From the Archives: On Blogging

Thank you. Useful info. I am starting a new class for continuing education for teachers. It is an Independent Travel Study: Actual or Virtual Trip. You’ve clarified info for me.

If my memory is correct, the issue is not DOE regulations but individual state laws. The issue is what under state law creates “presence in the state” for the institution. If presence is established then, as you note, the institution must comply with those state laws. The laws vary widely; in some states it must be a physical location, in others simply having a student from that state is sufficient, in others it may be faculty location, advertising, or some other factor … or a combination of factors. It is necessary to check the laws in each state. I congratulate you in having students from 20 states in your online classes, but depending on which 20 states registration may not be needed in all of them.

WASC commissioned a legal review of the proposed DOE regulation, which is described in the review (dated June 30, 2010) as “Existing federal law requires that, as a condition for eligibility for Title IV funding, private postsecondary institutions are legally authorized to operate within the States in which they are issuing degrees. Under the Proposed Regulation, an institution will not be considered legally authorized unless all of the following four conditions exist: (1) the State in which the institution operates has a method of formally approving of the institution, whether by charter, license or other document issued by an appropriate State agency or entity; (2) the authorization is specifically for programs beyond secondary education; (3) the authorization is subject to adverse action by the State; and (4) the State reviews and acts on complaints concerning an institution and enforces applicable State laws.”

Part of the issue is where is the degree granted — where the student is resident or where the granting institution is located? Note, too, that the regulation affects Title IV eligibility, not degree granting authority per se.

This is a welcome development. I hate to look at the anonymous comments responding to newspaper articles; the horrible racism and stupidity just depress me too much. The issues surrounding civility are really crucial to the maintenance of our democracy, ultimately. Great that someone in academia is paying attention.

I agree in part with Mr. Whitaker that “critical thinking” is not a monopoly exclusive to philosophy, but I do think training in philosophy can help attune one’s mind to making connections that others more narrowly focused might miss. I offer, by way of example, an article I wrote on “Dissertations into Books?” that analyzes how subsystemic rationality can result in dysfunctionality at the system level: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html. I credit my background in philosophy with enabling me to discern such problems in part of the higher education system.  And as director of a university press I certainly learned how to work as a member of a larger team.  There are others like me scattered throughout higher education who have held various administrative-level positions, including philosophically trained college presidents like George O’Brien (Rochester), Nannerl Keohane (Wellesley and Duke), Myles Brand (Indiana), Amy Gutmann (Penn). Such people would be particularly good to involve in efforts to work with teams investigating some of the major problems confronting higher education.—Sandy Thatcher

I suppose if you’re on a university campus, the whole Occupy movement might seem to you to be all about “the concerns of college students.” Here in NYC, I can assure you it’s not.

Actually, I am not on a campus, and I spend a lot of my time in New York City.  Much of what I know about the Occupy movement comes from talking with its NYC participants, though I have been talking with them elsewhere as well.  The movement is certainly not “all about” the concerns of college students.  There are numerous other threads.  But in the main this is a movement of college students and recent graduates.

Peter Wood

Glad to be of help, geochaucer.  I wouldn’t imagine that someone who quit the National Association of Scholars “in disgust” in the 1990s would be very likely to rejoin in 2011, nor would I especially welcome the company.  But I do want to be clear that what I write on the Chronicle’s Innovations blog expresses my personal opinions, not the policy views of the NAS. 

Peter Wood

“Ask participants…”

Have you actually done that? Did you (the anthropologist) actually collect some data on the career expectations of Occupy participants? And let’s not forget the activities happening on campuses are but one piece of the entire movement. DC, Oakland, Portland, Denver, not to mention across the world (Switzerland anyone?). Or are you just engaging in the kind of sloppy rhetorical banter that conservative columnists and pundits have cultivated into a multi-million dollar industry?

But I guess if you took into account actual data, your “rhetorical device” wouldn’t fly so well.

I think it’s curious that you, the president of an organization whose mission is “to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate” would both demean the intellectual choices that students make, as well as dismiss their activities with both a lack of scholarship and a flippant disregard for the very discipline you lay claim to.

