Confessions of a Community College Dean

This time of year, I take a break from my higher-ed wonkery and indulge in gadget wonkery. It’s the Consumer Electronics Show! (Sadly, I’m not there. Just musing...)

Unfortunately, the folks at CES seem to be obsessed with the wrong problems. I’m not waiting with bated breath for the forty-seventh variation on an Android tablet. I don’t especially care about 3D tv, and all the cool 4G stuff just serves to remind me that my neck of the woods barely has 3G. Any time y’all would like to leave to cozy confines of New York City and San Francisco, feel free...

What I’d like to see come out of CES:

- A variation on a Roku box that has enough good content on it that I can finally drop cable tv. Right now there’s a plethora of stuff you can add to a tv, but not quite enough to cut the cord. (That’s especially true when you have kids who love SpongeBob and Chowder.) Based on my experience with Comcast, if you were to tell me that it was the second shooter on the grassy knoll, I’d believe it. The first company that issues a wifi-connected box with enough goodies that I can drop cable will get my business.

- Actual honest-to-goodness broadband competition. Right now my choices for home broadband are basically 1) Comcast or 2) suck it. Unregulated for-profit monopolies are not pretty. While we’re at it, let’s get some serious net neutrality rules in place so Comcast-as-ISP couldn’t kill the super-Roku box in the name of preserving its monopoly on video on demand. Because they would, the scum-sucking cretins.

- The following tweaks to the Ipad: a case with a foldout keyboard that folds out to full size and isn’t all spongy; a usb port; and a serious price cut.

- A printer that works consistently, and uses affordable ink. While we’re at it, an office-caliber photocopier that doesn’t know the meaning of “paper jam.” (I still think that someone will make a fortune with a laptop that has its own built-in printer, like a Polaroid camera. It will spit out documents on command. You heard it here first...)

- Cheaper solid-state drives. Hard drives are just not reliable enough, but a small laptop with an SSD immediately hits a thousand bucks. Let’s see something like the smallest current Macbook Air, but around three hundred bucks.

- Two words: battery life.

- Y’know, it wouldn’t actually physically kill app developers to write some stuff for WebOS. I’m just sayin’...

- A dog-to-English translator.

- A “car diagnostic” app. I’d love to know if something is on its last legs, or if the mechanic is lying to me.

Wise and worldly readers, what would you like to see?

A new correspondent writes:

What happens when a community college Human Resources department receives
application materials for a job (in this case, a Deanship)
and never passes them onto the respective hiring committee? I
have evidence that this recently happened in my case, and have written
to the office many times without a response. I even wrote the
President of the college, whom I had met once about six years ago: no
response there either.

I mean, I might not have gotten the job anyway, but this seems . . .
very curious. Do I have any recourse here?

In a nutshell, yes, HR can intercept applications. There are caveats, however.

In private industry, it's fairly common – if a bit nutty – to allow HR to make actual hiring decisions. I've never really understood that, but it's widely practiced and accepted. In academia, as far as I know, that practice remains an exception. However, it's fairly common for HR to function as a first level screen (or what some less humane sorts call a “bozo filter”).

Most postings stipulate both “minimum qualifications” and “preferred qualifications” for the position. The minimum qualifications are exactly that; if you don't have them, you will not get the job. It's fairly common for colleges to empower HR departments to intercept applications that lack the minimum qualifications before they even get to a search committee. The reason given is usually saving the time of the committee members, and there's some truth to that, but it's also a way to prevent a committee from violating the ground rules by falling in love with someone unqualified. That's important from a legal perspective. Imagine the lawsuit if a minority candidate who met the minimum qualifications lost out to a white candidate who didn't. Ouch.

(It has the secondary salutary effect of reducing the number of lawyers in the pool. Once more and for the record: being a lawyer does not, in itself, qualify you to teach across the entire curriculum. It does not. Does my PhD allow me to practice law? I thought not.)

“Preferred” qualifications are a different matter. Those are stipulated to give a committee ironclad grounds to prefer one candidate over another, even if it's entirely possible that a chosen candidate will have, say, only five out of seven of the preferred characteristics. (It's pretty rare to find someone who has absolutely everything.) For example, at my college, the default setting for faculty positions is something like “master's required, doctorate preferred.” That gives the college the flexibility to hire an excellent instructor with a master's, but it establishes that a doctorate carries some weight.

In most cases, HR will intercept applications that lack minimum qualifications, but won't filter based on preferred. It leaves that up to the search committee.

In many settings, HR will also highlight any self-identified minority candidates who meet the minimum qualifications. Depending on the position, it may require that all qualified minority candidates get interviews; at the very least, it will raise a question if none of them do. (Contrary to popular myth, those who don't meet the minima get thrown out. Affirmative action does not trump minimum qualifications, even if it carries some weight against preferred qualifications.)

I won't claim that the HR filter gets everything right; it's entirely possible that you were inaccurately lumped in with candidates who had no real shot. The best way to prevent that is to ensure that your application materials address clearly, even pedantically, the minimum qualifications in the job posting. If you're in a field where hundreds of applications per position is the norm, you have to know that readers are looking first to winnow down the pile. If your qualifications aren't obvious, you may not make the cut.

In terms of legality, my understanding – and consistent with above, I am not a lawyer – is that HR can screen, but it has to do so in a consistent, rational, and nondiscriminatory way. As long as it applies its rules evenly, and the rules themselves are reasonable, then there's no legal issue.

