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The Power of Professional and Community Service

December 5, 2011, 3:51 pm

By Allison M. Vaillancourt

Organizing a professional conference can be gut-wrenching. Will enough people register? Will the concurrent sessions be compelling? Will the keynote speaker be delayed by thunderstorms in Houston?

Three days before one particular conference, I was relieved to receive the keynoter’s slides, as the content she included was exactly what I’d hoped to see … until I got to slide 16. There, toward the bottom of a list of companies that had lost their way in the integrity jungle, was the name of the company that was underwriting the conference, and, hence, her address. I panicked.

This experience (which actually ended without anyone crying, bleeding, or suing) provided me with about a dog year of experience in corporate and academic diplomacy, and demonstrated the career-development benefits of professional service and community volunteer work.

To be sure, there are some who argue that these kinds of activities are a distraction from “real work” and encourage their colleagues to do the bare minimum required or expected. I think this perspective is misguided. Professional and community service provides opportunities to expand and extend professional contacts, expertise, and influence and can promote new ways of thinking by pulling us out of our routines and exposing us to different experiences and perspectives. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned through service activities.

• You should ladder your certificates of deposit.

• Corporate sponsors have more to share than cash.

• The reasons donors give for offering financial support are often not the real reasons they donate money.

• By-laws can come to haunt you.

• If a speaker’s contract calls for fresh flowers in the dressing room, you may come to regret extending the invitation.

• How much cheese it takes to feed 250 people.

What have you learned from service in professional organizations or volunteer work within the community in which you live? Has this work enhanced your “day job” in any way?

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  • electronicmuse

    Your concerns have great credibility, particularly the idea that “caretakers” will take over courses that originators have created. The real strength of the non-profit education sector is that it is not homogenized-as inevitably the for-profit sector will gravitate toward. This is because, as you indicate, that courses in the non-profit sector are essentially “owned” by faculty-who will naturally tend toward diversity-not homogenization. Never mind who nominally “owns” a faculty member’s brick and mortar course . . . rare is the situation where another person can simply “take over” such courses. This could be done quite easily with online structures . . .

    I’ve worked both sides of the street. Don’t expect for-profits to manifest the same values of non-profits. It ain’t the way it wants to go . . . and, I expect for-profits to “win” the race to dominate online education. But, that is another much longer discussion.

  • electronicmuse

    Rare is the conduit that will not seek to own the content pouring though it, whether it be for-profit or non-profit. Golden rule: those who have the gold will rule. And professors (content producers) could not possibly prevail over institutions.

  • electronicmuse

    Evidently Polly doesn’t know just how easy it is to “re-purpose” someone else’s work. It happens all the time out here in the Real World-from reverse engineering complicated electronic designs, to the myriad of other (completely legal) schemes that subsume someone else’s work. It’s possible to copyright discrete collections of words, but not a novel viewpoint, or even a basic curriculum design-regardless of how clever it might be. Words can be paraphrased. Graphics can be mimicked. Certainly “subject matter” is not subject to copyright, so it’s going to be real difficult to imagine that ” . . . the institution cannot merely seize the instructor’s work and use it without permission.” And, there will be plenty of people around who will do this “re-purposing.” The actual teaching of a course is duck soup, it is the developing of a course where a faculty member earns h/er keep. Unfortunately, such developments are highly transportable.

    Course designs and curriculum development are not novels or musical compositions, where copyright issues are less cloudy. Better rethink your comment quoted above. Donoghue’s concerns are legitimate, and are well articulated in this article-whether he has the appropriate “experience” or not. Sometimes imagination trumps experience.

    Agree with you about the online environment being suited to all manner of courses, including humanities.

  • nanzing

    I find the notion of direct to student teaching intriguing but how would employers and graduate schools assess a folder of transcripts from a variety of professors?

  • nanzing

    Jerry has hit one of the nails squarely on the head: in these discussions of the pros and cons of online education the “high quality” of face to face is always taken for granted. 3 minutes on any student rating website will hammer home the point that face to face varies wildly and widely; some folks in classrooms are terrible teachers, and some of the curriculum being taught especially at lower levels (by any willing body they can hire at the last minute to teach it) is too bad for the best prof-in-training/early-rank-prof to save. The scrutiny ought to go both ways.

  • electronicmuse

    I don’t have a clue. But, the notion that a College degree constitutes some kind of guarantee to prospective employers is growing longer in the tooth day by day.

  • big_giant_head

    Um.  Why on earth would either of you think there is no scrutiny of f2f classes?  Nobody has ever claimed that they are uniformly excellent.  There is _so much_ scrutiny, in fact, that you can go get a PhD in it if you want. 

    It’s just that we all know what we’re dealing with, good and bad, when talking about the traditional classroom, and it isn’t the subject we’re discussing here. 

  • EricAdler

    You wrote:
    “At times when the weather is exceedingly warm, we hear that this is
    proof of AGW.  But when the weather is similarly cold, we hear that
    this, too, is proof of AGW (for example, from Robert Kennedy jr.)”

    No climate scientists argues that weather in a given day or month at a given location is proof of any climate trend. You will never find such an argument  in any scientific publication on climate science.

    Indeed you quoted Robert Kennedy Jr. who is not a climate scientist. I don’t form my opinion on climate science based on what I read from history teachers or attorneys, unless they are citing real climate scientists.

    Robert Kennedy Jr. who is an attorney did not make make the argument you attributed to him.
     
    http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/news/rfk-jr-15-months-ago-global-warming-means-no-snow-or-cold-dc

    He was not talking about a single winter, but rather about a number of years he remembers in his childhood and pointed out that in general recent years have seen less snow in Washington DC. People normally don’t go skiing or sledding anymore like they used to. This is not a reflection on a single day or months weather, and does qualify as an observation on climate change although it is not global but local climate.

    In fact the opinion editor of the Washington Examiner, from whom you apparently get your opinion on climate science, (you didn’t give a reference but it seems I have found the story online) made the following statement:

    “Having shoveled my walk five times in the midst of this past weekend’s
    extreme cold and blizzard, I think perhaps RFK, Jr. should leave weather
    analysis to the meteorologists instead of trying to attribute every
    global phenomenon to anthropogenic climate change.”

    It is pretty clear that he is trying to confuse  people into thinking that a single blizzard event outweighs the record of many years of weather which we call climate.

    I am dismayed that a professor of History gets his opinons on Climate Change from an opinon editor in a right wing political publication, rather than looking at publications by experts in climatology, and would want expose his folly to the public. This does not seem very scholarly to me.

  • JonasN

    Eric

    Again you are making wide, sweeping, general statements pretending to speak for ‘climate scientists’ (which you definitely are not) and claiming that you can determine which ones are of the ‘real’ variety and which ones aren’t.

    Maybe you should look up what Kevin Trenberth has to say about reversing the meaning of the ‘null hypothesis’ wrt weather events and climate change.

    You might miss most of the points, of course, but there is more to Bergmans observation than just some lines from a newspaper editor.

  • drjennycrisp

    I learned to write grants first as a board member of a nonprofit and only later brought that into my career.

  • dashwood

    The issue is not necessarily Petrino’s relationship with the young woman, though that is unsavory enough. The issue is that she was recently hired by the football program. What does it say about Petrino that he hired the woman with whom he is involved in an “inappropriate relationship” (to use his words). To what future scrutiny (and perhaps liability) does this open the university?

  • Socratease2

    She wasn’t hired by the football program or by Petrino, she was hired by Student Development office which is part of the athletic dept’s academic services. That position works with all sports, not just football. So, that is not his problem at the moment.

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