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Under what circumstances did/do you revoke tenure?
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Jun 23, 2019 23:54
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Brainworm posted:Let's not call it successful. Really, this was a successful thread for about five years and has been on something like life support since then. Which is fine. Lord knows there are goons who don't look up from the keyboard when their kids are born, but I'm not that guy. Kind of ironic in a post talking about capping faculty to forty hours a week that you consider the thread no longer successful because now you post brief essays monthly instead of bi-weekly or whatever. It's still a successful thread, just one with a more adult (encumbered) production schedule.
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Jun 24, 2019 00:41
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I'd love to hear about the earth salting, or the controversy of the 40 hour week rule.
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Jun 24, 2019 01:23
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Wallet posted:Kind of ironic in a post talking about capping faculty to forty hours a week that you consider the thread no longer successful because now you post brief essays monthly instead of bi-weekly or whatever. It's still a successful thread, just one with a more adult (encumbered) production schedule. That's a fair point.
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Jun 24, 2019 02:02
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:Under what circumstances did/do you revoke tenure? I think the best way to answer this is to spell out four situations where tenure revocation was on the table. I've changed some of the details so nobody gets outed and I stay out of court. ---------- 1) Imagine a Faculty member, Alex. Alex has a couple direct reports, both of whom are female. One day, one of those direct reports complained to a Dean that Alex had been creating a hostile working environment.. Instead of launching an investigation or following anything that looks like a credible process, the Dean had the locks on Alex's office door changed and announced to Alex's colleagues and his professional network that he'd been fired. This in the course of a single evening. The Dean in this case was a tenured member of an academic department. For most of us, it was clear that the Dean ought to be removed from their Deanship. It was less clear whether this rose to the level of tenure revocation. 2) While leading students on an off-campus program, a faculty member, Angelo, made remarks about the local politics and culture that some students believed were offensive. Those students were a member of a campus group, and asked the group's advisor, Bob, how they ought to respond. Bob advised staging a protest, and provided the students with detailed advice about how this ought to be done. The students, following Bob's advice, launched a protest that barricaded several Faculty, including Angelo, inside their offices. One of these Faculty, a combat veteran, was distressed by elements of the protest which included (for instance) sudden, loud noises. Bob's position as a student group adviser was unpaid, but he was removed from it. There was uncertainty about whether his tenure ought be revoked. 3) During a campus-wide budget reduction, Faculty member Angela altered the ways that several of her program's expenses were recorded, almost certainly with the intention of presenting her programs as revenue-generating when they actually were not. In reporting to the committee responsible for actually making college-wide budget reductions, Angela did not disclose the details of her accounting practices, or that -- if examined under other, more conventional accounting practices -- her programs would look very different. While there was broad agreement that Angela ought be removed from any position that involved budget oversight, there was uncertainty over whether her tenure ought to be revoked. ---------- One thing that might not be obvious: each of these cases involves a PhD being played out of position as an adviser, manager, or administrator. Each also involves an obviously terrible decision driven by moral certainty, and enabled by the lack of even cursory consultation with non-PhDs such (for instance) Human Resources staff, the College's legal counsel, or an accountant. That's a common problem. I think the only other thing I can add is that I was for revoking tenure in all three of these cases. I'm the only person I know who was, although there are a few people in the two-out-of-thee club. Based on what I know of the Oberlin case, I'd be for it there, too. No surprise. I'm a hangin' judge.
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Jun 24, 2019 03:09
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Brainworm posted:I think the only other thing I can add is that I was for revoking tenure in all three of these cases. I'm the only person I know who was, although there are a few people in the two-out-of-thee club. Based on what I know of the Oberlin case, I'd be for it there, too. No surprise. I'm a hangin' judge. You wrote the person's name in number 3. I don't know if that's their real name or not. I'm kind of interested in which two out of three and, if you can say, if tenure was actually revoked in these cases. I can imagine a number of professors I know doing something stupid of a similar character to number two. Protesting by barricading people into their offices is a particularly idiotic way to stage a protest whether there are any combat veterans involved or not, but I can see an argument for lenience. The first professor shouldn't remain in a position with power over others. I found myself wondering for a moment if that was disqualifying before remembering that students exist. The third just seems like fraud.
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Jun 24, 2019 14:18
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Wallet posted:The third just seems like fraud. Yeah.
