Admin Serves Kool Aid; Some Faculty Lap It Up

Fortunately, not at Maryland, but over at Critical Mass, where someone has swallowed the "accountability" potion whole. Bravo to the first, and, at the moment, the only respondent, whose comments ought to serve up some charcoal filtration for Miss O'Connor (the url is "Erin O'Connor.com")'s toxins. This one is all about post-tenure review. [Note to (exhausted) self: Insert longish and to be written section on the spread growing faux-legitimacy of this whole measurable outcomes mishmash and the AAUP's disappointing and growing complicity to act on behalf of adminstrations.] Critical Mass quotes from the Inside Higher Ed Piece by David Scobey that started her, uh, thinking:

Jonathan Sachs, president of the undergraduate student government, said that in general, he appreciates the quality of teaching at Maryland. But he said that he has noticed that those without tenure "tend to be really good," while "a small percentage" of tenured professors "neglect their classrooms." Sachs said he saw the faculty vote against the review plan as "arrogance," and said that they should be "accountable" for their performance.

Well. Well. See last post is what I say. This is a surprise ? That students would say those without tenure "tend to be really good ?" Or, in a part not quoted here, that graduate students would feel that tenured professors "shoot them down ?" And one presumes, of course, that these students would like a voice in this post-tenure review, to assure that faculty members continue to be... how shall we phrase this ? ...accomodating. Oh, heck: see last three posts. Will get back to this, but it makes me too upset to type. And yes, for the record, we all know of deadwood and the cottonmouths that lurk in it. But they would survive post-tenure review just fine anyway, OBN (Old Boy's Network) and all that.

Breaking my own rule about blogging on the mundane and obvious: on the personal cranky front, I can honestly barely get my tendons to keep the typing together here. What is it with March ? Write conference paper(s !!). Grade. Research and write some more. Grade. Meeting A. Meeting B. Meeting C. Meeting about meetings. Subcommittee meetings. Grade. Multiply papers ungraded by hours spent reading committee reports, raised to the power of students pleading for time, attention, extensions. Advising starts. Go to conference. Give paper. Meet people. Get home and e-mail newly met people (= networking or being a twit, twittering). Grade. Oh, yes: prep. Write other paper. Give presentation with colleague to students that, naturally involves demonstrating outrageous technological prowess with video-editing, things flying in from all corners of slides, soundtracks, everything but dry ice fog. Convinced of said prowess, colleagues stop by to ask for help. Senior colleagues. Grade. Oh, yes, teach classes. Fill out multitudinous forms with multiple check boxes, all demanding original receipts and rationales, for travel and conferences, some in the future. Two are returned because "estimated expenses" is not accompanied by receipt. One returned because receipt is not valid without both sides of cancelled check (checks ? are you kidding ? do people still use those ?).

Well, thank you for listening. Cranky is less so now. Cats are sleeping belly up on couch. Ah, Friday.

The New Academic Survival Skills

This is on PostSecret this week. Notice the "It works !" visible on the lower right. I do not work at a place like this (we do not have "Teacher/ Professor of the Year" awards, either, thanks be to god/dess). I did work at a place like the one employing the Secrets sender, and they are ugly, and it seems to me, the ever-increasing norm. The first question my colleagues and I were asked if we turned in a plagiarist or cheater was what we might have done to bring about the situation ("let's see how you wrote that essay question/test"), and people got a lot of mileage out of disparaging colleagues by saying things like I've never had a problem in my classes; I just let them know it's a question of respect; what does it say about us if we are treating our students suspiciously all the time ? And even though it was a small place, there were frats and other arcane organizations whose student members would simply blackball the class (without knowing the meaning of that word) so that the poor (always junior) prof's class wouldn't make, or, would sign up en masse for a class, behave normally throughout and do well, and then write horrendous student evaluations in vengeance for a brother slighted (i.e. caught) in a previous semester. And, dear reader: it worked ! The dean and the entire administration were fixated on student evaluations and numbers, and would turn to the poor guy who had found a few cases of plagiarism, pointing out that Prof. Cowering Dog (publically known as ---tenured--- Prof. Wonderful) was strict, but that the students liked him, and he "never had an issue with that." At the advent of TurnItIn.com, much hang-wringing and soul-searching abounded at faculty meetings, where near teary-eyed profs (the dean and admin enjoyed inner struggle as a spectacle) made little speeches in little voices denouncing the "lack of trust" that this would bring about. Or, infamously, the guy, who upon being told by the dean that he'd received tenure (they also liked ceremony: you had to go in person and wait for him to tell you yea or nay), jumped up from his chair, shook hands heartily with Dean Creep, and proclaimed, "No more Mister Nice Guy !" To which, no surprise, Dean Creep responded, "That's right." You heard me. That's right. Price of doing business, keep 'em coming and keep 'em happy. To pass out pizza during the filling out of evaluation forms (the only forms and type of evaluation that mattered for tenure) was not uncommon, but standard. Students would hint at their orders in advance, but always act politely surprised. One department chair apologized to a coach because a faculty member in his department had caught the plagiarism of two star athletes, deprivig him of their services for one (yes) game. I was young; I thought I was just at a Swamp SLAC, and that these monsters would never raise their heads out of larger lagoons. I was young.

