November 02, 2009, 09:57 AM ET

Administrative Top-Heaviness?

Who posts "comments" to blogs? And why?

It isn't just happenstance that some of the most dismissive and hostile "comments" to blog posts come from anonymous readers. Anonymity gives courage to the cowardly. And that was the case long before the Internet.

Of course, it doesn't even make sense to respond to dismissive comments. Nothing good can come of it.

I'm not sure that both of the comments listed below are dismissive, but I did want to take a second to reframe a couple of responses to my recent "mentoring" post.

The first, posted by "goxewu," is simple and straightforward:

Wait a minute. There's an "associate dean" for just "undergraduate studies" in just one school (and the middleweight one of "communications," at that) at Penn? Prof. Jackson is hereby enjoined from ever, ever complaining in the slightest about the problem of administrative top-heaviness in higher education.

This "goxewu" ignores the point of my piece and asks why a "middleweight" school like "communications" would even need an "associate dean" for its undergraduates? Is it really that atypical for "just one school" to have a dean devoted to undergraduate education? If anything, I would have imagined that "goxewu" would have asked why communications was a school at all, instead of just a department. The lack of such an additional query seems telling.

And why this drive-by attack on "communications" as middleweight in the first place? What does that even mean? Goxewu represents a lot of people (academics and nonacademics) who relish the idea of banishing entire fields with the snobbish wave of a hand. In faddish discussions about interdisciplinarity, we should spend some time interrogating our assumptions about disciplinary pecking orders, assumptions that get translated into all kinds of easily assumed hierarchies within the academy.

The second comment, left by "vfichera," responds to the actual substance of my posting. S/he quotes some of what I wrote:

"I have been touched by some equally memorable students here, and I have been trying to ask myself how I can be most helpful to them, especially in the context of an academic lifestyle that can already feel so overburdened and hectic."

And then responds with the following:

A little bit of "Prairie Home Companion" would be useful here or a touch of Jaime Escalante ("Stand and Deliver") -- all of the students are potentially memorable. Mentoring is not about just helping the "memorable" to achieve greater heights of success but of unfolding the talents of all of the students, of touching those who feel out-of-touch, of being a true advisor instead of having "professional advisors" for students to "relieve the faculty of that burden."

The corporatization of the university has indeed been achieved by proliferating administrations which have, with the consent of the tenured faculty, eroded the traditional roles of faculty into bits and pieces which are "adjuncted-out" to the point where undergraduates are even paying tuition to teach and advise themselves, as "undergraduate TAs" and "peer-mentors" -- often for academic credit.

Mentoring starts with faculty's acceptance and faithfulness to the full panoply of teaching and governance responsibilities, not just research. As the tenured faculty participate in the unraveling of their own duties and responsibilities onto more "manageable" personnel, they are "enabling" nothing less than the transformative unraveling of the idea of the university itself.

I feel like vfichera is picking a fight with someone else, a fight that he or she has probably been waging for quite a while.

vfichera's discussion about the "corporatization of the university" should be taken seriously, and s/he lists a number of reasons (not excerpted above) why "the tenured professoriate" should do better by its students, which was the point of my post.

I don't want to fall into that old Clintonian trap of parsing "what is is," but should we talk about what it means to call a student memorable?

I remember students for any number of reasons, including students "who feel out-of-touch." vfichera is right that student mentoring isn't a zero-sum thing. We should take on all comers, especially if they are willing to meet us close to half way. But is it wrong to remember some students more than others? Is anything else even possible?

But part of vfichera's real point is about the shifting of duties from tenured/tenure-tracked faculty to the growing number of hired guns working on an adjunct basis -- and with much less job security. The adjunctification of higher education is an important issue. I'm just not completely convinced of vfichera's way of linking it to my post on mentoring.

Of course, comments to blogs (like blog entries themselves) often boast a tangential logic, stream-of-consciousness as organizing principle. Fair enough. And vfichera's point is still well taken: The move to relieve faculty of more and more of their advising duties is something that faculty members should be spending much more time discussing.

Comments

1. macheath - November 02, 2009 at 11:24 am

this is getting a little too post-modern for me. A blog about postings to another of the author's own blogs, that includes the comments in the current blog? how about something that at least pretends to be new?