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Jun 24, 2019 15:08
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Wallet posted:You wrote the person's name in number 3. I don't know if that's their real name or not. Definitely not. quote:I'm kind of interested in which two out of three and, if you can say, if tenure was actually revoked in these cases. I can imagine a number of professors I know doing something stupid of a similar character to number two. Protesting by barricading people into their offices is a particularly idiotic way to stage a protest whether there are any combat veterans involved or not, but I can see an argument for lenience. I should clarify: there were other people in a position to judge who thought that two out of these three cases ought to end in tenure revocation, although many of them differed on which two. Case One (The Dean) I can safely say that the Dean in the first example was allowed to retire early but gracefully, which part of me still finds galling. On the other hand, it's hard to see how a tenure revocation would have improved things for the College. You just end up airing your dirty laundry in public. Case Two (Protests) I read Academic Freedom narrowly, in the sense that I think it exists to protect Faculty who (a) conduct research that interests outside the College find objectionable (like ways to provide safer abortions), and who (b) following a credible professional process, reach conclusions that their superiors -- Deans, Presidents, and Board Members -- object to. A good example of (b) would be when a committee is required to investigate (for instance) a Dean's misconduct, concludes that the Dean was in violation of one policy or another, and then the President fires the committee. (This happened about fifteen years ago at Southern Miss). Process is key there, right? It's perfectly reasonable to fire the members of that committee if it turned out that they joined it with the intention of seeing the Dean fired regardless of the facts. If the committee does a careful job of gathering information, and then delivers a conclusion that the President finds inconvenient, that's another thing. In the case of the protest: The issue is not whether the professor made a bad decision -- they obviously did. It's that they didn't follow anything like a credible process in making it. The College has a process (actually several) by which students can lodge complaints about faculty behavior, and engaging that process seems like an obvious first step. More generally, there wasn't any evidence that the Faculty Member did something like: (a) outline the options (like filing a complaint) that were available to students so they could make an informed decision about what to do next, (b) ask colleagues at other colleges whether and how they had handled similar issues, or (c) consider the legal and other risks that students might be exposed to by following the Faculty member's advice. If they had, I could see a case for leniency. It's possible to follow a reasonable process and still have things go wrong. But there wasn't even an attempt. Case Three (Accounting) This Faculty Member's creative accounting might have led either to criminal charges or to a lawsuit had the Faculty Member's bookkeeping made its way into the College's reporting to government, accreditors, or a granting agency. Luckily, we caught it in time. The sticky bit is that most colleges and universities (including ours) have a clause in their Faculty handbooks about tenure revocation that says something like "tenure may be revoked if the professor is convicted of a crime," but stay silent on what ought to happen when a college's due diligence cuts off a Faculty member's bad behavior before they're charged. I learned that there are vocal Faculty, here and elsewhere, who believe that tenure ought not be revoked when the College stops a Faculty member from committing a crime that they clearly intend to commit. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Jun 24, 2019 |
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Jun 24, 2019 16:58
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Brainworm posted:Definitely not. Somehow my brain broke there for a minute and missed that there were fake names in the other two as well.
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Jun 24, 2019 22:27
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Brainworm posted:
A little off topic but I am so glad to see someone with a narrow definition of academic freedom. A very vocal minority of the faculty I support interpret it extremely broadly and it can be a huge pain in the rear end for everyone involved.
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Jun 25, 2019 01:53
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Discendo Vox posted:I'd love to hear about the earth salting, or the controversy of the 40 hour week rule. I haven't had many Faculty object to the 40-hour rule on principle, although some have. The fire really starts with the policies you need to have in order to make a 40-hour week possible, because they place a lot of responsibility on committee and department chairs. For instance: Meetings All meetings must have: * Specific goals and an agenda. While draft agendas may be circulated for comment at any point before the meeting, a final agenda must be circulated at least three working days in advance of the meeting itself (so that everybody can prepare). Once this final agenda is set, it cannot be changed. * Enforced end times. If a meeting is scheduled to end at 5:00, it will end at 5:00 -- even if everyone ("everyone") in the meeting agrees that it should be extended. (Meetings may end early.) * Explicit time commitments. If the expectation is that members will spend one hour preparing for each one-hour meeting, that expectation is part of the committee's charge. A committee must have equal time commitments for every Faculty member, excepting the chair. (Deans, administrators, observers, and ex officio members aren't covered by this). Also: * Meetings held from between 11:30 and 1:30 must provide lunch for attendees. * No standing committee meeting may have an end time later than 5:15. Courses * Courses (including assignments) must be completely designed by the first day of classes, and on file with the department office (that way, if someone needs to sub in for a course, we know that they have the information they need in order to do it). * Courses are approved only if they make instructor time commitments explicit. The most common instructor time commitment is one hour outside of class for every hour of seat time, although there are some 2/1 classes. (Labs, studios, and applied courses usually work differently). Research Expectations * Departments must negotiate research expectations with Faculty using a 40-hour-a-week workload. That is, research expectations ought always be framed according to what type of scholarship a Faculty member ought be able to produce in (for instance) five hours per week. Those are the big ones, but there are some others. We have a rubric for chair performance that scores these factors specifically, and we've used it both to hand out raises and (once or twice) to remove underperforming chairs. Most often, though, it just provides a basis for talking about chairs' performance with them. You don't need a bushel of carrots and sticks. Most people -- and I mean like 99% of them -- want to do a good job but don't always know how. And so you've got to give them (a) the information they need in order to figure out how to change, and (b) the support they need in order to bring that change about. I like to say that both students and Faculty need to feel valuable, effective, and supported -- that is, they need to see (a) how the goals of the College (or the course, or the committee) line up with their own goals, (b) that they're capable of winning (or losing) based on the decisions they make, and (c) that there are people invested in helping them improve and succeed.