You probably remember the brouhaha (ire, in my mind) raised by the New York Times article, "Judgement Day," supposedly about "polarizing" professors, student evaluations etc. The object of the slaughter story, Annemarie Bean, received little support even on popular sites such as Confessions of A Community College Dean, where, except for one or two like-minded souls, those responding to the post wrote things like "there must be more to it [her non-renewal]," and, except for one writer, who must be my cyber-soulmate (Are you out there ? Have you found me ?), no one pointed out that only the women who were in danger of losing, or who had lost, their jobs, were named. Consider this cozy little bit recounted in the original (NYT) article:

In his polemic “Why the University Should Abolish Faculty Course Evaluations,” published in a faculty newsletter in 2004, Clark Glymour, a philosopher at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that giving good grades can even make up for a professor’s lack of charm and wit. When Glymour was department chairman in the 1980s, a “newly hired assistant professor consistently received the lowest faculty course evaluations in the department, and I was concerned for his career,” Glymour writes. “I knew the man and his outstanding scholarly work well, and I could guess the problems. He was not charming or funny or good-looking, and he had a deep and formal view of philosophical topics.” Traditional and serious, lacking the levity students appreciate, the professor refused to seek help with his teaching, but he assured Glymour that his student evaluations would nevertheless improve significantly. “The next semester he had the highest overall course evaluations in the department, and naturally I asked him how he did it — had he changed how he taught or what he taught? ‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘before the evaluations were given out, almost all of the students knew they were going to get A’s. I see no reason to sacrifice my career to the cause of grade deflation.’ ”

Let's be clear: Glymour [chuckle, chuckle, poke ribs] is condoning this boys' club bit, all for the career, you know. My guess is that women do this less openly. Though our pizza bills were no secret, there were none of those "Atta Boy !" moments in the dean's office. These are the things that make me very CIA. Discuss.

Cranky Is Out of The Office

But not on break, which is making her considerably tired. Still planning my rant on what happened in Kentucky, but a quick target tonight is easily this, from Inside Higher Ed:

Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads
March 18, 2009
Scholarly output rises; undergraduates are disengaged. “This is the real calamity of the research mandate -- 10,000 harried professors forced to labor on disregarded print, and 100,000 unwitting students missing out on rigorous face-to-face learning,” Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, writes in a new paper on relieving research expectations in the humanities.
“I think these two trends -- to do more and more research and less academic engagement on the freshman level -- are not unrelated,” Bauerlein said in an interview about “Professors on the Production Line, Students on their Own." The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research released the paper Tuesday.

Uh, help. This is a white paper ? A serious statement of the issue and policy recommendation ? Has no one told Mr. Bauerlein that a correlation does not, ispa re, prove cause and effect ? There are some very serious, thoughtful responses posted at Inside, unworthy of the alarmist provocation that inspired them. For heaven's sake, (CIA shouts to the rafters, the cats, the espresso machine), perhaps it IS related, Prof. Bauerlein, the other way around ? In all seriousness, student disengagement is a social phenomenom not reducible to this silly factor. Between Kentucky, Ink's post about children's books, and this, it is a very bad time in the history of serious thought. March Madness indeed. Of course, what might one expect from a paper originating from the American Enterprise Institute ? But an Emory professor ? For shame. Speaking of AEI and its philosophy, Stanley Fish would feel right at home. Maybe I am continuing my discussion of the decimation of KCTS after all.

Bad Luck Fails to Reach the Right Party In Spite of the Date

Mother of F*ckin' Almighty Goddess. And they thought this was funny ? To vote on Friday the 13th ? This brings on that sickened, pit in stomach, muscles stretched tense to the point of aching feeling. Everything good about American education (namely, higher ed) is being dismantled from the ground up by idiots. Just when we had hope of becoming a thinking nation again.

KCTCS Ends Tenure For New Faculty

KCTCS is the Kentucky Community College and Technical System. All of it.

This cannot catch on.
Now CIA and nauseated. Wishes she were actually cloak and dagger and could get Jack Bauer on their case.

Snort

This is not (usually) my convention. Maybe this is one of the reasons the Humanities are not being taken seriously ? I myself keep a distance from those perfume purveyors in department stores, but for the love of sanity, can pc really go this far and keep a straight face ? Will attendees' toiletry bags be vetted at the door ?

