Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun: The Radical Responds To Her Critics

Tenured radical faculty have too much, others have nothing.

This is a follow-up on yesterday's post, which unexpectedly turned into a brawl. Late-night anonymous commenters had issues with my inability to recognize that they are always right and that I am causing their oppression.  How did this happen? 

Let's roll the videotape:

I suggested (I deliberately did not make this a law, because I do not believe in coercion and I use my super powers with restraint and wisdom) that people who take full-time visiting faculty jobs should make themselves available to work full time, as opposed to teaching one or two days a week because they are traveling several hours each way from Big City.  Fulfilling this obligation (something that would be a normal expectation anywhere but in academia and e-trading) could mean moving to or near the place of employ, or making arrangements to spend several nights a week there.  I also suggested that if full time visitors were not going to do this, they should be responsible for actually getting themselves to the work site (a.k.a., skool) without assistance from the super-privileged tenured faculty who committed the crime of hiring them in the first place.

It turned out I was wrong about this, and that these are all not only highly retrograde notions unworthy of a true Radical, but also evidence of my secret affiliations with the radical right.  "About as 'Radical' as Don Chafin, I'd say," sniffs Anonymous 5:40 (I had to look that one up, not being well versed in the history of union-busting coal industry minions.) "TR, you say it's 'just advice,'" Anonymous 12:29 summed up in hir closing argument to the jury.  "Fine. But it's clear enough from your post that YOU are the one negatively judging those adjuncts who dare to hold on to their connections in other places. YOU'RE the one who feels offended by this practice, even though this practice is a totally rational labor response to a short-term, low-wage job contract."  Yes, and it would be a totally rational response on MY part to fire YOUR sorry a$$ for putting in minimal time for the actual job I had hired YOU to do.

Actually, I have had two homes for most of my adult life, which was expensive as all get out, particularly when I was in a visiting gig early in my career. Subsequently, I commuted between Zenith and New York for over fifteen years. I had two homes that I eventually gave up for one home in New Haven, from whence I commute 30 minutes a day, three to five days a week.  My point of view was that this was better than not working at what I wanted to do for a living.  But things have changed, I guess, since I was a young Radical (favorite comment from one of the multiple blog posts elsewhere sending me the hate?  "I want to rename her Tenured Liberal!" Yes, you do that.  Sounds like a devastating criticism anyone would take to heart, even me.)  The commenters above and others like them are clear: moving somewhere for a year, renting a room a couple nights a week, or taking responsibility for your own transportation to fulfill the terms of a full-time salaried, contract without any guarantee this will lead to future success or the lifetime security of tenure is something only ordinary people without PH.D.'s should have to do.

Well God Bless, and good luck. And the next time you decide to police the content of my blog, and reprove me for being condescending, be warned:  act like d00shb@g$, and the condescension veers way out of control.  Sorry.  Like the relentlessly condescending/entertaining Rachel Maddow Show,  Tenured Radical is not intended for children.  It may include adult themes, hard language, nudity, and all minors should be accompanied by a parent, guardian or dissertation advisor. )

In other news, readers who perceive tenured faculty as responsible for the death of their life prospects are going to be really upset when they see this one.  When we weren't looking, an administrator acquired two administrative jobs, 1,000 miles apart, that gross him $212 large a year.  Talk about a highway flyer! According to Inside Higher Ed:


Donald Green is executive vice president of instruction and student services at Florida State College at Jacksonville, where he has worked since 1998. He is also, concurrently, the acting senior vice president of academic affairs at Essex County College, in New Jersey, where he has been working 15-20 hours a week as a consultant since last October. 

Essex CC is actually paying Green as a consultant, at a rate of $130 an hour, which means he gets his benefits in Florida, Governor Chris Christie will be relieved to know.  This is probably about $127.75 more per hour than the adjunct profs teaching Humanities 101 are making, and $105.10 per hour more than full-time instructional staff.

While it isn't clear that Green has done anything illegal, it does appear that the guy had all kinds of paid sick days, vacation time and what not to fly up to the Garden State for a week or so at a time to be an adjunct administrator of sorts.  Marcella Washington, a political science prof at FSC, says that the faculty is investigating.  Full-time faculty members work "more than 40 hours per week" at FSC and administrators should at least be putting in their full forty.  "If we are truly giving all we have to our students, we don’t have time for another job. For [Green] to have another full-fledged job to put in 20 hours a week is just not giving all the attention and concern to Florida State College. It’s unacceptable behavior. [From an administrator], it just doesn’t set a good example.”

Interestingly, if you scroll down yesterday's comments you will get to "Christopher" who also had two jobs for a year, his regular adjunct gigs (three different jobs, it sounds like) and a one-year visiting slot with benefits that he was able to land in the same town.  

