May 27, 2009
Snoopy Supervisors
Many years ago, when I taught high school, I had an assistant principal who used to squat outside of classroom doors and press an ear to them, eavesdropping on what the teachers were saying in class. When caught, he would stand up quickly and act like he was looking for termites or something. It was hilarious.
Since then, I’ve seen deans who wander the halls checking on office-hour compliance, chairs who scour phone records looking for personal calls, and presidents who have accessed faculty e-mail accounts to look for discord.
Certainly there are times when legitimate investigations need to occur, but trolling for violations always has struck me as petty and an incredible waste of time. I suppose, as well, that supervisors aren’t the only ones who succumb to such temptations; colleagues can as well.
Do any of you have cautionary tales to share with us?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Wednesday May 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [8]April 22, 2009
Family-Friendly Policies May Not Help as Much as They Should, Conference Speaker Says
Are family-friendly policies at colleges and universities really in the best interest of women in academe?
That’s the question a Rutgers University administrator — herself the mother of three grown children — raised during a panel at the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education’s annual labor conference on Monday.
Speaking at a session titled “Under the Table: Race and Gender in Promotion and Tenure,” Karen R. Stubaus, associate vice president for academic affairs at Rutgers University, said that family-friendly policies, like allowing women to take time off the tenure clock to care for young children or creating part-time tenure-track appointments, are meant to help young academics. But she is concerned that such benefits may, in fact, hurt them.
That’s because the policies make it too easy for women — almost always the ones to take advantage of such benefits — to slow down their careers, she said. Such steps can delay salary increases, or keep them from moving into administrative positions, she said.
“I worry about women who go on what’s called the mommy track,” Ms. Stubaus said. “Research universities are fairly conservative and still dominated by white males” who didn’t take any breaks on the road to tenure and often sit on tenure and promotion committees, she said.
When looking at the tenure applications of female academics who have temporarily stepped out of the tenure stream, such committee members may question how to count that time out when it comes to research productivity — even though time out is, well, time out and shouldn’t be counted, she said.
Ms. Stubaus, who finished her dissertation while on an unpaid maternity leave for her first child and later had twins, acknowledged the hardships of being a working mother. And despite her remarks, which she billed upfront as “controversial,” she said she could “appreciate this generation of people saying, Why does it have to be so hard?”
However, the environment isn’t what it needs to be for female academics to seek the relief family-friendly policies offer, she said. “I don’t have the confidence that as a society we are there yet.”
By Audrey Williams June | Posted on Wednesday April 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [10]April 21, 2009
The 'Lucky' Ones
These days, it may seem somewhat improper to write about the stresses of the fortunate few who have found tenure-track jobs, since, without question, the people who haven’t are surely suffering most. But, as Ari Kelman points out in a recent post over at The Edge of the American West, one of academe’s “dirty secrets” is “how much it can suck to land [an academic] position.”
He explains why:
Precious few people, even in times of plenty, are offered jobs they really want, at least not straight out of graduate school. This means they’ll have to move to a place they don’t want to move. Or they’ll have to work at an institution that bears little resemblance to the temple of knowledge they associate with higher education. Because, after all, few people get jobs at schools like the ones where they received their BAs or PhDs. The conditions of employment, in other words, aren’t great in most instances: perhaps too much teaching, sometimes in fields distant from one’s area of expertise; perhaps low pay, sometimes not enough to buy a house or cover the cost of living in one’d new hometown; perhaps a grim work environment, sometimes peopled by unruly colleagues, hostile administrators, and intellectually indifferent students. And finally, the realization that this is it, that this is what all the fuss was about.
It’s that last point that can be most painful. We literally spend years pointing toward the job market. … Then, after all that time and energy, for those of us lucky enough finally to be offered a job, the experience can be disheartening. A sense of anti-climax: “My goodness, this is it. All that work, and what do I have to show for it? A job. … And very likely not even the job I really want. Which means I have to get back on the roller coaster right away.” … Advisers and peers typically expect successful job candidates to celebrate. It can be unsettling, then, to find oneself somber, or at least a bit wistful, in what one’s culture dictates should be a moment of triumph.
