Do Your Best And Don't Worry

This week I received the surprising news that as far as my department and department head are concerned, I had a very good 2007 indeed. As I indicated to my department head, I had been expecting far worse. The merit score is still far from a done deal; the department heads now have to make their cases to the College Dean. From there it goes to the Provost, who has proven herself quite capable of not signing off on things she's not completely good with. And only God (that is, not even the University President) knows what kind of a raise my exalted merit rating will net me. So I won't be holding my breath. The most important thing is that I did my best for dear old 901 South National last year... and it didn't go totally unappreciated.

What I hear from elsewhere is far less happy. The residual discontent from last year's merit process, along with the drive to repackage, repackage, repackage, has apparently been eating away at faculty morale. Now that the culture of accountability has lodged itself into workload discussions, the circle of yowlers is expanding beyond the asshats-n-looters community. Wait until the University adopts (as I am sure the University will) an "activity reporting solution" called Activity Insight. Those of us who walk right up to the microphone to account for our time will be happy for anything which helps streamline the process. The asshats will be up in arms. With a little luck, maybe they can be coaxed to get off the stage.

Get Off The Stage

The hammer came down on the Social Work program this week. Four tenured faculty members were "reassigned" and an associate professor appointed as the new, permanent program director. To judge from the discussion on the News-Leader's online forums (which has been extensively edited at least once), the controversy is far from over. Obviously the University is going to take a huge salary hit, as will the overall reputation of the University faculty: we'll all be regarded as asshats and looters now. On the other hand, I don't see anything else the Administration and the interim director could have done. The Social Work program's fabled toxicity had been festering well before the changing of the guard at 901 South National. A quick, painless, surgical fix was out of the question. As best I can tell, the next best option was cutting the program's losses and moving the project forward, and that is what the University did.

The hammer also apparently came down on the Academic Development Center this week. In her Spring Semester update to faculty and staff, the Provost included among positions "reorganized, with a savings of 50% or more" the Director of the Academic Development Center. If I have interpreted the handwriting on the wall correctly, the Director has returned to the Education faculty, where I wish him the very best. It also means that the University is serious about developing a Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. It will be interesting to see how a director is selected: there doesn't seem to be time for a nationwide search, which means the lucky person is already here at 901 South National. How I hope it's not a looter and/or an asshat; I'd hate to keep saying that the language they constantly prate says nothing to me about my life.

Hatful of Hollow

The raison d'être at 901 South National is, as famously stated by the previous President, "the production of educated persons." I quite agree, even though it's not always been clear that the Central Administration does. Were this the case, how would the Administration explain its massive outlays of money on wasteful excrescences great and small - like the mediocre basketball teams, the ghastly football team, the oversized marching band, and the Center for (fill in the blank)? I suppose most of the Centers for (fill in the blank) confer at least some benefit on some subsection of the student body. But as long as all of the academic units are being converted into cost centers, why not convert the marching band, the basketball teams, and the football team into cost centers too?

I have fumed elsewhere on this blog about the corporative approach marking many of the usual suspects' well-meaning attempts to raise the level of teaching: Blackboard(tm) bloatware, the Academic Development Center, the late and unlamented Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. I have also railed against the asshats who can't, or can't be bothered to, teach their way out of a paper sack. It's about time I also dump some of the blame on the primary, front line producers of educated persons... the faculty at large. Including yours truly.

If there's one issue that raises faculty hackles faster than merit pay, it's teaching evaluation. One can always blame the Provost, the Dean, or the Department head for any given merit pay inequity. But teaching evaluation cuts to the core of what the average faculty member is at 901 South National to do. It reaches into the castle keep, where every faculty member is King or Queen, with all of the authority and privileges thereby conferred. Seen in this light, it's easy to understand the faculty's reluctance to evaluate itself critically. Mix in the merit pay factor - the results of teaching evaluations can and will be used against one - and the issue becomes one no sane person will go near. I should know. I once served on a University teaching evaluation committee. I met interesting colleagues, did my fair share of the work, and helped produce a set of recommendations that accomplished doodley-squat. A couple of years later, the Faculty Senate Chair called me and refused to get off the phone until I agreed to serve on another such committee. But I got the last laugh. I never attended a single meeting.

