We Don’t Have a Rigor Problem

The close of last week brought a perfect storm of opinion pieces that would seem to herald the inevitable backlash against higher ed’s shift to remote learning and working from home. All three of the essays examined here adopt a posture and rhetoric of standards and rigor, suggesting that in the few short weeks since this shift occurred all hell has broken loose. Rather than arming the barricades for a presumed descent into anarchy, the authors would all do well to take a different set of lessons from this situation. We don’t have a rigor problem, we have a compassion problem.

Claire Laporte and Leonard Cassuto are authors of a piece intended as a tentative blueprint for opening campuses in the fall. As a question weighing heavily on the mind of everyone in higher ed, myself included, I was hoping for an enlightened plan. Instead, in their eagerness to open campuses back up (please note: their model for this assumes an almost exclusively residential campus–which is not the reality for the vast majority of college students), they made their rallying cry the restoration of face to face instruction and took things one step further to lob cheap pot shots at online education calling it “thin pedagogical gruel.” They even went so far as to assert that “online learning just isn’t as good” as in-class instruction. Their desire to open campuses back up is at its core built on an elitist and classist model of dorms and small classes. Its disparagement of online education is an insult to those who have been doing it with integrity and creativity for years.

The same day that this piece appeared, Inside Higher Ed also published an opinion piece that urged us all to wash our hair and present a clean and well-dressed online persona to our students. The author criticized her fictionalized, and tellingly female, target for appearing onscreen with “disheveled, unwashed hair,” and piles of “unattended laundry” in the background. The article brazenly fails to acknowledge the innumerable constraints that have made the shift to remote learning challenging at best, and positively overwhelming and demoralizing at worst. For this author, shared and improvised work spaces, child care, illness, limited resources, not enough time, and perhaps just the oppressive existential doom created by this whole pandemic are no excuse for not putting forth a tidy and composed image.

Often overlooked amid the justifiable outrage at the deeply gendered attempt to get professors to dress and practice a particular standard of hygiene was the Inside Higher Ed author’s concomitant demand that we not abandon standards in the assignments and assessments that we give our students during these difficult times. She and David Brooks would get along well, since his opinion piece also expressed a deep–but ultimately flawed and unsubstantiated–concern about grade inflation and students being coddled. He believes that this moment of hardship can teach us about tenacity and help us educate the next generation to “master hardship” and “endure suffering.” What he fails to acknowledge, however, is how many of them are already too familiar with both. Students are sitting in library parking lots trying to access wifi and complete assignments on their phones because they don’t have reliable access to internet or computing equipment. I’m fairly certain I don’t need to provide them with any lessons in hardship and suffering.

In short, all of these articles, have sought to capitalize on the current moment in higher ed to return us to their artificial and elitist notion of rigor and standards. They have defined online education and disheveled professors that hand out too many good grades as the problem. Those of us in the trenches know, however, that the problems are deeper and more complicated than that.

What all of these essays clearly demonstrate is that higher ed doesn’t have a rigor problem; we have a compassion problem. We are unwilling to see each other for who we are as faculty and students. The academy is deeply fractured along class lines and still sexist and racist. There is a thinly veiled disdain for and even hostility towards any pedagogies that depart from the model of the sage on the stage. There is also a deep unwillingness that keeps some faculty from seeing the harsh financial and socio-economic realities that shape the experience of the vast majority of our students. We have failed to acknowledge or remedy the fact that many of our faculty experience similarly precarious financial circumstances. Outside of the academy this is the story that we need to tell others like David Brooks who continue to rely on facile and outdated notions of what higher ed looks like.

Higher ed is broken and we will not be saved by clean hair and face-to-face instruction. We might be saved by a willingness to acknowledge the gaping rifts in higher ed that this crisis has exposed. We might be saved by taking this moment to really see one another in all our messy humanity through the lens of grace and compassion. Like you, I despair and worry that we won’t, in fact, take the opportunity to do these things. But if I don’t start by at least asking myself these questions and opening myself up to these realities, then all hope is lost.

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Being There

The landscape of higher ed these days can be pretty despair-inspiring. Admissions scandals, badly-behaved administrators, shrinking budgets and the like do much to demoralize. As these challenges and crises play out on individual campuses, anxieties mount, tensions flare, and we are often not our best selves. And curiously, the structural patterns and organizing principles of higher ed do much to exacerbate this.

Perhaps ironically, given its origin story as an institution that evolved from corporations of students and teachers, the post-modern university has become a highly atomized environment. We speak of and suffer from the compartmentalization of silo-ed departments and colleges. And this fragmentation reaches all the way down to the faculty and shapes their behavior as well. A 2014 study found that faculty spent an average of 57% of their time working alone. Some of this isolation derives from where and how we work—on weekends, in coffee shops. Some of it derives from our academic disciplines: my own, history, is driven by the model of the solo researcher (though that is slowly changing). And further, as a system, higher ed encourages faculty to think in highly individualized terms. Faculty talk in terms of “my course” and “my syllabus” and “my research.” I am currently reading Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking and part of her thesis is how the competitive funding structure and tenure and promotion processes of academe pit us against one another in potentially unproductive ways.

