It is a good time to be pseudonymous

As many faculty handbooks across the country likely state, faculty members walk an interesting line between private citizens and institutional representatives. Things get even more complicated when faculty become public intellectuals, advocating for particular causes. These divisions used to be relatively easy to maintain – what one said in private would not preclude one from being employed. Thanks to technological advances, though, even those who are not typically seen as institutional representatives are regularly fired for things that there is now a digital record of (as I’ve noted several times in the past, there is no backstage on the internet). Although I completely understand the reasons that one might want to have a social media presence as an academic, I have to admit that it seems like a good time to be pseudonymous. (Edit: Fabio also connects these cases to internet shaming.)

In the past year we’ve seen John McAdams get fired at Marquette and Steven Salaita get un-hired by the University of Illinois for social media activity. Twitter seems to be particularly problematic because of the lack of room for context in 140 characters. Twitter isn’t the only problematic outlet for our thoughts, though, and those of us who say that these things are easily avoided may be overstating things. As Tenured Radical stated earlier this year:

Most of us don’t go to the trouble of writing a whole blog post about a graduate assistant to throw our careers into a death spin, but most of us in academia *do* put up thoughtless, reactive things about colleagues, students and political events on Twitter and Facebook. Some of us do it all the time.  Might be time to check that at the door, until we figure out this new American thing of wanting to smash people for saying and thinking the wrong thing?  It might also be time to check what we tweet, re-tweet, Facebook and share to make sure it is true. The law of Internet truthiness means that social media utterances tend to acquire facticity as they trend, and they also become more “about” one thing — racism, free speech, misogyny, the One True God — as they multiply across platforms. In addition, when are the stakes high enough that we are willing to take a risk? And when could we just shut it and everything would be fine?

Most recently, another almost-hired faculty member has come under fire for tweets. This time, it is sociologist Saida Grundy, scheduled to start at Boston University in the fall. It currently appears that she will be allowed to keep her job, but starting a career with a stern rebuke from your new boss seems less than ideal. Grundy’s case highlights the danger of posting things on the internet that don’t seem problematic to friends or fellow academics but that are taken very differently by the public (or Fox News). Many of her tweets would have been right at home on the Facebook pages of my friends from grad school, yet her career has been threatened before it even starts.

This unpredictability is why I am happy to remain pseudonymous and I extend this offer of pseudonymity to you. If you would like to write something about academia without fear of reprisal from colleagues, lawmakers, or TV pundits, send me an e-mail.

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Faculty mentoring

Tenured Radical’s latest post states:

The other day I read a comment on Facebook to the effect that, after changing jobs, many academics experience a moment of intense regret. The author of the comment timed this moment of regret at about six months into the new job, when the losses and the difficulty of the transition becomes truly apparent.

Like her, I am not experiencing regret, but it have been noticing certain differences as I get settled in. In some cases, such as mentoring, these differences have given me an even greater appreciation for my former colleagues.

It is not that my new colleagues are particularly bad at mentoring, but one particular colleague at my former institution regularly went out of her way to ensure that I knew what was going on. Unlike mentoring undergraduates or graduate students, at the faculty level I think that successful mentoring is mostly about keeping new colleagues in your thoughts so that you can tell them when you have to do something that a new faculty member might not know about. An example of this is submitting final grades. When the end of the semester nears, a good faculty mentor will not only think, “I need to submit my final grades,” but also, “John might not know how grade submission works here, so I should stop by his office and show him.”

As faculty members it is easy to get caught up in our own grading, students, and deadlines. I think that successful mentoring of other faculty members requires an external focus that our daily work does not. Hopefully I will remember this if I ever get the chance to mentor a new faculty member myself.

