These Things Take Time

One promising - literally - initiative on this campus is the "Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning." It sounds like a wonderful thing. Provided, of course, that it can be located. Although the "Faculty Center" has been described as a "virtual center," the closest virtual resource center I could find was the Academic Development Resource Room. While other University documents - such as the Provost's page on SoTL,- reference the "Faculty Center" and/or its Fellows,"a full list of the Fellows is nowhere to be found on the University website. Evidence of the "Faculty Center's" effects on the quality of teaching is likewise absent to date.

I'm not faulting the Central Administration on this. The Associate Provost for General Education and the Assistant Provost for the Extended Campus are extremely busy people and, I suspect, have a good handle on what needs to be done. I understand these things take time. I'm not personally looking for the cavalry. Nor am I in any big hurry. Nothing's going majorly wrong in my classroom. Whatever can be improved upon will be tweaked appropriately. I don't need any help - at least not from the usual Carnegie/SoTL suspects - in designing my new class for the upcoming semester. If I cared about studying Educational Design or Motivational Student Psychology, I would have done it as an undergraduate. As with the dear old Showcase, the language that they constantly prate says nothing to me about my life.

What would I like to see at a "Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning?"For one thing, spaces - both physical and virtual - where faculty members can talk about teaching without necessarily feeling compelled to label their conversation as the almighty "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning." In the late 1990s I participated in an impromptu discussion group with faculty from four different colleges. I went primarily because I enjoyed meeting with colleagues and sharing experiences with them. The benefits I obtained over the two years I attended the group were substantial - but secondary. I think a sense of community can be built among faculty, but not if it is forced on faculty as a mandate.

I would also like to see the "Faculty Center" led by a real, live, practicing teacher. Not by a staff member, no matter how capable. Not by one of those semi-administrative looters who routinely cadge released time for dressing in nice clothes and going to meetings. Not by one of those armchair theoreticians who publish reams but can't teach their way out of a paper bag. Not by one of those hothouse flowers who hasn't taught undergraduates in more than a decade. Of course, most (if not all) of the real, live, practicing teachers I would have in mind would run screaming from an administrative job - especially one that would take them out of the classroom. I can't even imagine the patience required to sit through the endless meetings with people dressed in nice clothes. But maybe one of them could be talked into taking one for the proverbial team.

What Difference Does It Make?

Criticizing the so-called "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning" these days is like setting an American flag on fire with a flaming baby seal . SoTL, as it is fondly known to its devotees, is a fixture on university campuses literally around the world. I just wish I could figure out what the hell it is. I'm all for reestablishing teaching as a priority. Teaching is the reason why I entered academia. But I can't get excited about the jargon and the breathless testimonials and the prospect of endless meetings chock full of "Kumbaya." That's why my career as a Secondary Education major ended before my first day of college. Why should I give valuable time to stuff like this?

The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning - or CASTL, as it fondly calls itself - was founded in 1998 to "build on a conception of teaching as scholarly work." You can read all about it right here. In 1999, SMSU hopped on the CASTL bandwagon with coffee and doughnuts and press releases and hours of meetings attended by well-meaning faculty members, many of whom were among the institution's finest teachers. Copies of Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered and Glassick's Scholarship Assessed were stacked like cordwood in the Academic Affairs office, waiting for someone or anyone to take and read. After all due deliberation by the well-meaning faculty members, the following definition of SoTL was arrived at:

The definition of the scholarship of teaching and learning at SMSU, as established by the faculty in 1999 is: A systematic exploration and evaluation of teaching and learning processes that involves ongoing dialogue, documentation, and dissemination of results.

"Established by the faculty." This disingenuous phrase is typical of the way that CASTL and SoTL were more or less crammed down the University's throat. It suggests a wellspring of grassroots involvement from a wide range of faculty constituencies. Nothing could have been farther from the truth, although one would never have known it from the torrent of news releases about "distinguished off-campus visitors" and "Campus Conversations" and "SoTL Fellows." CASTL was in fact nothing more than useful window-dressing: it could just as well have been called the Potemkin Academy. While the CASTL Steering Committee preached to a continually shrinking number of the already converted, Academic Affairs went on its merry way managing the production of educated persons. CASTL, like the Academic Development Center, was a typical corporate approach applied to whatever was wrong with the teaching here. Buy something, throw it at the problem (hint: the real problem was faculty morale), and forget about it. If the problem persists, it's not management's fault.