Some of this independence or separation has its place and serves worthy functions. But I do believe that in times of crisis it doesn’t always serve us well. If anything, I think that those who would undermine or subvert the nobler aims of higher education (educating and empowering students, creating knowledge, faculty governance, etc) benefit from, and perhaps sometimes even capitalize on, our atomization and separation from one another. It is easier to drive a wedge when there is space between people or units where that wedge can fit.

With that in mind, I believe there are small steps we can take to push back against a system that would isolate us and turn us into competitors with each other. I am going to put aside—for the moment—large-scale ideas about big projects where we can and should cooperate and collaborate and systemic changes that would work against a competitive rewards system.  Instead, I am going to say that we should just show up and be there for one another.

Obvious, right? Not necessarily. I read this article about supporting the emotional needs of junior faculty with a combination of head-nodding (“yes, yes, we should do this”) and head-shaking (“what the hell? Why aren’t we already doing this?”).

And I mean being here and showing up for each other in its most basic sense. Go to your colleague’s presentation at the local library. Throw someone a little party when their book gets published. Thank a staff member in a department outside your own for something they’ve done that makes your life easier. Create community where there was none before. A few years ago I started a very small online writing group with some colleagues who lived all over the country. I had some self-serving reasons: I had a writing project I needed to finish and I knew I needed accountability. But I also drew together this group of friends because I suspected they would be good for one another and benefit from the opportunity. Two and a half years later, we’re still going strong. Sometimes we touch base about writing projects, but we have also morphed into a group that offers all other kinds of professional and personal support.

And I also believe strongly that we have to extend these efforts beyond the obvious beneficiaries like the friends we already have at our institutions. Go to the retirement party of the colleague you didn’t always agree with. Send an email to congratulate the colleague you don’t know terribly well who just won an award. Treat your co-workers as people who, just like you, have complicated lives. Examine long-standing practices and traditions that may, in fact, work to the disadvantage of those on the vulnerable side of a power differential. For example, the Psychology Department at UCLA recently discontinued the unspoken expectation that PhD students bring refreshments to their dissertation defense. Build connective tissue between you and your peers. A few years ago two of my fellow deans created an opportunity for all of the deans to get together on a monthly basis. We are a group that, given the funding models and other circumstances at our institution, should be fighting with one another over resources. Instead, these gatherings have made us more collaborative and collegial. We still represent and protect our respective units, but we do so with more care and concern for each other than we might have otherwise.

Even as I write these words, I worry that they are painfully obvious. Or that you’ll think I’m being a Pollyanna. And certainly big structural change is necessary to make higher ed a better place for all of us. But, as readers of this blog will know, I also try to think about what we can do in the moment, while we fight these larger battles. And certainly, I am more inclined to slay those dragons if someone’s worked alongside me collaboratively, noticed my efforts, or just said a kind word to me.

It’s Called Work for a Reason

So I have been thinking a lot about work.  And overwork.  And boundaries.  And trying to have a life (whatever that means).  My inner monologue is a constant tug of war between feeling woefully behind and unproductive and pep talks about how it’s okay to make time for things that don’t involve work. And judging from my Twitter feed, I’m not alone in this.

Undoubtedly, these anxieties are fueled generally by our culture’s obsession with overwork and productivity and how we make those the measures of our self-worth.  More particularly, the current metrics and marketplace of academe create a relentless cycle of never having done enough.

But I think there’s another, less examined culprit as well: the tension between a job on the one hand, and a vocation on the other.

A vocation is literally something you feel called or summoned to do.  And at the outset (before all the committee meetings and grading marathons) I suspect most of us came to higher ed with at least a small sense of that.  We wanted to teach.  We wanted to create knowledge.  And because it’s something we feel drawn to doing, a vocation is, by definition, supposed to provide satisfaction.  We wouldn’t be doing it, if we didn’t want to do it, or even love doing it.

But you know that saying, “Love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life”?  We might think this encapsulates the essence of a vocation–a job that transcends drudgery and mere necessity, and provides some sort of deeper fulfillment.  But here’s the thing: there’s a part of me that pushes back (hard) against this pithy little saying.  I think the concept of vocation also has the potential to become a limiting and tyrannical force in our lives.

