What's a Thought Leader?

What’s a thought leader?  And how do you know one when you see one?

I’d like to think that “thought leader” is the contemporary version of the public intellectual.  But the term isn’t usually used that way.  Public intellectuals, at their best, are broadly critical of existing political/social arrangements, typically in the name of some sort of preferred ideal.  And whether employed as academics or not, they’re usually scholars of something.  They can be full of themselves, ideologically blinkered, and subject to all the usual blind spots and human failings, but they’re supposed to bring a certain scholarly depth to the discussion.  And while they can be maddeningly arrogant and sweeping in their pronouncements, they at least aren’t afraid of big questions.  Thought leaders tend to be much more field-specific, and typically oriented more to construction than to analysis.

“Thought leader” isn’t exactly interchangeable with “famous” or “prominent,” either.  Lindsay Lohan is famous, but I wouldn’t call her a thought leader.  (Jenny McCarthy might be, in the realm of vaccination.  Thought leadership is not always a good thing.)  

Sometimes the term is thrown at entrepreneurs in creative industries, whether in tech, marketing, or fashion.  But that, too, strikes me as misplaced.  Entrepreneurship done right is admirable, but it’s much less about thought leadership than about seizing opportunities.  Mark Zuckerberg is a wildly successful entrepreneur, but I don’t think of him as a thought leader.  I once saw a locally prominent entrepreneur declare in a speech that “knowledge is useless unless you use it,” which I realized I simply could not top.  I’m guessing he would have rejected the term.

Some journalists get tagged as thought leaders, and I’ll admit being a bit more comfortable with that.  Anya Kamenetz, for example, has carved out a clear niche as a public voice in favor of de-institutionalizing higher education.  In politics, I could see Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Maddow as versions of thought leaders.  They don’t run for office themselves, but they use their versions of journalism to try to sway the masses.  If politicians are surfers riding waves, O’Reilly and Maddow are beach engineers, trying to make the waves go in certain directions.

I’ve also seen the term applied as a sort of “entrepreneur emeritus” to people who attained prominence in business but then stepped away from operations.  It’s akin to a “vice chairman” position, a potentate without portfolio.  It’s a sort of consolation prize.

As a piece of English, the term “thought leader” manages to be simultaneously clinical and vague.  It’s not a natural phrase, in the sense of being something that people say in the course of daily conversation.  And it’s nowhere near as precise as, say, “historian” or “philosopher.”  

In corporate settings, it’s often used to identify public champions of particular business methods.  I’m thinking here of the Stephen Coveys and Jim Collinses of the world.  In that setting, though, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it applied to the Juliet Schors or Barbara Ehrenreichs of the world.  It’s much more likely to attach to people with prescriptions how rather than to those with questions why.

Wise and worldly readers, is there a coherent meaning to the term thought leader that I’m missing?  (And what is its opposite?  I’ve heard the term “thoughtless leader” in private, but never in public.)  Does the term make more sense than this?  

Positive Academic Freedom: A Response to Tim Burke

Tim Burke just posted a long, thoughtful, beautifully written post on academic freedom, academic intramural conflict, and the dangers of thinking that “framing” solves everything.  Maybe it’s because I went through grad school in the 90’s, but much of it spoke to me, and I really can’t recommend it enough.

There’s too much in it to do it justice in a single post, but that’s sort of the point.  Burke calls for, well, reframing academic freedom as a positive freedom, rather than simply as the absence of censorship.  Among other things, that involves pushing actual, incumbent academics to become much more humble about their own claims.  

For example, Burke references the 90’s debates about “strategic essentialism” as a sort of well-intended bad faith move that wound up not helping.  For folks who managed to dodge the theory wars of the 90’s, “essentialism” was the term for attributing false solidity or naturalness to acquired or ascribed traits.  Essentialism was generally considered retrograde, since it fed into powerful oppressions along the lines of race and gender, for example.  Deconstructing those categories was assumed to be liberatory, since recasting them as voluntary (or “constructed”) could open up the possibility for political contestation and reconstruction along consciously-chosen lines.