That is just one of my personal crimes. I stopped reading my numerical student evaluations years ago, because my department has never normed them. There have been semesters (not under the present Administration, though) when I didn't even give evaluations. It seems that the others in my department share my attitude toward student evaluations: only a couple of colleagues used them in their merit pay applications. It's all a pretty big joke. Oddly enough, I still read the students' written evaluations very carefully. Just last semester, one of my students called me out big time. And quite rightly so. I'm working hard to address it, and I'm confident that I am succeeding. Maybe there's hope for me yet.

Any serious form of teaching evaluation will require peer evaluation. Not surprisingly, that idea makes most faculty run off screaming, and not just the asshats. Let an intruder into the castle keep? Most faculty would answer "Get real." Then factor in the time and trouble involved in constructing and administering a viable peer teaching evaluation program. Can you say SoTL? Even though I've been known to drag colleagues, students, and random passersby into my classroom, that's where I run off screaming. That's where I join the asshats in their incessant chant (incessant bleat, is more like it) of THAT'S TOO MUCH WORK.

In my heart of hearts, I still care about producing educated persons. I firmly believe that constructing and administering a viable peer teaching evaluation program is crucial to that goal. I guess I'm just waiting for a sign to tell me why I should put my gluteus maximus on the line to help accomplish it... instead of holding on to a hatful of hollow.

The Youngest Was The Most Loved

Our department has made a new hire this month. As word has it - I avoid getting involved in searches involving this segment of our faculty - our future colleague is promising, personable, and happy to be aboard. All the things one looks for in a new tenure-track person. I never even asked what our future colleague wangled by way of a salary. One of the other candidates had demanded a salary about $5000 less than what I am making in lo, my third decade at 901 South National.. Another candidate had basically demanded "Find me a job for my spouse." Hiring one of your top choices in a seller's market can get expensive. I hope the department salary structure didn't get knocked too far out of whack. There is a world-class junior asshat in our department who will unleash a whining unto God or the University President, whichever of Them responds first.

I myself used to get quite bothered by this sort of salary compression issue. But with the passing years, I realize more and more how lucky - or blessed, or whatever - I was to land in a tenure track job at a time when the bar was set so much lower. Sure, the department was run by the asshats when I arrived. But as long as probationary types like me acted friendly-like, didn't whine about a 12-hour teaching load and didn't threaten the asshats too much with the publication records we were forced to compile, tenure and promotion were no big deal. I had to plead with our then-department head to be given a third-year pretenure review. The response was "We like you! You'll do fine!" They did like me. Then. The response I got when I went up for promotion to professor was something different, but that is another cycle of posts.

Now, probationary faculty are confronted with a mind-numbing sequence of hoops to jump through: codified departmental and collegiate tenure and promotion guidelines; annual evaluation letters from the personnel committee, head, and dean; the rumblings from Carrington Hall that the standards will continue to go up, up, up as 901 South National becomes even more excellent than it already is. This on top of excelling in teaching, service and research at all times, and acting friendly-like to the tenured faculty. Know what? It's all too easy to gripe about how bad we had it when we taught 15 hours per week, published a book a semester, and sprinted to and from work, uphill in both directions. All too easy to compare salaries and whine that the youngest was the most loved, when in fact the mountains of released time and inflated salaries can't begin to compare with the pressures new hires live with every day of their probationary periods. In fact, as much as I genuinely love what I do for a living and as grateful as I feel to make a living doing it, I sincerely doubt I'd even go to grad school today if this gray miasmic haze of uncertainty and blind chance was what awaited me when I finished.

I Can Have Both

What prompts people to volunteer for committees which have nothing to offer except for tedium and yet another golden opportunity to make 901 South National look good, free of charge?

I never wanted to have both. Heaven knows I'm not paid enough even to consider it as an option.