On the one hand, I get it.  We all want to feel a sense of purpose and as though we are in the right place, doing the work we were meant to do.  We all want our work to be meaningful.  Considering the amount of time we spend there (and perhaps, even the amount of time we spend going back and forth to our workplaces) feeling passionate and excited about our work is critical.  And as someone who has supervised others–both faculty and staff–I know how essential it is for people to be excited and engaged with the work that they do.  And most days, I have these feelings and I love my job.  I work with amazing students, the college classroom energizes me, I have creative and supportive colleagues, and I’m still excited about my research agenda.  I do feel called to do the work I do in higher ed.

But some days it’s awful.  An angry parent, an uncooperative colleague, a failed grant proposal, a rejected article–all of these can derail that passion and sense of vocation.

And even without such dramatic interventions, sometimes work is just that: work.  It can be tedious (hello, endless forms required for anything to happen at my university), it can require tasks that are not naturally in your skill set (hello, Excel spreadsheets!), it can be boring (hello, bi-weekly compulsory meeting where nothing is accomplished). I don’t know about you, but I have days and moments when I genuinely question this thing I’ve felt was my vocation for so long.  Thankfully, those episodes usually pass quickly or are at least batted away by going for a run or drinking a margarita.

But this idea of a vocation can still mess with our heads and lead us to make bad choices.  Focusing on our job as a vocation and not simply the work that it sometimes is, runs the risk of encouraging us to make unnecessary sacrifices because it’s our “calling.”  If we treat our work as a vocation it becomes all too easy to justify staying in the office after 5pm, checking email when we wake up in the middle of the night, or saying “yes” to another commitment when our plate is already full to overflowing.  And I would venture to guess that the tyranny of vocation is particularly the bane of women and POC in the academy who tend to do or be expected to do more service and more emotional labor than their counterparts.  These individuals may in turn feel as though they should discredit or brush aside their exasperation and exhaustion because they’re meant to be fulfilling the higher call of a vocation.

It’s okay to be passionate about our work.  And we ought to seek and nurture and expand those parts of our job that deliver joy and satisfaction and purpose.  But sometimes work is work and it’s hard.  And we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about that.  So it’s also okay to say “it’s just a job,” and to close the laptop, set the phone aside, and to step away to do something else that makes you happy.

Department of Consolidation

Periodically, universities announce their intention to consolidate or outright cut academic departments.  Such a proposal is currently on the table at the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale.  As reported in Inside Higher Ed, the Chancellor there has proposed creating, for example, a “School of Humanities within the proposed College of Liberal and Performing Arts” where “there would still be programs, courses and majors in history, English, philosophy, philosophy and languages, cultures and international studies. But there would no longer be a departmental structure to support them.”

Such plans are typically presented as an opportunity to (1) cut costs and (2) promote interdisciplinary collaboration and “innovative” thinking.  Both of these presumed opportunities are built on false narratives about higher education and are dangerous to our common enterprise.

Arguably, consolidating departments into larger units has the potential to save some money in staff and related bureaucratic costs.  Academic departments typically have support staff and fewer of those individuals will be needed if restructuring amalgamates and thereby reduces the number of academic units.  But such savings are a pittance in the grand scheme of things.  Support staff are often poorly paid and the financial savings of eliminating a few secretaries or administrative assistants would hardly solve the budget deficits that many universities face.

Additionally troubling is the administrative assertion that there is a kind of intellectual inefficiency that results from departments being disciplinarily distinct.  Breaking down those silo-ed barriers, it’s argued, will foster collaboration and multi/cross/interdisciplinary projects.  All well and good.  And I fully support this kind of work.

But until all academics attend graduate schools built on this interdisciplinary model and attend conferences and publish in journals that have erased all disciplinary singularity and identity, faculty are not likely to collaborate simply because they now belong to a “School of Humanities” instead of an English department or now have an office next door to someone outside their discipline.  This is simply the higher ed version of the “open office” plan–the notion that if you throw people together in a shared space–physical or metaphorical–the innovative ideas will simply jump off the page and be ushered to fruition.  And guess what?  The effectiveness of the open office plan has been largely disproved by several recent studies.  While consolidating departments does not include moving to a different configuration of actual workspaces, it does operate on the (unproven) assertion that the thing holding back interdisciplinary work is the self-containment of academic departments.

In fact, interdisciplinary research is stifled not by departmental singularity, but a host of other structural impediments that are practically written into the DNA of academe.  A recent report funded by the NSF and examining the need for but also impediments to interdisciplinary work in the sciences discovered that “‘excellence-based’ journal rankings have a systematic bias against interdisciplinary research. This may create or reinforce disincentives for researchers to engage in interdisciplinary research. When journal rankings are used to help determine the allocation of prestige and resources for faculty, it can hinder interdisciplinary research.”  In addition, although women have a demonstrated greater propensity to engage in interdisciplinary research, they also worry about the effects this will have on their career advancement: “compared with men, women expressed more desire to pursue additional opportunities for collaborative and interdisciplinary research. However, women also perceived greater institutional constraints. Women agreed more than men with the statement, ‘I would like to pursue more interdisciplinary research, but only after I am more established in my career.’ Compared with men, women agreed less with the statement, ‘Participation in collaborative research is viewed positively during the tenure/promotion review process.'”  With such impediments and disincentives in place it is little wonder that interdisciplinary work doesn’t occur more often.