But in the world of actual politics, it didn’t always work that way.  That’s easy to see when applied to the movement for gay rights.  If homosexuality is a choice, then it follows that it can be judged like any other choice.  But if it’s essential -- as Lady Gaga put it, if you’re “born this way” -- then punishing people for it is just mean.  That kind of essentialism may be theoretically retrograde, but on the ground, it works.  Actual politicians, as opposed to academic theorists, have a knack for finding the arguments that resonate emotionally at a given moment.  The political progress of, say, gay marriage has resulted more from arguments from common decency than from subverting heterosexist constructions of gender identity.  And that’s okay.

Political practice often comes from a much more frank and honest discussion of self-interest and what Burke, interestingly, calls emotional intelligence.  The conceit behind “strategic essentialism” is that the strategist is above the fray, manipulating other people in the name of the larger good that the strategist favors.  In other words, it can’t explain the strategist.  As anyone who has dealt with academic politics knows, academics are no more immune to self-interest than anyone else.  Laypeople know that intuitively, and look askance -- rightly -- on people who try to manipulate them while denying that they’re doing it.  Whether you call it strategic essentialism or the noble lie, it’s based on the assumption that some people are In On The Truth, and others never will be.  Politics becomes a puppet battle, with disingenuous masterminds “deploying” various “discourses” to move the rubes.  The public doesn’t much care for that, and rightly so.

Burke suggests, plausibly enough, that much ostensibly liberatory work is actually quite controlling, albeit in a different direction.  Incessant critique presumes a standpoint of perfection.  Moving from all-encompassing critique to action within constraints involves accepting some pretty severe epistemological limits, among other things.  It means making peace with the reality of acting with incomplete information, and of confronting people who can see your self-interest, even if you can’t.  And it usually involves selecting from among imperfect options, in a context in which other people will respond to those choices in ways that reflect their own interests.

Where I part company from Burke, at least somewhat, is in his expansiveness.  He moves from an appropriate recognition that all perspectives are constrained to a sort of fatalism in distinguishing one from another.  “Let a thousand flowers bloom” doesn’t have a great history, and it doesn’t work terribly well when there’s only so much soil.  Put differently, I can agree that there is far more in heaven and earth than is covered in my philosophy department, but that doesn’t mean I have the budget to hire dozens more philosophers to expound on it.  Which means that I need to base allocation decisions on something.  I need a basis from which to say no.

My preferred way to balance that tension is to think in terms of pathways.  Given such a vast, and largely unpredictable, set of pathways that students can follow, which initial directions will give them the best start?  What will they most likely need?  I don’t know what the hot thing will be in ten or twenty years; if I did, I’d buy stock in it.  But I’m pretty confident that developing and/or navigating that world will be easier for people who can communicate well, handle ambiguity well, and reason both quantitatively and critically.  It’ll be easier for people who can make a decent living, defend their interests politically, and handle disagreement on the job.  Admittedly, that’s a lot less ambitious than, say, decentering phallogocentrism, but hey.  Ya gotta start somewhere.

It also offers at least the beginning of a way to handle the always-sticky issue of tolerating the intolerant.  Academic freedom is easy when everyone mostly agrees.  But should the creationist get tenure in the biology department?  I would say no, on the grounds that creationism plays by different, and incompatible, rules of evidence.  It’s one thing to interpret findings differently; it’s quite another to write off evidence as planted by Satan to deceive us.  That position simply rules out further discussion, and therefore prevents intellectual growth.  It defeats the purpose of the larger enterprise.  

Burke’s piece is far more thoughtful and nuanced than I’ve captured here.  If you have a chunk of time, check it out.  Every so often, it’s healthy to step back a bit and ask just why we do what we do in the first place.  Nicely done.

Friday Fragments

Unapologetic Family Brag: Mom is the director of career services for the MBA program at the LeBow College of Business at Drexel University, in Philadelphia.  The Financial Times just issued its international rankings of MBA programs.  In the “career services” column, Drexel/LeBow was ranked #1 in the world.

Go, Mom!

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If you haven’t yet seen Rebecca Schuman’s anti-Powerpoint Powerpoint, check it out.  

It’s uncomfortably funny because it’s uncomfortably true.  Nicely done.

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This week I heard another local story of a student who had a hellish experience in high school, but who got back on track by coming to community college as a dual-enrollment student.  The issue wasn’t academics; it was the need to escape from the dysfunctions of high school culture.