“we might witness a student rebellion against those diversity czars, and
the rest of the administrative bloat and ideological claptrap that is
rolled into the package.”

Oh, please.  There are lots of things wrong with how higher education works, but this is just nonsense.  On my campus, the “diversity claptrap” is less than three people.   I can’t count the people engaged in making sure that no one spends a dime on alcohol from state funds, or to report everything we do for all the gazillion reports that state and federal governments ask for.  We’ve just added 4 staff people to help us do assessment, because we have to report our assessment in ways that does not make sense within our disciplinary norms.

Every time someone wants more accountability, they should be asked how much time it will take to gather the data that are needed to be accountable, and produce it in the exact form that they want.  If all the agencies that regulate higher ed would agree on standard reporting forms and categories, we’d save tons of time.

And 11122741, 50 years ago we educated a far smaller proportion of the students, and the government didn’t want to know how many crimes there were on campus, and what we did with every chemical that was used in a lab, etc.  

susanda, you are just exactly right:  Staff dedicated to compliance and accountability outnumber diversity missioned staff by about 50:1 at my R1.  It is not hard to imagine the day they will outnumber tenured faculty.

Yet another utterly clueless article. The situation is very clearly defined by Bill Black. The United States has become a banana republic and is now dominated by the criminal gang that runs Wall Street. Our country is in the throes of being destroyed.

1, They crashed the world banking system executing a huge fraud. They knew the loans they were re-selling were garbage. When assessment reports came back saying so, they dealt with it by ceasing to contract for such reports. They bought insurance policies (CDSs) and sold bundles of these garbage loans as securities. Bank of America kept its older, good loans though. They didn’t sell those on downriver.

2. The bailout was prompted by the fact that after raping the world’s financial system, there was not enough money to service the wire transfers and redemptions. So the taxpayer bailed them out with TARP. We gave these criminals $700 billion. The criminal gang that includes Paulson and Geithner told the president, and the president told the public that it had to go to banks because of the banking multiplier.

3. But the banking multiplier is demand driven. And – every one of those guys knew that if a creditworthy borrower were available, they could loan the money. In the modern world, banks settle up on the back end. So they were lying, again.

4. We have now given them over $2.5 trillion. And they, the bankers, are sitting on that money, not loaning it. Why? Because there are not enough creditworthy borrowers.

5. If we had spent that money domestically, it would have created tens of millions of creditworthy borrowers. That $2 trillion would have been expanded to at least $20 trillion. At $80,000 a year per job, that is at least 20 to 40 million jobs and a lot of sunk capital.

6. When the government spends money to seed the economy, all that money goes into banks. Duh.

7. After being handed trillions in reward money for criminal fraud, the gangsters who gave so generously to this president’s campaign went further. They forged thousands of loan documents they had lost. And, they have foreclosed on loans that required the buyer hold it as primary residence, even though the loans were current!

8. The administration has cut a deal with them once more. In return for a few hundred million (a small fraction of what we have given them since the global financial crisis) the bankers get off on all charges in the massive felony forgery fraud. And the little guy gets held to the letter. That is what a banana republic does.

Even most professors have no idea what a bank is, how it works, or how it creates money. Few can tell the difference between fiat money and bank created money. Without understanding that, nobody can really comprehend what these gangsters have done.

You’re calling the President of the United States a “boy?” Hmmmm. Interesting choice of words.

“Or, perhaps, the notification comes via a visit or phone call”? Then the first thing you must do is insist that all communications on the matter be in writing.

Conversely, during my teaching years, I found myself on boards where student affairs professionals waded into areas in which they had no special expertise. We had a wave of student protests about the length of reading lists in some courses, and the student affairs person on that committee called his mother, a high school English teacher, to determine what was (his phrase) “A professional amount of pages per week.”  We had another SAP who counseled students doing badly in biology to protest the grade because the professor
“believed in evolution” so “a Christian can’t get a fair grade in his classes and we need to get him out of here.” 