The insidious effect of these false narratives about financial and intellectual inefficiency is to shift the blame to the academic side of the house.  It suggests, incorrectly, that the university is in financial trouble because faculty are not responding nimbly to student interest because they’re sequestered away in their departments instead of developing cool interdisciplinary programs that will draw the students in.  I find it hard to believe that the current combined budgetary/enrollment crisis facing some campuses is result of the History department being distinct from the English department.  Being flexible and responsive with curriculum might allow us to create opportunities for student-designed majors and other programs that blur disciplinary distinctions, and perhaps would attract students, but such efforts are not going to solve the multi-million dollar budget crises proliferating across college campuses.  The best way to retain and graduate students (thereby ensuring the financial health of the university), in fact, is to invest in faculty and student support services.

And despite these narratives shifting budgetary blame to academic departments, such reform programs are typically enacted with little if any consultation with the faculty in those very departments.  Some faculty at Southern Illinois are rightly arguing that collapsing departments into larger units has curricular and other implications that fall within the domain of shared governance.  While it would undoubtedly take more time, wouldn’t it be more interesting and constructive to ask faculty to be participants in these discussions, encouraging them to identify thematic overlap and potential areas for interdisciplinary collaboration?  This, however, will be hard work.  Departments can undoubtedly and demonstrably behave in unproductively silo-ed ways and shifting that culture will be no small feat.  But forcing such decisions will only destroy faculty morale, which in turn will yield little or none of the results that chancellors and others claim to be so desirable.

 

Of Surgeries and Superwomen

I love the start of a new school year.  Even after 20+ years in higher education, I thrill to the new-ness of it all.  Fall temperatures, new students, and that “anything is possible” atmosphere all bring me great delight.

Thus, I was both surprised and disappointed when I found myself in the emergency room the night before the start of the semester, looking at the possibility of needing a surgery that week [spoiler: I’m fine; everything worked out; my health is good].

So I missed the first week of classes, had my surgery, and, as you’ve probably already anticipated, the world didn’t end.

But neither did my fretting, fear of falling behind, or general anxiety about missing so much work.  So I went back to the office the following week.  And lasted about four hours.  And then later that week I put in a twelve-hour day.  Which turned out to be a very bad idea.  I spent the next three days recovering from that decision.

Reflecting on the experience of those two weeks, I have realized that I let my desire to be a superwoman outweigh common sense.  “I’m tough,” I reasoned, “I can go back to work.”  I wanted to be some sort of shining example of resilience and determination.  This surgery couldn’t slow me down.  I’m a superwoman!

While I do not think that women exclusively fall prey to the temptation to be superheroes in these situations, I want to address this post to women in the academy and point out why this behavior and the temptation towards superwoman-hood does us a disservice.*

Senior superwomen: I suspect that we build this tendency towards superwomanhood when we are junior or contingent faculty, trying to be the best and most dedicated colleagues possible.  But what dismays me is that this behavior continues even later in our careers.  I was out once for drinks with a group of female colleagues who all held administrative positions at my university.  At one point the conversation devolved into a somewhat competitive round of who got to work earliest/stayed latest/put in the most extra hours.  It is telling that even senior women who are tenured and secure engage in this behavior. We are still trying to prove ourselves in a culture that whether explicitly or implicitly has not fully welcomed us.  Some places are better than others, but overall, women in the academy as reflected in service obligations, teaching evaluations, pay scale, or any host of other metrics still fight an uphill battle for acceptance.  So whether consciously or unconsciously we continue to try to prove ourselves and our worth and our right to be here.

That said, I try not to play along with my colleagues.  Whenever possible, I leave work at 5.  I don’t check my work email after I get home.  Weekends are for non-work activities.  Now certainly there are exceptions to this.  Big projects or the inconvenient overlap of multiple deadlines sometimes means I stay late or work on the weekends.  Sometimes my role as dean comes with evening and weekend responsibilities.  But generally speaking, making overwork and the dissolution of work-life boundaries a competitive sport is not productive.

Which brings me to my next point:

Modeling and normalizing: What message are we sending to our female colleagues when we try to be superwomen who prove their dedication and their talent through overwork?  We’re certainly modeling a behavior that says that self-care doesn’t matter.  We’re setting a presumed standard that values and perhaps even rewards overwork.  We are perpetuating the cycle and a culture that asks women to rise to the standard of superwomen at a possible expense to their health and well-being.