The one year gig was a 3/3 and paid $46k. Except, I'm used to 6/6 and even 7/7, so 3/3 was a snap. I kept 3 of my adjunct gigs, and pocketed the $46k plus another $18k, give or take. Nice. Plus, the FT gig provided health insurance, and so I made sure during that year to have every test known to medical science done. I'm good. For now.

The more salient fact, though, is that when the FT gig was done, I still had employment. Yes, it was back to the adjunct pool, but that's certainly better than nothing.

I suppose folks could call me out for gaming the system. Right. Go for it. Sue me, or something.

Dude! I think people are not calling you out because they are in awe of you, as well they should be.  Consider yourself invited for a guest post.

Disciplining Your Class: How Not To Go About It

Mark P. Talbert, a senior lecturer at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, is having a bad week.  Not only did he go berserk in front of his class, the episode was recorded by a university video system, which means the quality is better than what is produced by your average cell phone held in the air by a student.  Oh yeah, and it also means the tape is in possession of university officials, who are investigating, according to Inside Higher Ed.  Talbert's little breakdown was triggered by a very loud, and I suppose facetious, yawn.  Roll the videotape!



If it isn't bad enough that Talbert exposed his students to this ill-humored rant (my favorite part is where he tells the class that they are just going to stay there until the culprit confesses), he has now exposed himself to the slings and arrows of everyone on the Internet too, and many of them are ROTFLTAO.  A discussion of the merits of losing your $hit in front of an entire class appended to the YouTube posting include one gem that will keep me laughing all day tomorrow:  "OMG i wonder what he would do if someone farted...I think he would kill all of them. lol."

Department Of Teaching and Preaching: Update On Academic Freedom Case At University of Illinois

Or is that the UI homophobia-in-the-classroom case? You figure it out. Inside Higher Ed's Scott Jaschik updates us on the teaching status of religious studies instructor Kenneth Howell at the University of Illinois, Champaigne-Urbana. Howell came under scrutiny because of an email he sent to his class that articulated gay male sex acts as immoral and the equivalent of bestiality: you may recall that I wrote about it here. It appears that for years, Catholic thought instructors have been nominated and paid by the Newman Center, an institution that exists on many campuses to support the faith and the sociability of Catholic students. Although Howell has been reinstated for the fall, this incident has created an opportunity to end a curious arrangement that some faculty on campus have opposed for reasons you don't have to be skeptical of religion to understand. Think about it: would you hire someone nominated and paid for by BP, and approved by no department, to teach the ethics of offshore drilling?

According to this report, the agreement puts Howell (who is a published scholar) back in the classroom, and affirms that he is subject to public university guidelines around the expression of religious views (and presumably, expressions of prejudice that would not be perceived as discriminatory if articulated in a community of like-minded believers.)

A bigger question might be: are religious institutions a legitimate "student service?" And what is the role of clerics on secular campuses, unless they have been hired in a secular capacity as tenure-track faculty or administrators? This isn't something I have seen discussed much, and yet most campuses devote a part of their budget to doing so. The Howell incident should perhaps cause us to wonder why, in this day and age, secular institutions feel they have any obligation to provide religious resources to students at all: or, to put an even finer point on it, to students of some faiths and not others. I suspect the answer to the question is that when they do hire preachers of various kinds, for one low, low, price they get an adjunct teacher/psychotherapist/co-curricular coordinator all wrapped up in one.

But it is also one of those wheels within wheels situations that makes me happy I am not an administrator. Nothing I have seen has addressed the question of a complaint filed by a student not in the class: despite your views on faculty hired because they have been approved and paid for by the Vatican, all of us should find this a little scary. It has not exactly resolved the academic freedom issue, which may create difficulties for UI down the line. While Howell will have a contract for next semester, the religion department now has control over its hiring (as it should), and will decide whether to retain him in the future.

So here's the happy choice facing UI's chair of religion next year: continue to employ indefinitely an instructor who the department doesn't seem to care enough for to defend, and who it never hired in the first place; or decline to employ him further and risk a lawsuit backed by either the liberal AAUP, the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, or both.

Because it is summer, I have illustrated this post with James Tissot's "Jesus Teaching At The Shore," taken from this website.

Don't Shoot! A Meditation on Civility

The sensationalism of the Amy Bishop tenure case, in which a University of Alabama biologist shot numerous colleagues in the head after her failed appeal, has us all unnerved and fascinated. Of course, the news reports that are piecing together a portrait of a sociopath, a ticking time bomb who happened to have become a university professor, have already helped us build distance between "us" and "her." The Bishop story, which is being reported over at University Diaries in press clippings and terse, incisive commentary (that makes you think Margaret Soltan really could produce the thriller or mystery we all long to write) is, however, countered by the more prosaic and recognizable case of Bill Reader, a journalism professor at Ohio University. Reader seemed to be on track for tenure and now -- isn't exactly. Why? There are allegations that, although he is not a sociopath, he may be a garden variety bastard (or not) who is being portrayed as a sociopath by colleagues who voted against his tenure.