I do strongly say to new faculty that if they want you to serve on a review panel, you are getting something that is ultimately good for you, despite being a great deal of work and annoyance.  First of all, there is no other faculty service line where you will so quickly get an actual picture of what campus life is like, and an understanding what your students cope with (yes, it is quite possible that the struggling student’s roommate has invited her boyfriend and his band to live in the dorm room with them, and she has had some days without sleep or study, and is afraid to defend herself); secondly, you’ll get an idea of the relative truthiness of excuses and student tales of faculty misbehavior (i.e. some are true and some are not and most are in between and sorting is imperfect); third, you’ll learn to recognize the professionally aggrieved along with the faculty behaviors that attract them, which means you’ll deal better with them.  A final benefit only occurred to me after I left the committee: I taught controversial works regularly, and because the committee all knew me and I knew procedure, I never lost an appeal because I knew how to quickly and clearly establish that the work was in my syllabus for a good reason (and sometimes that the student or my fellow faculty member was objecting from an unsuitable agenda or misinformation). 

The worst time I had was an hour spent in front of the VPAA explaining that an edict handed out from a new employee at Student Affairs (“no one should be required to read a work in which a suicide occurs unless there is counseling and the suicide is clearly condemned by a trained professional”), which I was the first person to fall afoul of, would rule out a pretty big chunk of the works that humanities students are expected to know, and that “I am a trained professional in suicide prevention” does not make one the arbitrar of Ajax, Seneca, or Hamlet.

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davidfromdarkestpa seems to have supplied all the answer that 11179102′s note requires, though kamikaze is the more usual spelling.  Nonetheless, since I am procrastinating finishing some paid work today, I will now pound this horse into the ground, in hopes that it may not be dead yet.

Student Affairs Offices have an ingrained tendency to try to own the fundamental issues of the humanities, because students, regrettable though that may be, are human and encounter those issues.  But the perspective of Student Affairs is necessarily limited and limiting; not getting hammered every weekend is important, and may be the most important thing in an individual student’s life (in which case time off from college may be advisable), but it is not a substitute for or a supplementary perspective on Eugene O’Neill’s explorations of how alcoholism can smite down a whole lineage in a way recalling the House of Atreus. 

For what it is worth, when I taught Sophocles’s Ajax, I pointed out, at about this length, that Ajax kills himself because he (correctly in his society) perceives that he can never recover his time (Greek word teemay, not English time), and that time as a concept has been gone for millennia.  Not because I feared what the students might do, but because we were trying to understand what the play meant to an Athenian in 500 BC, and that had quite literally nothing to do with present-day suicide, and everything to do with how Sophocles structured a dramatic action around an abstract concept.

To then declare that class discussion time must not be spent on that complex, difficult, mind-stretching issue because we needed to hear some clown with a masters in student affairs regurgitate “Chapter Six: Tell them Not To Kill Themselves” would be to accede in the gradual stupidification of the American academy, and to signal to the students that we must continue to give time, money, and attention to the platitude specialists, something which is already done far more than necessary (or has no one else ever been around a human resources office?). 

Though I might have lost the quarrel (in this case I did not, our VPAA being a literate and worldly basketball coach), the struggle was part of what I was there to do, and one reason that so much of academic life has been ceded to anti-academic (or at least unconcerned-with-academic) people is that faculty are not willing to profess what they are professors of.

Student Affairs is, as I tell the students, an excellent place to go with problems of the material realm, may be a very good place to go with problems of the spirit (even just to find out where else to go), and is a perfectly awful place to go with problems of the mind.

It’s even funnier when they start asking YOU to stop put things in writing.  True story.  

 Changed it entirely, 11179102?  I thought your response was a perfectly valid one to what I had said; I just didn’t agree with it, and so I further elaborated.  Sorry it upsets you to discover that I think that students are here to tackle hard issues — intellectually rather than emotionally hard — and that the caregiver/nurturing aspects of the college experience are secondary, with a tendency to become primary that must be struggled against.  You advocated your side very ably; I just don’t think it’s right, and explained at some length why I don’t.  I think for the benefit of the others you might restore it, with perhaps a note that you would not have bothered to write it if you had known what an obnoxious person johnbarnes is.