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Thinking about moving

Moving this summer would be a pain even if I was just changing offices. Recently, Tenured Radical and Wendy Christensen shared some moving tips. I don’t have much to add to their experiences other than to say that my preferred form of moving has always been from one place to another in the same city, allowing me to move nearly everything myself and never have to live out of boxes (fill a box with pots and pans at the old place, unpack that box at the new place, repeat). When moving for my current position I actually had a large enough budget to have the movers pack for me. The only problem with taking advantage of that was that I didn’t do the sort of cleaning that one should do after seven years in one place. This time I plan to be more discerning in what I bring with me.

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The reality of writing at teaching-oriented institutions

The other day Tenured Radical had a great post about the reality of writing in academia in general, but especially at teaching-oriented institutions:

The truth is that the vast majority of academic jobs, and some of the jobs that people want most because they conform to our romance of what higher education ought to be, are the least likely to forward one’s life as a writer and a scholar. Do you believe in faculty governance? OK, then, slice about six to eight hours out of your week for it, unless you are in the faculty senate or on some other major committee, and then take out another five hours. Are you a dedicated teacher? Six to seven hours a week, per class, until you start to enter Grading Hell about the middle of February, and then you can double that commitment. Do you like students? Well, then they will love you! Reserve another four to six hours a week for scheduled and unscheduled office hours, Mr. Chips, and this doesn’t even begin to count the hours you will spend advising and writing letters of recommendation.

I became increasingly aware over the last 25 years that peers who did not work at teaching intensive colleges had a great deal more time to spend on their writing. Yet strangely people act as if all full-time academic jobs are more or less the same, and that we all are similarly accomplished. We act as though there are not more than a very few people who work under the conditions that allow them to write more. In fact, I would argue that there is a kind of accelerator effect in academia, in which people who have access to the best fellowships and best jobs coming out of graduate school will, increasingly have access to more time to write than other people. It is these people who set the standard for excellence that, in the end, the vast majority of academics are expected by their institutions, and expect themselves, to meet.

This is a problem that I’ve discussed before in terms of academic false consciousness and the publication gauntlet. I am also hurrying to get some writing done before the crush of grading makes it practically impossible. While I think her identification of the problem is right on, most of her proposed solutions are aimed at helping faculty write more rather than addressing the fact that expectations no longer match a practical definition of reality for most academics.

False consciousness strikes again!

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Halloween roundup

Happy Halloween, everybody. Here is a roundup of some of this year’s Halloween-themed posts:

• Sociological Images takes a look at changes in girls’ Halloween costumes over time, via the Huffington Post.
• Kristen Schaal also tackles the topic of sexy Halloween costumes on The Daily Show.
• Cyborgology tells people how to avoid being racist on Halloween.
• Tenured Radical does the same.
• The Society Pages discuss Halloween class assignments.
• For those who want to scare themselves with stories originating on the internet, the PBS Idea Channel discusses Slender Man, via Kotaku.
• And finally, Deadspin fights back against the ubiquity of pumpkin spice with a recipe for Apple Crumble.

I hope that the Great Pumpkin brings you lots of toys and candy. If not, there’s always next year!

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Academic consciousness at St. Mary’s College of Maryland

Friday, Tenured Radical featured a guest post by two faculty members of St. Mary’s College of Maryland who discuss a plan to ensure that all employees of the College are paid a living wage and that none of them are paid too much. It would work like this:

Under the St. Mary’s Wages plan, a benchmark salary for the lowest paid employees would be set at 130% of the poverty line for a family of four, currently $29,976. This would ensure that no family of four with one full-time wage earner would need to depend on SNAP (formerly called food stamps). Other salaries would be subject to minimum and maximum pay levels based on multiples of the benchmark salary. For example, the President’s salary would be free to adjust based on market forces anywhere between a minimum of 7.5 times the benchmark (currently $224,820) and a maximum of 10 times the benchmark ($299,760). Assistant Professors would start at no less than 2 times the benchmark ($59,952) and all faculty would be capped at 4 times the benchmark ($119,904).

As inflation raised the benchmark, those numbers would change so that even someone at the maximum salary would be eligible for cost-of-living raises. For faculty, other salary considerations (including merit pay, raises for 5 year reviews) would set pay levels in between the top and bottom caps. The staff union, which has signaled its support for our efforts, would retain the right to bargain on behalf of all union members.