Hence, the Reader case raises a set of more serious issues for all of us, in my view.

According to Inside Higher Ed, prior to his tenure case, Reader "had received nothing but glowing annual evaluations with no mention of untoward behavior in his file." But when the case was reported out of the Journalism School, with a positive but very split vote, three female faculty members who voted against the case filed harassment charges against him, citing threats allegedly made by Reader that were related to them by third parties. The rumour was that Reader "was 'out for revenge' against those who had opposed his bid for tenure." Subsequent to the filing of these charges, "recommendations by the journalism school's director, a college-level review committee and dean have all come out negatively."

It's always difficult to know what happened when reading public reports of these things. Apparently Reader was prone to nasty email exchanges, one of which, ignited over the failure of colleagues to sign a card for a departing colleague, was particularly unpleasant. I doubt that he was the only one who sent flaming e's, although he was in a position to know he could be harmed by such behavior and clearly failed to perceive it. But many people suffer failures of self-perception on email, as adrenaline and self-righteous wrath washes over their -- no, let's say our -- brains. Even those of us who don't have grievances filed against us have probably participated in terrible e-mail exchanges that we are embarrassed about in retrospect, whether we believe we were right or wrong at the time. Reader apparently isn't embarrassed about the greeting card incident, however, which tells you nothing about his suitability as a colleague, but a lot about what constitutes normal behavior at the Ohio State J-School. “I opted for vitriol," he states. "I have no regrets. Before my e-mail, there were few signatures; afterward, there were many.”

Really? Even now you are not ready to stand down about that stupid greeting card?

Inside Higher Ed sees this case as part of "a continuing national debate over the extent to which 'collegiality' ought to be considered in the awarding of tenure," and on the surface I suppose it is. But Reader's supporters, and presumably Reader himself (who was not informed or or able to respond to the harassment charges until several negative decisions on his case had already been made), say the tenure process has been tainted by these allegations. I tend to agree with this somewhat narrower interpretation. So does the Faculty Senate at Ohio, which has reversed the negative rulings, and sent the case forward to the next level. The attorneys standing outside their office sharpening their knives probably had nothing to do with it, although this is a situation where a little gentle advice from the AAUP can go a long way.

I don't know whether I would like Bill Reader or want to work with him, and it's difficult to tell from the few facts that can be gleaned from the IHE piece, of course. But take it from someone who has been bullied: what is wrong in that department goes beyond Bill Reader and points to a winner-take-all culture where there is more than one person with no commitment to civility. Although there are clearly people who believe they have been victimized, the search for authentic victims is likely to produce instead a vivid picture of professional relationships dominated by gossip, faction and spite, in which people who insist they are wedded to "procedure" manipulate it cruelly to get their way. It's not for nothing that novelists as different as Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, C.P. Snow and Ishmael Reed have spent anywhere from a semester to a career with us and consistently pointed out these very qualities.

Academia, one might say, is characterized by strong personalities out to win an argument, and sometimes the desire to win gets out of hand. The origins of the bad behavior at Ohio University, either Reader's abusive emails and threats over signatures on a greeting card, or individual faculty members trying to have more than one vote on a tenure case by launching an internal grievance process, might well be a departmental culture in which the need for authority and the disregard for appropriate behavior is pervasive at all ranks. I also find it useful to remember what every child psychologist knows: that people who bully have often themselves been bullied. I once saw an older historian who was famous for hir nastiness, public temper tantrums and contempt for colleagues, treated with such contempt and rudeness (in public and for no good reason whatsoever) by hir prestigious dissertation director of three decades ago that it literally took my breath away.

This observation didn't make me like this person any better, nor did it make me more willing to be subjected to verbal abuse by others. But it did create a little window of understanding that subsequently caused me to look around the world I live in differently; to understand the ways in which we replicate the behavior of others, often unconsciously; and to place my own actions under the lens that I used to evaluate other people's behavior towards me. The lesson, in my view? We need to model judicious and civil behavior at all costs, and speak to people honestly when they breach the bounds of civility, not wait until a high stakes moment to declare them unfit for our company. We all need to insist that our authority and reputations be taken seriously by others, but not demand it by damaging them, in turn, after the fact. It is quite possible to work productively with people one neither likes or respects, and it is possible to have one's judgement not be sustained by the judgement of the majority without going nuclear: people outside the academy do it all the time.