I used to think of dual enrollment as a way to keep bored prodigies from bumping their heads against the ceilings of high school curricula.  Those students still exist, and dual enrollment still serves them well.  But increasingly, I’m seeing non-prodigies use dual enrollment for the sake of escaping a culture that does them no good.  (In some parts of the country, dual enrollment has also become popular among students who have been home-schooled.  I haven’t seen much of that here yet.)

If it were one or two students, I could see them as flukes.  But it’s starting to look like a trend.  

These students are invisible in our political discourse around education, both secondary and higher.  They aren’t high school dropouts, but they aren’t attending high school, either.  “Time to completion” is hard to measure when they’re completing two things at once, and neither in quite the traditional way.  And if a dual enrollment student transfers to a four-year school after completing the high school diploma and, say, twenty or thirty college credits, she counts as a dropout.  Considering what the alternative was, and where she could go in life once she transfers, counting that as institutional failure is nonsense on stilts.

I know I’ve been hitting the “we’re counting wrong!” theme a lot lately, but that’s because we’re counting wrong a lot.  If we’re going to hold colleges “accountable,” let’s at least get the counting right.

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The Boy has jazz band practice at dark o’clock every Thursday morning, so I’ve recently had the experience of watching an adolescent boy try to function before the sun comes up.  

In that spirit, I’m happy to see that some school districts are starting to catch up with scientific findings about the adolescent body clock -- and the observations of parents everywhere -- and moving the start of the school day later.  

It’s the kind of forehead-slappingly obvious move that could easily spread even to places that can’t afford other ways to improve.  Here’s hoping it starts to become the new normal.

Applying for Faculty Jobs at Community Colleges

Mark Connelly posted a well-meaning, but somewhat off-key, column offering advice to candidates for full-time faculty positions at community colleges.  I’ll assume good faith and ascribe some of the stranger elements of the piece (teaching licenses? really?) to regional or state differences, and instead offer advice based on what I’ve seen on this side of the hiring table in the Northeast.

First, keep in mind that the college is hiring to solve its problem, not yours.  And full-time faculty positions are dishearteningly rare.  That means that you may find subfields or teaching modalities combined in ways that graduate programs typically don’t.  A smaller department may get a hire only when someone leaves, and that may be every ten years.  In that context, the opportunity cost of a suboptimal hire is quite high.  They are looking for someone who can fill in the hard-to-fill gaps, who actually wants to be there, and who looks likely to be a congenial colleague over the long haul.

That final factor -- sometimes called “fit” -- is easy to characterize as sinister or vapid, but I think that’s a copout.  In community colleges with tenure -- yes, they exist -- people often stick around for decades.  The abrasive-but-brilliant tortured artiste wears out his welcome quickly.  In a small department in which you’ll see the same three or four faces for the next ten or twenty years, the ability to work well with colleagues (and students!) counts.  I know that “fit” is sometimes used to naturalize racial or other hierarchies, but in my observation, community college faculties tend to be much more diverse -- certainly much more female -- than you find in the rest of higher ed.  

Second, though, community colleges are colleges.  They focus on teaching, rather than research, but the faculty know the norms of higher ed and came up through the usual grad school route.  They know their stuff, and want to be treated as the college professors that they are.  In that spirit, then, the advice to do a resume rather than a cv strikes me as terrible.  Yes, the cv should focus on teaching and whatever college service you’ve done.  But especially in the liberal arts fields, you should be able to show some scholarly depth.

The real focus, here, is in making difficult material accessible to students who may not be ideally prepared for it.  That requires understanding it pretty deeply yourself, so you can recraft it as your students need.  That’s why the teaching demonstration is so important here.  

What separates a hire from a near-miss is often the second level of teaching.  Okay, you’re good in the classroom.  How are you online?  Have you done course design?  What’s your experience with outcomes assessment?  How have you worked with students with disabilities?  English language learners?  Adult students?  

If you’re in a fairly traditional graduate program that hasn’t offered you exposure to any of those, you might want to find other ways to prepare yourself.  That could mean working in a campus tutoring center, or picking up an adjunct class at a community college, or finding workshops on instructional technology, or whatever else.  The key is to show that you’ve put actual thought into your teaching.  