From the MLA Convention website:

The Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession (CDI) reminds attendees that refraining from using scented products will help ensure the comfort of everyone at the convention.

Aromatherapy is apparently so over. Take a Benadryl and chillax.

Someone Ought to Kill Stanley Fish

Oh, MOG (Mother of God. Get used to that, too). Pending after dinner.

...Back. Remember The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover ? I hope you do. As an ostensible allegory for Thatcherism, it is quite apropos of tonight's topic. It also helps me to imagine the (proposed) body in question, large wads of Amartya Sen being unspooled from what must have been its gasping, resistant, throat. Fish's feeble attempt at playing Socrates (to paraphrase: "So I went about, asking others, what is this neo-liberalism that you speak of, and discovered that they themselves had mistaken the one [me] for the other [neo-liberal]. Thus, I was seeming, while not being." Yadda yadda) yields no insight. Instead, it produces another mirror, in which, as is true of all narcissists, Fish is only too happy to see himself: "and it now becomes clear (even to me) why McLennen would see in what I write an implicit support for the neoliberization (sic) of academic life." Still playing (poorly) at his Plato game, Fish is happy to concede resemblances, but not to cop to the thing itself. What he has failed to notice in his quick study of neoliberalism, gadding about and googling and the like, is that real neo-liberalism (not the classic neo-liberalism of Freidman, et al.), the lived neo-liberalism of today, is very much part of a complex of policies and ideals steeped in theories of social justice. One may find one's own footnotes. This is not a lecture. This is also a not uncontroversial claim, granted, but find the references and move on. That is, neo-liberalism was never morally indifferent at its best; one can hardly say the same for Fish's ideal fortress in Academia. Stumbling ever further, as do Socrates' interlocutors (except that SF is at the mercy of himself), Fish yaws into hyperbaton:

By defining academic freedom narrowly, as a concept tied to a guild and responsive only to its interests, I am said to ignore the responsibility academics have to freedom everywhere, not only in the classroom or in the research library but in the society at large and indeed in the entire world.

My, the entire world ! Surely this is wrong: one can feel academia go out of bounds in the building tetracolon of "classroom," "research library," "society," "world," quite a leap in spatial concepts as well as logic. He cannot answer to what he is said to say; he can only misdirect his readers with the promise of a related topic (or the promise that he will relate something provocative to this topic). Alas, one is provoked to respond in kind: what does he think ? Does this guild weave rugs? But that is not helpful, and does not get to the heart of it: SF is unable to define, not only here, but elsewhere, what the "interests" of this guild are, and most seriously, postulates pontificates with no underlying theory or philosophy of what freedom is, of what it consists, how it might be constructed, and how it is expressed, i.e. made real. He evinces no sense at all of academic life, teaching and research, of the arts, sciences, and surrounding disciplines and their products (yes, let's get that out on the table) as engagement with the world (yes, the whole one), leaving the "interests" of academia to be only itself. That Fish's solipsism has been mistaken for economic ideas of self-interest is not surprising --yes, SF, exclaims, as we noted, I see me !-- but pathetic, as he, resembling more a first year economics student babbling about "products" and "expenditures" than a capable public intellectual, meanders through falsehood after falsehood, rewriting the past as he goes: "students... now become consumers and debt-holders rather than beneficiaries of enlightenment." Ah, the golden years, when Buddhist monasteries, free university education for all , elitism (the GI Bill ?) reigned supreme ! Sadly, and doubly so because he does not realize it, Fish's erroneous reconstruction of the past reveals, as he calls upon it to avoid being cut by the shards of logic he tries to assemble, an inarticulated longing for the very freedom that he would deny to his peers to engage ideas and the world , but seems very much at work at himself. To not know oneself is the ultimate crime; to not know what it is one does not know is both a symptom and a result. Someone, go into his cave finish him quietly.

It is late and I am now very cranky.

Footnote: Not that I, to be clear, agree with the social policy makers who see neo-liberalism as the mechanism for bringing their ideas to fruition. The issue where I raised it is that neo-liberalism is not morally indifferent, not whether I or anyone grant it ethical validity. Read on your own.

