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Next Episode 11: Emergency Notification: Not Just a Technology Issue |
November 15, 2007, 4:36 pm
Are college presidents involved in discussions about technology on your campus? Robert E. Cernock, the chief information officer from Central Connecticut State University, joins Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant, to talk about college leaders and their interest (or lack of it) when it comes to technology.
Download this recording as an MP3 file, or subscribe to Tech Therapy on iTunes.
Technology continues to change college life, and each month The Chronicle's Tech Therapy podcast offers analysis and advice on what the latest gadgets and buzzwords mean for professors, administrators, and students.
Join hosts Jeff Young, a Chronicle reporter (left), and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant who works with colleges, for a lively discussion—as well as interviews with leading thinkers in technology.
Jeff and Warren welcome your questions by e-mail, phone (805-CHE-TECH), or Twitter (@techtherapists).
As always, you can subscribe to Tech Therapy through iTunes. Click here—or just search for "Tech Therapy" in the iTunes store.
Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.
10 Responses to Episode 10: Are College Presidents Talking about Technology?
Thanks, Lesboprof: this is a really good brief on what The Great Recession has done to our universities. You are right that it’s a problem not to have resources with which to reward the good citizens and to withhold to punish the bad. But, aren’t there other relatively cost-free things that Chairs and Deans could do to create incentives?
For example: it always seems to me that scheduling is a big concern for faculty–getting to teach on a T-Th instead of a MWF schedule, and/or getting to teach all late-morning/early-afternoon classes instead of 8 a.m. or 4:30 p.m. classes. And how about throwing some serious committee work towards some of those bad citizens? (How much damage could they do, really? Let them answer to the Dean if they screw something up.) Freeing up the time of your good citizens is almost as good as handing them money if they have active research agendas.
In sum, it seems to me that the bad citizens get their way with Chairs because they’re pains in the a$$ and they’re not afraid to get up in their grills and be angry, not because they’re cheerful, productive, and helpful. Why not try to reward the cheerful, productive, and helpful with the meager tools you have? Why not discourage the temper-tantrums and acting out by not rewarding it? (Of course, you may already do this–I’m not lecturing you, just brainstorming about how to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior in the absence of financial rewards.)
Historiann: I like your suggestion about scheduling, though there are some challenges to that in my new, smaller program. With fewer sections and a scripted, tight list of courses, it is a little harder to mess with schedules. Committee work is a larger problem, especially from my viewpoint, because the lack of follow through winds up on my desk. I am willing to let some things fall, and to embarrass those who don’t do their share, but bad committee members make life hell for everyone.
Thinking along your lines, though, classroom space is another issue that makes a difference. Good performers could get space in house, while slackers could have to walk to a different building in the rain. Having a student assistant is also another privilege that could be shared or withheld.
Another possibility for those who are money-motivated and seeking to get consulting money is to refuse to approve external income. That makes sense, too, because if you aren’t doing your real job (like advising and committee work), you obviously aren’t in a place to do extra work outside of the job.
My problem with a lot of these methods is that they are so punitive (rooted in behaviorism, this isn’t all that surprising). The bad faculty will feel chastised, and I don’t really know that that will improve morale or team spirit in anyone, even those who get the good stuff. And it encourages the us and them thinking in a department, which is something I want to decrease, rather than increase.
Ah, well, I’m not ready for Taco Bell just yet. Hang in there, Missoularedhead.
In my experience, regardless of what a manager or “team” does, poor performers will almost always continue to behave badly.
Now take all of that full-time disillusionment and add being an adjunct. Seriously considering a job at Taco Bell.
You may be dean, chair, director, whatever — but they are not “your” faculty.
If I don’t think of them as “my faculty” I cannot do my job as their advocate; I can only advocate for myself.
Most striking in the other comments is that fact that chairs have only sticks, no carrots. I’d be embarrassed to give someone an 8:00, or a class in a building across the street, in an effort to make them shape up; I also find it hard to believe that such measures would work.
The problem is familiar: too many chairs have been disempowered even while they have been asked to do more to advance somebody else’s agenda.
