July 1, 2009
Academic Self-Fashioning
This article on professorial fashion caught my eye. As much as most of us hate to admit that fashion plays a role in our professional lives (we echo Henry David Thoreau’s lament in Walden: “The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same”), the reality is that there are trends and expectations aplenty even in academe.
This got me thinking about the amount of fashion posing that goes on in any profession; higher education certainly is not immune to this, from the grungy Marxist to the cuff-linked development officer to the seersucker-clad law professor to the presidential wannabe’s who wear those trendy rimless glasses. Most campuses have more than a few poseurs in their communities; likewise, we have enough free spirits to keep things interesting (I have fond memories of colleagues who have worn the occasional kilt and bathrobe around campus).
So, which fashion items drive you the craziest as you look around campus? Which do you secretly envy?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Wednesday July 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [55]U. of Wisconsin Academics Win Collective-Bargaining Rights
More than 20,000 academic employees in the University of Wisconsin system have collective-bargaining rights now that the state’s new budget has been signed into law. Those covered include tenured and tenure-track faculty members, part-time and full-time lecturers, and adjuncts, among others. The law, long sought by the Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, paves the way for the federation to begin organizing campaigns.
By Audrey Williams June | Posted on Wednesday July 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]June 29, 2009
See You in the Funny Papers
College professors have a well-known affinity for comic strips, but I have a feeling that this recent Wizard of Id strip won’t be going up on office doors or into PowerPoint slides on too many campuses.
When I saw it, it made me think about a colleague who told me that a relative of his, who is a farmer, once observed that he worked more during most days than a professor did in an entire semester (professors only teach 12 hours per semester, right?).
One of the problems we face as a profession is the perception that thinking is not legitimate work. It’s hard to compare jobs that include visible, sweaty, physical labor to reading, writing, and reflecting. I have to say, however, that writing a book is just as tedious and exhausting as any job I’ve ever had (and I’ve had some very physical jobs throughout my life, including four years as a dry cleaner’s assistant in a steam-heat environment); it’s just a whole lot less sweat-inducing. Teaching involves many bleary-eyed nights spent squinting at essays or late-night sessions in laboratories. Reflecting can be an emotional kind of work that alternately drains and invigorates.
In the current economy, it is more important than ever to communicate to folks outside the academy that our work is worthwhile and legitimate. How can we explain to people that what we do is “real” work?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Monday June 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [18]June 17, 2009
5 Colleges Make List of Best Places to Work in IT in 2009
Five colleges and a research organization have been named to Computerworld’s list of the 100 Best Places to Work in IT in 2009.
The University of Pennsylvania placed fourth, recognized for good benefits and the diversity of employees. The University of Miami was ranked 10th; it was also recognized for diversity and benefits, as well as retention and career development.
The Online Computer Library Center, and Cornell, Temple, and George Washington Universities also made the list, which looked at surveys from 27,812 employees from the top 100 companies nominated for the honor. The evaluation focused on salaries, promotions, retention, training, benefits, and the makeup of staff members.
By Marc Beja | Posted on Wednesday June 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]June 15, 2009
Publishers Perish
We have just begun to see academic publishers ramp up cutbacks due to the current economic malaise. I have a sense that this won’t affect the so-called “first tier” of scholarship produced in universities with publish-or-perish environments just yet, but I do think it will impact more middle-tier scholars or emerging junior scholars who are just beginning to navigate the intricacies of academic writing.
As publishers perish, or at least languish, do you think we will ever see an overhaul of the publish-or-perish culture? At what point will higher education be forced to deal with deeply rooted tenure-and-promotion policies that may not reflect the current state of academic publishing?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Monday June 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [11]June 12, 2009
'Mobbing' Can Damage More Than Careers, Professors Are Told at Conference
It probably wouldn’t be that hard for faculty members to imagine that academic mobbing — a form of bullying in which members of a department gang up to isolate or humiliate a colleague — could derail their careers. But a discussion of the phenomenon today at the American Association of University Professors’ international conference on globalization, shared governance, and academic freedom illustrated that the consequences can be much worse.
The session, based on a paper titled “Mobbing as a Factor in Faculty Work Life,” began with a gripping story about how colleagues and administrators had ganged up on a highly productive tenured professor — think of being subjected to a stream of trumped-up complaints, ousted from an office, shut out of departmental meetings and committees, accused of an affair with a graduate student, and more. The professor was eventually fired and almost immediately afterward died of a stroke brought on by the stress of it all.