As I repeatedly argue on this blog, those of us in a secure position of power have an obligation to do the work to gradually shift the culture of academe.  So I would ask you: what example do you set for the women in your office or department?  If you are an administrator what policies do you lobby for at your institution?  Sometimes, for example, our jobs require us to work nights and weekends.  But if we’re going to normalize the expectation for that kind of work, then we also need to normalize the concept of comp time [this idea came from one of my wise female administrator friends].  Work four hours on Saturday at a recruitment event?  Fine.  The duties of the job require it.  But then when you take four hours on a Friday afternoon to have a life, you shouldn’t feel guilty or have to explain yourself to your provost.  We need to stand up for and beside our female colleagues when they make choices like these.

Talk about it: Wherever and whenever possible, we need to highlight this issue.  I posted on Twitter when I started working on this post and was surprised/not surprised at how many people responded, indicating that these issues resonated with them.  Despite an enthusiastic response for addressing this issue, I have never had a conversation about this with anyone on my campus.  That needs to change.  Again, those of us in secure positions need to take some risks and bring this up with the senior administration at our universities.  We need to forcefully and vocally advocate for female colleagues who we see trying to take care of themselves while still fulfilling their responsibilities.  We need to intervene when we see someone falling prey to the Superwoman Syndrome.  This last one, I think, is particularly tricky; we tend to praise, and even reward, superwomen, not caution them.

Our efforts to speak up and highlight this issue probably won’t go terribly smoothly.  We will probably be accused of whining or shirking.  And I am the first to acknowledge that institutional structures and cultures do not always support our ability to take care of ourselves and have fulfilling lives beyond our workdays.  But until those of us who are senior and reasonably well-protected begin modeling better behavior and advocating for ourselves and our female colleagues nothing will change.  We will be very unhappy superwomen.

 

*I want to be quick to say that I think this issue is undoubtedly relevant for scholars of color, contingent faculty, and others who find themselves feeling unwelcome in the academy and/or needing to prove themselves through overwork.

Administration and Faculty: Can This Relationship Be Saved?

A week or so ago I published a piece in Inside Higher Ed about bridging the divide in higher education that too-often separates the administration from the faculty.  It prompted some lively discussion.  I appreciate those of you who engaged with my argument and offer the following as things I learned from your feedback.

* Experiences vary: One thing that the response to my essay taught me is that experiences vary widely.  I would not have necessarily characterized the relationship between faculty and administration at my university as good, but I have learned that it certainly isn’t as difficult as it is elsewhere.

* Point taken: Several of you called me out for describing my colleague’s move from faculty to administration as a “promotion” since that contributed to the very divide that I was railing against.  You are absolutely right.  And such a description is part of the problem.  I will think and write differently about that as a consequence–thank you!  I need to avoid characterizing, and thus valuing, administrative work as something “above” the work that faculty do.

* There are administrators and there are administrators.  What do we mean when we say “administration”?  The responses to my piece would suggest that among faculty the word conjures up images of overpaid and ineffective presidents, vice presidents, deans and others in the upper echelons of administration.  My own definition is a bit more all-encompassing and includes individuals who occupy more modest, but nonetheless administrative, roles at the university–associate deans, directors, and department chairs, for example.  It is often these folks that I think of (though not exclusively) when I think of talented, dedicated colleagues who are not deserving of faculty antipathy.  So we need to be careful that we don’t paint “administration” with too broad a brush.

Which brings me to my next point.

* Bad actors: I resisted the urge to respond to each comment that trashed the bad behavior of a particular administrator or administration with a counterpoint story about the bad behavior of faculty.  I resisted, because that’s NOT THE POINT.  You’re mad because an administrator pushed through a bad policy without adequate faculty governance?  I’m mad at the tenured faculty member who never answers student emails and reads aloud from her textbook as a substitute for holding class.  Both of these individuals are outliers.  They are not the sole face of either the administration or the faculty.

Now, I will acknowledge that my analogy breaks down in the face of the power differential that often separates administrators from faculty.

Which brings me to my next point.

* Cultural v. structural: Admittedly, what I was arguing for was a change in the culture that often divides faculty from the administration.  But as many of you pointed out, there are often structures that mitigate against that.  On campuses without a strong tradition and culture of faculty governance it may be virtually impossible to work with the administration.  If the administration controls large swaths of the decision-making process and wields that power without input from faculty, small wonder that faculty might be inclined to view them in a negative light.  I don’t think this means that bridging the faculty-admin divide is impossible on campuses such as these, but it will face different and harder challenges.

Which brings me to my next point.

* Growing administrators: If your campus is plagued by a toxic environment that divides the faculty from the administration, then perhaps you need to think about moving some of those faculty (or yourself!) into the ranks of administration.  Many of you lamented the fact that some of the most troublesome administrators come from outside the institution and don’t stick around very long.  I agree that this creates disruption and distrust.  One remedy is to encourage talented and dedicated faculty (and again, maybe YOU are one of these faculty) to consider moving into these positions.  The faculty perspective, institutional memory, and commitment to the institution that these individuals bring to the table could go a long way to creating better relations between the administration and faculty.