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle

For more than a decade, IDS 110 and its Honors counterpart, UHC 110 have been providing the freshmen of 901 South National with their introduction to college life. None too well, for the most part.

The previous administration had rightly seen the need for such a course, and ponied up the resources to develop and staff it. Unfortunately, they selected as program director someone whose only qualification was having chaired (satisfactorily, for the administration's purposes) the Faculty Senate. A professor of "Administrative Office Systems," no less... a glorified typing teacher who looked and acted like the Church Lady. Within her first year as director, the Church Lady's control-freak tactics had run off 90% of the committed and enthusiastic faculty members who had crawled out of the woodwork hoping to help the poor little freshmen assimilate to college life. Soon IDS 110 was taught only by staff members and a handful of faculty members who were desperate for the money.

The kids hated the class too. They were frogmarched through every chapter of the IDS 110 textbook, which was authored by (you guessed it) the Church Lady herself. They snoozed through the stultifying group lectures about the evils of alcohol, drugs, sex, smoking, and whatever else the Church Lady considered worth worrying about. By semester's end they were well on their way to a profound cynicism about 901 South National and everything it was hoping to offer them. The original version of IDS 110 was literally worse than nothing at all.

There was no question of making changes to IDS 110. Not only did the Church Lady defend her turf like an irate mama badger, she was the BFF of the one person the University President was known to fear. Mrs. University President. It took two years' worth of surveys, reports, and committee meetings for the Church Lady to see the handwriting on the wall and begin the practice of addition by subtracting herself from the employ of 901 South National. IDS 110 soldiered on as best it could, somewhat bereft of direction while the current administration took the University in hand.

In keeping with the current administration's emphasis on student success, IDS 110 is being retooled yet again. Administrators of all levels are signing up to teach sections of the new and improved course, and have been tasked with "nominating" worthy and interested faculty members to teach other sections. The course carries a small stipend of $1000. A section of UHC 110 pays $1500. Another student success initiative involves "learning communities" consisting of a dorm floor's worth of students and a faculty member who becomes (I guess) their faculty big brother or big sister for a semester or two. I have been approached to participate in both initiatives for next year. I enjoy doing things like this, and have done them in the past, sometimes even without extra pay. Nor am I necessarily adverse to doing things which will redound to the greater glory of 901 South National.

But before I decide - well, I know I'm not going to teach the UHC as a matter of principle -I would like to know one thing. Will my contribution to bona fide University initiatives benefit me professionally? If so, how? Just about anything would count. Even the right to boot the asshat of my choice right in the ass, even once a month.

Certain People I Know

At 901 South National, you don't find committee work. It finds you. That is, if you're worth a damn at serving on committees. I'm hardly the most assiduous Servant of the University; my name appears exactly twice in the 2007-2008 Committees Handbook. That handbook, of course, doesn't list College or Department Committees. Nor does it list the instances in which faculty members are pressed into doing something because everyone else who could do it is already too busy, and the others are too lazy or too stupid, or both. Here's a quick guide to the certain people I know on these committees.

Saints: These are the true believers. 901 South National calls, they answer. They can't say no, even if they are already overcommitted to start with. Lookthem up in the Committee Handbook index and you will see five to ten separate numbers after their names. I know a few of them, some very well. They include gifted teachers, gifted scholars, and people who are accomplished at both teaching and research. I just don't get it.

Sycophants: These people sign up because it gives them something to do instead of teaching or doing research. If they do it long enough, they may get a job as director or full-time administrator of Something Really Important, where they get to sit in a big office wearing nice clothes and telling a secretary what to do. Or, at the very least, a drastically reduced teaching load and a graduate assistant. Some are Usual Suspects. They can also be described as the highest echelon of looters.

Saps: The saps tend to jump in if and only if it looks like nobody else will take on a given task. They are respectably cynical about their place in the 901 South National community. Most wouldn't consider becoming an administrator or the director of Something Really Important for double their current salary. Most would much rather do research, or teach, or both.