The story, actually a composite of the real-life experiences of several professors who were victims of mobbing, was written by Joan E. Friedenberg, a professor of bilingual education at Florida Atlantic University who herself has experienced academic mobbing. Collapsing many stories into one, she said, allows her to better communicate “the feelings of bewilderment and dread that victims of mobbing feel.”
Ms. Friedenberg and the paper’s co-authors, Mark Schneider, an associate professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and Kenneth Westhues, a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, presented their research at today’s session. Mr. Westhues, who discussed his studies of academic mobbing with The Chronicle in 2006, also offered a handout that included a list of 16 indicators of mobbing. Among them: If rumors are circulating about the target’s supposed misdeeds, if the target is excluded from meetings or not named to committees, or if people are saying the target needs to be punished formally “to be taught a lesson,” it’s likely that mobbing is under way.
But victims should not assume that notifying an administrator will help. Evidence suggests that administrators may find it easier to become part of a mob than to try to stop one, Mr. Schneider said. That’s because administrators are likely to think it’s better to have one person upset with them than a group. And faculty associations, he said, can’t really “confront and expose mobbing unless they are very strong.”
Ms. Friedenberg added that administrators should be forewarned that mobbing can have a boomerang effect on them: Some victims are “driven by detail and an intense need for justice,” she said, and may launch a “significant counterattack.”
By Audrey Williams June | Posted on Friday June 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [7]June 3, 2009
Adjuncts and Retention
In our discussions here about academe’s use of adjunct faculty members, one issue that has arisen several times is the notion that full-time faculty members can — and should — provide much more support for students beyond the classroom than can be fairly asked of adjuncts. Since such support is demonstrably effective in promoting student success and retention, it’s worth considering how the high use of adjuncts affects retention and graduation rates.
Student-retention rates are affected by many, many institutional factors. For example, there is a fairly direct correlation between incoming students’ academic credentials and their first-to-second-year retention rates, which explains, in part, why the most selective institutions tend to have the highest retention. It could also be argued that such institutions have the highest-quality academic programs, and that, as they tend to be rich, they also tend to rely less on adjuncts — all of which are at least somewhat true. However, it’s very difficult to disentangle correlations and causations here in a way that will lead to rigorous conclusions.
For the rest of us at less-selective institutions, the picture is somewhat clearer. Students who are not exceptionally well-prepared for college do better with careful, sustained attention from faculty members, and that kind of attention is much more likely to come from full-time, rather than adjunct, instructors.
Excess use of adjunct faculty members, then, can actually cause a kind of spiral of decreasing retention, and here’s why. The make-or-break moment in retention generally occurs almost immediately in students’ first year of college. At institutions that employ a lot of adjuncts, generally most of them are teaching in general-education/core-curriculum courses that students encounter early in college. Thus, from a retention standpoint, adjunct faculty members are serving in the place where their service is contributing to poor retention.
In turn, poor retention actually increases the call to use adjunct faculty members. As fewer first- and second-year students progress into majors and upper-division curricula, the overall proportion of an institution’s credit-hour production shifts to general education. Even if full-time faculty members teach an increasing load of such courses, unless new hires are strictly required to teach them, the load will move to adjuncts, and that will happen regardless of how cooperative full-time faculty members are in adjusting their teaching loads.
Since I’ve been trying to provide actual numbers regarding adjuncts, here are a few more. When I was chair of an English department of 22 full-time faculty members (again at a university with a 4/4 teaching load), by the time I factored in various release times (mine for chairing, for example, as well as those for coordinating women’s studies, directing the honors program, and that sort of thing), if we staffed the entirety of our core-curriculum obligations with full-time faculty members, we would have been able to offer no more than 10 courses for majors over the entire academic year (we offered more than 140 sections of core courses each year). And this was at a respectable, and increasingly selective, small public university, albeit one without a large cohort of graduate teaching assistants. We actually did find a strategy to reduce the use and abuse of adjunct faculty members, but it was extremely complex and required a very large infusion of money.
To offer the same amount of courses with new full-time hires would have required hiring about a dozen more of them. Once again, the numbers just didn’t add up. However, increasing retention would have made a strong argument (in fact, it did) for further increases in full-time hiring, as it shifted the load balance back toward upper-division and graduate courses that posed stricter demands on faculty qualifications.