I quite agree that this has gotten away from the issue of what to do when accused of misconduct; it is peripherally related because some accusations do originate with offices and people whose business they are not, and faculty senates may, for example, wish to take up some of the issues of where and when non-academic offices should be inserting themselves in the classroom.

Thank you for responding. The reader can take as much responsibility as the writer to understand the words. That’s what makes dialogue so important. That said, I think you’re right. When under investigation, it is essential to be cool. Even if you’re not under investigation, it’s best to be civil; civil by choice without deference.

This is not only important when under investigation, but also in every day activities, or you may find yourself under investigation.

Let me provide an example. At a faculty meeting, our then-dean called a then-faculty member, let me call him the provocateur, to the podium in an off agenda segment of a faculty meeting. He aggressively began to berate me and my website in full view of the entire faculty. I was totally blindsided. The provocateur had advised the faculty to stand and discuss disagreements at any point. I stood and vigorously challenged his accusations. The whole room erupted in a cacophony of outbursts–my website was the subject of most of them. Colleagues also came to my defense. I advised the provocateur that our website welcomed news stories, opinion pieces, and took seriously the reliability of our news. I would immediately address any issues of inaccurate reporting he or others had. And that they should also provide reasons and evidence that stories were inaccurate. They were primarily concerned, however, that some stories on usmnews made them or the school look bad. Not much could be heard over all the hollering, so I left, along with other faculty. After the meeting, the then-dean and a group of ally faculty reported to the USM President that I had gone berserk and had terrorized them. Some time passed and the administration began to take formal action for my alleged misconduct. I was under investigation. The dean and his allies had by then put their accusations in writing. Unknown to the dean and his allies, or me, a colleague had recorded the entire meeting. It was and is the most compelling evidence that the dean and his allies set up and fabricated the scene and their written representations. They got caught. Were it not for my keeping relatively calm and the colleague’s recording, I may have been fired for cause.

Your advice, in my experience, is sound.

Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA (Accounting with a minor in Logic and Ethics), Professor, School of Accountancy, College of Business, University of Southern Mississippi. Recent academic research: http://ssrn.com/author=397169 ; Novels found at Amazon: Rufus McCoy and Profiteers in the Ivory Tower, and TobaccoPharm, A Divine and Deadly Green Factory. Editor, http://www.usmnews.net

The sad part is the frequency of occurrence and the assumption the Dean, student and/or faculty bringing the accusation always tell the truth.  Learn why these individuals act they way they do at http://www.workplacebullying.org/. It would be sad if they didn’t cause so much harm.

From the website: Who Gets Targeted, Why me? and Why U.S. Employers Do So Little

Unlike schoolyard bullying, you were not targeted because you were a
“loner” without friends to stand up to the bullying gang. Nor are you a
weakling. Most likely, you were targeted (for reasons the instigator may
or may not have known) because you posed a “threat” to him or her. The
perception of threat is entirely in his/her mind, but it is what he/she
feels and believes.

WBI research findings from our year 2000 study
and conversations with thousands of targets have confirmed that targets
appear to be the veteran and most skilled person in the workgroup.

Targets are independent. They refuse to be subservient. Bullies seek
to enslave targets. When targets take steps to preserve their dignity,
their right to be treated with respect, bullies escalate their campaigns
of hatred and intimidation to wrest control of the target’s work from
the target.

Targets are more technically skilled than their bullies. They are the
“go-to” veteran workers to whom new employees turn for guidance.
Insecure bosses and co-workers can’t stand to share credit for the
recognition of talent. Bully bosses steal credit from skilled targets.

Targets are better liked, they have more social skills, and quite
likely possess greater emotional intelligence. They have empathy (even
for their bullies). Colleagues, customers, and management (with
exception to the bullies and their sponsors) appreciate the warmth that
the targets bring to the workplace.

Targets are ethical and honest. Some targets are whistleblowers who
expose fraudulent practices. Every whistleblower is bullied. Targets are
not schemers or slimy con artists. They tend to be guileless. The most
easily exploited targets are people with personalities founded on a
prosocial orientation — a desire to help, heal, teach, develop, nurture
others.