I know that's small consolation when you feel like you've been wronged, but it's the way the game is played.

Good luck. I wouldn't wish this job market on anybody.

Wise and worldly readers, have you had any weird experiences in that nether zone between HR and the search committee?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

According to IHE, Tiffin University and Altius Education -- the former a small traditional college, the latter a for-profit -- have combined forces to form a third entity (Ivy Bridge) that offers an all-online general studies Associate’s degree. The for-profit runs enrollment management and student services, and the traditional college is in charge of faculty and curriculum. Warming my heart, the traditional college has a renewable-contract system for its full-time faculty.

I read this with considerable interest.

At one level, it seems like the perfect solution. Use private-sector money to fund operations, but leave the academic decision-making to the academics. On its face, it’s close to the dream model of any college: write me a large check and shut the eff up. Since American culture has decided that pooling large sums of money in the public sector is immoral, but pooling historically unprecedented sums of money in the private sector is wise and virtuous, getting that large check from the private sector seems like a minor adjustment to restore the more appealing parts of the status quo ante. Replace state money with private money and get back to work. After all, as the robber Willie Sutton said of banks, that’s where the money is.

As an academic administrator whose roots and loyalties are to and within academia, I like the “Chinese wall” model of separating the funding from the teaching. I’d love to be able to confine my worries to the quality of delivery and the next area of curricular or pedagogical innovation, rather than constantly scouring travel requests for loose change. Sounds good to me.

(Of course, the thing about Chinese walls is that they get breached. Sooner or later, he who pays the piper will want to call the tune. As I discovered in my time at Proprietary U, the financial folks may be content to be hands-off while things are growing, but they tend to panic and demand changes when the growth cools. But that’s another issue.)

There’s an old joke among economists, who aren’t generally known for jokes. Two economists are walking through the quad. They spy what looks like a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. As the first one bends down to pick it up, the second one says “don’t bother. If it were a real twenty, it would have been picked up by now.” I was reminded of that in reading this piece. If it were really that easy, why hadn’t it already been done?

Follow the money.

Tuition for a year of full-time study is $9,450. At my cc, tuition and fees total well below $4,000. (The article doesn’t mention whether fees are included in the $9,450.)

I think I found the twenty.

A little back-of-the-envelope math should take care of this. Tuition/fees at my cc constitute over half of the operating revenues of the college. (State funding used to be the majority, but it has been dropping severely for several years no matter how you choose to measure it: percentage of college budget, percentage of state budget, inflation-adjusted dollars, or even nominal dollars. And don’t get me started on health insurance costs.) They’re currently well below 4k. If we were to nearly triple the tuition and fees, which already account for more than half of the budget, we’d have money to spare!

Of course, in this political climate, a public institution couldn’t get away with that. But since Americans give private institutions license to do all sorts of things that we’d never let publics get away with, the Ivy Bridge venture gets a pass. Its breathtaking innovation isn’t student service or online education or renewable contracts, all of which exist elsewhere; its breakthrough is in finding a fig leaf for the equivalent of a colossal, otherwise-unthinkable tuition increase. (Bristol Community College’s arrangement with Kaplan University for its Nursing program follows the same model: Bristol handles the academics, but students are charged Kaplan-level tuition.)

Gail Mellow, the President of LaGuardia Community College and one of my personal heroes, has argued for years that what community colleges need more than anything else is funding parity with four-year schools. The folks at Tiffin have found a way to run a two-year college while charging four-year tuition, and getting away with it. I salute their ingenuity and envy their budgets.

Over the long term, I expect to see many more arrangements similar to this one. Quality education is costly. It doesn’t necessarily need to be as costly as it is -- longtime readers have seen me pop off on that once or twice -- but doing it well costs money. Since Americans as voters have decided that it’s immoral to pay real money for any public service that doesn’t involve weaponry, but Americans as consumers have no problem paying for-profit companies several multiples of what their public counterparts charge for the same damn thing, the public-private partnership may give the ideological cover needed to find the funding to do this right. That comes at a cost, of course -- it amounts to a catastrophic regressive transfer of wealth from poor students to wealthy investors, as the students pay higher tuition to support profits for the investors -- but that seems to be the way Americans would prefer to do it. The price people are willing to pay to sustain an ideology should not be underestimated.

Of course, we could just fund publics at reasonable levels, paid for through progressive taxation, and siphon off some of the windfall gains of the wealthy to support quality institutions that don’t burden students with backbreaking debt. Hell, while we’re at it, we could divert money from wars of choice to, say, high-quality subsidized preschools or affordable housing.

Sorry, I slipped into “Swedish” mode for a minute there. I actually wish Ivy Bridge well. It’s not a pretty hybrid, but it may be a more sustainable model in this culture than anything else that has come along. That says more about the culture than it does about the college, but I’ll take what I can get.

The academic job market differs from most others in any number of ways. Salary ranges are one of the ways that nobody ever talks about.

I'm not referring to the absolute level of salaries; everybody knows that teaching is not the path to great wealth. I'm referring to how 'salary ranges' are handled.

Since I'm writing from the context of a teaching-focused institution, we don't go out of our way to recruit national superstars. We post openings, sift through applications, and hire the best teachers we can find. The Harvard/Princeton model of hiring is simply irrelevant here, as as its salaries.

