May 9, 2008
Huh? If I Were a Dog?!
I’m in exams this coming week, so I’m in the mood for something funny. Do any of you have stories about down-right weird interview questions?
One of my previous departments was interviewing an on-campus candidate many years ago and the interview had gone pretty well. At lunch we were getting a little silly and somehow we got to going around the table describing each other in terms of dog breed. As I recall, I was a golden retriever or a border collie (pretty good breeds for a department chair). One of my colleagues looked straight at the candidate and said, “So, if you were a dog, what kind of dog would you be?” The look on that poor woman’s face was priceless. Fortunately, after she regained her composure, she gave a great answer that defused what had suddenly turned into a tense moment.
Of course, I have a touch of dyslexia, so I sat there pondering “If I were a god, what kind of god would I be?” That might be a good question too, though it would definitely qualify as a weird question.
So, any weird questions out there that seemed to have come out of left field?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Friday May 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [36]Dismissed for Flunking Students
Steven Aird, an associate professor of biology at Norfolk State University, is getting the boot at the end of this semester for flunking most of his students and resisting university pressure to dumb down his classes, The Virginian-Pilot reports.
For more than four years, Aird has carried on a running battle in which NSU administrators repeatedly pressed him to raise his pass rate and he steadfastly refused.
Twice, he was denied tenure and issued a one-year terminal contract, meaning he would have to leave at the end of the year. After the first denial, he filed a grievance. A faculty grievance committee found in his favor, ruling that the tenure decision was flawed by procedural violations and retaliatory actions by administrators.
He reapplied and was turned down again, despite a favorable recommendation by a departmental tenure review committee. Citing seven classes in which 83 to 95 percent of his students got a D or F, Sandra DeLoatch, dean of the School of Science and Technology, wrote that Aird’s “core problem” was “the overwhelming failure of the vast majority of the students he teaches.”
His bosses say it’s the teacher’s responsibility to make sure the lessons are getting through.
Aird, on the other hand, says coddling students who don’t pass muster does them a disservice: “I really care about my students,” he told the reporter, Bill Sizemore. “That’s why I refuse to lower the bar. The objective should be competence, not grades.”
Aird isn’t the only professor who’s felt pressure to lower his academic standards, Sizemore writes. He quotes Joseph Hall, a chemistry professor and president of the Faculty Senate, who said that …
“faculty are – I’ll use a nice word – encouraged to try and pass 70 percent of their students.” If the rate drops below 70 percent, [Hall] said, “faculty are called in and asked to explain what they’re going to do about it.”
Sharon Hoggard, a spokeswoman for Norfolk State, denies the assertion that the university is setting the bar lower, Sizemore writes:
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Friday May 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [33]“It goes against our very mission, which is to provide an affordable high-quality education for an ethnically and culturally diverse student population,” Hoggard said in an e-mail response to the Pilot. She pointed out that NSU is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, for which it must meet stringent standards.
May 7, 2008
The Siren Call of an Overseas Position
In my previous post on good advice from mentors, I mentioned that of not taking an overseas position while I was A.B.D. I thought I’d follow up on that.
During my doctoral program, I received a February phone call out of the blue from a dean at a college with an overseas branch. The campus was in a quiet, tropical country. It was near the beach. The pay was extremely good in terms of the local economy: “most of our faculty have house servants, in fact.” It was near the beach. The position included two round-trip airfares, special insurance for medevac air ambulance if necessary, and the prospect of tax-free income if I kept my days in the States within a certain limit that’s established by the feds. It was near the beach. The teaching load was very nice, with extended vacation periods. Did I mention that it was near the beach?
I was intrigued by the position and the prospect of such an experience, but I was in the early stages of being A.B.D. My mentors each said, “NO! DON’T DO IT!” I think they actually spoke in all caps, in fact! They were emphatic.
