Is There A Budget To Be Cut Under Your Christmas Tree? A View To The Future

In yesterday's Huffpo, David J. Skorton, the president of Cornell University  asserted that "We Can Do Better On College Costs."  He proposes calling a halt to the educational blame game:  "let's stop the intellectual shoving matches," he argues, "and get about the business of dealing with those factors that can and should be controlled to attenuate the rate of rise of both cost and price. And let's also stop apologizing for investments that are necessary to keep higher education one of America's premier 'products.'" His suggestions include:

1. greater specialization on individual campuses, so that institutions are not duplicating partially filled programs;
2. reviews of "faculty productivity and quality," including post-tenure reviews;
3. acknowledging that educational administrators who are skilled at running an institution might not always have the skills to do so in a cost-efficient way.

The economic crash that has motivated our current state of intensified budget cutting, Skorton argues, should be viewed as a re-set.  "Given our continuing uncertain economy," he concludes, "I call on my colleagues in higher education to reduce the rate of rise of our operating costs through focus, connectivity, accountability and administrative streamlining. Improvements in higher education's pricing and accessibility will follow."

Now, before you fill the comments section with off the cuff remarks about what self-interested sleazebags and incompetents administrators are, please do two things.  Read the article, and ask yourself the question:  Isn't it time that faculty started to work with administrators to reshape and rethink what we do, rather than sitting around and howling about the latest set of budget cuts made by corporate executives and legislators who really don't have a clue what we do or why it matters?  And isn't it time for faculty to stop defending everything they do, in exactly the way they learned it should be done decades ago, as if the university is a place where nothing has changed since the 1880s?

So here are a few initial responses to Skorton's suggestions from this faculty member.

Overspecialization on campuses:  The vast majority of departments and programs would not be vulnerable to elimination on any campus under a plan to scrutinize overspecialization, in my view, although some positions within them might be useful targets for cross-institutional appointments.  Colleges would want to duplicate fields that draw numerous students and that are basic to citizenship, social/cultural competence, literacy and a student's capacity to choose a future: for example,  English, history, political science, mathematics, and philosophy.  But such departments might be asked to work together to ensure that they represented an intellectual direction that was coherent and distinctive, rather than one that fulfilled individual desires without regard to how those fields are supported elsewhere in the curriculum.

Furthermore, the failure of area colleges to work together to establish consortium arrangements for areas of knowledge that are less desired by students is leading, not to duplication, but to the actual collapse of certain fields of knowledge.  German, for example, is under-taught on many campuses, due in part to the fact that the teaching of German at the high school level is almost non-existent. It is a difficult language that requires dedication to learn, and a background in other languages (also difficult to get more than a couple years of in most high schools) doesn't hurt either.  The response of the budget cutters is that there German departments should be eliminated due its marketplace failure -- even though the market for German among students has been actively and deliberately undermined.  One might argue that this failure does not, in fact, represent the actual value of being literate in German.  Knowledge of German continues to be highly relevant to many fields other than German literature (science, philosophy, history); furthermore, if you look at a market that really matters, Germany is the biggest economy in the EU, and you might think a global power like the United States might want to train people to communicate in German.

Proposed solution:  cooperative hiring practices and curriculum development between area universities, as well as investment in transportation and technology that could make a cooperative curriculum genuinely accessible to all students.

Improving faculty productivity:  I am not altogether sure what is meant by this, but there is one thing I know:  if we are talking about the teaching of students, there are very few courses that are underpopulated because the professor is a well-known incompetent (in fact that can have the opposite effect, as well-known incompetents are also often well-known for assigning very little work.)  Profs pulling down big salaries to teach few students is far more complex than this.  Issues to be addressed would include:

• Elimination of core curricula and real distribution requirements in liberal arts schools means that most of us are simultaneously maintaining fields of knowledge and allowing uninformed student preferences to dictate how courses are populated.  Hence, Department X might be groaning under the weight, not just of its numerous majors, but of its massive service to the general curriculum.  Meanwhile Department Y culls a few dedicated majors from an introductory curriculum that students can completely avoid; and those faculty go on to teach 10 students a semester or so -- for salaries that can be (if say, the comparison is between a humanities and a science or social science department) significantly higher than the faculty in Department X.  
• This straightforward ratio of students taught to salaries paid is accentuated by a second problem:  that most faculty don't want to teach students who are only in the room because they are fulfilling a requirement.  Hence, core curricula have to be backed up by persuasive advocacy and creative teaching.
• The mania of "raising standards" for tenure and promotion everywhere is affecting other things that faculty do.  Granted, the production of good scholarship is important to good teaching in any field.  However, the increased pressure to produce ever more prior to tenure and promotion to full that younger scholars are facing is an indirect incentive both to evade students and to evade roles in faculty governance that, in turn, creates a need for more administrative staff.  In many places, senior faculty instruct those they supervise to attend to publication over all other activities, sending the message that dedication to teaching and institutional work is evidence that the scholar is insufficiently dedicated to success.
• The mania of liberal arts college faculties for insisting that their "standards" for tenure and promotion are just as high as those at institutions with prestigious graduate programs undermines teaching at institutions that advertise this as their greatest value.  This is an odious and false assertion, and academic administrators should act to intervene in these expressions of hubris. Standards can be high in terms of quality without sacrificing anything to the teaching mission; however, except for the rare scholar, it absolutely cannot be true in terms of the quantity of publications in the dossier prior to tenure without sacrifice to the teaching mission. 
• Take a good hard look at faculty who, post-tenure, might benefit everyone including themselves, by choosing another career and help them transition to it.  Admit that a faltering vocation is one of the conditions of labor, not just in the academy, but everywhere.  Most of us have a mid-life crisis; not all of us are good at addressing it without help and encouragement.  Instead of talking about "dead wood" in the contemptuous way we do, wouldn't it be better to find other things for such faculty to do and replace them with another person who really wanted the job?

Proposed solution:  sustained discussions that instill a sense of collective responsibility for educating students across the faculty, establish a curriculum that demonstrates the values that caused the institution to invest in the faculty it actually employs, and see which fields and disciplines might be revived by humane restructuring of personnel.

Increased administrative efficiency:  Okay, so you know what is not helping here?  The constant screeching, at all levels, for "accountability" and "standards," particularly from politicians who don't know squat-all about what constitutes good education.  Administrators who should be engaged in leading a process of renewal and reform are, instead, responding to politically-motivated attacks on education. But the other thing we have to re-think is the question of what kinds of problems are amenable to governance by people who are trained as scholars; and when is a good time to call in a consultant or two.  I can't tell you how much time I have spent over the last decade trying to solve problems that neither I or anyone around me has any expertise in solving.  One solution to this problem would be administrative exchange programs between colleges and universities:  if College X has someone who was able to find a creative solution to a particular problem, could we bring hir to College Y for a few months to look at our problem, sending in return one of our people back to College X to study the outcomes of their reorganization?  Reversing this exchange would then give College Y an administrator who was skilled in implementing the new plan.  As a not insignificant aside, this might eliminate the problem of larding on new administrative staff to address new problems without ever taking a fresh look at what the old administrators are doing and whether their work is still relevant.

Proposal:  Increased hiring of consultants with relevant expertise; a high focus on continuing education and retraining for administrators; and ongoing consultation between institutions with similar missions about the challenges of the new environment.

Department of Economics: Observations On The Lack Of Raises and Thinking Out Of The Box

As if you didn't know

We are in a prolonged period in which suppressing faculty wages is the preferred solution (after firing the staff) to "controlling" the costs of higher education.  Although paid better than many colleagues at state institutions and community colleges, for my two decades at Zenith, the faculty has come to the depressing conclusion at the end of each year that we are more or less at the bottom of our so-called "peer group" of liberal arts colleges.  One year, in an attempt to raise our position, our peer group was adjusted:  several larger research institutions were removed and they were replaced with smaller liberal arts colleges.  This helped our ranking for a bit, but of course, university rankings -- whether they are compiled by U.S. News and World Report or by the AAUP -- don't pay the mortgage.