Of course, those are lucky problems to have, Kelman writes. He urges people to keep in mind that some jobs turn out “better than anticipated. Hostile environs sometimes hide delightful landscapes. Good friends sometimes lurk amidst scores of eccentric colleagues. And eager mentees sometimes rise above crowds of indifferent students.” And “in the end, it really is just a job.”
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Tuesday April 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [28]April 17, 2009
It's Not Just About the Money
Hardly a day goes by without news of layoffs or pay cuts. (In fact, about the only thing not being cut these days is workloads.) But wages and jobs aren’t the only casualties of the recession. Those who still have jobs are curtailing time normally spent with friends and family, and postponing research and travel opportunities, out of fear of ending up unemployed themselves, a recent article by David Shieh in The Chronicle notes. And that’s hurting workers’ morale and leaving them stressed out.
Shieh talked with Michael K. McBeath, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, who likes to burn off steam in the middle of the day by playing basketball with his colleagues. For years, he and roughly two dozen faculty and staff members hit the gym for a game around noon, three days a week.
Now their roster has been chopped in half — by anxiety, Shieh writes:
As budget cuts have prompted the university to announce that it will shutter more than 40 academic programs, cut 200 faculty-associate positions, and force both faculty and staff members to take unpaid furloughs, far fewer people show up at the gym these days.
Mr. McBeath said many are just too worried about job security to risk an hour of lost work or a supervisor’s raised eyebrow over a game of basketball.
“People just don’t want to take any chances,” he said.
James B. Jeffries can tell you about anxiety. He told The Chronicle that he has no other option but to work extra hours at several part-time jobs this summer. Jeffries, a visiting assistant professor of history in his third year at Clemson University learned in January that though he would be renewed for another year, it would probably be his last. Thanks to a universitywide furlough, he’ll take home less money this year. And thanks to budget cuts and travel restrictions, he’ll now be picking up his own tab for travel to national conferences, which are a must now that he’s back on the job market.
So, how has the economic crisis affected your plans and quality of life?
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Friday April 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [10]April 3, 2009
The Six Musketeers
I have lost many excellent writers over the years that I have been publishing the Adjunct Advocate. Some simply stopped freelancing, and others landed full-time writing jobs. A third group is made up of writers who landed tenure-track jobs; six of them in the past 18 year. They share some of the same characteristics. In fact, the six of them took an almost identical path toward the tenure track. It got so that I could tell which of my freelance writers who were adjuncts on the prowl would, eventually, end up sending me a “Dear P.D.” letter. I have come to think of them as the Six Musketeers.
So how did they do it? Here are several of the character traits they had in common:
- Hell bent for leather: Each of the six writers applied for dozens of jobs every year, and never let rejection deter them. They applied for every full-time teaching job opening for which they were qualified. Of course, the sheer number of applications you send out won’t guarantee a full-time teaching job; it’s entirely possible to send out 50 incredibly horrid applications.
- OCD: None of the six sent out incredibly horrid applications because all of them were compulsively detail-oriented. Their writing assignments were turned in on time, and free of misspelled words or misplaced punctuation marks. Their pieces were always accompanied by sets of detailed interview notes. In short, I could count on their work to be well crafted and easy to edit. They followed directions exceptionally well.
- Idea factories: The six musketeers never sat on their hands and waited for assignments. I could count on all of them to regularly pitch ideas for articles they thought would appeal to the magazine’s readership. In short, these people were always thinking about the next step, the next job, the next opportunity.
- Good jugglers: All of them taught, had research interests, applied for awards and grants (three of them won Fulbrights), and published. None of them ever said juggling all of that was easy, but neither did any of them ever complain about their situations — at least to me. Juggling was what they had to do and if they had to juggle well, they were going to be the best jugglers possible.
- Accentuating the positive: The messages in their columns were realistic, but never pessimistic. They saw life as a glass half full, and their current jobs as an opportunity to learn certain skills and master specific challenges. I field “poor me” essays all the time, and I politely tell the writers that we need essays that don’t preach to the choir, as it were.
- Interpersonal skills: Some people have them, many people don’t. The six musketeers I lost to the tenure track were all friendly, warm, and easy to talk to. In short, they were the kind of people you’d want to be seated next to at a dinner party.
- Humility: None of them ever demonstrated what can only be described as the diva gene. They understood that writers write and editors edit. They took constructive criticism well, and solicited it.