2. goxewu - November 02, 2009 at 12:45 pm

1. I post comments for fun. Good, clean, quasi-intellectual, informative fun, but fun nevertheless.

2. The author of the post does not (repeat: does NOT) determine the nature of the comment. Commenters are not students in the post author's seminar who get a wrist slap if they "ignore the point of [the author's] piece." I happened to notice a little side-issue in Prof. Jackson's post and thought I'd comment on it. (If my comment was so off-topic, why on earth did Prof. Jackson title this post with the very point my comment made?)

3. Compared to "heavyweight" schools, which might include the likes of School of Humanties, School of Engineering, School of the Physical Sciences, School of the Arts, a School of Communication is "middleweight." Why? Because it's kind of hollow, with a core-subject hole in the middle, i.e., communicating about WHAT (such as, perhaps, the humanities, physical sciences, engineering, etc.)? But because a School of Communications does concern something--the media--that insinuates itself into every corner of our lives, and because it's not total lightweight stuff, such as School of Education Policy Studies, a School of Communications is middleweight. And why is "middleweight" so hurtful? It's in the middle, neither especially heavy nor especially light. Not all schools in a university can be heavyweights.

4. My comment's "lack of such an additional query" is a red herring. I know full well that a School of Communication might contain separate departments for Film, TV, Radio, Print, New Media, etc., etc., and I was trying to be concise, and not get sucked into prolixity, as I am here. I was making a comment, not conducting an interview.

5. I wasn't "banishing" an entire field with the wave of a hand, I was merely labeling it "middleweight." There's a difference. And this whole business about "interrogating our assumptions about disciplinary pecking orders" lies somewhere between convenience and rationalization. I do, like everyone else, engage in de facto ranking things and find it a little strange to be chastened on hierarchies by, ahem, an Associate Dean (who ranks below the Dean, who ranks below the Provost, who ranks below the President, who ranks....etc.). The length of Prof. Jackson's response relative to the brevity of my original comment says that I touched upon an inconvient truth about which Prof. Jackson is especially sensitive.

6. No, it's not "atypical" for one school to have an administrator in charge of undergraduate education. That's the problem. These Assistant and Associat Deans and Provosts, and even Vice-Presidents, are breeding like mold all over the place. If the School of Communication's faculty and department chairs do their jobs, the School wouldn't need an Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education. Now, that's just a guess, but unless Penn is wildly different from other universities, Prof. Jackson's post is yet another example of why the faculty-to-student ratio in American higher education is dropping and the administrator-to-student ratio is climbing.

7. None of my business, but Prof. Bauerlein's method of simply adding his voice to the comments on one of his posts, instead of devoting a whole post to comments, seems better--more efficient, appropriate, and, well, more fun.

3. johnljacksonjr - November 02, 2009 at 02:40 pm

macheath: postmodern, indeed. but i wouldn't take that as "always already" a bad thing--or as me not pretending to render something new (or at least newfangled).

goxewu: i've taken your advice and responded in "comment" form, although i do think that there is no way this blog post on your early comment wasn't "fun" in just the sense you imply.

But maybe it seemed unfair. I apologize for that. If anything, it should indicate that I am reading comments and taking them seriously, even as serious fun. That should count for something, no?

I love your "inconvenient truth" line. I think that I'm sensitive to this idea that people will flippantly toss off dismissals of entire fields of inquiry. Annenberg's School for Communication encompasses faculty with advanced degrees in sociology, political science, anthropology, history, law, and communication. There is no reason to think that it isn't as rigorous as any of Penn's other schools might be. (Actually, we don't have any of the "departments" you list in your follow-up comment. Annenberg doesn't approach the study of communication that way. Even if it did, the "middleweight" reference would still urk me. But that might also be becasue I just don't like boxing.)

Moreover, it wasn't your fundamental contention that I found problematic. We are human, which means that we hierarchize. I get it. I also think your conerns about growth in the size of academic administration is a valid thing to debate (although it is complicated by the fact that you are talking about an administrative position filled by a member of the standing faculty). But what troubled me most was what I interpreted as the tone of your piece. There seemed to be very little that was "fun" about it, except insofar as you wanted Communication to serve as the butt of your joke. I am offering a different punchline.

I do think there is a logic to the way your are divvying up academic worth that doesn't work for me, but I do appreciate that maybe I should have just left you alone. Sorry to drag your comments from the rafters to center stage. But at least you have your anonymity. I'm out here talking to what feels like a ghost in my machine.