I'm writing, too, from a union shop. The collective bargaining agreement sets out a rigidly prescriptive formula for determining salaries. The intention is to prevent inequities, though it often also prevents hiring.

In this context, published salary ranges bear almost no relationship to what a new hire can actually expect to get.

That's not because we're lying jerks, or bad at math, or out to screw people over. It's because salary ranges are defined by the highest-paid and lowest-paid people at the college holding that rank. And in a context in which salaries are determined mostly by seniority, it's possible for someone to command a salary at a given rank that has far more to do with how long they've been there than with anything else. Worse, since some fields command salary premiums – Nursing, most obviously – their relatively inflated salaries are included in the published ranges. An Assistant Professor of Nursing in the last year before promotion makes more than a new hire in History ever will.

The problem is that, as a public institution, we have to make our salary ranges public. Candidates frequently see the range, and assume that if the range is, say, from forty to seventy, that they'll get around fifty-five. They won't. In practice, most will land between forty-two and forty-six, depending almost entirely on factors beyond their own control.

Based on some discussions I've had with frustrated candidates, it would have been better if they hadn't seen the range at all. In the corporate world, it's normal to expect to start somewhere in the middle of the range; after all, if you were at the minimum, why would they hire you at all? But here, with a mechanistic grid, that's just not reality. (And heaven help the poor sap who tries to go above the grid for a candidate who seems especially appealing. One of my predecessors tried that, and the union grieved it. It wanted to stop its own members from being paid “too much.” I am not making that up.)

It's one thing to offer an unimpressive salary. It's another to offer an unimpressive to salary to someone who thought she had good reason to expect about ten thousand more.

Unfortunately, in this context, that's the way it has to be. So my free advice for job candidates at unionized schools is to read salary ranges, if at all, as only vaguely relevant. To do otherwise will just set set you up for disappointment.

- Strange juju at home in the weeks before Christmas. A hard drive died, a radio died, the DVR developed a mind of its own, and a cellphone bricked. The electricity gods were clearly angry, though I know not why. (The dvr eventually returned to normal, and the cellphone and radio were still under warranty. The jury is still out on the hard drive.). Or maybe it’s all Comcast’s fault. I prefer that theory.

- TB is on two basketball teams: one CYO and one “in-town.” I hadn’t appreciated the differences until seeing them back-to-back. The caliber of play in the CYO league is tremendously higher than in in-town, which is good and bad. He’s far from the strongest player on his CYO team, but he utterly dominates his in-town games. The confidence boost from in-town has done him good, and the coaching in CYO does him good. It would be lovely if he could get both in the same place, but alas. It’s not his fault his Dad doesn’t know anything about basketball.

- Once in a while, you hear some unambiguously good news. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” has been consigned to the dustbin of history, where it belongs. Let’s toast that one this year.

- As regular readers know, I have a love/withering contempt relationship with The New York Times. It has continued its maddening ways with a few recent stories that, for unknown reasons, it failed to connect. First was this story about young college graduates in China who find themselves unable to find work that requires a college degree. Shortly thereafter followed a story about young (and not so young) college graduates in Italy who find themselves unable to find work that requires a college degree. On that same day it ran a story about public employee unions in the US finding themselves under the gun as states face austerity budgets. And I thought, hmm. In every case, excess stability for some people is paid for with excess instability for others. Sooner or later, someone will write about that.

- Several years ago, Eric Klinenberg wrote an unjustly neglected masterpiece called Heat Wave. It detailed the city of Chicago’s response to several weeks of crippling heat in the summer of 1995. His thesis was basically that too much focus on ‘efficiency’ in budgeting left the city first responders too lean to handle an outlying case. I thought of that last week as I read about towns in New Jersey that didn’t get plowed for three or four days after the big storm. Apparently, Gov. Christie’s budget cuts led to layoffs for many of them, effective December 31. Some of the layoff victims decided to stage a “sickout” in this storm, to give the state a taste of life without them. One skimps on disaster preparedness at one’s peril...

- One of the joys of a holiday break is the chance to read stuff just to read stuff. Dirk Hayhurst’s The Bullpen Gospels, based on his experiences as a minor league pitcher, was perfect vacation fodder. I will never see the words “Spiderman” or “Jessica Simpson” the same way again. Some passages aren’t for the easily offended, but the arc -- ‘dark’ to ‘ribald’ to ‘sweet’ -- works. And it paints a picture of baseball as played by actual people, behaving in recognizably human ways. Just don’t read it anyplace where suddenly laughing out loud would be considered inappropriate.

- Jefferson Cowie’s Staying Alive was also worthwhile. It’s a history of the 1970’s in the United States, told mostly from the perspective of the white working class. Some of it was old hat, and some of it a little more inside-baseball than I really cared about, but one part in particular brought me up short. Apparently, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act was originally conceived as the necessary corollary to affirmative action. The idea was that in the absence of full employment, affirmative action would inevitably lead to zero-sum conflicts that would fragment the Democratic party. The act eventually passed, but in such watered-down form that its own supporters largely disowned it. Which, I must admit, explains a hell of a lot about the politics of the subsequent decades.

- Christmas was lovely. We saw grandparents on both sides, ate far too much, partied with cousins, watched Heat Miser and Snow Miser, and actually got some sleep. No lutefisk this year, but not every tradition needs to survive...