 

If I learned nothing else from the comments on my essay, it’s that the relationship between faculty and administration is fraught and often outright contentious on most campuses.  But I remain resolute in my insistence that there are things we can do to change that.  I welcome your continued thoughts and suggestions.

Academic Kindness

Not gonna lie.  I’m angry.  As I reflect upon the presidential election and the troubling ripples it continues to cast I am angry.  And fearful.  I have tried in the short-term to productively channel these emotions by calling my congresspeople and making donations to various organizations.

But in the longer term I have concerns about my anger.  I think it is okay to be angry, but generally speaking I am aware that my anger and fear have made me impatient and short-tempered in my daily interactions with colleagues and students.  And this worries me.  While I think anger can be an inspiring emotion–it can motivate us to take action and fight back–it is ultimately, in my experience, an exhausting and unproductive emotion if you inhabit it for too long.  So inspired by a terrific Tumblr account and the Twitter hashtag #AcademicKindness, I’m determined to find ways to insert more of this into the culture of my campus and my broader professional communities.  And before you accuse me of being a Pollyanna and just trying to paper over real problems with sunshine and flowers, I also want to offer some insights as to why such an approach has merit beyond temporarily assuaging unpleasant feelings.

Being truly present for my students.  Over and over again the evidence about retention and student satisfaction demonstrates that one of the most significant factors is the sense of connectedness that students form with their professors.  In his book, Small Teaching, James Lang highlights small, easy things we can do to reach out to our students.  For example, arrive a few minutes early for class and make a point, over the course of the semester, to chat with each student–not just the ones in the front few rows.  The twenty-first century university has, in my opinion, become too enamored of shiny software fixes.  Yes, that clever online advising system does make a difference, but so does something deceptively simple: human relationships.

Such an approach doesn’t just make students happier, it can also impact student learning.  In their book How College Works, Dan Chambliss and Christopher Takacs have demonstrated that student motivation increases when they sense this kind of investment and attention from their professors.  If we can engage students at this level, then we can leverage that motivation and enthusiasm in other ways that promote their learning.

But then it occurs to me, why would we limit such an approach to our students?  Surely we want to retain good faculty and colleagues and promote their job satisfaction, too, right?  Surely, we want to motivate them to do their best work.  What might this look like in practice?

Create community among our colleagues.  And no, I don’t mean department meetings.  I never cease to be amazed at the power of a shared meal or cup of coffee and conversation.  When I was a department chair I instituted a weekly opportunity for faculty to gather, imbibe some caffeine, and share a snack.  It cost next to nothing and it fostered tremendous good will.  Some of the conversations inspired new initiatives and projects.  We could replicate this practice or variations on it across various categories enacting it at the departmental level, as a way to foster interdisciplinary conversations, or to bring colleagues together to discuss teaching and pedagogy.

Recognize good work.  Let people know when they’ve done something you appreciate or find valuable.  In these short-tempered days I am very quick to complain about the colleagues who annoy me.  But this it to ignore the ones who unfailingly meet deadlines, produce great work, or otherwise are just easy and pleasant to work with.  And here, too, the lessons from student motivation and learning have something to tell us.  Much of what drives faculty is the reward system of tenure and promotion–in other words, they are extrinsically motivated.  Staff motivation is often built upon a parallel rewards system of merit pay and the like.

But in these difficult times I believe it is all the more important to help connect the people we work with to intrinsic motivation, something bigger than themselves and beyond the quotidian tasks at hand. Research has demonstrated that the more specific we are in our praise of students and the more we connect it to their development of skills or a larger purpose, the more it resonates with them and motivates them to improve or continue to perform at high levels.  So rather than simply thanking a staff member for helping a student, what if it went something like: “thank you so much for taking the time to work with that student.  Connecting her to that important resource is going to help with her graduate school application.”  And for the faculty colleague: “I really appreciate your hard work on that report.  Your thoroughness is going to make it much easier for me to argue with the dean for new positions.”

Finally, practice some academic kindness on yourself.  I know it’s a busy time of the semester/quarter/term.  But this week commit to carving out 20-30 minutes in your schedule for something that is pure joy for you: reading for pleasure, going for a run, watching an episode of your favorite sit-com, taking your dog for a walk, enjoying a meal and conversation with your partner or a friend, or maybe, just maybe sitting still and doing nothing.

Back to School, Administrator-Style

I confess: the first day of fall term always gets me.  I love the shiny new-ness of it all.  The term and the academic year lie in front of you–anything is possible!