The goal is to create cohesion across the campus community by aligning wages with the College mission. It is interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that more schools haven’t done this. Although St. Mary’s is a public school, it seems like these sorts of plans could work well for small private colleges. Tensions are certainly high at my own institution as administrators look to cut costs. Knowing that everybody’s salaries increase or decrease together might provide some relief.

As hard as it is to imagine these sorts of plans taking hold at colleges and universities in an age of academic false consciousness, there are entire countries where they are being considered. Switzerland, for example, will vote next month on whether to limit CEO salaries to 12 times those of their lowest-paid employees. If you can’t get a job in Switzerland, St. Mary’s College of Maryland may be worth checking out.

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Republicans take their ball and go home

In case you hadn’t heard (in which case, you may be a student), the government shut down last night at midnight. Republican demands to delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) because they don’t like it, despite the fact that it was passed in the house and the senate, signed by the President, and withstood challenges in the Supreme Court, reminds me of when a kid who loses a game takes his ball and goes home because if he can’t win he would rather not play at all. After thinking of this earlier today and congratulating myself for being clever, I watched last night’s episode of The Daily Show and noticed that Jon Stewart said essentially the same thing.

Slate has a nice roundup of stories about the shutdown, including an article written in the style that we would likely use if it was occurring in another country. I also like this collection of wire photos used to depict the impending shutdown (Slate is not immune to these tactics – see the photo on the aforementioned article).

Over on the blogs, John Quiggin at Crooked Timber reposts an analysis from 2011 and Dan Hirschman talks about the plight of graduate students who need to use the National Archives (as does Tenured Radical).

Finally, Jimmy Kimmel demonstrates the importance of survey wording by asking people whether they prefer the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare without informing them that they are the same thing:

This is all so exciting that I can’t wait to do it again in a few weeks when the debt limit is reached! On another note, my “Government Inaction” category has never been so apt!

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What constitutes an adjunct?

Over the past few days a new study of Northwestern University by David N. Figlio, Morton O. Shapiro, and Kevin B. Soter and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research has been making the rounds. The study, discussed at The Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, Orgtheory, and Tenured Radical, among others, finds that students learn more in classes taught by adjuncts than in those taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty. A lot of the people reporting on this study talk about the fact that adjuncts are being paid solely to teach so it may not be surprising that they do a better job of it than those who are also supposed to publish, serve on committees, publish, and publish.

What I have not seen anybody address for certain (and what I have not been willing to pay $5 to access the article to find out myself) is whether the “adjuncts” in the study included graduate students. Beyond the other potential problems with the study (such as using student grades to indicate greater learning), the answer to this question is crucial to interpreting the findings, since graduate students, like tenured and tenure-track faculty (and, as some point out, many adjuncts), also have many other competing expectations and are not just “paid to teach.”

If anybody has access to the full version of the paper I would love to know the answer to this.

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Don’t forget the mission

When discussing issues related to funding, one of my school’s president’s favorite sayings is that we are “not for profit, but we’re not for loss.” I recently saw this phrase in a book somewhere, so I imagine that my school’s president is not alone in his affinity for this statement that is intended to justify whatever he is arguing for at the time (such as outsourcing various things, expanding degree programs for non-traditional students, and bringing in huge freshmen classes).  I am relatively certain that he makes these decisions based on what he believes is in the best financial interest of the school. When chasing money, though, one must be careful not to forget the mission, as a recent failed experiment in online courses at San Jose State University demonstrates.

Will Oremus at Slate reports that more than half of the students enrolled in SJSU’s first batch of five online courses through Udacity failed their final exams. Tenured Radical has a good take on this, writing:

I am not against online learning, and I am persuaded that under the right conditions it can be effective. It is, however, becoming ever clearer that corporate methods for extracting profit from education are exploitative and ineffective for students.  I don’t think any of these providers are honest about the down side of not having a real, live teacher — not to mention the absence of classmates who might help you learn.