- Finally, it’s a pleasure to introduce a new cast member to the blog. We got The Dog over the break, and already it’s hard to remember life without her. She’s a shelter rescue, mixed breed, two years old, and a little shy. The kids have been pining for a pet for a long time, and we ran out of reasons to say no. We found an organization that rescues dogs from “high-kill” shelters in the South and places them in foster homes, pending identification of “forever homes” in the Northeast. (It was the subject of the “Last Chance Highway” tv series.) The Dog had a looonng ride to get here, but we’re hoping it’s her last. If you find your faith in humanity starting to flag, show up in a park and ride lot on a cold morning to watch twenty or so families adopt shelter rescue dogs. The Boy and The Girl have been admirably restrained with The Dog, letting her settle in and (mostly) not overwhelming her; as a parent, I couldn’t be prouder.

The Boy and The Girl decided to write stories as Christmas presents to their teachers this year.

They started on Monday at about 4:00. Other than a brief break for dinner, they kept writing until about 7:30. TB didn’t even want to stop then -- he mentioned that once he found his groove, writing was really fun.

They both made their teacher the center of the story. TG’s version made her teacher a bird, and told a story of a family of birds looking for food. TB’s version made his teacher the captain of a spaceship, with the class going from planet to planet. When they finished, they made covers and dedication pages; TB even did an “about the author.”

Their teachers loved the stories, but not nearly as much as I did. TB and TG loved the process of writing. They lost themselves in the flow of it, and took obvious glee in elaborating the plotlines. When they finished, they were justly proud of what they had done, and didn’t even notice that they hadn’t watched tv all day.

As a father, I was absolutely thrilled. They intended their gifts for their teachers, but I felt like I had received a gift, too. They’ve discovered one of my greatest loves. They’ve had the experience of losing themselves in the flow of writing, and of writing just to write. They’ve discovered a craft we can share, one in which I can actually be of some help. (I’m completely helpless when it comes to TB’s basketball or TG’s gymnastics.) And for their ages, they’re already pretty damned good at it. I can’t wait to see what they can do as they get older.

Writing really is fun. Thank you to all of my readers for giving me an excuse to keep writing. May your holidays bring you as much joy as mine already have.

I’ll take a brief break from writing for the holidays; the blog will be back on January 3. Happy holidays, everyone.

A new correspondent writes:

This is something I have been thinking about for about 6 months, but your two columns about administrators and faculty really reflected the observations I've had about both positions. I am currently an administrator at a good sized community college in an urban/suburban area (we are in a county wrapped around a major city). I am not an academic administrator, but work in professional development. I have been in this position for [a few] years, and before that spent [more] years teaching at this same college, in a variety of pt/ft positions, but never tenure-track (proves you don't have to be tenure-track to move into the administration...)

My experiences are really very similar to what you noted in your columns- and while able to do it quite well, I really don't enjoy being an administrator. I am hoping to return to the ranks of the teaching faculty. I am adjuncting again for my former department, and enjoying the teaching and students, and the elemental differences in the job itself.

The question really is: is my administrative experience a hindrance to finding a tenure-track teaching job? I think this experience has been very valuable, and has informed my understanding of teaching, as well as my understanding of a college as a whole. But not everyone thinks the way I do...

Any thoughts? I know that any tenure-track job is a rare prize... I just wonder if I am now at even more of a disadvantage.

Based on the few cases I’ve seen, I’ll give two slightly contradictory answers. One, it depends. Each search committee is different. Some would treat administrative experience as toxic; some would see it as an asset; and some wouldn’t care much one way or the other. Since there’s no way to know in advance which committees are which, I say just go for it and see what happens.

The second answer, which may be in slight tension with the first, is that administrative experience is likelier to be held against you at your home institution than at a new one. At the home institution, you carry the baggage -- fairly or unfairly -- of association with The Administration and all that entails. At another campus, though, you have skills and experience that you’ve gained in that role, but without the baggage.

The advantage for a department in hiring faculty from administration is that the department knows that you have the skills. You can be counted on to step up for projects when needed, which means that the incumbent faculty won’t have to. Having a workhorse around can come in handy.

From my side of the desk, the great appeal of former administrators is both the broader skill set and the broader perspective they bring. Having seen the world from here, they’re much less likely to fall into the exaggerated expectations/exaggerated blame cycle that so many do. They have a more realistic sense of how colleges actually work, which means they’re less likely to generate drama and more likely to get things done. Yes, those are broad strokes, but they’ve held pretty consistently in the cases I’ve seen.

As with graduate students from elite programs, the great danger is in giving the impression that your return to teaching is a form of stepping down or slowing down. Search committees at this level are keenly attuned to attitude, and will shoot down otherwise-desirable candidates on the basis of perceived arrogance. As in any job hunt, the focus shouldn’t be on the job you had, but on the job you want. What is it about teaching that calls to you? And are you willing to put in the level of effort consistent with a new vocation, rather than a consolation prize?

Good luck! I hope you’re able to find a role in which you can be happy.

Wise and worldly readers, I suspect that a candidate like this might be received differently in different settings. What counsel would you offer?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Last week we had parent/teacher conferences for The Boy and The Girl. We’re lucky enough that parent/teacher conferences pretty much consist of hearing how wonderful our kids are, how well they’re doing, and how much their peers like them. It’s not stressful.

That happened again, and it never gets old. TB and TG are doing great, and we’re thrilled.