But I will also confess that as an administrator, a little bit of that fall luster is lacking. When I was a full-time faculty member, I usually had been away from campus for big chunks of the summer.  I’d also been in a different kind of headspace: doing research, taking time to think, and with any luck, do some writing.  I would return to campus with renewed resolve.  I was all about the bouquet of newly sharpened pencils that Tom Hanks describes in “You’ve Got Mail.”  This would be the year that I would get all my lecture notes organized!  This would be the year I would stay current with the journals in my field! (we will put aside, for now, whether or not I achieved these things.  I suspect you know the answer).

But as an administrator, I work on a 12-month contract.  Sure, I take vacation in the summer, but I don’t really get long breaks from campus.  And yes, I try to carve out a little bit of time for my research, but it usually takes a back seat to more pressing administrative projects.  There’s a continuity to my work life now that means fall doesn’t feel like the dramatic shift that it used to when I had been away geographically and cognitively during the summer.

Administrative work, in addition to its continuity, can also easily become drudgery. Reports, meetings, spreadsheets, and other bits of administrivia can wear down even the best and most enthusiastic administrators.

So rather than get mired in my meh-ness or let my 12-month contract define me, I’d like to propose some strategies for recapturing some of the fresh start-ness of fall term.  Consider this a back to school primer of sorts, for administrators (though faculty may find some useful tips here as well!).

1.  Identify something about your administrative work that brings you joy.  It can be big or small, but you need to find it and make time for it.  Maybe it’s helping faculty connect with grant opportunities.  Maybe it’s developing new curriculum.  Maybe it’s finding a new way to make a cumbersome university process more streamlined.  Use the start of a new year to reconnect with the part(s) of your job that you enjoy and let that provide a jump start for the next twelve months.
2. Identify something that you could be better at.  If you’re like me, graduate school didn’t prepare you for administration, so the learning curve can be steep.  For example, when I started in administration, I was AWFUL at Excel and spreadsheets.  I have worked on cultivating this skill.  Embrace the start of a new school year to say that this will be the year that you learn how to do a certain task or figure out a certain problem.  It’s okay to be bad at something.  It’s not okay to continue to be bad at it if it’s essential to your work.
3. Pay it forward.  If you’ve made it into the ranks of administration you probably have some seniority at your institution.  One thing that can restore a sense of resolve and purpose to the start of the new year is reconnecting with your faculty colleagues and helping those individuals thrive.  So reach out to those junior to you and be a mentor or an ally.
4. Find a way to teach or interact with students.  I have strong feelings about why administrators should teach (which I will save for a future blog post), but for now, I will just say that much of what is missing in higher ed administration could be remedied by administrators reconnecting with the classroom and students.  And it’s good for you, too.  Nothing helps me transcend administrivia and spreadsheets better than the unscripted and unvarnished perspective of students.  So maybe you don’t have time to teach an entire course.  What if you guest-lectured for a colleague in your disciplinary area?  What if you sponsored a co-curricular activity that gave students the opportunity to meet and provide feedback to the dean/associate dean/provost?
5. Vow to do one thing that is about taking care of you.  Maybe it’s getting regular exercise, or drinking more water, or taking time for a hobby that makes you happy.  Whatever it is, take advantage of this time of fresh starts to make it a priority.

I hope these strategies or any others you might identify will help you reconnect with the newness of the fall term.  May it be a year of sharp pencils, well-written reports, and easily comprehended spreadsheets!

 

Mentoring 2.0

By all accounts, having a mentor is a good thing. A mentor is there to provide advice and guidance.   The most common model in the academy is for junior faculty to be assigned a senior faculty mentor. The senior person helps steer the junior person through the first few years of teaching, figuring out the requirements for tenure, and generally negotiating the landscape of a new institution. The research on mentoring demonstrates its key role in recruiting and retaining good faculty.

Yet there are at least two shortcomings with the current way that mentoring happens on campuses. First, despite its clear benefits to institutions and individuals, we are far from a universal culture of mentoring in higher ed. My non-scientific research on the subject suggests that in the case of junior faculty some institutions assign mentors, some don’t (perhaps due to department size) but do provide broad mentoring support, and some do not have any system, formal or informal, of mentoring. Models for mentoring contingent faculty are few and far between and make the mentoring of junior faculty look positively robust.

Second, where it does exist, the model of one-on-one mentoring is not adequate. What do you do when confronted with a difficult work situation that because of power dynamics can’t be addressed entirely or adequately by your mentor relationship? Let me ground this in a specific example: a junior female faculty member receives a very critical peer evaluation of her teaching from a senior male colleague. Her attempts to discuss the evaluation with her colleague are rebuffed. But this individual is also a close friend of her mentor and has repeatedly sung his praises to her. What recourse does she have? The scenario could even be less dire. Even with the best intentions and careful selection, mentoring matchups don’t always work. What if you have a mentor assigned to you and that person isn’t a good fit (for whatever reason)?

