May 24, 2012, 2:04 pm
By Rob Jenkins
As my colleagues and I gathered recently to hear our new interim president address the college, we knew the news would not be good. And it wasn’t. For the upcoming academic year, at least, we’re probably looking at larger classes, increased teaching loads, furlough days, a virtual moratorium on travel, and perhaps even layoffs.
And yet, as we filed out of the auditorium afterwards, the prevailing mood seemed to be one of optimism. That’s partly, I think, because we have confidence in our new “pilot” to pull the plane out of its nosedive. But it was also due, in no small part, to the fact that we had just been addressed as if we were intelligent adults.
Missing completely from the interim president’s remarks were meaningless platitudes, patronizing buzzwords, and blatant aggrandizement. In their place were difficult truths, stated plainly and succinctly, with little in the way of…
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May 15, 2012, 11:55 am
By Rob Jenkins
A couple of years ago, I went back to high school.
No, my life is not like a bad movie on the Disney Channel. I actually found myself, after nearly 30 years, back on a couple of high-school campuses. I was at one school to teach dual-enrollment college classes and at another (my son’s school) to help out as a volunteer coach.
What I discovered is that I’m glad I don’t have to spend all of my time at high schools. My decision to become a college professor instead of a school teacher was, in retrospect, the right one. In fact, I’ll go a step further and say that I hope none of my kids becomes a high-school or grade-school teacher, even though I know at least one of them is thinking about it. I’d much rather they chose a career where the working conditions are slightly less stressful and stifling, such as TSA agent or pro-western journalist in Iran.
Don’t get me wrong: Teaching at …
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May 8, 2012, 1:22 pm
By Rob Jenkins
Over the past few months, I’ve been writing about higher-education administration as if it were some sort of Manichean duality: authoritarians versus libertarians, control freaks versus true leaders, power-mongers versus those who exercise authority properly.
The reality, of course, is that administrators don’t always fall at one end of the “good-bad” spectrum or the other. There is a broad middle area, and I’ve known plenty of “leaders” during my 27-year career who have taken up permanent residence there.
Please note that when I say “middle area,” I don’t mean that in a positive sense. I’m not saying that these people are moderates or that they’ve somehow arrived at the perfect balance between authoritarianism and libertarianism. Rather, I’m suggesting that they’re neither hot nor cold but tepid. I refer to them as “Lumps,” because they’re mostly just there.
Simply put, The…
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April 30, 2012, 12:23 pm
By Rob Jenkins
When I talk to graduate students about academic careers in the nation’s community colleges, I try to be as honest as I can. I want them to know that, although there are many great reasons to work at a two-year school, and I wouldn’t trade careers with anybody, there are also some undeniable negatives.
My purpose, in these presentations, is not to persuade attendees that the community-college life is necessarily for them. Rather, I try to give them as clear a picture of that life as possible, so that they can then make up their own minds about whether or not they might be interested in a two-year college career.
Sometimes, though, I’m afraid I might be a little too honest–especially when I talk about the fact that community colleges will rarely consider anyone who doesn’t have significant college-level teaching experience.
Two categories of graduate students tend to be…
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April 19, 2012, 1:23 pm
By Rob Jenkins
It happens every semester: About four weeks before the end of the term, two or three students in each class simply disappear. Sometimes I feel as though I’m watching the opening scenes of a “Without a Trace” episode. I look out over the classroom and see their happy, expectant faces–and then the air shimmers, I rub my eyes, and when I look up again all I see is their empty desks.
This phenomenon has always left me feeling a bit dismayed, not to mention somewhat bewildered. Why would people come to class for 12 weeks, then suddenly stop showing up at the very end? In some cases, they’re pretty good students who have turned in all their assignments and maintained a passing grade in the course. Dropping out at this point just means they’ll have to sit through those same 12 weeks again next semester, plus finish out the last four. (Not to mention what it does to their GPA.)
To be fair…
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April 11, 2012, 12:58 pm
By Rob Jenkins
Anyone who thinks that being an administrator means you get to tell everybody else what to do either hasn’t read George Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” or else completely missed the point.
Orwell (nee Eric Blair) wrote the essay about an incident that took place when he was a young soldier serving as a kind of constable in a small village in British-occupied Burma. A tame elephant had gone “rogue,” destroying a great deal of property and killing a couple of people. As the primary local authority figure, it was his job to hunt down the elephant and, if necessary, put it down before it could cause further damage.
By the time he caught up to the elephant, however, with most of the villagers at his heels, its fit had passed and it was peacefully eating grass beside the road. “As soon as I saw the elephant,” he writes, “I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot…
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April 3, 2012, 12:22 pm
By Rob Jenkins
Gene Fant’s excellent recent post, “Academe as Slacker Haven,” caught my attention because it reminded me of an experience I had a couple of months ago while serving on a symposium panel.
But before I go into that, I’d like to offer my own take on the subject of academic “work.” I’ve often thought that the problem creative types have–and I would include most academics in that description–is that so much of what we do isn’t visible to others, and the part that is visible often doesn’t look like work.
A professor sitting in his or her office staring out the window may well be working–plotting out that new article or book chapter or contemplating a better way to teach some topic–but to anyone wandering by, it just looks as though the professor is daydreaming. That’s one reason I keep my office door closed most of the time.
Even when I’m not sitting in my office, I might very we…
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March 27, 2012, 1:15 pm
By Rob Jenkins
The other day I exchanged e-mails and eventually spoke on the phone with a young woman who is about a year away from finishing her Ph.D. in a humanities discipline at one of the country’s top universities.
When I say a “young woman,” what I mean is that she’s younger than I am. She’s actually a little older than most graduate students and on her second career. A few years ago, she told me, while working as a trainer in the corporate world, she realized that what she really wants to do is teach. So she decided to go back to school, get a Ph.D., and become a college professor.
Sounds pretty unrealistic, huh? Those who have been keeping up with the dismal state of the academic job market, especially in the humanities, are probably thinking to themselves, “She should have kept the job she had.” No doubt there would be some truth to that—except this particular story has a …
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March 19, 2012, 1:44 pm
By Rob Jenkins
Anytime the President of the United States sends American servicemen and women into harm’s way, politicians and pundits are sure to argue over whether or not he has the authority to do so.
I’m not qualified to participate in that kind of constitutional debate. But I can offer the following observation: whether or not the President has the authority to deploy troops in a given situation, he certainly has the power to do so.
That’s because authority and power are not the same thing, even though many leaders fail to grasp the distinction. In particular, an alarming number of academic administrators these days don’t seem to understand the difference between exercising duly constituted authority and merely wielding power.
Authority is essentially the capacity to carry out one’s duties and responsibilities. Faculty members have the authority to assign final grades, because doing so is…
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March 6, 2012, 10:39 am
By Rob Jenkins
For years I’ve tried to figure out how to get my “Introduction to Literature” students–99 percent of them not English majors–to appreciate literature. And by “appreciate,” I don’t mean “like.” That’s probably a lost cause. I just mean I want them to be able to understand what a writer is saying, how he or she goes about saying it, and what relevance it might have to their lives.
As anyone who has taught a course like that knows very well, this is an uphill battle. Or at least it was for me until a couple of years ago, when I had an epiphany. Two, actually. The first was that the thinking process I’ve been trying to get students to apply to literary texts is really not that different from what my undergraduate science professors referred to as the scientific method. The second was that, in our hyper-technological society, most students definitely see the relevance of science, even if…
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