momprof
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Posts: 49
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« on: April 13, 2008, 10:24:36 PM » |
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A few years ago I got rear-ended twice in a few months, and someone told me I should take the "TARGET" sign off my back bumper. Well, apparently I have one that says "sucker" on my forehead, because I have spent this year as interim/acting department chair in a SLAC up for reaccreditation--and at a school where the administrative ethos is that anyone "below" you on the totem pole is your employee and had better come through, put up, and shut up about it. Definitely not the collegial model, and the reaccreditation pressure is intensifying it.
Anyway, here's the latest. The college is flirting with trying to offer online courses. I won't get into the pros and cons and issues for us, but this week I looked at the list the Office of Academic Affairs had just circulated of summer online courses, and was profoundly surprised to find several in my department (recall I am acting chair)--including some upper-level courses that only I can teach. My eyebrows shot up and I reached for the phone to call the online course coordinator, who told me the Provost had said to "offer a variety of courses and see what students expressed an interest in, and if the department couldn't cover them, then maybe they'd hire an adjunct."
There are quite a few practical and specific reasons why this is not appropriate. For example:
(a) I said in a faculty meeting to the coordinator and the provost a couple months ago that I did not want upper-level courses in my department to be offered online, and that the courses I teach would not be offered online, as I prefer to teach face-to-face and consider that particularly appropriate for the type of school we are, and the nature of our major and our courses.
(b) Our seniors take comprehensive exit exams, and it will be doing them no favors to have a hired gun teach some other version of one of the courses they will be tested on a year later, when it's the regular faculty who write and grade the exam.
(c) We do not accept transfer credits for upper-level courses, so why would we pull in an adjunct to do what amounts to a transfer course?
(d) We've been told there is *no*money*for*adjuncts* until I almost started to believe it... silly me.
(e) Not to be snooty, but there aren't any adjuncts around who could teach my specialty course, which is one of the ones they put online and which is not taught elsewhere in this geographical region.
But those are all detailed arguments. My overriding issue is that I thought that the department chair should have jurisdiction over certain departmental decisions, including what courses may be offered online and what instructors will be asked to teach them. Instead here they are offering all kinds of courses I happen to know my faculty are not going to be teaching online, and apparently planning to set up a kind of online course ghetto within the college, taught by goodness knows who, or bought from some other online course provider, or ....?????
Comments? Am I wrong to think there are still a few areas where the chair calls the shots? I'd love to know if this is as weird as I think, or if it's a new norm.
Momprof (not the other way around)
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