If only Academic Affairs could have been bothered to lead.

This perception is not unique to Missouri State University. Eileen T. Bender's 2005 Change article, "CASTLs in the Air," offers a detailed review of CASTL's progress to date. While fundamentally sympathetic to CASTL and its goals, she is ultimately realistic about its achievements.

Thus even these optimistic CASTL exemplars must acknowledge the continuing gap between their own transformation as Carnegie Scholars and the un-transformed academy at large. The central idea of teaching as scholarship is parroted today by campus spokespersons--but their words are not matched by changing policies.

That observation is not only echoed but even magnified in reports and observations drawn from the rank and file of the professoriate across institutional types. When we move from the rarified air of CASTL and its scholars, a somewhat more discouraging picture emerges about the actual penetration of SOTL into the deep structures of academe.

Has SoTL actually penetrated into the deep structures of Missouri State University? What difference does it make? The official CASTL site at http://www.missouristate.edu/carnegie was last edited August 31, 2005: the date of the Great Name Change. It directs questions about CASTL to the email of a faculty member who retired from the Biology Department in 2006. Clicking on the "Discussion Group" link gets you an Error 404 page. The 2007-2008 Committees Handbook contains no sign of a CASTL steering committee. Here is what President Nietzel had to say about SoTL in his 12 September 2007 Report to Campus:

And finally, we want to look at the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Faculty need to have the opportunity to compare and contrast different strategies of teaching and to see what we learn by conducting research on our own scholarship.

So much for CASTL. The President obviously knows what SoTL is, but he doesn't see many signs of its effect here. So what difference does it make? It makes none. What is the next flavor of SoTL going to be?

Stop me, oh stop me

Prominently featured this holiday vacation on the MSU website is a little banner announcing the Academic Development Center's 19th Showcase on Teaching and Learning. Given that it's holiday vacation, I assume the banner will remain in place until the 19th Showcase on Teaching and Learning actually transpires on 9 January 2008. The casual visitor might be forgiven for thinking it is a pretty big deal. It showcases teaching, and learning, and is the nineteenth in a series. The very existence of an Academic Development Center on this campus would indicate that MSU is serious about quality education, right? Stop me if you think you've heard this one before.

Even a quick look at the ADC website suggests the Showcase is not the big deal it's cracked up to be. The content hinted at by the ADC website's left-hand navigation bar promises more than it delivers. One can choose from "professional development resources," or "learning communities," or even a conference on the "scholarship of teaching and learning" to be held a year and a half from now right here at MSU. Whatever the "scholarship of teaching and learning" is or isn't, it has never repaid the effort I have invested in trying to comprehend it. For example, the ADC website proudly features an article entitled "Integrative Model for Learning and Motivation in Higher Education." The article's authors, which include the ADC Director, undoubtedly worked very hard on it. But the accompanying graphic also - unwittingly, I'm sure - illustrates my stupefaction with the entire concept:

It looks like somebody decorated a dartboard with buzzwords: hit the bull's eye and win LEARNING PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES! Again, I'm sure the article is a major contribution to its field. But how it applies to anything I do in a classroom is utterly beyond me.

As for the development resources, the ADC offers seminars, learning committees, workshops, and - drum roll, please - the Showcase on Teaching. I have never attended the Showcase on Teaching, but I have been presenting at it since the last century. It used to bring together a mix of teachers with things to show off and support staff with new tools to offer, and it once attracted a representative audience of faculty. These days it is pretty much the usual suspects talking about the usual stuff to a rather specialized audience. Tenure-track faculty attend it because they have to attend everything, and attendance is taken (by social security number, no less). Administrators attend it because it would be churlish not to attend a showcase on teaching. Everyone else there attends it because they want to rub elbows with administrators. There are some interesting presentations scheduled the 19th Showcase on Teaching - but only one of them would add to what I already know. I think I'll be spending my time on something more meaningful - like a killer round of Bookworm.

Unloveable

From time to time, the powers that be Missouri State University let on that they are not exactly feeling the love from the community at large. Usually, the coldness is blowing down from Jefferson City: either the Legislature is screwing MSU, or the Governor is, or the Coordinating Board for Higher Education is. Democrats punish MSU for being in a Republican part of the state. Republicans punish MSU to get even with the whiny liberal professors. As a matter of fact, MSU has been getting screwed for years. The slice of the funding pie we receive from the CBHE is rather smaller than the piece of the pie - credit hours taught, degrees granted - produced by this particular state university. And women never really faint, and villains always blink their eyes...