Targets are non-confrontive. They do not respond to aggression with
aggression. (They are thus morally superior.) But the price paid for
apparent submissiveness is that the bully can act with impunity (as long
as the employer also does nothing).

According to the 2007 WBI-Zogby Survey,
45% of targeted individuals suffer stress-related health problems.
Additional findings regarding targets’ health can be found in WBI
research and the PTSD-related research by others posted at this site.

Read our checklist of common signs of bullying.
Why U.S. Employers Do So Little
Many of the facts below have been confirmed by the 2007 WBI-Zogby Survey.

Bullying is Legal
Most workplace harassment and mistreatment (80%) is completely legal.
Remarkably, a hostile work environment is actionable (illegal) only in
very few situations.

America’s individualistic society feeds aggression and competition in
the workplace. These traits block an empathic concern for the
well-being of others, make bullying look tame when compared to other
forms of physical violence, and justify inequality of status across
ranks within organizations — dubbing a few as winners and the rest
losers. Bullying is not only tolerated in business, it is often seen as
necessary. Lawmakers are reluctant to pass laws that reign in unfettered
workplace violence resulting in psychological injury.
Poor Leadership, Inept Managers
The majority of bullies (72%) are bosses…

Bullies derive most of their support from…HR. It’s a club, a
clique, that circles the wagons in defense when one of their own is
accused.

Some executives command bullies to target particular employees.
Bullies are simply good soldiers following orders in a blind fashion.

Supervisory training is nearly nonexistent. No budget. No time. Few good skills taught. OJT transmits bad habits.

Executives blame the problem on a “few bad apples,” deflecting blame
for systemic causes and denying responsibility for systemic cures.

Employers Don’t Know How to Stop Bullies
Everyone walks on eggshells and is afraid to confront “the golden”
bully, the boss’s favorite.

HR misapplies the tools of traditional conflict resolution, for example,
mediation. Wrong solution for the actual problem.

The workplace culture holds no one accountable. Confronting bullies is
unthinkable.

Executives and senior managers have been badgered by the bully, too.
They are afraid of an emotional confrontation. They loathe conflict and
remain paralyzed. By not acting, they tacitly endorse the bully.

They fear lawsuits brought by the bully if they dare investigate or
punish the bully. There is rarely a basis for such suits. The fear is
irrational.
Bullying Is Underreported
Forty percent (40%) of targets never tell their employers…

Bullying is erroneously branded as “conflict” or a mere “difference in personality styles.”

Both are true, but bullying is also a form of violence. Simple labels minimize its impact on both people and the organization.

Historically, complaints lead to retaliation (revengeful hurting) or reprisal (taking away of rights or status).

Knowing this, targets are reluctant to use internal employer processes.

I’ve worked in a staff position at a major university for almost 30 years and have a BA in Business Administration.  I have worked in my latest department for ten years.  I’ve seen younger, skinnier, less educated (i.e., high school graduates) mentored and promoted ahead of me.  When I request mentoring it has been refused and the practice verbally refuted.  Bottom line, I believe this particular department likes moldable clay.  I’m the only one in my classification who has consistently been refused mentoring and promotion.  I’m at the age when it’s in the University’s interest to keep retirement benefits down as well.  It’s illegal and rampant at this university.  I’ve been on at least a half dozen interviews where the internal candidate had already been chosen; and I’m insulted and disheartened every time.

There is a slight variant on this that is almost more insulting.  I have known of situations in which an inside (or inside the system) candidate is going to be appointed, but the best qualified candidate shows up from outside.  This outsider is then accorded an interview in order to allow the committee to formulate talking points on why they gave this person a fair shot, but there were these just discovered shortcomings that didn’t come out until the interview.  

What makes you think it is only a ruse to hire only white males? It’s a convenient ploy for all sorts of employment sleights of hand.