At age 52, I make slightly more than 107K, 16K less than the median salary at my rank at Zenith and, adjusted for inflation and health insurance, less than I made three years ago.  The actual number of my salary tells you little, since I am quite sure that salaries vary wildly at Zenith and that I make more than some people who have worked there for longer (colleagues are invited to contribute their own salaries, anonymously if they wish, in the comments section.)  What I also know is that we don't get meaningful raises any more, and that it seems unlikely that the wage gap will be closed except through the retirement and departure of better paid colleagues.  Two years ago, Zenith finally locked on to what the public and state schools have known for a long time:  pay your faculty less, and there isn't a damned thing they can do about it.  Year before last, we received no raises; last year I was pretty much at the top of the chart at slightly less than 2%; and this year's overall pool will only be increased by 2%.  Simultaneously, insurance costs and co-pays have risen, and our health insurers are reimbursing less than they did, mostly by fu@king up our paperwork.  Conference stipends no longer come close to covering the costs of conferences (sometimes they cover the plane ticket and that's it.) The teeny raises also mean we are getting smaller institutional contributions than we expected to our retirement savings and -- for those of us in our fifties who are at what we were led to believe was to be our peak earning capacity -- beginning to address mid-life financial responsibilities for our families with a diminished ability to meet them.

The only way to make more money is to work more:  we now have multiple opportunities to teach more classes, and be paid adjunct wages to do so.  This is called, for those of you unfamiliar with labor history, "speed up."  The idea is this:  the university needs more revenue, so regular faculty teach an extra class in our extension program, for which everybody in the class has paid $2,130.  Regular Zenith students pay $2600 for summer courses, plus a housing charge for dorm space that would otherwise be vacant.  The faculty stipend for any of these courses is around 6K (which is about 1K more than an ABD adjunct wage at Zenith and 2K less than what grad students are paid for their own courses at Oligarch); there are 15-20 people in the class.  You do the math here:  are Zenith faculty being paid a fair wage for this work?  No.  They are being paid a market wage -- and, my guess is, twice what adjuncts at the local state schools are paid.  And yet, increasingly, faculty are getting squeezed into doing this as their salaries flat line.

Here's the bottom line:  I am not unsympathetic to the financial problems in higher education, or to the important restructuring that is long overdue at my own institution.  But I refuse to sell myself for less; I refuse to sell myself for less than I am worth; I refuse to contribute to the casualization of academic labor; and I refuse to do what is essentially volunteer work for my employer.

As an aside, this also leaves your Radical -- who is, in fact, a devoted teacher, in the curious and ironic position of being asked to reverse priorities that were just recently reversed.  Having had a huge career crisis resulting from the error of over-invested in the institution to the detriment of my scholarly pace; having reversed that formula following my big crisis and entered into one of the most productive scholarly periods of my life; having had my salary suppressed as an associate because I did not publish as others did while I was institution building; guess what?  Faculty are currently no longer being rewarded for their scholarship -- unless it can be leveraged into an outside offer.  Instead, the only way to get a decent "raise" is to increasingly take on work to the detriment of one's scholarship.  I have more or less missed the train of history on this one, which is a stunning discovery, to say the least.

And yet, it is also potentially liberating and -- not to be mysterious -- it is a problem I am working on, because if I can't control the financial priorities of the institution, I can control my own choices.  If I am no longer really working in hopes of improving my economic condition, what am I working for, and how should I imagine what "a better life" means? What would it mean to exercise more choice over the job I am underpaid for, and simply create priorities that are independent of -- or selectively dependent on -- the priorities of the institution?  To do less institutional work for my flat lined salary as compensation for not getting the raises I should be getting for my accelerated scholarly activity?  To do another kind of institutional work that is wholly and completely chosen, and which gives prestige to Zenith in exchange for Zenith giving me my freedom to define my own priorities?