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Jun 25, 2019 15:47
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Brainworm posted:Let's not call it successful. Really, this was a successful thread for about five years and has been on something like life support since then. Which is fine. Lord knows there are goons who don't look up from the keyboard when their kids are born, but I'm not that guy. My sister could probably rate your accomplishments (she's an academic working for the US govt). Me on the other hand: you make me so glad I never graduated college and am now a successful IT developer. Great job overall
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Jun 27, 2019 09:01
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:Under what circumstances did/do you revoke tenure? You can look at the rules for tenure at various institutions. I think they vary but generally speaking the only thing that it exists to do is protect intellectual freedom. So if you are writing papers that some other professor thinks are worthless or dislikes for some political reason there's gently caress all that can be done. Generally speaking revoking tenure or getting rid of a tenured professor involves things like incompetence or insubordination. Tenure isn't some magical "you can't fire me ever neener neener" shield. If a professor just kind of quit doing their job entirely but expected their paycheck to continue that would obviously be something that could remove their job and tenure. Same goes for becoming incapable of doing the job for whatever reason, committing crimes, or even institutional financial hardship. Generally speaking if a college needs to cut costs it can cut positions. I think in that case there are rules in place for who gets cut first. Untenured professors are usually the first to go and then there's seniority. That sort of thing.
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Jul 1, 2019 14:52
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ToxicSlurpee posted:You can look at the rules for tenure at various institutions. I think they vary but generally speaking the only thing that it exists to do is protect intellectual freedom. So if you are writing papers that some other professor thinks are worthless or dislikes for some political reason there's gently caress all that can be done. Generally speaking revoking tenure or getting rid of a tenured professor involves things like incompetence or insubordination. Tenure isn't some magical "you can't fire me ever neener neener" shield. If a professor just kind of quit doing their job entirely but expected their paycheck to continue that would obviously be something that could remove their job and tenure. Same goes for becoming incapable of doing the job for whatever reason, committing crimes, or even institutional financial hardship. Generally speaking if a college needs to cut costs it can cut positions. I think in that case there are rules in place for who gets cut first. Untenured professors are usually the first to go and then there's seniority. That sort of thing. That's a solid overview. The place where it's often not clear cut involves specific kinds of faculty behavior that (a) don't directly pertain to research or teaching and (b) are perceived to harm (or threaten to harm) others -- especially students or the College. Good, recent examples of that kind of situation include Melissa Click (although she wasn't actually tenured), and Sam Abrams. They're good examples because they're at least a little muddy. Nobody ever seriously debates whether (for instance) a professor who commits sexual assault ought to have their tenure revoked (although lots of people will rightly defend the idea that their tenure ought to be revoked according to the same process that applies to everybody else). I'm not saying that Sam Abram's tenure ought o be revoked, or that the case is even borderline. Just that these are the kinds of situations where committees have to do more complex kinds of work. If Sam Abrams's article had, for instance, made false (or over-generalized) statements about students or the College, he might have been in real trouble. But you don't get to know that until you actually investigate.
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Jul 1, 2019 19:33
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Jordan Peterson and Mehmet Oz, though.
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Jul 1, 2019 19:46
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With all this talk about revoking tenure, I'd like to flip the focus to ask about granting it. I'm going up for tenure at an institution which resembles yours in a discipline which is relatively closely related to yours. I've got a very strong record on scholarship and teaching and a fine enough record on service, so I'm not trying to hide any shortcomings. But it does feel in some ways like I'm sending my portfolio into a great unknown where it will be discussed and voted on in ways that nobody at my institution seems able, or at least willing, to talk clearly about. And of course there is the alarming ability of academics to take the tiniest piece of evidence, fixate on it to the exclusion of everything else, and use it to justify whatever they want. I've seen that happen at meetings too often not to have nightmares about it happening in tenure deliberations. So what's it like at the departmental and college-wide level when you're considering tenure cases? How much do institutional and personal politics (which I imagine are fraught at your institution, like pretty much everywhere) enter into deliberations? Do your have any tips for crafting the narratives portion of the portfolio or anything else about the process? p.s. I've been following this thread with interest since the beginning of grad school, though I haven't been an active participant in it.
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Jul 2, 2019 17:03
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striking-wolf posted:With all this talk about revoking tenure, I'd like to flip the focus to ask about granting it. [...] So what's it like at the departmental and college-wide level when you're considering tenure cases? I can speak to my current College and to a few others. First, while the standards for attainment of tenure aren't usually precise or well-defined, the process that a College committee goes through to grant tenure, including evidence that they may (or may not) consider, is usually well-defined. This sometimes looks different at the departmental level, where standards for attainment are well-defined but the process is more open. The biggest wildcard in the process is usually external reviewers. If you're lucky, you get three instead of two (which is OK) or one (which is very bad). A well-constituted three-person group of external reviewers will almost always go 2/1 (just like article and book reviewers). Some people fundamentally disagree with every line of research except their own. This can get you into trouble if you only have one external reviewer, and a department with other members who can't speak to the quality of your research in any credible way. quote:How much do institutional and personal politics (which I imagine are fraught at your institution, like pretty much everywhere) enter into deliberations? True story: I put off going for Full Professor this past year because of the constitution of my College's review committee. There were people on it who disagreed with how I handled a specific, recent personnel situation which became very complicated, and which ultimately resulted in the removal of both a Dean and, eventually, our College President. Both the Dean and the President were good people who made at least one very bad decision, and -- before they were removed -- there was a contingent of Faculty who believed I should have played stronger defense on their behalf. I didn't put off review because I thought I wouldn't get Full, but because I didn't want to hand a then-incoming Dean and President a problem they would need to solve by overruling the recommendation of our tenure and review committee. That kind of decision makes Deans' and Presidents' lives more difficult even if it is also clearly in the right. That said: I probably also made the wrong decision. I imagined a lack of integrity in colleagues with whom I really just had a difference of opinion. And that's the shadow that I think most covers most worries about politics and Tenure. Everybody who doesn't get tenure both (a) acts surprised, even though the reason that they were denied tenure was well-documented in earlier reviews, and (b) says that it's because someone on the committee didn't like them. (b) is probably actually true, in the sense that it's easy to dislike an underperforming colleague. But I've never personally seen a case where a clearly high-performing candidate was denied tenure. I have seen cases where someone who knew that they were at risk of not being tenured played defense by blowing smoke about committee members, though. A great example was a Faculty member who was denied tenure because they hadn't completed their PhD. Having been hired ABD, their two- and four-year reviews both noted that the Faculty member wouldn't be tenured without the PhD (a terminal degree is an inflexible criterion for Tenure here). And so they spent the weeks before their tenure review lodging complaints with HR about the behavior of members of the tenure and review committee, none of which were verifiable, and then used those complaints after the fact to try to get the then-President to overrule the committee's recommendation. quote:Do your have any tips for crafting the narratives portion of the portfolio or anything else about the process? You can't demonstrate a lot in a narrative, but you can demonstrate self-awareness. So be authentic and straightforward. Don't hide your mistakes, or talk around weaknesses in your file. Let the committee know you see these things, and detail how you plan to address them (if you haven't done so already). The best way to do this is usually by crafting your narrative as a response to whichever minutes you received from your earlier reviews.