There is plenty of resentment to be found right here in the Queen City of the Ozarks. Always has been. Coming here from a college town where the university basically is the city, I was taken aback by the locals' vitriol toward "Sodom and Gomorrah on the corner of Grand and National." Over time, I came to see as partially true the local belief that college professors are pathological whiners out of touch with how the real world works. Unfair, yes. Totally unfounded, no. Still, the institution itself has not helped its case much either.The Emily Brooker case brought MSU national notoriety. Spring 2007's furore over Dr. Michael Hendrix raised a stink statewide, as has the recent flap over the Strong Hall Christmas tree. It seems like a valid time to ask just how MSU presents itself to the local community.

So I clicked on the Community link featured prominently on the MSU home page. I was shocked into shame to discover the relationship between university and community expressed in exactly two paragraphs.

The community of Springfield and the Ozarks supports Missouri State by attending campus events, cheering Bears sports, and interacting through many other activities.

Missouri State also supports the community through its statewide mission in public affairs. Community outreach programs through public affairs research centers, adult continuing education, distance learning courses, public broadcasting, and telecommunication linkages with other metropolitan universities utilize faculty expertise and skills to address state and community problems.

Great. The community cheers for the Bears, and in return we give the community public affairs. It dawns on me that if this is the best MSU can do at justifying itself to the local community, we really deserve all the opprobrium we get. And if the best MSU can do to remedy the situation is appoint a blue ribbon committee packed with the usual suspects, I'm going to give up defending my job as a lost cause.

You Just Haven't Earned It Yet

I barely recognize the Honors College any longer. When I taught my first Honors sections back in the late 1980s, they were smaller (about 60% of the normal class size) and the students expected to be worked harder. Not only expected it, enjoyed it. Being an Honors student was a big deal and so was being a member of the Honors Faculty. Not all applications were accepted, and not all of those accepted stayed accepted. I myself felt honored when I got to teach an Honors section.

But things changed. One common way for a college or university to make itself look good is to trumpet its Honors program. The bigger the better, even if there's not enough brains to go around. Not so much the kids, although over the years there did seem to be a few more marginal students than before. No, there was a shortage of "stations," as the then-dean used to put it. First, the number of "stations" was increased by adding extra students to each section. By and by, additional Honors sections were added as individual departments felt able to do so. I am told that the Honors College reimbursed departments for offering Honors sections, although the exact nature of the arrangement still escapes me. Over the years, I must have brought a fair amount of money into my department that way. Whatever. I was still just genuinely honored by the chance to teach in the Honors College.

I honestly can't say just when I stopped being pleased to teach in the Honors College. Even though additional Honors sections had been added, the number of "stations" in each section crept upward. In his unending quest to grow the program by adding more and more "stations," the then-dean of Honors College insensibly exercised less and less scrutiny over the faculty providing these "stations." Quantity counted more than quality.

The situation has not improved with time, as a quick glance at the Honors College's official list of outstanding faculty demonstrates. Most of these people are in fact outstanding teachers and scholars. Some are decidedly not. The official list includes adjunct faculty, retired faculty, and even one full-time member who boasts an Ed.D. from Nova Southeastern University. Absent from the list is last year's dean of the College of Arts and Letters, despite a teaching load which consists exclusively of one Honors section per semester. But absent from the list are several long-time Honors Faculty members who have won various University awards for teaching and/or research, but no longer teach in the Honors College. Not what I would call true excellence.

I don't question the administration's sincere intention to "upgrade" the Honors College. The proverbial rising tide lifts all boats, et cetera. The time, trouble, and money expended in renovating Scholars House, instituting three endowed chairs, and founding a new Honors academic journal all demonstrate good intentions. Yet to me, at least, these initiatives address only tangential concerns. The Honors College already has more students than it can effectively handle with the resources - Honors sections and qualified Honors Faculty - it currently has. Until the Administration addresses this very real need - an outside review would be an excellent start - I am concerned that its efforts will amount to little more than window dressing.