Doctorates are nice, but not necessary.  I’m told that in some parts of the country, a doctorate will trigger skepticism, but I haven’t seen that myself. Both of the community colleges at which I’ve worked have had multiple Ivy League Ph.D.’s on the faculty, as well as a healthy number of Ph.D.’s from flagship state universities and similar places.  Don’t assume that a doctorate is disqualifying, but also don’t assume that you’d be the first Ph.D. they’ve ever seen.  Particularly in the liberal arts fields, they’re becoming common enough that they don’t raise eyebrows.

Community college teaching positions typically feature higher course loads than most places (other than for-profits), but they usually don’t have significant publication requirements, so you’ll actually have time to focus on your teaching.  The classes are often relatively small, especially when compared to the cavernous lecture halls at large universities.  If you think of teaching as a distraction from your research, then these are the wrong jobs for you.  But if you can see teaching as a craft in itself, worthy of reflection and experimentation, then these can be very congenial places.

Finally, of course, keep in mind that the market, ultimately, is not about you.  You can be pretty good and catch a lucky break, or you can be amazing and stuck on the periphery through no fault of your own.  There’s a tremendous element of luck to it, even more in the last few years.  I’ve seen plenty of searches in which the second-choice candidate was frankly excellent, and lost only because the first-choice candidate fit current needs more closely.  It happens.  Ultimately, you control only what you control.

If you really want to be Professor Kingsfield, weeding out the unworthy, these are not the places for you.  But if you attend to the craft of teaching with as much intellectual vigor and love as you do your subject matter, you may find a wonderful life here.

Students Not All the Same, Study Finds

It’s lovely when you get scholarly backing for something you already knew.  

Along those lines, I was happy to see this report by Erin Dunlop Velez, of the American Institutes of Research.  She looked at graduation rates and dropout rates across various student populations and institutional types, and she found that…

brace yourself…

Different students have different needs.  Specifically, about 30 percent of the students who dropped out of four-year colleges would have had a higher probability of eventually attaining a bachelor’s degree had they attended community colleges instead.

In other words, the idea that an institution’s overall graduation rate can be taken as any given student’s likelihood of graduating -- an animating assumption behind the whole “undermatching” literature, as well as no end of attacks on community colleges generally -- is false.  A significant number of students -- particularly low-income and first-generation students -- would be more likely to succeed at a community college.

That may sound obvious, and in a way, it is.  But it calls into question much of our current political discourse.

For example, it suggests that students who choose community colleges often know exactly what they are doing, even if much of the commentariat doesn’t.  Someone who has a strong local support network, and no family background in higher ed, may very well benefit from living at home and staying connected with their support networks while attending a low-cost institution that specializes in the first two years.  That benefit may take the form of graduation, or of early transfer, or of coming back later to try again.  (The latter two count as institutional failures, even though students often don’t experience them that way.)  

If we assume that students often know what they’re doing, then the “rescue” narrative starts to fall apart.  At that point, rather than asking how to punish colleges with low graduation rates, we should instead ask how to make the colleges worthy of their students’ valid ambitions.

Tressie McMillan Cottom has found similar truths in her examinations of students at for-profit colleges.  Yes, much of the for-profit sector has reason to be suspect.  But it’s also true that students who choose to enroll there aren’t just helpless sheep, waiting for the heroic crusader to save them.  They have their reasons, and if you listen closely, many of their reasons make sense.  (When I taught at DeVry, I found many of the students quite savvy and well-spoken about their choice.)  Yes, most choices happen within constraints.  But the right response to that is to look at those constraints, rather than to blame the students.

If we take Cottom’s and Velez’ work seriously, which I strongly believe we should, then we land in some very different places than the folks who look at higher ed merely as a “pipeline” do.  (For some reason, hydraulic metaphors are everywhere.  I keep hearing about “fixing” “leaks,” as if students are as interchangeable as water molecules.)  The pipeline metaphor assumes a unidirectional path towards a single goal.  But that’s not reality.  Students stop in and stop out, they “reverse” transfer, and they even change goals.  A unidirectional measure does violence to those intentions.

None of this is meant to imply that community colleges should stop working to improve.  It’s to say that we can’t really talk about colleges without understanding the different students who attend them.  Unless we make those distinctions thoughtfully and attentively, we’ll wind up shutting down the very places that provide the best opportunity for the people who need it most.

Students are not all the same.  Institutions shouldn’t be, either.  The hydraulic metaphor doesn’t hold water. (Sorry.) That should have been obvious by now, but if a new study helps make the case, I’m happy to highlight it.