My A.B.D. status was in large part the reason I declined the kind offer, but it was so tempting. I have a feeling that there are wonderful opportunities afforded by overseas positions, but I likewise sense that timing is everything in terms of how such appointments will impact the job search down the road.
In most of the searches I’ve run, we have had at least one applicant who was serving in an overseas appointment. They are hard to treat equally because of time differences for phone calls, costs related to on-campus interviews, relocation expenses, and a ton of other reasons. Mind you, we have always tried to treat them fairly and to ignore those kinds of factors, but the challenges for overseas candidates are nigh unto insurmountable.
I do, however, know a few people who’ve held those kinds of positions and who have benefited from the experiences, though the benefits have been more personal than professional, I suspect.
I’m curious, though, about two things.
First, if you’ve had experience in an overseas appointment, what is your advice to others who are considering such a position?
Second, for those of you on the hiring committees, what’s the reality about how overseas candidates are treated?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [16]Baylor U.'s Faculty Senate Passes Resolution Criticizing Administration
Baylor University’s Faculty Senate has passed a resolution by a vote of 29-0 chastising the administration for its lack of shared governance, the Waco Tribune-Herald reports. The resolution is a response to an alarming jump in the number of faculty members denied tenure by Baylor University’s administration despite the approval of their departments and the universitywide tenure committee, the reporter, Tim Woods, writes. Read more.
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]May 5, 2008
Wise Advisories
I posted last week about bypassing a mentor’s advice against interviewing at a teaching institution. As I’ve reflected on that posting for a few days, I’ve pondered the good advice I received from my mentors. Two things come to mind.
First, they encouraged me to jump into the search process early on, when I had just reached A.B.D. status, even as they warned me explicitly that I was not likely to land a good job at that point. They told me that the search process was sort of a two-stage project, the first stage being the gaining of experience and the broadcasting of my name as a kind of advertising and the second being an earnest pursuit of my initial career appointment.
Next, they strongly urged me to pass up an appointment overseas when I was A.B.D. I had an intriguing offer, and the compensation looked pretty good relative to my graduate assistantship. One of my mentors told me, though, that accepting it while I was A.B.D. would put me into an 80-plus-percent likelihood of never finishing my dissertation because of trouble accessing resources (this was in the days before the Internet had taken over). At the time I thought he was being paranoid. Now I know that he was being judicious.
What was the best advice you ever received from a mentor? Did you realize that it was wise counsel at the time, or did you need a bit more experience to understand it better?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Monday May 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [12]California State U. Sacks Another Quaker Instructor Over Loyalty Oath
Yet another Quaker instructor has been sacked by the California State University system for objecting to a state loyalty oath that clashes with her pacifist religious beliefs, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Wendy Gonaver, an American-studies lecturer at California State University at Fullerton, was fired the day before the start of classes because she would not “sign an oath swearing to ‘defend’ the U.S. and California constitutions ‘against all enemies, foreign and domestic’” unless she was allowed to include a statement explaining her views, “a practice allowed by other state institutions,” the reporter, Richard C. Paddock, writes. The university refused to grant her request.
Earlier this year, California State University at East Bay fired Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker mathematics instructor, for trying to add the word “nonviolently” to the state loyalty oath and for refusing to sign it when the university did not allow her to add the word. She was later reinstated.
See an item on The Chronicle’s News Blog for more details.
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Monday May 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [11]May 2, 2008
Office Space
A friend of mine teaches at a school where a good deal of remodeling is under way. “They moved me,” she observed, “to a wonderful new office with a beautiful view. My old office, though, was mercifully converted into a hallway.”
I’d say that if your office is convertible into a corridor, it was not the nicest office in the world.
At my previous place of service, I had a fabulous office: on the corner, on the third floor, with a million-dollar view of the ancient quad. At my current institution, our newest buildings have very attractive offices, but I’m in an older building with sternly spartan offices. Even my decanal suite has nary a window.