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Jul 3, 2019 21:58
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Thanks for the tips -- it's always good to get an insider perspective on the process!
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Jul 5, 2019 20:51
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Wonderful thread. Not sure if you're still around or not - looks like the last post was more than nine months ago - but if you are, and you don't mind answering, how are you spending the lockdown? I can't imagine there's any sort of precedent your college can fall back on for handling a pandemic, which means there's probably a lot of leeway for some real creative planning.
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Apr 9, 2020 22:27
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Eason the Fifth posted:Not sure if you're still around or not - looks like the last post was more than nine months ago - but if you are, and you don't mind answering, how are you spending the lockdown? I can't imagine there's any sort of precedent your college can fall back on for handling a pandemic, which means there's probably a lot of leeway for some real creative planning. Oh man. There's a short answer, like how our college specifically is working with the pandemic, and how that relates to what other colleges are doing. There's also a long answer, which is about what my life looks like right now. Here's the short answer: in mid-March, just before Spring Break, the College decided to send students back home. That's a flexible "back home," and we still have a few hundred students on campus. Some of them are from places like Syria, where travel bans mean they can't re-enter the US if they leave. Other students are from countries with closed borders, or don't have anyplace else to go. The details go on and on. We've refunded everybody's room and board for the semester, and set up emergency financial aid. For employees who can't work remotely, we're paying their time anyway. We're also paying our subcontractors to keep their folks on payroll. Classes here, like everywhere else, are running online. We haven't done online courses before. My team and I ran a Spring Break course transition boot camp for Faculty. This semester, everything's running pass/fail, although students can request letter grades. (There are some cases, like admission to graduate programs, where the requirements are still "applicants must have a B or higher in organic chem.") Student internships, externships, off-campus programs, and so on are all cancelled. There's some grumbling about that, since we (the College) pay our students to do internships, and some of them were counting on a combination of Summer money and internship credit. In that case, as in a lot of other cases, I don't know that there's a solution that will both satisfy students and be legally workable. We can't just give credits out, and we can't pay students for internships that get scuttled. That sucks for our graduating Seniors, but this is a pandemic. At least we had a fauxmencement before they left campus. The takeaway? I think we're way, way ahead on looking out for our students' interests. A lot of places aren't refunding room and board. I understand why -- they'd fold if they did. But it's unconscionable. The same goes for blanket policies that keep campuses open or remove students entirely. The details matter. Too many places are absurd, tragic, comedies of mismanagement and gently caress-you-got-mine institutional self-interest. There are places that seriously expect $3K-per-course adjuncts to pivot to online instruction, like, for free, after not issuing room and board refunds and throwing everybody off campus. What do they do for an encore? Hire Harvey Weinstein to cast the chapel's Christmas Pageant? To gloss that: Doing the right thing well is expensive. This year, we're looking at a $15m deficit on a budget of about $50m. A lot of that is room and board refunds, since those are a straight loss -- you've got to pay for foodservice regardless of whether students show up at the Dining Hall. The same goes for housekeeping, maintenance, and so on. You're either paying for work you don't need, or paying people to stay home. I don't think the Trump administration is going to pass relief bills for non-Ivy League colleges, so we're just gonna have to eat that. Admissions is also getting rear end blasted, so we'll keep eating it for another four years.* Here's the long answer, Part I: Half of my job is teaching. There, I'm running courses remotely using our CMS (Moodle) and Discord. I gave students a choice of non-synchronous options (Discord, Slack, Telegram, etc.) and Discord was each class's tool of choice. Tells you a lot about who we attract. I've had a couple students and advisees just ghost. I've also had some students land in quarantine once they get home, and when that happens they usually don't have internet access. So my grading has changed a bit. The upshot is that any student who does any amout of work at all can't earn a lower grade than they had at midterm. If they were passing before midterm, it's technically impossible to fail. The other half of my job is running our Teaching and Learning Center. We did the boot camp for moving courses online, and we've organized a support system (on-call hours, etc.) to make sure our Faculty have the resources they need. We've also organized course failovers, since we have a handful of Faculty who've just disappeared -- they never moved their courses online, or they did and their students haven't heard from them. The Dean can sort out the disciplinary end of that later. For now, or job is to make sure that every class gets taught. Here's