The Headmaster Ritual

My generation of faculty was the first in Missouri State University history actually required to earn tenure and promotion. In some ways it was the worst of both worlds. President Marshall Gordon had been brought on in 1983 with an explicit mandate to raise the University's research profile, and woe to the tenure candidate whose publication record did not satisfy then-VPAA Donald E. Bowen. On the other hand, the departmental personnel committees were stocked with asshats who had never published anything, and who had gotten tenure and promotions just for showing up on a regular basis. The same was true for most of the department heads. My generation taught the same number of courses per semester as the belligerent ghouls who were already tenured - the difference was that we were expected to publish or perish.

As an incentive for faculty performance, President Gordon had also installed a "merit pay system." Part of any annual raise for the faculty would be doled out as an across the board percentage, with an additional raise for faculty who had been "meritorious." For purposes of merit pay, the workload for all faculty at SMSU was set at 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% service. This was an ideal balance for newcomers like me, because we were expected to be all things to all people at all times anyway. But the oldtimers didn't like the merit pay system at all. They had been hired to teach, not to do research. They sure didn't want to receive a grade on their annual performance. Worst, the idea of their junior colleagues making up ground on them financially was downright perverse.

Naturally, the departmental merit pay committee and personnel committee were controlled by the oldtime asshats; they passed their recommendations up to the department heads, who tended to be even older timers (although heads were starting to be brought in from off campus by the time I arrived). Non-tenured faculty could serve on merit pay committees, but they tended to keep their mouths shut, even if it meant going along with some rather outlandish claims on the part of the senior faculty. A colleague I like and respect deeply, two years senior to me, chaired the committee once while still non-tenured. He had the nerve to call out an old-timer on a bogus conference presentation the old-timer was trying to take credit for. In return for this and other alleged instances of "uncollegiality," the personnel committee (they had to recommend tenure; this colleague had literally outpublished the whole department) unanimously recommended against promotion to associate professor. The department head concurred. If not for swift strong action by the then-College Dean, my colleague's promotion would have been toast.

As the Gordon administration plodded onward, the pool of money for merit pay eventually dried up. But the merit pay evaluations, and the wealth of bad feelings they produced, continued regardless. Acting President Keeling introduced a sliding percentage scale for faculty to set their own workloads; a worthwhile idea which only complicated matters in practice. The Keiser administration's solution was to pay off four years' worth of arrears with a maximum available raise of $1000 for a faculty member who had averaged 100% meritorious performance over that time. For what it's worth, I racked up $960. I wasn't happy to see the merit pay system go, but I respected President Keiser's decision to end the unfunded charade. It was replaced by a greatly increased number of faculty awards for research, service, and teaching. But that is another rant.

That Joke Isn't Funny Any More

The major shortcoming of the Keiser administration was its utter lack of concern over what the faculty, as a whole, thought or felt. Of course, the faculty had just as little of an idea about what the central administration really does. But then, since the central administration exists primarily to facilitate and guide the faculty in "producing educated persons," I considered them to have have a more pressing need to understand the way we operated, and not the other way around. Such was not the case.

When I got here, the University still had a biennial morale survey. Whether I believed or disbelieved in any particular rant, paean, or simple comment, I was almost always edified, and in time began to submit comments of my own. But the biennial morale survey vanished from sight in 1996 in a welter of rumors and dire predictions of potential libel suits, prompting a suspicion that the central administration was more interested in throttling meaningful faculty input than practicing shared government.

Over the years this suspicion has hardened into certainty, as illustrated by the scathing Diamond/Sell Report presented to the central administration in January 2004. Foremost among the identified shortcomings were indifference toward the Public Affairs Mission and the lack of any meaningful communication between the faculty and the central administration. I was personally informed by one of the then-Vice Presidents for Academic Affairs that remedying these perceptions was the job of... the Director of the Academic Development Center. WTF?

The central administration responded with a series of "Centennial Public Discussions" in early October 2004. Handsome fliers were produced and splattered all over campus, facilitators trained, and tables loaded with Sodexho's finest hors d'oeuvres - and almost nobody showed up. Those who did show up were invited to discuss not the Diamond/Sell Report but about how best to include the Public Affairs Mission into one's teaching. WTF?

It's not that I'm not blaming us. It's nothing short of pathetic that 90% of the faculty couldn't be bothered to spend a couple of hours discussing the future of the institution. Too many of us are indeed that shiftless. But it didn't take a rocket scientist to tell that nothing worthwhile would come out of the Centennial Public Discussions.