Thoughts on “What Excellent Community Colleges Do”

Plato suggested that to know the good is to do the good, which is why I’m not a Platonist.  Knowing something and doing it are very different propositions.  That’s why I could finish a very good book about ways that community colleges can be more successful at what they do, nodding along contentedly as I read, and still come away feeling like something was missing.  

Joshua Wyner directs the Aspen Institute, which offers awards to community colleges for excellence in degree completion, equity, student learning, and labor market success.  He has a new book out, What Excellent Community Colleges Do, offering an overview of what he has learned in that role.

It’s brief, accessible, and very much worth reading, once you get used to the genre.  It’s sort of a cross between a foundation report and a scholarly analysis; it has a clear point of view, and it gets some digs in, but it’s intended mostly to provoke change.  I frequently found myself wanting more detail, but that’s not really the purpose of the book.

I won’t spoil the content -- honestly, it’s worth setting aside the time to run through it yourself -- but I did detect a couple of themes.  The first was legibility.  The kind of students in whom community colleges specialize often don’t know the unwritten rules of how to navigate higher education.  That’s not their fault, and it’s not an accurate measure of “merit,” whatever that is.  The better community colleges have stopped blaming students for that, and have instead developed intentional protocols to fill in the gaps.  Those protocols take a number of forms -- guided pathways, targeted advising, mandatory counseling, student success courses -- but they’re all based on the idea that students’ talents won’t really shine if they don’t know the rules of the game.  

The second was that while community colleges have been badly underfunded relative to the rest of higher ed, and have often fallen victim to policy decisions based on other sectors, they need get beyond their circumstances.  (As I put it in my own book, they need to make none of that matter.)  Yes, it’s easy to catalog the ways in which they’ve been dealt a bad hand, but it’s still up to them to play that hand as best they can.  

And that’s where I wanted more.  

For example, Wyner discusses the elimination of late registration as a way to improve student learning and completion.  (The idea is that students who show up having already missed class time are statistically far less likely to succeed than students who are there from day one.) Valencia, one of the colleges he highlights, has done that, and has partly compensated for the enrollment loss by running late-start sections of popular classes.  

All of which is great, but as those of us in the trenches know, late-start classes raise difficult financial aid issues.  From Wyner’s treatment, I don’t know how Valencia handled those.  To the extent that scaling and sustainability are important -- and Wyner acknowledges both -- classes that aren’t eligible for financial aid aren’t really helpful.

Wyner is quite good on outlining some of the policy-based dilemmas that community colleges face, even while refusing to let colleges off the hook.  Credit transfers to state colleges and universities are an obvious case; for all of the talk about student success, it’s not unusual for department chairs at receiving colleges to balk at “giving away too many credits.”  They tend to cherry-pick which courses they’ll allow in transfer, often inventing academic rationales but actually responding to very real material incentives -- conflicts of interest, if you prefer -- on their own campuses.

Some states, including my own, have recognized the issue and legislated solutions for public colleges and universities.  (In Massachusetts, the program is called “Mass Transfer.”)  The benefits of that kind of rule are twofold.  It relieves taxpayers of the burden of paying for the same course twice.  And less obviously, it creates a competitive pressure on the less selective private colleges to follow suit.  

I was surprised that Wyner largely left out credit-recovery and reverse-transfer students; they’re both significant portions of the student body, and they both raise challenges for folks who think only in traditional categories.  “Credit-recovery” refers to prospective students -- typically working adults -- who have a hodgepodge of credits from various stints at various schools, but no degree.  Credit-recovery programs help them fill in the gaps and turn a collection of courses into an actual degree.  Reverse transfers are students who start at four-year colleges but decide to switch to community colleges.  They’re typically younger than “credit recovery” students, though not always, and they raise difficult questions for the folks who like to cite transfer and graduation statistics.  The path doesn’t only run in one direction, even though most policy discussion assumes that it does.

Still, as a sort of primer and goad, Wyner’s book works.  Most of the colleges he examines face many of the same fiscal and policy constraints as everyone else, but they’ve managed to find ways to move forward anyway.  “Guided pathways,” learning communities, and careful curricular pruning are all realistic options for many colleges, and there’s much to be said for each.  And his relative circumspection around tactics actually helps with his discussion of personnel matters, where it would have been easy to take an ugly turn.  He acknowledges the issues, but then quickly looks away.  I consider that to his credit.

