it’s a total figure over a set of years. Let’s say it’s a four year grant. At that point, you have $250,000 per year. (For reasons I’ll never understand, this is how the media insist on reporting union contracts. “A nine percent raise over three years” sounds a lot bigger than “annual three percent raises for three years.” People grab the “nine percent” number and get righteously mad. It’s not helpful.)
As a condition of receiving the grant, each campus had to hire a project manager. Figure a salary of $60,000, with another $15,000 for benefits. Assume a small fraction -- let’s say another $15,000 -- for indirect costs of administration, such as grants compliance, IR time, office space, and the like. So now you’re down to $160,000 per year for four years.
You hire a full-time person -- $50,000 plus $12,000 for benefits -- and a part-time assistant, making maybe $20,000. Now you’re down to $78,000. Subtract travel, office equipment, and the like, and you’re probably somewhere around $70,000.
That’s assuming no major technical equipment purchases, proprietary software, or licensing fees. (Admittedly, it’s also assuming that everyone is hired on day one, which typically isn’t the case. There’s usually some breakage there.)
And that’s how a $15 million grant lands with a relative fizzle.
Meanwhile, the faculty are upset at “administrative bloat,” as if the grant money used to hire the project manager and full-timer would otherwise have been available for them. The Feds are upset that you didn’t “move the needle,” and they respond with ever-more-taxing reporting requirements (requiring more IR time and clerical support). And cynics point to the whole mess and conclude that the issue is that some people just aren’t college material.
*headdesk*
A few suggestions:
1. An incremental increase in operating funding is more efficient than another grant. That’s because the incremental increase in operating funding doesn’t require all-new hires; people who are already there can manage it. If you don’t want administrative bloat, don’t require a new project manager for each new increment.
2. If you must go the grant route, the best way to do it would be to harness people who are already there. Fund course reassignments, travel, subscriptions, and meetings. Build the capacities of the people who will still be there when the grant expires. (The expiration dates that come with “soft money” make good hiring a real challenge.) Ideally, use the grant to buy time so that people can develop projects, rather than requiring them to develop projects to get the funding. It’s still possible to build in accountability measures, but if you leave enough flexibility for people to make adjustments to their methods when the results dictate, then you’ll eventually get better and more sustainable results.
3. Remember the importance of local control. The more prescriptive the grant, the less likely you are to get significant local support. Again, operating funding is ideal, but if the money must be separate, use it to empower the people who are already there -- and will still be there later -- to achieve goals in their own ways. The grant can -- should -- have goals, but it shouldn’t dictate means. Projects work best when people put their hearts and souls into them, and they’re likelier to do that when the projects were their idea.
4. Let’s have some honesty in the public relations. So many grants have promised the moon and stars over the years that a certain cynicism has set in. Let’s stop lumping multi-year appropriations into single headline numbers, pretending that the equivalent of one percent of a budget will be transformative, and declaring every grant a roaring success.
5. Kill the “supplanting” rule. Many federal grants come with a stipulation that the money is to be used to “supplement, not supplant.” In other words, you aren’t supposed to use grant money to pay for things you otherwise would have paid for with your own money. It’s supposed to be used only for extras. As external funding has moved from operations to grants, we’ve been able to pay for extras but compelled to hollow out the core at the same time. This is madness. And when you combine the “no supplanting” rule with a “sustainability” requirement -- a promise to keep doing those extras after the grant expires -- it becomes madness on stilts.
None of this is to denigrate the intentions of grants, or the real achievements they enable. It’s just to say that if we’re really serious about getting bang for the buck, the first thing to do -- without which we’re just kidding ourselves -- is to support operating budgets. Without that, we’re trapped in the cruel realities of grant math.
Monday, May 21, 2012
The Paradox of Conflict Aversion
Anyone who wants to understand the reality of academic administration should read this article. (Hat tip to Joanne Jacobs for highlighting it.) It’s about some shady dealings come to light recently at Bergen Community College, in northern New Jersey. According to a report prepared by a retired judge at the behest of the trustees, the president of the faculty union was caught getting his granddaughter’s failing grades changed.
The article paints quite a picture.
Having balked at paying even a reduced rate, Prof. Helff apparently did not balk at getting his granddaughter’s failing grades changed. The previous president of the college tried twice to investigate Helff, eventually getting forced out himself; apparently out of desperation, the college eventually hired a retired judge to report on the case. (To be fair, it would be accurate to describe that president, Jerry Ryan, as “imposing and rumpled,” too.)
The article suggests that BCC has become far too inbred, and that a culture of favors and exceptions has taken hold. It goes on to suggest that a more professional culture is needed.
Well, yes, but that’s like saying that big banks need to be more civic-minded. In the absence of drastic and fundamental changes, it’s not going to happen.
Many years ago, I worked briefly under a vice president in a very similar setting. His way of handling prickly personalities in a setting of minimal turnover was an elaborate system of favors. Conflict was a crisis; anyone who got jumpy was to be either mollified or cast into darkness. When he hired me, he bragged that there had not been a grievance filed in over ten years. I quickly learned why, and it wasn’t because everyone was content.
He practiced conflict aversion in the same sense in which the Pope practices Catholicism. It was the undercurrent of every decision he made.
As a result, by the time I arrived, nearly every statement made on campus was spoken in code. Information was always partial and typically flawed; predictably, people filled in the gaps with their own worst fears. A culture of favor-trading, looking out for your own, and Potemkin processes flourished.
In a setting like that, I can completely understand how someone like Prof. Helff could get his way. He would throw his weight around and intone darkly that we take care of our own. Conflict-averse managers would do the math and take the deal, panicky about what would happen if they didn’t.