the long answer, Part II: Mrs. Brainworm and I had a son on February 27th, two weeks before classes got cancelled and three weeks before I had a manuscript deadline. That means I came back from paternity leave on the day the College announced that everyone was going home, and had a week to finish a book, move my classes online, and run a boot camp to help other Faculty do the same. Since then, I've been working from home in the company of a 3 Y.O. and a newborn. My wife is the Lab Director at our local hospital. She's technically on maternity leave, but got called back in to set up lab stations for about a half-dozen improvised respiratory clinics (her hospital system has pressed all of its urgent care centers, and a few parking lots, into service for this purpose). Her work is more important than mine. This means that I work from about 4-7 AM, run child care until about 6PM, co-parent until 9, and get another hour's work in before bed. Sometimes I can get something done during our daughter's nap time, but it's rare that our son is sleeping then. Four hours a day is just enough for me to bounce in on my courses, message my advisees, and check the worst impulses of our Faculty. I have a Philosophy professor who insists that his "three strikes and you're out" attendance policy ought apply to three-time-a-week hour-long Zoom lectures. Outside of that, my wife and I both had what was probably Covid in mid-February: two weeks of fever, hard breathing, dry cough, and joint pain, with a dash of pinkeye. I had pneumonia. But we're not taking any chances. That means no day care, babysitters, or family help. So far, everybody's healthy. Here's the miscellany: We've got two other things going on. One of them is the Shakespeare Festival, which would have had its seventh season this May and June. We have event insurance, but Actor's Equity is being a pain in the rear end. I don't know how large Equity theaters are going to weather this. We're OK since we're a seasonal theater and our financial exposure was low. Still. Cancelling a season is a lot of work, and it came at a bad time. Mrs. Brainworm and I are also landlords. If we gave everyone an indefinite rent holiday, we'd hit serious liquidity issues starting in July and start folding properties in August or September. So we've suspended rents for our nonprofit commercial tenants and our low-income residential ones. Everybody else can request rent reductions or deferments The uncertainty is a killer. Everybody's applied for stuff, but nobody knows whether they're getting anything or when. That means we don't know what we'll be getting either. Our business partner is handling all this, thank God. We've got some commercial tenants who aren't going to make it no matter what we do. I mean, this is the Midwest. Commercial rents can be like $850 a month. You can forgive that outright, or even refund it back to the beginning of the year. For our bar and restaurant people it's not gonna make a difference. The takeaway: for me, the real shitshow ended about a week ago. The book I've got under contract is the one that came out of these forums, by the way, although you wouldn't know that to read it. I can link to the manuscript if anybody wants a Very Rough Draft. Also, the stress means that it has become very important for me to build Exactly the Right Kind of handheld retro game emulator. If anyone knows of handheld hardware that can manage N64 games gracefully, I'm listening. I'm also good to answer questions about any of this -- more specifics about what I'm doing, what the College is doing, or how Higher Ed. is managing, somehow, to screw up worse than the Feds. * A small class hits you for as long as they're at the college, since you can't just admit more first-year students to make up for not having very many Sophomores. Even if it's possible to accommodate that on your campus, your bad year is also very likely your peers' bad year. That means that, to build your larger class, you and your peers all end up bidding harder on the same students. That means that even if you get your larger class, you're not bringing in more money.
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Apr 10, 2020 05:40
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Would be very up for you thoughts on how Higher Ed is screwing up/the institutional response. At my university the administration was originally planning on giving <10 days of severance pay to externally contracted resident services workers across the board, and suspend their contracts with very little warning. Student/faculty/alumni protests got them to extend pay/benefits through May (incidentally, it turns out one use for the Zoom backgrounds that I thought was kind of cool is for putting up virtual flyers in support of university workers), and some student-initiated fundraising means they should be getting at least a few more months directly, but it was kind of remarkable how lovely the initial University decision was. They also still haven't done anything to help the rest of the dining hall workers etc, 2/3s of whom are still being furloughed indefinitely. The school is a private/wealthy research university, and I guess this was pretty naive given capitalism and how they've treated workers in the past, but I'd hoped they'd be willing to put some very small portion of the absurdly large endowment towards continuing benefits/pay. Also, good luck with handling everything, I hope that your family continues to stay healthy and safe!
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Apr 10, 2020 17:55
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RIP ZEEZ
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Brainworm posted:Oh man. I’ll read it.