Excellent community colleges work in plenty of ways, often against considerable headwinds.  Wyner should be commended for gathering some of the greatest hits in a single, easily understood collection.  We can save the messy details for the sequel.

Ask the Administrator: A New Faculty Rank?

Thanks to the thoughtful readers who wrote in last week, concerned.  The major personal event was a good thing, not a crisis, but I appreciate the sentiments.

Meanwhile, a new correspondent wrote with a question:

I have a question/scenario that has come up at my college. The proposal has been made to add an Associate Instructor position. We currently have 4 levels of full-time faculty: instructor, and then assistant/associate/full professor. A faculty member moves up through the ranks by completing more graduate school and/or more years at the CC level. I believe that most early-career folks start out at instructor level. Functionally, there's no difference between what an inst. versus a prof. does. There's no tenure (we are all on 1, 3, or 5 year contracts); we all do student advising, committee/governance, and scholarship. We (most of us) teach 30 credit hours a year and have no summer duties unless we step into Asst Dean or other roles.

The Assoc. Inst. position that is being proposed, however, will be different. It will NOT have any non-teaching duties. They will have no assigned student advisees, and no on-paper expectation of committee or other college-wide work. They will teach "33 to 39 credit hours" and will be eligible for renewable contracts (unlike one-year restricted positions), and benefits. They must have the same minimum credentials as an instructor, but their pay will be less--the range minimum is about $9,000 less, the max about $15,000 less. Although not required by our state system, my college wishes to put the following additional restriction on the position, at least for the time being: they may only be hired to teach courses with a set syllabus and assessments, and only in areas with "demonstrable need." For us, for now, that largely means an Assoc. Inst. could be hired to teach ONLY developmental mathematics or development English (no higher-level classes). And they'd be teaching 16/17 to 19/20 credit hours per semester of, say, developmental math. (Which the math profs do NOT envy...) 

The final pertinent piece of information: our president has offered to provide supplemental funding to any campus that wishes to take an open instructor position and convert it into 2 assoc. inst. positions. 

The plan is being proposed as a way to convert adjunct-taught classes into classes taught by FT with benefits assoc. instructors. If this plan gives more PT employees access to secure employment and benefits, that's a wonderful thing. My concerns, though, are that we as a college will be institutionalizing the expectation (unwritten but not unspoken) that adjuncts and soon Assoc. Inst. advise students, serve on committees, and involve themselves in the non-teaching aspects of the college. In short, doing more than they are paid to do. If they do not, the alternative is that fewer FT faculty are advising MORE students, doing more governance, etc. 

I know that it might seem like a non-problem, and perhaps it is just a molehill that I'm making into a mountain. But I can't help but think of parallels to the nationwide conversation about the role of and our increasingly reliance on adjuncts, and wonder if this proposal isn't a step in a wrong direction? 

I'd very much like to know whether other community colleges have made a similar move, what the impacts have been on the other FT faculty/the institution more generally, and - most of all - what possible issues am I not thinking about? I'm sure there are many!

I’m guessing that the proposed new rank is a way to bring some stability to hiring, and to make the best of the coming Affordable Care Act mandate.  It basically splits the difference between traditional adjunct roles and traditional full-time roles, and offers the institution the ability to find some cost savings by trading off some non-teaching duties.  

Of course, that assumes that the trade-off actually occurs.  In reading the letter, I’m struck by the gap between the “on-paper” expectation of no duties beyond teaching, and the reference to “unwritten but not unspoken” expectations of advising and committee work, among other things.  To the extent that the latter are significant, then this isn’t so much a trade-off as a second tier of salary.  

“Tiered” contracts and employment arrangements aren’t new.  Many industries offer newer hires lower salaries, lesser pensions, or higher payroll deductions than earlier hires got when they started (controlling for inflation).  A “tiered” approach is a way to cut labor costs over the long term without antagonizing incumbent employees, which is why it has become so popular.  It’s a holding action. The folks who will pay the brunt of it aren’t at the table when the decision is made.

In this case, I’m guessing that the new rank amounts to tiering, with the exemption from advising and college service as a sort of fig leaf.  