That said, though, I heard a couple of things that gave me pause.

TG’s teacher said approvingly “I can see that you read to her.” Well, yes, but it’s a little unnerving that that’s worthy of note. Would you say “I can see that you feed her”? Shouldn’t that be a baseline expectation?

The more disturbing one, though, was a comment about one of the girls in TG’s class. We asked who TG plays with the most, and whether we should be concerned about any of them. Her teacher replied that one girl -- I’ll call her Jennifer, which is not her name -- is “a good school friend.” Apparently Jennifer has a rough home life, and the teacher was trying to warn us away from letting TG go to Jennifer’s house for fear of what she would be exposed to there.

(Apparently, “Jennifer” was specific to Generation X. Growing up, all of my classes had at least two Jennifers in it, and often more. Now I don’t think there’s a single Jennifer in the entire school. “Madison” is the new Jennifer.)

I don’t know the specifics the teacher had in mind. We didn’t press, and got the impression that we would have been overstepping our bounds if we had. And I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge some gratitude in keeping TG away from what could be a bad situation. The teacher isn’t generally alarmist, so I assume there’s some reason for what she said. Since TG is only in first grade, there are limits to what I expect her to be able to handle. There’s enough darkness in the world, so there’s no need to rush to it.

But I couldn’t shake the sense that by spreading the word, the teacher was consigning poor Jennifer to even more isolation. Assuming some truth to what she said, the poor kid has a rough time already, but manages to rise above it at school; appending an asterisk to her efforts puts a sort of ceiling on them. If her home life is rocky, then limiting her exposure to other visions of home life seems like it wouldn’t help.

TG likes Jennifer, and so do we. We had her over once, prior to the conference, and she played well with TG and another friend who was also here. TG has asked to have her over again, and we’ll do that.

I don’t know the best way to handle this. At some level, I feel like the teacher did Jennifer a disservice, but as TG’s Dad, I’m glad to keep TG out of harm’s way. I don’t want Jennifer isolated, but I don’t want TG in a bad situation, either.

One of the hardest parts of parenthood is seeing some of the ways other adults treat children. Some children aren’t read to, or fed breakfast, or allowed to feel safe at home. It’s one thing to know that in the abstract, but something else to see it in your kid’s class. I’m just not ready for TG to know that yet. She’s six, and her world is still safe and secure. I’d like her to have that a little while longer. The bad stuff will still be there when she’s older. It can wait.

This story about course repeaters in California struck a chord with me. We’re facing a similar question at my own campus.

Apparently, California is considering amending its policies on allowing students to repeat courses as many times as they want. It’s looking at a cap. The idea is that seats in classes are not infinite, and once someone has whiffed several times, someone else should have a shot.

Okay, but to me, that leaves out the most interesting and compelling reason. On my own campus, as well as nationally, we’ve found that the pass rates on second attempts are well below the pass rates on first attempts. The pass rates on third attempts are lower still. There comes a point at which there’s a compelling argument to be made that by allowing students to register for a course yet again, we’re just taking their (and the taxpayers’) money.

Pass rates are largely counterintuitive. The ‘easier’ the course content, the lower the pass rate. Basic arithmetic has a much lower pass rate than does calculus, even though calculus is ‘harder.’ Similarly, third-time course takers have much lower pass rates than first-time course takers, even though the third-timers should have the advantage of previous exposure to the material.

Of course, that observation may be flawed in that most people taking developmental math for the first time aren’t really first-timers. They’ve had it before, in high school, and it didn’t ‘take.’ Part of the great tragedy of remediation is that we’re taking students who have (generally) had thirteen years of exposure to the K-12 system, where standard methods didn’t work for them, and we’re giving them a fourteenth year of standard methods. The fact that it often fails really shouldn’t be so surprising.

But that strikes me as an argument for trying different teaching methods in developmental math, rather than giving up on it altogether. To give up would be to write off anybody who went to a crappy high school. Second chances are worth something, and enough students actually do something positive with the second chance that throwing it away would feel like a crime.

Of course, there are second chances, and then there are fifth chances. There comes a point...

Community college faculty and administrators, as a group, tend to believe in open access. So even when there’s a good argument for restrictions, it cuts against the cultural grain.

Wise and worldly readers, has your campus found an elegant way to deal with the balance between access and, well, futility?

Students say the darndest things. Just this week, before the official start of the final exam period, I overheard a cluster of students complaining about all the final exams they had already taken. One was especially miffed at having three exams on the same day.

And I thought, hmm.

They didn’t seem to be posturing for my benefit. I’ve entered middle-aged invisibility. At this point, if I’m not wearing antlers, I walk unseen. The reactions of the other students, and their quick commiseration and offerings of stories of their own, seemed credible. I’m pretty sure I was hearing something at least mostly true.

Like many colleges, mine ends the semester with an official final exam week. The idea is to allow professors to give exams longer than a single class period. (It also facilitates “common” finals in departments that choose to give them.) It also gives students a chance to focus on finals without also having to worry about other assignments. Tonier colleges build in a “reading period,” or what we call a “weekend.” But the idea is to give students a chance to synthesize (or, less charitably, cram) without having to deal with having classes at the same time.

Some courses don’t use final exams, and that’s fine. Depending on content, a final paper or portfolio or performance might make more sense. There too, though, the idea behind the final exam week is to give the students the benefit of the full semester.