Or even to imagine leaving academia entirely and becoming a writer, full-time?  Stay tuned.

Why Can't We Get Anything Done? How To Run An Effective Meeting

No one likes going to meetings. But admit it: you dread some meetings more than others, don't you? And if you hate all meetings, academia might not be the career for you. As chair of a major Zenith university committee some years back, one week I was tearing my hair out because I was scheduled up to the eyeballs with meetings. "How the Hades do administrators ever get any work done if they are in fracking meetings all the time?" I railed at my companion, a former dean, as I pulled on a clean black tee shirt to greet that day's scheduling marathon in high style.

"That's how administrators do their work," she replied patiently, reaching for the Arts section of the New York Times. "They are doing their work in meetings." I was gobsmacked. Of course that was right. So maybe it wasn't the meetings themselves that were the problem -- it was the question of making -- and marking -- the progress we made in them.

This post is for everyone, no matter how unimportant you think you are. Whether you are going to be a first time chair in the fall, or chairing a committee with a small mandate, or just a member of a department or a committee, you need to be able to run, and/or contribute effectively to, a good meeting. It is one of the many failures of academic life that this is not a skill that either taught or openly discussed, nor is it one that faculty will usually admit to valuing. But actually, most do because they hate having their time wasted. From time to time, you might hear it said about someone in a tone of admiration, "S/he runs a really good meeting." It's a genuine compliment my friend: will it ever be made about you?

Never fear, the Tenured Radical is here! Here are the five things that I always think about when I am planning and participating in a meeting.

1. Every meeting requires a realistic and clear agenda. If you are running the meeting, you need to take account of what time is available, and how much of the hour you should allot to each item. An agenda should not be too full, and conversely, if there is very little to discuss, cancel the meeting: this will make everyone happy. Getting together just because you are scheduled to do so makes people feel like they are spinning their wheels. Driving people through an agenda as if the building was burning can, on the other hand, cause the group not to take ownership of decisions made in haste, or cause them to (perhaps rightly) not make decisions at all. If an item is taking longer than you thought it would, even if you have pruned out ancillary issues, consult with the group as to whether they wish to defer the item to the next meeting, or finish that discussion and defer the other items to the next meeting.

If you are chairing, you should rough out a semester of meetings in advance so that you know how much aggregate meeting time you are willing to allot to each of the items your group is tasked with. You should plan a regular weekly time so that you are not wasting time in each meeting trying to find space in every one's schedule for the next one. You need to leave some space for unplanned items that have been added to the semester's work.

It is also important to designate why things are on the agenda: is a particular item there for discussion and advice, or is it what we call an "action item" -- an issue on which, ideally, your group will produce a recommendation, request or policy?

Above all, the committee has to be encouraged to work together as a group, and each member of the committee needs to know that hir opinions (unless utterly irrelevant and noxious) are important to the process. Because of this, you need to:

2. Avoid giving speeches or monopolizing the discussion. This is definitely my worst flaw, either as a chair or a participant in meetings. If you are chair, your job is to establish the agenda, keep it moving, and end the meeting with a sense of the actions to be taken as a result of the committee's deliberations. It is also your job to listen and make sense of what other people have to say, such as asking people to clarify points. pause the discussion periodically to articulate areas of consensus and disagreement. If you are a member of the committee, don't speak in long paragraphs that are designed to foreclose alternative opinions before they have even been voiced. This can be terribly polarizing. Worse, it encourages a few strong personalities to dominate, and others to melt away.

The point of the meeting is participation. If you are talking, no one else is, and those other people are sitting there thinking: "What is the point of being at this meeting?" Reserve a few minutes for each item to make sure you have solicited the opinion of everyone who wishes to speak: many people, especially new and less experienced colleagues, will be reticent about expressing their opinions in a more experienced group. Make sure you repeat the positions voiced by these people to reassure them that you have heard what they said, and to make sure others have taken account of it too.