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Apr 10, 2020 18:29
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Speaking as the Teaching Learning Center person at a community college - it hasn't been super easy, but things have transitioned smoother than I was expecting. We gave our faculty 2 weeks to transition their courses, with a decent amount of options that we are able to support (I am a shop of a single person so I had to triage support) and the ability for faculty to do their thing if they are tech-savvy. I trained over 150 faculty over the two weeks on our options in crash course "remote instruction" stuff, and when we went live it was ... surprisingly smooth. I did get a few faculty who thought requiring 3 Zoom sessions a week mandatory was going to fly, but thankfully most people were reasonable or realized that wasn't going to work pretty quick. I technically can't tell people how to teach but I can give good examples, let my champion faculty model stuff for me, and my department chairs were extremely supportive of being flexible and understanding that this is a lovely situation for students too. It really helps when senior faculty can help tamp down some of the less than stellar ideas other people have been having. Students have been pretty decent and wiling to give this a shot, honestly. They picked up the technology pretty quickly, and we got a stock of computers to lend out to students who didn't have equipment. We also cranked up the wifi in our parking lots for students who might not have access at home. We did have withdrawals but our advising center said that most of the reasonings they've been seeing are family/work related and not because of the shift to remote instruction. Our dorm was taken over by the county to serve as a non-critical hospital. It's possible they might not need to use it, but we did have to move our residence staff and the remaining few students to a sister college to stay for now. I'm hoping that we didn't kick up a fuss about that will help us get at least flat funding or maybe a little bonus, but we are going to have some tight belts for a while. I'm pretty sure we refunded at least partial room and board as well, since the state made the decision for us. We are currently planning for what we are going to do for Summer. We were already stretched thin with enrollment declines before this happened, so I don't know what's going to happen in terms of payment for developing for remote instruction, etc. I know the union is working on it but I am keeping myself as far out of that as possible because I have Thoughts that probably don't jibe with what some of our more vocal faculty want. We just cannot afford a lot more than we are already doing right now - I'm pretty sure we are paying everyone, including student workers, whether they are working or not right now. We are really trying hard not to screw anyone for as long as we can, but in order to be sustainable we have to look carefully at additional expenditures. I understand the need to compensate people for the work done but you cannot get blood out of a stone.  Thankfully I have heard the same (in less politic language) from some respected faculty so I can hope that they will understand whatever comes out of the negotiations. I really would like all our faculty to keep their jobs, so (in my opinion) if that means small or no payment for getting Summer off the ground beyond their normal salaries, then so be it. Above all, this is a temporary situation. It will pass, and we will probably be changed because of it - hopefully for the better, but it's going to be a hard few years. LegionAreI fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 19:15
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foutre posted:Would be very up for your thoughts on how Higher Ed is screwing up/the institutional response. There's at least one mistake I see a lot of Colleges making, and it's embedded in what you're talking about : quote:At my university the administration was originally planning on giving <10 days of severance pay to externally contracted resident services workers across the board, and suspend their contracts with very little warning. Student/faculty/alumni protests got them to extend pay/benefits through May (incidentally, it turns out one use for the Zoom backgrounds that I thought was kind of cool is for putting up virtual flyers in support of university workers), and some student-initiated fundraising means they should be getting at least a few more months directly, but it was kind of remarkable how lovely the initial University decision was. They also still haven't done anything to help the rest of the dining hall workers etc, 2/3s of whom are still being furloughed indefinitely. Rule number one of running a morale organization: never turn down a chance to ask for help. Sometimes, people can actually help you. Always, they have egos. They resent not being consulted, and resent whatever solution you come up with because they're going to think that they can do a better job. They may even be right. Put another way: people in a morale organization want to feel valued. There are a million different sins you can commit in a College community, but the only unforgivable one is showing people you don't value them. If you do that, man, you're a leper. Your department, your students, your alums, they'll throw you into a loving volcano. Here's what should have happened at your College: First: your Dean or Provost sends out a public message describing the financial consequences of room/board refunds, and explains that this gives the College no financial choice other than to furlough some number of workers. Then, in the same message, they ask for help. Give students and Faculty something they can do: "what can you do to support our workers through this? We need volunteers to fundraise for a worker relief fund. We also need volunteers to help our furloughed workers file for unemployment benefits. We're also setting up a series of virtual meetings where you can suggest other ideas..." The message: we value our furloughed workers' well-being, and we value your good intentions and ingenuity. That's the playbook. Ask for help. If you don't, everybody's going to read every unpopular decision you make as you not giving a poo poo about people. In a morale organization, this means that the they will (a) resent you and (b) undercut you until the clock runs out. This is so basic. But Colleges gently caress it up to no end because they're full of beep boops who don't understand how actual human beings react to feeling threatened, betrayed, or powerless. And the degree to which they don't understand this is absolutely unholy. Here's an example: moving courses online works ok for lectures and for some activity-based courses. It works very badly for labs, studio courses, and practical courses. So suppose you're a school of performing arts, and your students say something like "I'm a Dance major. How is the College going to move my dance studio online?" The obvious answer is that you can't. On top of that, these are fine arts people. They're not deluding themselves about the amount of debt they're taking on or their earning potential once they graduate. So in this situation, they feel threatened. If you don't treat that as a legitimate concern, or if you try to bullshit them, they're gonna feel betrayed. And then, man, it's blood in the water. So how do you handle that? Ask for help. Invite a committee of alumni, faculty, and students to come up with a solution. You know: "most colleges can move their classes online, but we can't. We have X amount of money we can use to solve this problem ,so what do we do." The gist? "We're an arts community. These are the resources we have. It's us against the world, so let's figure it out." Meantime, use the crisis to hit up your hall-of-fame alumni and donors. Invite your most famous graduates back to teach master classes and catch your students up on credits. That way, you don't have to hire extra faculty to do it. Ask your wealthiest donors to pony up for your scholarship fund. That way, the cost doesn't come out of your operating budget. Again, it's "we're an arts community. These are the resources we have. It's us against the world, so let's figure it out." A competent Dean should have wet dreams about this kind of challenge. Ask for help in a morale organization, and people will set themselves on fire for you. Why? Because they want to feel valued. Want your departments to streamline their majors so students can graduate on time? Want Faculty to teach extra courses? Want students to tolerate larger classes? Want alums to donate more? If you ask first -- before you alienate them by loving up -- they'll do it. So what happens when a real-life Dean gets handed this kind of opportunity? This. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 20:21
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lifg posted:I’ll read it. OK. I compiled an ePub here. Obviously this is pre-publication so, you know, don't share it. Palgrave could lose tens of dollars. This is out for clearance reading right now, but I'll take suggestions.