Which is why I get a little annoyed every year around this time when I discover anew that substantial numbers of professors are simply moving their finals up a week and going on vacation early. Based on my accidental eavesdropping, as well as personal observation every year, the empty hallways during exam week aren’t entirely a function of term papers.

It’s annoying on several levels.

At one level is basic workload equity. The faculty all adhere to the same union contract and the same academic calendar. For some to simply shave off a week while others work until the bitter end seems unfair. But the level of surveillance that would be required to suss out who had legitimate alternatives and who was just shirking would be both culturally and personally offensive.

Fairness to students complicates the picture. The students are supposed to get a full semester of instruction, followed by a week of evaluation. They’re getting less than they were promised. Worse, they’re often compelled to take more exams in a single day than would have been the case if the rules had been followed. I’m willing to guess that by the time you get to your third final of the day, you probably aren’t performing at your best.

I don’t want to be the exam police. But at the same time, it’s hard not to notice that the rules are being abused on a regular, and even predictable, basis.

Since mine is a commuter college, this isn’t mostly about flying back to wherever. Nor is it a principled exercise in defiance, since nobody owns up to it in public. It’s just cheating, hiding behind the folks who actually do use final projects.

Grumble.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s relatively small. But as someone charged with establishing and maintaining fair treatment for employees, it’s annoying.

A few months ago, I floated the idea of just cancelling the final exam period altogether, and having classes run right up to the bitter end. That way, we could ensure equality across the board, and nobody would have to guess at anybody else’s motives. But the conscientious folk who actually do common, two-hour final exams objected. From their perspective, I was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. And while nobody offered a principled defense of shirking, I did notice an odd silence from certain corners...

Wise and worldly readers, has your campus found an elegant way to deal with premature examination?

‘Tis the season for student evaluations of their instructors, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on how best for administrators to read them.

In a phrase: look for outliers. It’s really about spotting the folks who are badly trailing the rest of the pack. Putting much weight on the difference between the lower middle and the upper middle is missing the point. There’s considerable normal variation, and all kinds of irrelevancies can push one instructor slightly above or below another. But when the same few names show up at the bottom of the list semester after semester, it’s difficult to write that off to random variations.

That’s where comments are useful. Some comments suggest ideological or cultural antipathy at work; those discredit themselves. (About once a year I get a student complaining that his professor is gay, and wanting to know what I’m going to do about it. “What would you suggest?” usually ends the discussion.) But some comments are actually revealing. I tend to discount references to “arrogance” or “full of himself,” but I take seriously comments like “he takes two months to grade papers” or “he’s incredibly disorganized.” When clusters of students make the same basic comment, there’s usually at least a conversation to be had.

Some professors like to say that student evaluations shouldn’t exist, or at least shouldn’t count for anything. I have to disagree. When a dean does a class observation, she observes one class meeting. Things like “speed of grading” simply won’t show on the radar, and of course, anyone can have an uncharacteristically good or bad day. But students see every day, so things that might seem inconsequential (or be entirely invisible) in a single moment take on their full significance.

Students also have different ‘eyes’ than faculty peers or deans, and reaching them is really the point. Inferential leaps that may seem obvious to someone with a doctorate in a related field may be entirely opaque to a freshman encountering the subject for the first time. It’s hard to fake ignorance, so we need to ask those who don’t have to fake it.

That said, I’m often struck at faculty paranoia around student course evaluations. They’re part of the picture, but they’re far from dispositive. In my student days at Snooty Liberal Arts College I remember a young professor -- maybe second year -- handing out the evaluation forms and then just sitting there and staring at us as we filled them out. He seemed paralyzed with fear that we’d be lukewarm and get him fired. After an uncomfortable silence, we started filling out the forms, wondering when/if he would leave. Another student -- I can’t take credit, though I wish I could -- raised his hand and asked “how many m’s in ‘incompetent?’” It broke the tension, even if it seemed just this side of cruel.

Of course, most student comments aren’t quite so clever. I don’t know why students feel compelled to comment on professorial hotness, and I wince whenever I read something like “he helped me write more better.” (I actually got that one once.) My brother reports that he once had a professor in the later stages of his career, perfectly fine in class but long past caring about evaluations. The students decided collectively to write their comments as baseball metaphors. “Although he’s lost a little on his fastball, he makes up for it by painting the corners.” Okaayyyy....

Wise and worldly readers, have you ever read anything on a student course evaluation that stuck with you? Is there a right way to read these things?

This comment by Dr. Crazy about yesterday's post stuck with me. In explaining – very clearly – why she refused to move into administration, she noted that much of what attracted her to academia is precisely what keeps her out of administration. Instead of teaching and doing research, both of which she enjoys, she'd have to spend her time in committee meetings and dealing with recalcitrant colleagues. Plus, she'd have to do it eight-plus hours a day, five days a week, twelve months a year.

Some other commenters made similar points, if with different emphases. One put it quite bluntly, asking just what, exactly, makes this job worth doing.

I had to think about that one for a while.

It's certainly true that the day-to-day work of deaning is very different from the day-to-day work of faculty. There's far less autonomy, whether in terms of choosing tasks, making decisions, or even setting your own schedule. I didn't realize how much I valued time flexibility until I had lost it. Suddenly even banal stuff like oil changes and haircuts took planning.