Furthermore, what course open to thousands of random people could really teach all of them well? Part of what actual schools (where students are taught in non-profit numbers) can provide is some sense of what might be expected from a course. At my last job, it was reasonable to expect that students would devote themselves full-time to school, and when they didn’t that was a choice. At my first job, and my present job, it is reasonable to assume that students are pressured by work and family. That means, depending on which group I am teaching, I assemble different courses, different ways of using class time and pacing the semester, different ways of paying attention to my students, and different ways of choosing course materials. One is not easier than the other; they are different. Increasingly, I teach students differently within the same class.

David Silbey at Edge of the American West notes that “Not finishing or failing the course is – from a monetary standpoint – a feature, not a bug. Students who fail to finish or finish but fail have to pay again for the same (or an equivalent course). Profit!”

Both points underscore the importance of focusing on a school’s mission. What does the mission statement actually say about educating students. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that students are actively engaged in a course? This is something that I have struggled with over the years; as I implement requirements that students dislike but that force them to engage with a course or give very detailed writing assignments because many students cannot handle the lack of structure in more open-ended assignments it is inevitable that some students will complain I am treating them like “high schoolers” or that they should be able to skip class if they want to.

As Tenured Radical notes, being there in person I can adjust things, sometimes even for students in the same course. If I were responsible for thousands of students through an online course, though, not only would these sorts of adjustments be very difficult to manage, but requiring students to complete discussion questions or take quizzes about the reading themselves would be nearly impossible.

SJSU’s mission statement declares that its goal is “To enrich the lives of its students, to transmit knowledge to its students along with the necessary skills for applying it in the service of our society, and to expand the base of knowledge through research and scholarship.”  This, like most mission statements, seems fairly vague. If, as a job candidate, you are able to meet with a school’s president, I think that an important question to ask is how the president personally views the school’s mission statement and works to fulfill it. Is he or she focused on keeping the school afloat financially or on enriching the lives of students? The answer will likely tell you much more about the school’s direction than the mission statement itself.

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What would you do?

In the wake of shootings that involve classrooms, whether elementary, middle school, high school, or college, I ask myself what I would do in a similar situation. I have been fortunate to never have a a student that I was genuinely afraid of, but that is no guarantee against violence. Claire Potter, a.k.a. Tenured Radical, has had such an experience and discusses the possible ways that the situation may have played out:

So because I knew nothing, except that this had occurred in a small town near my old rowing club that I had driven through multiple times to get to I-84, what I thought about was the campus shooting I experienced on May 7 2009. On that day, a young woman at Zenith was gunned down in front of her friends at the campus bookstore by a man who had stalked and threatened her for several years.

And on that day, the campus went into, as they say now, “lockdown.” We had very little information about what had happened, or what might happen next. My office was in a small building: we locked all the doors and gathered upstairs. I, at least, was well aware that if the gunman proceeded up the hill towards the main campus, ours would be the first building he got to.  As we waited, for hours, I turned different scenarios over in my mind. Most of them had to do with running away: how thick was the front door? If the gunman entered our building, could we all escape in good order through the back? And as Director of the building, would it not be my moral duty to help everyone else get out in front of me, be the last to leave, and assume the greatest risk?

In case you have never had this experience, these are the kind of things you think about as you are waiting to see if you are going to die you are going to become a casualty. After a bit, my co-teacher, a young postdoc, and I quietly confided to each other our worst fear: that the shooter was one of our students, a young man I will call Jack. Jack’s eccentricities had morphed, week by week, into what both of us believed was a full-blown psychosis, resulting on odd to scary behaviors.

…

Suddenly, the front doorbell rang: we looked out the window and — it was Jack. What to do? If he was the shooter, could we keep him out? If he was not the shooter, he was in danger, and as his teachers, we had a moral obligation to help him. What if, floridly psychotic or not, murderer or not, he had come to us for help?

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