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Apr 11, 2020 04:46
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LegionAreI posted:Speaking as the Teaching Learning Center person at a community college - it hasn't been super easy, but things have transitioned smoother than I was expecting. We gave our faculty 2 weeks to transition their courses, with a decent amount of options that we are able to support (I am a shop of a single person so I had to triage support) and the ability for faculty to do their thing if they are tech-savvy. I trained over 150 faculty over the two weeks on our options in crash course "remote instruction" stuff, and when we went live it was ... surprisingly smooth. This is almost exactly where we are. Enrollment's been tightening for a decade, and we just suffered through two consecutive bad presidencies. If this had hit in 2018, our President and C-Suite's mismanagement would have put us under. I think everybody understands that. They're on their best behavior. That said, we have a cohort of faculty who think that the College ought to be a little state, with its own social safety net and welfare system for staff and students alike. It's a noble idea but they don't understand how endowments work -- they see them as bank accounts, not as money that belongs to somebody else -- and so they're proposing spending that just isn't possible. We also have a few Faculty who used their department budgets to give students back-door financial aid. I'm not sure how that's gonna shake out. They're lucky they got caught. That's the kind of thing that drives me to confusion. It takes twice as long to clear up a single department's back-door student aid shenanigans as it does to refund the entire student body's room and board. And while you do it, all you can think about is how the next piece of idiocy is already in motion. It just never stops.
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Apr 11, 2020 05:11
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Brainworm posted:OK. I compiled an ePub here. Obviously this is pre-publication so, you know, don't share it. Palgrave could lose tens of dollars. Thanks!
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Apr 11, 2020 14:42
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Brainworm posted:OK. I compiled an ePub here. Obviously this is pre-publication so, you know, don't share it. Palgrave could lose tens of dollars. I don't have any meaningful criticism to contribute but it saddens me that readers under 30 will not appreciate the Ross Perot burn on page 17.
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Apr 11, 2020 16:03
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Finally, someone has the balls to say what we're all thinking: Tootsie is better than Hamlet
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Apr 11, 2020 16:38
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I read the first three chapters last night. I found it extremely engaging, and that's as a mathematician who normally has little interest in these matters. Please do share a link once it's out, I'd be happy to buy a copy.
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Apr 12, 2020 13:48
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I will echo others in saying to share a link for the book once it's out so we can purchase a copy.Brainworm posted:OK. I compiled an ePub [...] Brainworm posted:
For what it's worth, I'm an adjunct/sessional who now needs a monograph — or at least a contract for one — on the cv. If you have broader reading recommendations about monograph proposals and publishing I'm all ears. I haven't read the David Ball you mention in the Palgrave book, but I absolutely love some of the older literature textbooks aimed at undergraduate students: Brooks's Understanding Poetry, Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense. I always end up disagreeing vehemently with this or that — some of their claims as well as their broader framing of ideas are obviously, ah, of a time — but it's a very pleasurable disagreement that helps clarify my own thinking. I wish there were more books like them, especially nowadays.
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Apr 12, 2020 14:52
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DirtyRobot posted:I will echo others in saying to share a link for the book once it's out so we can purchase a copy. Can do. We're targeting an October release to allow Spring 2021 textbook adoptions. Things as they are, I think we'll be lucky to get it under the Christmas tree. quote:I'm very curious about your process and your thinking for these, in terms of the planning and proposal stages, and how you see them fitting into your career. Are you imagining the Palgrave book as at all contributing to your application for full professor, or was it mostly to help you work through your thinking (and/or for fun) before you wrote the other one? Have you submitted the proposal for the textbook yet? If so, does it mention the Palgrave version? I'm gonna disappoint you with my thinking and my process. What I ought to have done was discover what it takes to land Full Professor, and then do that. Really, I spent the last two years writing fiction. Turns out the pay is garbage and there's a lot of rejection. So I wrote something that I knew would make it into print. I needed a win. Also, I wrote it for fun. So there's that. Based on the proposal and sample chapter, I signed a contract with Palgrave just before Halloween with the rest of the book unwritten, and delivered this version of the MS to them on about March 15th. It still has to go to the clearance readers, but their job is to either greenlight it or kill it based on whether it does what my proposal said it would. Incidentally, the sample chapter had four readers. Three of them thought that the book's language was accessible and its approach was refreshing. The fourth wrote an article-length screed about how it's completely unsuitable for his or any other classroom and called me a "scholar" (with scare quotes). Point is, I'm up for Full Professor this year and don't know if the book will help. quote:For what it's worth, I'm an adjunct/sessional who now needs a monograph — or at least a contract for one — on the cv. If you have broader reading recommendations about monograph proposals and publishing I'm all ears. If this is your first book, get everything you can out of your dissertation. I recommend the the old four plus one: one dissertation makes four (or so) articles -- one per chapter. Then, Frankenstein them together into a book. One body of research, five lines on the CV. If your dissertation wasn't that developed, no sweat. What used to be called "dissertation series" -- books that are longer than an article but shorter than most monographs -- are still around. Palgrave has a line called Pivot that just screams "publish your dissertation," and I'm sure Routledge, Springer, and the other academic non-University presses have something similar. If I were in your shoes, and absolutely gunning for a book-flavored CV line, I'd focus on the contract more than the publication. Even if you got a completed MS accepted today, it's not going to be out in time for the next hiring cycle (or maybe even two). So you want a publisher or publishing line that can offer a contact based on a spec chapter and a project outline. Don't do that thing where you finish a MS and spend a bajillion years shopping it around. quote:I haven't read the David Ball you mention in the Palgrave book, but I absolutely love some of the older literature textbooks aimed at undergraduate students: Brooks's Understanding Poetry, Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense. I always end up disagreeing vehemently with this or that — some of their claims as well as their broader framing of ideas are obviously, ah, of a time — but it's a very pleasurable disagreement that helps clarify my own thinking. I wish there were more books like them, especially nowadays. Those are both good. Good textbooks ought to focus on concepts, be short enough to read in an afternoon, and re-readable in the sense that they offer something to both novices and experts. While I'm at it, I think they should cost $20 or less.