- Focus: One musketeer after another told me that while freelance writing had been possible before jumping onto the tenure track, the new job had to be the primary focus.
To be clear, there are musketeers out there who, through no fault of their own, don’t manage to land on the tenure track. You may be one of them. If you are, it has little to do with you and everything to do with the nature of supply and demand in higher education. Of this I am sure: Musketeers like you don’t end up teaching as adjuncts for long periods. You eventually realize there are plenty of opportunities outside of academe for our country’s most highly educated and highly motivated graduates.
By P.D. Lesko | Posted on Friday April 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [11]Things They Don't Teach You in Grad School
As I was speaking at a faculty meeting the other day, I had a thought that comes to me with some regularity these days: Right now, almost nothing I do in my job as dean of the faculty is directly related to what I learned in graduate school, or to my original plans when set out to earn my Ph.D.
I certainly never thought that I would become an administrator, at least beyond the department chair level. Even as a visiting instructor, though, I quickly developed an intense interest in how my college worked. The analytical thinking and institutional skepticism inculcated by scholarly training in my discipline (English) most definitely contributed to that interest. I think they also made me a pain to our administration in ways that I now understand quite thoroughly.
But budgeting, student recruitment and retention, strategic planning, facilities, personnel, and other issues that I now deal with almost daily were definitely not on my agenda back then. Even as a young professor, a lot of the issues I encountered were simply not part of my graduate training. Life as a new faculty member was full of surprises, not all of them pleasant. The relative purity of graduate school’s scholarly agenda does not fit that cleanly with the life the vast majority of college and university faculty members end up leading.
I am nevertheless immensely grateful for my disciplinary training. Although it has a complex and abstract relationship with my current daily work, it still was excellent preparation for the duties I now fulfill. Every day I am glad I am a fast and thorough reader, and a fluent writer. I am thankful for the training that has made me a skeptical consumer of language.
Most important, I am glad I spent a lot of time as a faculty member. I hope I still understand and sympathize with the particular challenges faculty members face in dealing with students, their teaching loads, and the challenges of scholarly and creative activity at a small, teaching-oriented university. My teaching experience has made it easy for me to speak to groups and think quickly on my feet, and to answer unanticipated questions.
But if you had asked me 15 years ago what I would be doing today, I would surely not have answered correctly — not even close.
What have you encountered in your career as a faculty member or administrator that was not part of your planning or training when you were a graduate student?
By David Evans | Posted on Friday April 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [34]March 6, 2009
The Fairness of Partner Hiring
In a recent post here, I discussed how the recession is making it even more difficult for colleges and universities to provide employment (or even real placement assistance) to partners of prospective hires. A few days later, The Chronicle published an article, “Employment for Spouses Gets Harder to Find,” that took up, and expanded on, the same issue.
In the comments to my post, people raised several questions about partner hiring. One of the overriding issues concerned fairness: Is any substantial effort to accommodate the partner of a potential hire “fair” to the other candidates? Do such efforts unjustly disadvantage candidates without partners? Is academe’s approach to partner hiring a deviation from practices in the “real world”?
As I have said before, when a college or university recruits a new faculty member, its main concern should be to make the best possible hire for its particular needs and circumstances. In that light, if the “best possible faculty member” seeks a partner accommodation, then the primary purpose of the search is best served by trying to meet that request.
Most important, partner accommodations are actually not a zero-sum game. One of the main reasons why the economic crisis has made such accommodations more difficult now is that institutions usually do not offer existing jobs to partners; they create new positions when the top candidate makes a request. Every institution has an array of unmet staffing needs that aren’t sufficiently urgent to rise to the top during regular budgeting processes. However, if several such needs can be met by a candidate’s partner, little pockets of money can often be assembled from different places to make a new position possible.
In such cases, there is no job “lost” to other candidates by the accommodation. It’s actually arguable that the hiring institution’s actions in creating a new position increase the pool of available jobs by one (or at least reduce the competition for those jobs by one, presumably qualified, candidate). Except in the most abstract sense, no other candidate is harmed by such an accommodation.
The problem now, of course, is that those little pockets of money don’t exist in most institutions. Because of that loss of flexibility, partner accommodations are now much harder to provide than they would have been even a year ago. What is at work here, unfortunately, is the rough justice of the larger market, not any academic principles about fairness in hiring.