This essay really rings true for me. I used to be one of those faculty routinely “stepping into the breach” at my former institution, but eventually found it unsustainable. Some may see this as a sign of moral weakness, or lack of real commitment or solidarity, on my part in these tough times, but I chose to leave my institution
After three years of developing and providing a number of faculty development workshops, coordinating a shift in institutional assessment from CBASE to use of the CLA (including faculty-developed and graded performance tasks), starting an Ethics in Business Education Project, running a Writing Across the Curriculum pilot study, and then both writing portions of my institution’s Quality Enhancement Plan and then explaining it to faculty, students, and accreditors (here’s a bit of that: http://youtu.be/zGIQvNx-vPQ ) — much of which I did for free, some just for lunches, a few for relatively small stipends — and all of this on top of teaching a 4-4 load, committee work, and scholarship — I realized the truth to what other people had been telling me: that course couldn’t be kept up
I’d been doing several people’s jobs, for the same salary of one prof — which, due to the budget situation, remained at the same relatively low level my entire time at that institution. I’d been contributing considerable value to my university, usually putting in about 60-80 hour work weeks. Although I was at times acknowledged for the level of service I was providing to the institution, faculty, and students, there was really little compensation, and little likely to come in the future — certainly nothing commensurate to the value added.
The “weary and wary” jibes with my experience — both as a faculty member, and as someone who occupied a semi-administrative position and thus had to try to get other faculty to go the extra mile — but also from my time interacting with and discussing these sorts of issues with administrators.
Eventually, I resigned, relocated to where my partner lives, and started a consulting company which does many of the same sorts of things I’d previously been doing. There came a point where I just could not see continuing on a course of high performance for low rewards in an institution where that simply couldn’t change — mainly due to factors admittedly beyond their control. I would guess that there are many other profs getting close to similar “tipping points”
Gregory:
I appreciated your comments (see my “like”), and your video and work on your school’s QEP provided some inspiration for my next post about assessment. I am sorry you are not working in academe any longer, but I am glad you and your partner are reunited. I have lived far from my partner several times, and we have agreed never to do that again.
Best, LP
I’m glad the QEP material spurred a post about assessment, which I’m reading through right now — I’ll comment on that one there, rather than here. I’ve been meaning to write a piece specifically on why we ought to assess for some time, and it seems that your views on it and my own are quite close — a kind of convergence which is good to see, on my part.
I am actually still in academe, but working in a different function, and without a tenure-track job. I’ve got two classes this semester as an adjunct, and the consulting I’ve started to do is still — at least for the moment — in higher ed. I’ve got three academic conference presentations this semester, two of them basically SOTL,but still involving my discipline of Philosophy, and one specifically doing regular discipline-centered work. Once I’ve got settled in, with the additional free time and reduced stress, the idea is that I’m to start researching and writing some of those books I’ve been meaning to get to for the last several years.
Yep, long distance in a relationship is very tough, perhaps even more so for academics who tend to have their work on their mind most of the time. Being able to count on being in the same place — just as a matter of course, rather than on the occasions we could travel – as my partner, is certainly a great good which can’t be compensated for by other goods, as I’m sure it was the case for you and yours as well.
I also have to credit my partner for my decision to leave FSU and head north, a decision that was the fruit of many discussions. She was the one really encouraging me to take the risks involved and supporting me when I began to understandably second-guess its logic
These are real and frustrating problems. But it’s hard to motivate faculty to put aside self-interest when they perceive their school’s educational mission as losing ground.
If you ask people to put the common good ahead of their personal self-interest, you need to be able to identify common goods that they can actually achieve. If you ask someone to sacrifice to make a department stronger, and the next two rounds of budget cuts weaken their department, then you can’t ask those people to sacrifice any more.
There are lots of faculty who are happy to forgo some self-advancement in order to make their department stronger and their students more successful. But it’s hard to ask people to forgo their self-interest in the name of a program that gets weaker every few years anyway, as more and more resources are taken out of the classroom.