4. goxewu - November 02, 2009 at 03:45 pm

As I've had to say endless times to Prof. Bauerlein, anonynmity (or pseudonymity) is what unpaid content providers (a familiar term in a School of Communication, no?) are granted in order for them to keep providing unpaid content. There's nothing preventing "Brainstorm" commenters from using their real names right now, but somehow about 99 percent of them (peace be unto Sandy Thatcher) choose not to. "Brainstorm" could institute a rule that all commenters must use their real names. How many comments would "Brainstorm" get then?

"Annenberg's School for Communication encompasses faculty with advanced degrees in sociology, political science, anthropology, history, law, and communication." But how many departments of sociology, political science, anthropology, or history would hire a faculty member with a Ph.D. in "Communication"?

"...an administrative position filled by a member of the standing faculty." Does that mean Prof. Jackson still teaches his full load and does the administrative part for free? If he gets either extra money or a reduction in class load for being an Associate Dean then that means an addition to the administration. An "additional administrator" doesn't necessarily mean one person doing the job full-time; it can be a couple of professors who step away from teaching to do it half-time. Fungibility doesn't obviate top-heaviness.

All that said, Prof. Jackson and Prof. Bauerlein are my two favorite "Brainstorm" bloggers; they talk about serious stuff in a direct, sincere and unhaughty manner. I'm a liberal and generally agree with Prof. Jackson and disagree with Prof. Bauerlein on both academic and political matters, as my previous comments elsewhere indicate. But I still have to call 'em as I see 'em: "Communication" as a genuine academic discipline ranks above "Recreation Administration" but below Classics or Physics (neither of which is my field), and the existence of an Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies within a single discipline is another example of top-heavy administrations.

5. vfichera - November 02, 2009 at 06:53 pm

Actually, Prof. Jackson, I'd like to thank you for embedding comments by commenters into your posting. For one thing, it makes it harder for the "moderators" to delete them.

As "goxewu" knows from another blog where we both participated, the CHE likes to censor postings, especially if they are a bit critical of the CHE's "priorities" -- so yes, criticizing administrators (like criticizing the CHE) is often taboo. (I guess it depends on who's "moderating" and how active s/he is at "stalking" Internet prey.) Suffice it to say that administrators' voices are more often in the postings than in the comments -- that might help you to understand the use of pseudonyms.

I did hesitate a bit to jump on "goxewu"'s bandwagon, so to speak but, as s/he pointed out, the hybrid of faculty/administrator which your posting introduced muddied the waters of your topic.

Yes, the "unraveling" of "the idea of the university" by administrations is a war that is being waged on many fronts. The subject of your last post, mentoring, is a form of "advising": the spin-off of advisement and mentoring from the faculty to other -- what I have called more "manageable" and managerial -- administrative personnel is the issue I was attempting to foreground.

Unfortunately, you misunderstand me if you thought that I was diverting your posting to adjuncts as advisors and mentors. I may not have been clear; I was trying to highlight the entire departments of "student advisement" run not by faculty but by full-time "professionals" (usually wanna-be administrators) who often actually simply coordinate student peer-advisors who do the mentoring for the faculty.

To be "memorable" a student has to be perceived as an individual in the first place -- not just another face, or another name on an enrollment list, in the amphitheater of a lecture course (surely, even Annenberg is guilty of the use of large-enrollment classes). By the time a student has the opportunity to become "memorable," s/he may be at junior standing. So, my quarrel with the quality of mentoring is linked to the quality of advisement -- its devolution from the purview and profile of the faculty, with the faculty's consent and often active approval.

All that said, I daresay that many of the faculty in the nation's higher education institutions now spend much of their time lamenting that students just aren't what they used to be -- forgetting that, first and foremost, faculty aren't what they used to be. Therein lies the crux of the matter: the professor-student relationship is the heart of the university. Whatever undermines, distances, dilutes, minimizes that relationship is an enemy of "the idea of the university."

Indeed, mentoring is actually the best faculty response to the corporatization of the university -- and if writing in the morning is a way of preparing one's soul for that joy and responsibility, then yes, let's set that alarm. Students, by and large, live on campuses where the faculty are increasingly absent from their lives outside of the classroom -- in short, true mentoring is rare. Many, if not most, faculty spend less and less time in the company of students and, for them, the idea/ls of mentoring are as foreign as the idea of the university -- to the detriment of both.