By David Evans | Posted on Friday March 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [43]February 27, 2009
Scoring Points on the Side: Fair or Not?
I overheard a colleague say once that his basketball skills had paid dividends in his academic career.
In graduate school, he had discovered that the department chair and several other significant faculty members played lunchtime pickup games. So he landed an invitation and ended up playing almost daily with most of the members of his dissertation committee. He found a similar situation in his first tenure-track job, playing with several leaders on the campus, including his department chair and the dean, who became friends as well as supervisors.
I’ve seen the same thing happen with golf, community-service organizations, and other extracurricular activities, in which a faculty or staff member forms relationships with important persons through nonacademic interests. I’ve been told by such insiders that it is simply a part of collegiality — but there are times when I wonder if that’s not really just code for the “good-old-boy/girl network.”
Have you ever seen these kinds of off-campus relationships become unfair?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Friday February 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [10]In Support of Academic Dads
Despite academe’s supposedly progressive tendencies, when it comes to parental policies, mothers seem to get all the love while fathers get left out in the cold. In a recent Balancing Act column, Mary Ann Mason, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and co-director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, describes that cultural bias and calls on colleges to extend paid parental leave (and other official and unofficial parental perks) to dads.
Too many colleges still assume that the primary parent is always the mother, Mason writes. “Among the members of the Association of American Universities (the 62 top-ranked research institutions),” for instance, “only a handful offer paid parental leave to fathers after their children are born — the majority offer it to mothers — and none offer graduate-student fathers paid parental leave (a few offer it to mothers).”
It’s no wonder that fathers like this one — a scientist who wrote to Mason after reading her previous column, Do Babies Matter in Science? — feel frustrated and discouraged at times:
“For our daughter’s (a special-needs child) first couple of years, I took her to physical therapy three times a week, losing about seven hours of work time. I was pre-tenure at that point. Everyone assumed that my wife (also a tenure-track scientist) was the primary caregiver, including the male chair and female dean and provost, so she was offered special consideration on scheduling classes and such. She had to tell them that I was the primary caregiver with respect to physical therapy, since our daughter wanted to nurse, not work, when my wife was there. No special scheduling was then offered to me. I think their minds simply couldn’t get around the idea of a man being the primary caregiver.”
Mason points out that while many academic fathers want to be more deeply involved parents, they’re reluctant to ask for accommodations, out of fear that they’ll be stigmatized or viewed as “less committed” by their departments. Of course, mothers worry about being mommy-tracked, and rightly so, but cultural norms encourage them to put family and spouses’ careers first.
If we hope to change outdated cultural norms to the benefit of both academic parents, “family-friendly policies must include fathers as well as mothers,” Mason writes. “Only then will the strongly held gender stereotypes against men as committed caregivers dissipate.”
What parental policies/benefits does your institution have in place for fathers (and mothers)? What else can be done to support both working parents?
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Friday February 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [37]January 16, 2009
Thinking Twice About Jobs at Research Universities
An article on The Chronicle’s Web site today describes the results of an important new survey that shows a growing proportion of graduate students worry about balancing a career and family. As a result, they are turning away from a career at research universities in favor of one at teaching institutions that are perceived as more family friendly.
The survey of 8,400 doctoral students from University of California campuses was conducted in 2006-7 by Mary Ann Mason, a professor at Berkeley and co-director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, and by Marc Goulden, director of data initiatives in academic affairs at Berkeley.
According to their findings, only 29 percent of women and 46 percent of men rated research-intensive universities as family-friendly workplaces for tenure-track professors. In contrast, 82 percent of men and 73 percent of women considered teaching-centered institutions to be family friendly.
Of particular concern is the finding that many Ph.D. students who had aspired to work at a research university had had a change of heart on the way to the degree:
Forty-five percent of men and 39 percent of the women surveyed intended to become professors at a research institution when they started their doctoral program. However, once into their programs, the numbers dropped to 36 percent and 27 percent, respectively.
That shift was especially pronounced among women in the sciences, where a mere 20 percent of women “still wanted to become professors at research institutions, compared with 31 percent at the outset of their Ph.D. programs,” Audrey Williams June notes in her article.
So tell us, readers: Do those numbers surprise you? What can research universities do to improve their family-unfriendly reputation?
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Friday January 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [27]