In the short term, I don’t see much impact on the workloads of incumbent full-time faculty.  If these positions replace adjunct positions, and adjuncts weren’t required to advise or do service, then the impact should be quite small.  Over time, though, the new rank will probably take the place of what would have been new traditional hires.  (The president’s two-for-one deal seems designed to encourage exactly that.)  As that happens, the advising and service workload could fall more heavily on the remaining traditional faculty, by default.  

I’d also be concerned about the long-term implications for shared governance.  The line about restricting this rank to courses with prescribed content suggests some awareness of the difficulty of combining shared governance with a tiered system.  To the extent that the sphere of those eligible to participate in shared governance shrinks, the “shared” part becomes more questionable.  Shared governance is a time commitment -- as Oscar Wilde put it, he liked to keep his evenings free -- and increased teaching loads compete for that time.  

All of that said, though, the new rank is probably much more humane and appealing than the pure adjunct role it partly succeeds.  An adult salary, even a modest one, plus health insurance, beats most per-course rates, and offers more stability.  It may not be what a lot of people had in mind when they went to grad school, but then, neither was adjuncting.  Among actually existing options, there’s something to be said for it.

I’ve heard of variations on this at other places.  They’re sometimes called “professors of practice” or something similar.  I’m curious to hear from my wise and worldly readers who work in places with ranks like that about unanticipated outcomes. Folks who’ve worked in those settings -- is there something the rest of us should know?

Thanks for the note.  I suspect others are wrestling with similar issues.

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

Friday Fragments

Earlier this week I ordered a copy of What Excellent Community Colleges Do, by Joshua Wyner.  It arrived last night.

The Boy:   Is the Amazon package a gadget or a book?

Me: It’s a book.

TB: Oh.  What is it?

Me: What Excellent Community Colleges Do.

TB: From the “most popular books” collection.  Why would you read __that__?

Me: To help me do my job.

(pause)

TB: You mean, you read books so you can work __harder__?

Me: I read them so I can work better.

TB: At HOME?

Me: Well, yeah.

TB: That’s just wrong.

The world looks different at twelve...

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Between the kids’ February break (!) and far too many snow days, activities have been at a premium.  We picked up a cheap paperback compilation of crossword puzzles, and discovered that they work pretty well as a group activity.  One person calls out clues and parameters (“six letters, ends with an “r.”)  

One clue was something like “peak,” and the answer was “acme.”  

The Girl: “Isn’t “acme” a kind of anvil?”

Wile E. Coyote lives on.

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The West Hills Community College District, in California, is experimenting with allowing students to register for classes a full year in advance.  The selling point for students, as near as I can tell, is that they’ll be able to get the classes they want at the times they want.

I don’t see it as terribly likely to work for more than a small number of students, but it’s worth trying.  

The obvious danger is that only the type A students will take advantage of the program.  Students are required either to pay upfront or to arrange financial aid upfront for the entire year, so I don’t foresee too much of an issue with “placeholder” registrations, though I could be wrong on that.  

In the best case, students’ self-commitments become self-fulfilling, and the college is better able to plan how many sections of what to run in a given semester.  In the worst case, they’ve just mightily increased the workloads for the financial aid and registrar’s offices, without really solving anything.  

I’ll be curious to see how “sticky” the students’ commitments turn out to be.  My guess is that relatively few students will actually take the plunge, and most of those that will, would have been fine anyway.  But I wouldn’t mind being proved wrong on that.  Give it a shot, West Hills.  I’ll be genuinely curious to see how it goes.

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The Girl and I went to the local Daddy-Daughter dance last night.  She’s getting too big to just pick up and twirl like I used to, but she’s still young enough that going to a dance with Daddy is appealing.  I’ll hold on to that as long as she lets me.

She spent most of the dance goofing around with her friends, which is as it should be, but I got a few dances in.  We had our picture taken, and this year made the strategic decision to avoid the chocolate fountain before pictures.  It’s the right call, and I stand by it.

As we left, each girl was presented with a teddy bear to take home with her.  On the drive home, she pondered what to name it.

As we pulled in to the garage, she announced that she’s naming the bear Matthew.

I’ll hold on to that one, too.

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Program Note:  The blog will be on break next week, as I’ll be preoccupied with a fairly major personal event.  It’ll be back on Monday, March 10.