I was thinking about this the other day and about how when I was on the market, I usually asked to see where my office would be. One school in North Carolina had almost palatial offices, with expansive views of the mountains. One in Florida was on the Intercoastal Waterway. Other places, though, were kind of sad, even depressing.
As you’ve made your rounds on the market, have any of you been either impressed or discouraged with the office space or lab facilities to such an extent that it impacted your decision to accept an offer?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Friday May 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [12]April 30, 2008
When to Question a Mentor's Advice
In a recent interview in my office, a candidate mentioned that her doctoral advisers had been very critical about her interest in locating a faculty position that emphasizes undergraduate research. As a scientist, she talked about the importance of cultivating strong research skills in preparation for both graduate and professional work. She believed that her role as a professor would be to foster excellence in a department that shared that kind of vision.
As she related this to me, I remembered one of my mentors wriggling his nose over a university where I had an interview. Never mind my out-and-out JOY over even having an interview, he was insistent that going to the interview was a waste of my time and that my talents would be wasted if I ended up taking the position. I landed the job and had a wonderful several years there before moving to my current institution.
I am mindful, though, of how many positions out there are, indeed, backbreaking career killers. These positions have unreasonable teaching loads and poor pay. They suffocate freshly minted Ph.D.‘s or, perhaps worse, short-circuit A.B.D.‘s into degrees that are never completed. Mentors are justified in cautioning advisees against these kinds of positions.
Have you had these kinds of conversations with your mentors?
For you folks who have landed jobs, were your mentors’ cautions valid or invalid?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Wednesday April 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]April 23, 2008
Spousal Hires: a Golden Opportunity
In his latest Heads Up column, Gary A. Olson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University, suggests that colleges that refuse to hire dual-career couples out of a fear of being saddled with an undesirable spousal hire are missing out on a good thing.
As a case in point, he recounts the experience of a leading scholar and dean he knows who, before taking her current job, was up for a deanship at another institution that turned her down because it didn’t want to foot the bill for her spouse, who is a superstar in his own right.
By not being open to the idea of a spousal hire, the institution let a golden opportunity slip away, as “the dean’s husband would have been every bit as much of a catch for the institution as the dean,” Olson argues.
Such hires must be handled carefully, lest they produce resentment within a department, Olson says. The department should get to meet the spousal candidate and review his or her credentials, and “the administrator who makes the offer should be cognizant of salary compression and inversion issues with existing faculty members in the department.” But “a carefully vetted spousal hire” can be a boon, Drew writes:
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Wednesday April 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]Some of the best hires I have made over the years have been dual-career couples who ended up contributing substantially to a department’s culture and prestige. In fact, in a few cases, colleagues have commented that the partner was ‘even more of a catch’ or ‘even more impressive’ than the principal hire.
Wednesday Reading
- Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California have proposed legislation that would give graduate students at private colleges and universities the right to unionize, Charles Huckabee writes on The Chronicle’s News Blog. Brainstorm’s Marc Bousquet has more on the subject.
- Rumor has it that some professors at the Johns Hopkins University are pushing its presidential-search committee to consider New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who is an alumnus, as the next chief, The New York Sun reports.
- Elsewhere on The Chronicle’s Web site, David Glenn reports that the University of Missouri has finally — after 10 years — filled its Kenneth L. Lay chair in economics, which was named for the Enron Corporation’s notorious founder, who died in May 2006, just weeks after he was was convicted on numerous counts of corporate fraud.
- Meanwhile, in a recent First Person column, Philip Drew explains why requests for early tenure should often be denied.
- According to an article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Georgia Institute of Technology has accused two leading health-science-engineering professors, who are husband and wife, of simultaneously drawing paychecks from Georgia Tech and the University of Minnesota. The couple, who’d worked at Georgia Tech since 2000, were apparently hired away by Minnesota last fall, but neglected to tell Georgia Tech and continued to collect their paychecks, the reporter, Andrea Jones, writes.
- Finally, Paula Wasley reports that the University of Southern California is closing its German department.