Years ago, the University employed an Attendance Counselor named Harry O. Taylor. Mr. Taylor was an imposing figure who sounded and even looked a little bit like James Earl "God" Jones. I once stopped by his office to follow up on a student whom I had sent to see him; turns out that the student had poked his head into Mr. Taylor's office, looked him in the eye, said "My professor told me I had to see you," and got the hell out of there. "I guess he saw me, all right," laughed Mr. Taylor.

I would have expected behavior like that from a teenaged snot who thought he could pass my course without actually attending it. The faculty should have been able to expect better from the central administration. Yet the President's Office tasked Academic Affairs to establish campus dialogue about the Diamond/Sell Report; Academic Affairs passed the job down to the Academic Development Center, which outsourced it to the Communication Department, whose veteran public dialogue mongers tried heroically to start some meaningful conversations, but in vain.

I guess we had our Centennial Public Discussion, all right.

Alma Matters

I am in my third decade of employment at Missouri State University. It is not my alma mater, but it matters greatly to me. Hence this blog.

Dr. Marshall (no middle initial) Gordon, who was the president when I arrived here, is best known today for financing almost all of the Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts and for putting the second deck on the football field now known as Plaster Stadium. Which of the two he considered more important is clear from his famous statement that "potential donors never ask how your chemistry department is doing." Dr. Gordon was not what you would call a particularly "accountable" leader. What Dr. Gordon did, and why he did it, and the outcomes of what he did... was nobody's business but his. Not mine, not yours, not even the Board of Regents'. The Board eventually got wise to his modus operandi, but even so the process of flunking Dr. Gordon took time, and money, and more under-the-table machinations.

From February 1992 to June 1993, Dr. Russell Keeling served the University as "Chief Executive Officer." Although Dr. Keeling was rightly regarded as one of the biggest old boys on campus, he also enjoyed a justly deserved reputation for personal probity. I personally knew Dr. Keeling would never be ready for prime time when he selected, as his three top assistants, one colleague from the Communications Department and two of his former graduate students. His choices showed more concerned for his personal comfort level than for the advancement of the University; he was allowed to be a finalist for the permanent Presidency but it was well known that the Board was looking elsewhere. It would be churlish to say Dr. Keeling flunked, when in fact he served the University very creditably under exceedingly difficult circumstances. On the other hand, it would be difficult to contend that he passed, either.

Dr. John H. Keiser became President in 1993 with a mandate to clean house. Heralded as a "what you see is what you get" type of leader, he pretty much lived up to his billing. From the beginning he was very clear about what he wanted to accomplish, and how he planned to accomplish it. To this end, his administration developed and disseminated the first of three highly detailed Five-Year Plans. The University would focus on five major themes, with the Public Affairs Mission bringing the themes all together. And so it did. The Public Affairs Mission became a reality - or maybe a surreality; general education was trimmed down and reorganized, admissions became more selective, and so on. That's not to say, though, that things didn't go on under the table. In the late 1990s, Dr. Keiser threatened to dismantle the Economics Department, which was at that time just one of several underperforming departments on campus (in the interests of fair disclosure, mine was another), but counted among its faculty one of his most vocal detractors, Dr. Thomas Wyrick. Another instance was Dr. Keiser's steadfast - and in my opinion, ass-headed - refusal to include sexual orientation in the University's standard non-discrimination language. Incompetent administrators who toed the party line were rewarded, and incompetent faculty asshats who didn't make waves were allowed to collect their across-the-board raises. I could say it stronger, but it's too much trouble.

Besides, I have to admit that I became personally rather fond of Dr. Keiser. The last two or three years of his term, he came to visit one of my classes at least once a year. The last of these times he got into an animated (if not quite heated) argument with three young women in my GEP 397 class. For someone who had spent the last four decades administrating things, he did a very good job of holding his own, which impressed me a great deal. A traditional faculty gripe about administrators is that they have no idea of what goes on in a college classroom. We had a few of those administrators during Dr. Keiser's presidency, but he himself was not one of them. I can't say that I miss him terribly, but I have to credit him for giving the University a sense of focus and for steering it successfully through some genuinely trying times - such as the Hancock II Amendment of 1994 and the State revenue crisis of the early 2000s. He gets high marks in my book.