The paradox of conflict aversion is that it doesn’t actually avoid conflict. It hides it, distorts it, and allows it to fester. If the squeaky wheel always gets the grease, over time, you should expect a hell of a lot of squeaking. And when Prof. Jones finds out that Prof. Smith got a better deal than he did, as a result of one backdoor deal or another, you can expect that Prof. Jones will be righteously pissed. Pissed-off people talk to each other, sometimes embellishing as they go. Others listen and fill in the gaps with whatever resentments they already had. Before long, you have another, much bigger, problem.
The article notes that Prof. Helff is facing possible revocation of tenure and termination; if the charges are true, I consider those penalties entirely appropriate. That kind of self-dealing is a textbook abuse of very real power, and it needs to be stopped.
But the larger issue is around the strategies used by the administration. You don’t avoid conflict by being conflict averse. In fact, given large numbers of intelligent and independent-minded people, you just don’t avoid conflict at all. The best you can do is keep it from festering by dealing with it directly, and consistently, as it arises. That means avoiding the temptation to appease the blowhard who’s ruining your day, and thereby avoiding the trap of trying to remember every little deal you’ve cut over the years. It means keeping a relatively thick skin, maintaining emotional discipline, and enduring some very unpleasant confrontations. It’s not easy.
The way around conflict is through it. By addressing the real issue, you at least have a chance of preventing the snowballing-bullshit dynamic that happens when angry people talk to each other. If you can keep the conflict to the actual issue, instead of inadvertently triggering a litany of every resentment ever felt, you have a shot at a constructive outcome.
Making that transition -- from a favor-trading culture to a rule-bound one -- isn’t easy in the best of cases. In a deeply inbred setting, it may simply be impossible. But it needs to happen. The alternative is continued corruption until the whole thing collapses in a pile of bloated salaries, backroom deals, and hollow credentials.
The article paints quite a picture.
A math instructor, Helff makes more than $133,000 at the college, where he has worked since 1970. As his dependent, his granddaughter attended Bergen Community College tuition free but, as was customary, was required to pay fees. The report noted that Helff balked at the levying of those fees.Imposing and rumpled, Helff has been a high-profile union president, known for his free-wheeling diatribes against administrators.
Having balked at paying even a reduced rate, Prof. Helff apparently did not balk at getting his granddaughter’s failing grades changed. The previous president of the college tried twice to investigate Helff, eventually getting forced out himself; apparently out of desperation, the college eventually hired a retired judge to report on the case. (To be fair, it would be accurate to describe that president, Jerry Ryan, as “imposing and rumpled,” too.)
The article suggests that BCC has become far too inbred, and that a culture of favors and exceptions has taken hold. It goes on to suggest that a more professional culture is needed.
Well, yes, but that’s like saying that big banks need to be more civic-minded. In the absence of drastic and fundamental changes, it’s not going to happen.
Many years ago, I worked briefly under a vice president in a very similar setting. His way of handling prickly personalities in a setting of minimal turnover was an elaborate system of favors. Conflict was a crisis; anyone who got jumpy was to be either mollified or cast into darkness. When he hired me, he bragged that there had not been a grievance filed in over ten years. I quickly learned why, and it wasn’t because everyone was content.
He practiced conflict aversion in the same sense in which the Pope practices Catholicism. It was the undercurrent of every decision he made.
As a result, by the time I arrived, nearly every statement made on campus was spoken in code. Information was always partial and typically flawed; predictably, people filled in the gaps with their own worst fears. A culture of favor-trading, looking out for your own, and Potemkin processes flourished.
In a setting like that, I can completely understand how someone like Prof. Helff could get his way. He would throw his weight around and intone darkly that we take care of our own. Conflict-averse managers would do the math and take the deal, panicky about what would happen if they didn’t.
The paradox of conflict aversion is that it doesn’t actually avoid conflict. It hides it, distorts it, and allows it to fester. If the squeaky wheel always gets the grease, over time, you should expect a hell of a lot of squeaking. And when Prof. Jones finds out that Prof. Smith got a better deal than he did, as a result of one backdoor deal or another, you can expect that Prof. Jones will be righteously pissed. Pissed-off people talk to each other, sometimes embellishing as they go. Others listen and fill in the gaps with whatever resentments they already had. Before long, you have another, much bigger, problem.
The article notes that Prof. Helff is facing possible revocation of tenure and termination; if the charges are true, I consider those penalties entirely appropriate. That kind of self-dealing is a textbook abuse of very real power, and it needs to be stopped.
But the larger issue is around the strategies used by the administration. You don’t avoid conflict by being conflict averse. In fact, given large numbers of intelligent and independent-minded people, you just don’t avoid conflict at all. The best you can do is keep it from festering by dealing with it directly, and consistently, as it arises. That means avoiding the temptation to appease the blowhard who’s ruining your day, and thereby avoiding the trap of trying to remember every little deal you’ve cut over the years. It means keeping a relatively thick skin, maintaining emotional discipline, and enduring some very unpleasant confrontations. It’s not easy.
The way around conflict is through it. By addressing the real issue, you at least have a chance of preventing the snowballing-bullshit dynamic that happens when angry people talk to each other. If you can keep the conflict to the actual issue, instead of inadvertently triggering a litany of every resentment ever felt, you have a shot at a constructive outcome.
Making that transition -- from a favor-trading culture to a rule-bound one -- isn’t easy in the best of cases. In a deeply inbred setting, it may simply be impossible. But it needs to happen. The alternative is continued corruption until the whole thing collapses in a pile of bloated salaries, backroom deals, and hollow credentials.
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