The legislation that my parent union (Massachusetts Teachers’ Association) proposed, modeled on the AFT FACE legislation, pretends that guaranteeing long-time contingent faculty advance notification of full-time openings and perhaps an interview is sufficient to safeguard our best interests.  It is not.  The only reasonable procedure for hiring for new tenure-track positions is to limit the search to current contingent faculty.  If we have been good enough to teach multiple sections for multiple years, we must be good enough for that coveted full-time slot.  Anything less is insulting and illogical.  Those of us with unions need them to support us, not undermine us.

Of course, the best solution is to follow the example of the Vancouver Community College contract and the proposed Program for Change (http://newfacultymajority.info/PfC/?page_id=2) and “regularize” part-time faculty after a probationary period, giving them job security as well as the same responsibilities and benefits as tenured faculty.  This would eliminate the need for courtesy interviews and would be the best way for those part-timers who want to become full-time to achieve that goal while allowing those who prefer to teach only a course or two that option.  The most important part of this model is that, by expecting all faculty to participate equally in all aspects of institutional life (and by paying them proportionally), students get the benefit of having their professors on campus, available on a regular basis.  We do not need to re-invent the wheel.  We only need to implement a system that has proven to be beneficial to all concerned. 
 
Betsy Smith/Adjunct Professor of ESL/Cape Cod Community College
(Massachusetts Community College Council/Massachusetts Teachers’ Association/National Education Association)

I really feel for your situation. My first staff job, working in a research lab, I was given excuses why I could not apply for a better paying technical job I was qualified for. In my case, it was not an environment that was friendly to women. (With one exception, all PIs were men. One classified staffer was female – the rest were men. All administrative staff, with two exceptions in the accounting department, were women.)

Is it possible you could investigate positions at other schools where your skills might be better appreciated, e.g. a community college (where there’s been a lot of growth)?

As far as mentoring, there are a lot of great organizations out there like Toastmasters, NAWBO, AAUW, etc., which might be beneficial.

I find coutesty interviews insulting.  I was once asked to apply for a job, and I found out later that the organization already knew whom they wanted to hire.  I grudgingly accept that sometimes you get an interview, and there’s an inside candidate.  But the invitation to apply for something that has already been decided seems especially dishonest, not to mention wasteful.

I had one of these.  I should have figured it out but was naive at the time.  Was picked up at the airport by a “driver.”  Stayed at a hotel without ever being greeted by anyone from the university.  The look at the campus was done by a student worker.  They never showed me the office of the Center I would have been directing.  The interview itself was fairly easy.  However, sitting with the associate provost there were no questions and no conversation.  Finally the person asked if I would like to get to the airport early to see if I could catch the earlier flight.  I agreed as by then I knew what was going on.  I did catch the earlier flight…the only good thing all day.  

I learned later that an internal candidate was to be crowned for the job.  But they needed two “patsies” to make it look good.  The only thing that really angered me was when a friend sent me the school newspaper article where the associate provost was quoted talking about how the internal candidate was head and shoulders above the others.  No wonder, I was never in the running nor given any chance.  

About all I got out of the whole mess was some extra frequent flier miles.

Next time, they ought to save their money and just have ONE interview.  That was all they were interested in.

As a recipient of a job that came from an courtesy interview, I am not all that put off by them.  I can, after all, refuse to take the interview if I feel it is perfunctory.  Years ago though I came to an interview and was told candidly by the chair over drinks that the committee already knew who it was going to hire, and that my disability was a non-starter for the administration.  He told me I could interview, or give it up – but that it would be a favor for them if I did interview because it would keep them in state compliance.  I chose to interview just for the chance to meet the people, several of whom had reputations in their fields and were well worth talking to.

Something changed in the interview, and three weeks later the interview chair called me and said I had totally swung the process around – the job was mine if I wanted it and the administration was already making the facility changes to accommodate my handicapped status as an enticement to recruiting me.  When I enquired closer it was a combination of my own enthusiasm and strong CV, my candid explanation of my disability (I had nothing to loose) and the lack of enthusiasm from the candidate who had already been assured the job was theirs by a friend, that tilted the tables dramatically.

Personally, if I have the time I like going on interviews just to meet the people.