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Apr 13, 2020 04:43
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Funktor posted:I read the first three chapters last night. I found it extremely engaging, and that's as a mathematician who normally has little interest in these matters. Thanks! I ought to have something to add to that, but I don't. quote:Please do share a link once it's out, I'd be happy to buy a copy. My Development Editor thanks you. She thinks the worst sin I've ever committed is not having a Twitter account for the sole purpose of relentless self-promotion.
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Apr 13, 2020 04:47
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I found the statement about how we are not done with Shakespeare, unlike most older authors, interesting. I know that Ibsen, being Norwegian, is not your field, but could you say the same about him? Sometimes I see him characterized as the second greatest playwright of all time.
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Apr 13, 2020 08:28
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Brainworm posted:Based on the proposal and sample chapter, I signed a contract with Palgrave Thank you again, Brainworm. This was very helpful. edit: Brainworm posted:Incidentally, the sample chapter had four readers. Three of them thought that the book's language was accessible and its approach was refreshing. The fourth wrote an article-length screed about how it's completely unsuitable for his or any other classroom and called me a "scholar" (with scare quotes). Point is, I'm up for Full Professor this year and don't know if the book will help. DirtyRobot fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Apr 13, 2020 |
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Apr 13, 2020 15:30
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That absolutely blows my mind. I'm only about halfway through too, but I've learned more about interlocking story design from this manuscript than I learned in most undergraduate (and even graduate) creative writing courses. I wish I'd had something like this back when I taught intro to CW. It's a great text that's a pleasure to read. Thanks for sharing.
Eason the Fifth fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Apr 13, 2020 |
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Apr 13, 2020 16:23
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meatbag posted:I found the statement about how we are not done with Shakespeare, unlike most older authors, interesting. I know that Ibsen, being Norwegian, is not your field, but could you say the same about him? Sometimes I see him characterized as the second greatest playwright of all time. Oh yeah. Ibsen is alive. I'm not on Ibsen the same way I'm on Shakespeare, but Ibsen's legacy looks a lot like a domestic drama that reveals the humanity and occasional seediness of upper-middle-class households. The idea is that conflict occurs as characters try to explode the fictions they've been living in. So If you think of an Ibsen story as following that basic arc, plays like Long Day's Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman are Ibsenesque (Ibsenish?), and you could read e.g. Salesman as half Ibsen and half King Lear.
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Apr 14, 2020 02:23
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DirtyRobot posted:
Not sure what his motivation or goals are, but the flaw is obvious and I put the odds of revelation at close to zero. Just finished chapter 3 (obviously) and really enjoying the book so far. I love this way of thinking about stories.
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Apr 14, 2020 09:31
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:Finally, someone has the balls to say what we're all thinking: Tootsie is better than Hamlet This is perfect. My editor wants me to include some endorsements -- the little blurbs you see on the back cover or in the preview materials. Here's what that looks like: quote:Endorsements can be accepted up to six weeks after manuscript submission. Any endorsements submitted after that point will be uploaded to the book’s page on our website. We can usually accommodate 2-3 endorsements of 75 words each, including the endorser’s name, job title, and institution. I haven't gotten on this yet, what with a new baby and my wife working for a hospital during a pandemic. So if any of you want to write an endorsement, write it. You can PM it to me, if you don't want a thousand quarantined goons knowing your name, title, and workplace.
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Apr 14, 2020 14:48
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I've finished reading most of the book now because it seemed like a better thing to do than work these last couple of afternoons: It's better in content than most Chapter six is a little out of joint with what comes before it for me. It feels like the taxonomy you've been developing is supposed to reach towards some kind of climax that clarifies why using these elements in this particular way makes a collection of words into a story, but instead we get a sort of perfunctory unpacking of genre. While I'm entirely sympathetic to the message—there is almost nothing* worse than listening to academics argue about genre categorizations as if the abstraction was the point—it seems misplaced. Could just be me, though. Also you've got what looks like a sentence trapped between two versions in editing on page 73: "Imagine that I want to a Tropical Island card for my Magic: The Gathering deck." * Listening to them argue about what constitutes literature may be worse.
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Apr 14, 2020 22:43
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