Several people mentioned a lack of mentoring, which I've absolutely found to be true. Even more astonishing to me was how quickly people expected me to know things. I got asked “what's the procedure for...?” for things I didn't even know happened. (I also got the opposite – “how was this decision made?” – whenever someone didn't like the answer.)

Academic culture tolerates a level of open insubordination and contrapower harassment that simply does not exist in any other established field. That can be rough on neophytes. Reading the blogs, you'd think that so many “gadflies” would made academia the sanest, justest workplace in the whole wide world.

I'll just let that one sink in for a minute.

Worse, new deans and chairs often discover, sometimes quite quickly, that many people with lingering grievances against an institution or an entire industry will treat you as a synecdoche, and unload on you. I get this on the blogs all the time. As the only academic administrator who actually writes about adjunctification in a serious and sustained way, I get treated as some sort of class enemy by armies of embittered adjunct activists. They're deeply wrong – anyone who has read my stuff for the last several years knows that I'm opposed to the tenure/adjunct dyad, and anyone who works with me IRL wouldn't recognize the caricatures – but the libel serves a political purpose, so it survives. Someone has to be the common enemy, whether he’s actually an enemy or not.

Similar things happen on campus. If you like being accused of things you had no part in doing, go into administration. If I had a nickel for every conversation that went like this:

Prof: Why did you make this awful decision?

Me: I didn’t. One of my predecessors did. In 1980.

Prof: Well, The Administration did this...

I’d be a wealthy man.

So with all of that said, why do I keep doing this? And would I encourage others to do it too?

For all the doom and gloom above, I actually like my job most of the time.

Some of that is location-specific. It took a couple of tries to find the right college. Some wells are simply toxic, and need to be abandoned. There is such a thing as cutting losses.

But some of it is real gratification at seeing a culture change for the better.

Success in administrative roles is often more vicarious and subtle than in the classroom. My most satisfying moments are when people realize that the climate has changed to the point that it has become safe to act as their best selves, rather than cowering in fear of the next (often sideways) attack. When I see people actually tell truths, rather than adopting the usual poses, I see it as a win. When people come out of their silos and work in productive collaborations that they simply would not have a few years ago, it’s a win.

It’s frustrating to work towards that kind of change on campus, only to have state budget pressures intrude. But one can do only what one can do.

I’m increasingly convinced that good leadership is as much about temperament as about anything else. My sense of administrative “vision” is not “we will have the highest graduation rate in the state,” or “we will have the best program in X in the region.” It’s more like “we’ll have a workplace in which the best ideas can win, and experimentation is rewarded.” Actually seeing that start to happen has been gratifying. The most appealing part is that it’s cumulative; cool experiments lead to more cool experiments. We’ve got one on campus now that’s so )$#(*^%&#^%_! cool that if it wouldn’t blow the pseudonym, I’d spend a full week writing about nothing but that. It’s the fruit of years of deliberate climate change, and it’s sending an unmistakably positive message to the rest of the campus. That wouldn’t have happened a few years ago, and I take real pride in that.

Would I recommend this to others? In many settings, no. But if you have the right local climate, and the right vision, and serious tenacity, and the ability to distance yourself from personal attacks, and a strong sense of why you’re doing it, then maybe.

Which may explain the small applicant pools...

Over the past year, my college has advertised for both tenure-track faculty positions and administrative positions. (More of the former than the latter.) The tenure-track faculty applicant pools, unsurprisingly, have been large and deep, with no shortage of very qualified people. The challenge for the search committees has been to discern relative degrees of excellence.

The administrative applicant pools, by contrast, have been markedly thin. After filtering out the clearly underqualified, we were left in the single digits.

Odd.

If administrators were as wildly overpaid as some like to claim, I’d imagine the ratios would be reversed. That hasn’t happened. I won’t deny that some folks at elite places make staggering sums, but at my cc and at every other cc in my state, this is simply not the case.

People with longer histories here tell me that administrative searches weren’t always so difficult. Ten years ago, administrative postings generated floods of quality applications. Now, not.

I’m guessing the cause is a combination of things.

The most basic is the lack of a pipeline. With so few associate professors running around, the pool of potential applicants is simply smaller than it once was. A faculty hiring shortage eventually led to an administrative candidate shortage.

The housing market is probably also at play. Many of the people far enough along in their careers to be credible applicants own their homes; in this market, you don’t sell unless you absolutely have to. Yes, some folks rent, and there are some local-ish applicants, but the housing market may be exerting some serious drag. (The same would be less likely to apply on the faculty side, since folks fresh out of grad school don’t usually own their homes.) I’d guess there’s less job-hopping when making the leap requires taking a serious loss.

There’s also the ongoing cultural taboo against “crossing over to the dark side,” though I think that taboo predates the last few years. (Notably, many of the same people who resort to “dark side” rhetoric with the most vigor are also the first to complain about administrators coming from outside the faculty ranks, yet they rarely notice the contradiction.)

At some level, though, I wonder if part of the issue is a growing sense -- largely correct -- that succeeding in these roles is getting objectively harder. Resource constraints are far worse than they were even a few years ago, and that doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon. (I get periodic emails soliciting applications for positions in California; I delete them unread. No way am I going to board that sinking ship.) When your first task in your new administrative role is to cut budgets, you’ll have a rough time lasting.