If these issues were easy to resolve, someone would have already done it.
By David Evans | Posted on Wednesday June 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [19]May 29, 2009
Easy Come, Easy Go
The session presentation was titled “Optimizing the Use of Part-Time Faculty.” Titles like that make me queasy, because “optimizing” people generally goes well for those doing the optimizing, and badly for those being optimized. I spent Memorial Day weekend at a conference of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, in Austin, Texas. It’s the first time I’ve attended (well, exhibited at, actually) that conference, and I can tell you that few disciplinary meetings offer the quality of the sessions at NISOD.
Jim Hammons, a professor and program coordinator in the Higher Education Leadership Program at the University of Arkansas, led the session on optimizing part-time faculty members. Unlike the sparsely attended sessions on part timers that are held at other big conferences, Hammons’s room was jammed with program directors, department chairs, deans, provosts, and college presidents.
Hammons, a fan of the Socratic method, questioned his audience: Who were they? How many part-time faculty members were they responsible for? At one point, as he spoke about best practices in hiring, he asked a simple question: “How many of you check references of part-time faculty applicants?” In a room of 50, five hands went up. Hammons was nonplussed, but I was stunned. Hammons explained that many a disappointing hire could be avoided by simply checking references. Well, duh! You can’t get hired to sling coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts without having your references checked, but evidently you can find a post at your local college teaching astrophysics part time without having a prior employer vouch for your teaching.
Granted, the statistical sampling of employers at this meeting was in no way scientific. But I think Hammons may have stumbled on one reason why the “quality” of part-time faculty members suffers, and turnover is problematic, at some colleges. Hiring processes directly affect the quality of hires, and part timers are routinely hired through less than optimal practices. Perhaps, then, recent studies concerning the “problems” associated with the overuse of non-tenure-track instructors are less about their qualifications and more about the unstudied hiring practices of the institutions.
So while national education unions employ academic researchers to document the impact of part-time faculty members on higher education, and while those same unions call for the use of fewer part timers in order to improve the quality of higher education, perhaps the answer has been staring us in the face all along. We need to drastically retool and improve hiring practices when filling positions off the tenure track.
I’ve actually thought for many years that higher-education unions ought to pursue a bargaining strategy of, say, requiring all hires off the tenure track to have terminal degrees, or requiring those same hires to be put through most of the same rigorous steps used when hiring on the tenure track. To have bargained, instead, for retention based on seniority has been a monumental failure for part-time faculty union members. That bargaining strategy, after all, was crafted for a 1930s assembly-line worker. At the moment, thanks to the use of that outmoded yet widespread strategy, unionized part timers in Washington, California, and Oregon are bearing the brunt of forced layoffs. Easy come, easy go.
As for Hammons’s workshop, he outlined best practices for hiring part-time faculty members that include a multistep hiring procedure, a comprehensive orientation for part timers, written job descriptions, evaluation, as well as mandatory professional-development programs. If that sounds radical, well, it’s not. As Hammons pointed out, it’s how most large corporations in our country find, train, and retain all of their employees — both full and part time.
By P.D. Lesko | Posted on Friday May 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [10]May 26, 2009
Heading into Next Year
I try not to be pessimistic, but the realist in me says that if this year has been difficult budgetwise for most institutions, just wait until next year. Tax revenues for states will continue to decline, donations will continue to wane, and endowment returns will get even worse since many institutions use a three-year rolling average for their disbursements.
I see more budget cuts on the horizon. Anyone who has had to deal with deep cuts knows how frustrating it is when the process works in one direction only: top down. Most folks in the trenches feel that a more team-oriented approach might be more effective.
What advice would you offer to administrators who must make more cuts next year?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Tuesday May 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [11]May 20, 2009
Art Imitating Reality
It’s exam time, and I need something to distract me: Most of my friends have no idea what it’s like to be a professor, so they project their favorite television shows onto the profession. For some, I’m like one of the faculty members on Saved by the Bell: The College Years. Or like the professor on Gilligan’s Island. For others, I’m like Gary on thirtysomething. Personally, I don’t see the similarities between me and any of them (Dick Solomon on 3rd Rock From the Sun, maybe?). Then again, television and movies shape our perceptions of all sorts of professions.
Have you been influenced by a fictional professor, even one from a novel? Which one most closely matches the reality of your own life or career?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Wednesday May 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [35]