The remedy for both of these shortcomings rest with senior faculty and administrators. We need to commit to and create a culture of mentoring on our campuses. This is an admittedly broad and amorphous goal.   Simply saying that an institution has a commitment to mentoring, will not be adequate. Once it’s been said, though, there are ways to build it into the culture of the place.

Don’t wait or hope for mentoring relationships to be constructed. Obviously, the particulars will vary according to the size and other circumstances at each institution, but make mentoring the responsibility of someone at the vice provost or dean level. That person can certainly delegate the specifics down to the department or division level, but the mentoring buck needs to stop with someone. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to assume that someone else will make it happen. Make the provision of mentoring a part of what’s discussed in campus interviews—we tell job candidates about parking and healthcare, why not let them know that mentoring will be part of their experience? Build the expectation of mentoring into letters of hire. Create a community of mentors on campus, who through face-to-face meetings, and some sort of online platform, can talk to each other about challenges and best practices. And do not limit mentoring to tenure-track faculty. We all know the demographics. If we are neglecting to mentor contingent faculty we are doing them and our institutions a disservice. And what about mid-career faculty? Faculty who need support to make the jump from Associate Professor to Professor rank? Or tenured faculty who are beginning to move into campus administrative roles? Wherever and however possible, weave mentoring into the fabric of campus life.

But as you do, be attentive to the limitations of the one-on-one model described above. What about instead assigning groups of faculty mentors to groups of mentored faculty? In other words, what if we imagined mentoring on the model of networks? This is more consistent with how we conduct much of our academic lives these days anyway on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms that connect us to multiple people at once. The existence of a network would give the mentored faculty options in seeking guidance and resolution to problems. It would also give them an immediate community on campus. Rather than isolated meetings with one mentor, the network could meet at least once a semester and the mentored faculty would meet not just mentors, but other new faculty as well. Meaningful one-on-one relationships might grow out of these networks, and that would be an added bonus. But it would be an outgrowth of a broader network and would be more flexible than simply hoping that one-on-one assignments were a good fit.

Certainly, the network model comes with complications. What if, for example, the members of the network offer conflicting advice? Some conflicts like this could be avoided, though, if the mentors worked together, compared notes, and got to know the mentored faculty as well as possible. Rather than a barrier, then, the need for this kind of mini culture of mentoring within the network of mentors would bolster the overall institutional culture of mentoring.

When mentoring works, everyone wins. The mentored faculty receives guidance and advice that can only contribute to their job satisfaction. The mentors build strong ties with their colleagues. And the institution is stronger for this culture of support. That said, the old model of mentoring tenure-track faculty through the one-on-one model is inadequate. Mentoring needs to be woven into the fabric of an institution at all levels and should embrace a networking model of connecting mentors and mentored.

 

We Are All Bunnies

I’m sitting at my desk today watching the reactions and commentary about the situation at Mount St. Mary pour in via Twitter and Facebook.  In case you haven’t read about it yet: here’s the latest.  Those of us who recognize the value of tenure, still believe there is a place for respectful disagreement in higher ed, and want better things for our own students and institutions are a bit speechless (which would be a wise strategy if you were at Mount St. Mary).  Horrified and shocked and saddened seem the most common emotions.

I’m guessing that this drama isn’t over yet.  I expect lawsuits, alumni protest (at least the president can’t fire them), and hopefully, some response from the college’s Board of Trustees.  But in the meantime I think we faculty and administrators at other institutions need to do three things.

The first is to engage in some self-education.  What are the policies and procedures at your institution governing speech?  In one of the first ripples in the drama at Mount St. Mary it became clear that the university had a policy that “all university employees must clear any communications with reporters first with the university spokesman.”  What is YOUR university’s policy in these matters?  Perhaps there isn’t a policy, which is probably a good thing.  But my PSA to you is to find out.

The second two items hinge on the assumption that in the current higher ed climate no one is immune from these kind of actions.  We can shake our heads and wring our hands and say how messed up things are at Mount St. Mary, but I bet our colleagues there didn’t see this coming, either.

So the second item is to become the allies of vulnerable individuals at your institution who might end up in the firing line.  A particularly troubling part of the recent developments is that the untenured facultly advisor to the student newspaper, which leaked the president’s emails, was one of the faculty members fired.  I’m not sure what sort of things might have protected this individual, but having senior, tenured members of the faculty recognize his vulnerability would be a good place to start.

The third item is to write and tweet and post about this as much as possible.  And sign this petition.  We need to recognize not just that this could happen to us wherever we are, but that we need to be in solidarity with our colleagues at other institutions.  It is easier to pick off faculty like this if the perception is that they are isolated.  And I say this to my fellow administrators, too.  We need to say that this kind of management is unacceptable and an insult to the enterprise of higher education.