With more no-win decisions to be made, there’s also more litigation to be endured. Since our judicial system has yet to embrace the fundamental fairness of “loser pays,” there’s little incentive to forego retaliatory lawsuits when someone doesn’t like an outcome. Labor relations are always hard when budgets are tight; walking right into a flurry of grievances is no fun. And as bad as regular budget cuts are, midyear budget cuts are inexcusably brutal. Walk into that propeller once, and you will go out of your way to avoid it thereafter.

There’s also increasing external pressure to do things that internal constituencies simply don’t want done, like outcomes assessment. Every time a college replaces operating funding with grant funding, it takes on a new set of reporting requirements and criteria, and a new set of judges for whom to perform. I tolerate rubrics, but have never developed a love for them.

I don’t think it’s anything terribly specific to my college, since it’s pretty well respected in its niche. And its geographic location hasn’t changed in the last ten years, so I hesitate to blame geography.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen anything similar on your campus? Any contributions to a general theory of administrative candidate shortages?

Friday’s IHE did a story featuring a report by Douglas Harris and Sara Goldrick-Rab that’s well worth reading in its entirety. In a nutshell, it measures the ‘productivity’ of various programs, using what boils down to dollars-per-graduate. Among other things, it suggests that call centers to nudge students into attending class have great bang for the buck, but that Upward Bound and similar programs are wildly expensive for what they achieve.

The goal of the study -- which is entirely to the good -- is to encourage colleges to base resource allocation decisions on actual effectiveness, rather than on what sounds good or what has usually been done. The authors break out two-year and four-year sectors -- thank you -- and actually define their variables. (Notably, the productivity decline over the past forty years has been far more dramatic in the four-year sector than in the two-year sector.) Even better, they acknowledge that most of the research done on various programs are done on those programs in isolation, rather than in comparison with each other. If we’re serious about dealing with limited resources, we have to acknowledge that money spent on program A is money not available to be spent on program B. It’s not enough to show that a given program helps; it needs to help more than its alternatives would have.

Broadly, the paper finds that outside of call centers, there isn’t much low-hanging fruit. It tackles the “fewer adjuncts or smaller classes” conundrum directly, finding that more full-time faculty leads to greater bang for the buck than do smaller classes. (It notes, correctly, that the evidentiary basis for this claim is thin, but at least it’s something.) Given the choice between full-timers teaching large sections and adjuncts teaching small ones, this paper suggests the former. Strikingly, it notes that the bang-for-the-buck of most student services and student service programs is terrible. The TRIO programs look particularly bad, with Upward Bound standing out as a conspicuous boondoggle.

I’m not sure I buy every argument in the paper, but it’s a great start.

It leaves out a critical factor in administrative decision-making, though, which is the sources of money for the various programs. If every dollar came from the same pot, then the bang-for-the-buck measure would be significant. But some dollars come from pots of their own. If a program is entirely grant-funded, and those grant dollars can only be used for that program, then the fact that those dollars could have been more productively used elsewhere is of only theoretical interest. (Put differently, if the choice is between program A and program B, that’s one thing. If it’s between program A and nothing at all, that’s something else.) As long as, say, Federal dollars will pay the entire cost for a given program, then my only concern is whether the program makes any positive difference at all. The question of relative payoff may make sense at, say, the Congressional level, but not here.

There’s also the question of the financial relevance of cost-per-degree. (I’ll leave aside the educational relevance, since that’s too easy. Yes, a degree should actually signify something. That’s why we need robust outcomes assessment. Noted.) My college, like most, doesn’t get funded by the degree. It gets funded by a set amount given by the legislature, plus student tuition. (It also subsidizes the credit-bearing side by profits from workforce development contracts, but that’s neither here nor there.) Tuition is by the credit, and the state appropriation is by the whim of the legislature and governor. In other words, while I can acknowledge the inherent goodness of student success, improved success may not pay for itself locally. In fact, it almost certainly won’t, since tuition covers less than the cost of educating a student, and graduation rates don’t affect our appropriation in any intelligible way.

That’s why I can understand the argument about full-time faculty, but not be able to do much with it. The dollars simply aren’t there. (Of course, we could try to divert money from, say, counselors to faculty, so the analysis isn’t entirely useless.) This is in contrast to the for-profits, where tuition more than pays for its attendant costs. That’s why the for-profits are as focused on student success as they are, and why they pioneered call centers. They capture their own gains. We don’t. Cost effectiveness is great, but if the cost accrues to the college and the benefits don’t, we can expect underinvestment. Doing otherwise would be irrational.

Notably, the study notes that the underlying “cost disease” of higher education as currently defined -- broadly, denominating currency in units of time -- more than swamps any savings to be had by adopting even the most rigorous use of comparative measures. (It also assumes, I think falsely, that call centers and similar “intrusive advisement” models have no negative effect on academic quality. Based on what I saw at Proprietary U, I’d suggest that students who discover that the college needs them more than they need the college will adopt attitudes of entitlement that will make academic rigor more of an uphill battle.) In other words, it addresses more intelligent short-term decisionmaking, rather than fundamental structural change. That’s useful as far as it goes, but it only goes so far.

Still, caveats noted, I have to give thumbs-up overall. Subjecting the claims of various campus constituencies to evidence-based analysis strikes me as worth trying. Diverting money from boondoggles to productive uses may not make all the difference, but it would certainly help. As someone who actually has to make certain budgetary decisions, I say thanks.