Fail Male

It seems we'll be going through this all again: Inside Higher Ed has an article on what, every other year, is brought forth as a new national emergency. crisis. reason to think male academics have learned nothing. I debated linking to the article at all, because it is written by someone named Thomas Whitmire, whose blog is dedicated only to that issue ("why boys fail;" must be hell keeping that going). His statistics are just startling: "lackluster graduation rates are due to men floundering in college," he mongers. Forty-two percent of men earn four year degrees. Clearly a crisis when a gap in parity with females is eight percent. Perhaps one has not consulted obvious things, such as atlas.gov, which states, "According to Census 2000, 281.4 million people were counted in the United States — 143.4 million of whom were female and 138.1 million male." There are more women, fool. No wonder more of them are getting degrees ! Of course, it's more complicated than that, but the argumentation in this particular article couldn't be bothered, in its zeal to fuel a crisis (and grab money for the MDRC), to examine the percentage of males entering four year institutions who graduate compared to that of female entering students. But never mind: our author is doubly concerned because men tend to major in math and science, so if they don't graduate, this is a "special concern" for the tech industry. I am not making this up. It's the only reason I included the link, because if you haven't read the article, you will have a hard time believing that it says what I claim it does. I had to have two Extra-Strength Excedrin and a coffee just to kill the throbbing pain in my head caused by the illogic and Inside Higher Ed's flashing, gyrating, irritating layout. But never fear: our man admits "Elite colleges generally don’t suffer gender imbalances, especially those offering boys admissions preferences." Oh, footnote that, please. If anyone out there knows which "elite" colleges implicity or explicitly don't offer boys admissions preferences, please raise your hand. Can anyone say "alumni network" and "legacy admission" ? I need chocolate, now.

CIA (that's Cranky In Academe, get used to it) does agree with Mr. Illogic's article in one very broad respect, but most likely, not with the particulars (there are none): Public K-12 is a ruinous system. It is not only bad for boys, but bad for the human species as a whole. The whole culture, from certification to the layouts of buildings to the serf-like conditions designed to create and rein in an anti-intellectual cadre of teachers, has got to go. Most of my plagiarists are young men. Women do it too, but over the last five years of running a good number of all sorts of papers through TurnitIn.Com and various search engines, working from memory (men tend to buy essays more than women do, in my experience), I have found that the male plagiarists outnumber the female [insert many valid theories as to why here]. In part, I blame the acculturation to neglect created by the K-12 system, where overworked teachers can barely find time to grade in between monitoring the halls for violence, drugs, and death threats; where cameras lurk in every corner of every building, and lunch is twenty-five minutes long if you are lucky. I see this, in "good" schools, and it makes me cringe and wonder: it must be quite a shock for teenagers, prone to be clever and defiant, keen as truffle hunters when it comes to hypocrisy, to stumble from a culture of numbers management and surveillance, counting and regulating and watching, into one that has the time and intellectual resources to care that they learn, to even care for the subject itself. By the time they come to us, many students are damaged in small and large ways: they do not trust the value of their own intellect, and thus, they do not trust the value of ours. I will venture that boys and young male teens are more negatively affected by the numbing prisonlike atmosphere of their schools, but I leave it to others to venture why. Plagiarism, along with many other "shortcuts," is now viewed as a means to an end, a way through an obstacle course rather than an education. This kind of talk will lead us to those proposing three-year college degrees, cutting out the "fat" of extra courses, and that will lead CIA to need more aspirin and a drink, not a good combination. I told you I was cranky.

Image found via , and copywritten to, the owner of http://urbanhawks.blogs.com/urban_hawks/
2006/08/pale_male_gets_.html

The Intelligence Community

Well, here we are. I am an academic, and I love my job. Sometimes, though, academics really annoy me. The narcissism, the constant blogging, people who have had tenure since they were thirty. If I had known how much neurosis and subterfuge were involved in this career, I wonder if I would have given a career in psychotherapy or security analysis more than a passing glance of undergraduate interest. Of course, that was long ago. My undergraduate thesis was typed on a Smith Corona because my room mate hid my IBM Selectric ball. Instead, I ended up in interdisciplinary humanities, and after passing through several SLACS of high and cult-like repute as a "visitor," found my permanent place at a public institution in eastern seaboard suburb, USA. My dissertation was written on a Mac Classic. I remember telnet prompts with fondness. I am stuck between the generation (older) that, especially in those cultish SLACs, deplores the "careerism" of their newly hired colleagues, and those new hires (younger) who certainly got more guidance than we did. I sometimes bewail the demise of Lingua Franca, perhaps because it had such mean things to say about several places where I worked at the time.
But when did what should be the intelligentsia stop defining itself as such ? Why are there no public intellectuals, but only "popular" scholars (say with disdain and a sneer) ? Why is there so much whining about men being outnumbered in higher ed ? Buck up, people. Believe me, we could teach the CIA a thing or two when it comes to double-agents, paranoia, and intelligence gathering. Academics is a learn-those-skills-on-the-job cornucopia. Meanwhile, we somehow actually do get things done. The wonder of it all. I have come to stare it all in the face. Do not expect a daily account of the papers I grade, the meetings I go to, or what I [don't have time to] eat. I have no idea what I'm going to say, and neither should you.