Finally, try to have a sense of when a discussion has gone on too long. You know this has happened when the same opinions, or disagreements, are being recycled; if people are starting to talk among themselves and crack jokes; or if the conversation is straying into peripheral issues. Bring the discussion to a close by asking the group to:

3. Make effective decisions. The best decisions are reached by consensus, in my view, but this isn't always possible. It is much harder to do in a large department, which can split over real differences in intellectual and institutional philosophy without losing their effectiveness in the institution over the short term. This can be a problem, of course, because it leads to faction. Unfortunately, large departments have no disincentive, year by year, to avoid factions, since it allows strong personalities to flex their muscles in ways that are undemocratic but efficient. But in the long term the damage can be great if these factions harden. What you then get are political struggles that overwhelm legitimate intellectual issues, cause a lack of comity and ultimately, hamper the department's capacity to do business.

Small departments cannot afford the politics of faction because unfriendly relationships or long-term struggles in a small group can be devastating as people become isolated and angry over long-term grievances. This means that, while large groups are far more likely to vote on items and move forward, even items of little importance, small groups are more likely to invest in compromises that can take much longer to reach but that every member is invested in. Over time, however, the down side of small group consensus building can be an unwillingness to take risks, or make timely decisions on small matters even when such decisions are urgent to the department's future. Disagreement with the consensus can come to feel socially fraught, causing individuals not to disagree even when it would be useful and productive.

If the small group sounds like a conflict-free zone, it isn't. Small groups can become idiosyncratic and defensive, and can be rife with the passive-aggressive behavior that the failure to have and resolve conflict can breed. But large groups -- particularly departments -- should not become too reliant on voting. It creates the misimpression that every decision, no matter how small is a matter of "policy;" and it means that factions become reified, as strong personalities constantly troll for votes and mark others down as loyal or disloyal.

As chair, you need to decide which decision-making style is best suited to the action you are seeking and the group you are in -- not simply go with what is traditional within the group because it is comfortable. Neither consensus or voting is necessarily a better method for making group decisions, although I like consensus because it allows a group that is in the minority to concede its point but still be heard on the matter. Ideally, the minority can modify the decision in a way that strengthens the outcome and invites their support of a decision which they initially opposed. Whatever method you choose (and it could be a mix) you need to:

4. Cultivate respect for the decision-making process within the group. Your meetings are not effective unless every member of your group leaves ready to support the decision or recommendation that is made and the process by which it was achieved. In the case of a personnel decision, each person who voted needs to be able to describe accurately, and in detail, to anyone who has the right to inquire, why s/he voted the way she did. In policy and governance matters, however, the best outcome is that every member of the group is ready to support the decision that has been made, regardless of whether s/he supported it in the meeting or not.

This last point is a particular issue in an academic environment where one's colleagues often assume that lingering disagreement and argument is not just the norm, but is a right and a legitimate expression of one's individualism. In intellectual matters this may be productive (although it can lead to stubborn eccentricity in a person's views), but in institutional matters it can be crippling. There is nothing more annoying than to come to a decision as a group, and then have one or more people leave the room and criticize others, or the group itself, to the larger community.

Oh yes: the one thing that is more annoying is to have the person never give up a disagreement, and divert energy from other business by constantly trying to pressure the group to reverse what it has done. Trying to undercut the decision by disseminating information in the larger community, real or false, is really bad, unless there is a matter of great ethical importance at stake. And under no conditions should people be sending each other rabid emails that pursue struggles that began in meetings, copying and blind copying them to others. Which is why you need to....

5. Discourage gossip. Be firm about which decisions require confidentiality, and why. Give clear direction on what that means: are members of the group not allowed to say anything about a decision? Are they allowed to distance themselves from the outcome publicly if they have voiced their disagreement appropriately within the group? Particularly if your committee draws on numerous departments for its membership, people may have different standards for confidentiality and these may need to be discussed.

Along with discouraging gossip, members of your group will inevitably discuss agenda items with each other outside meetings, but the caucusing to straegize a meeting's outcome is divisive and should be discouraged, as should email exchanges about business from which some members of the group are excluded. It also encourages the bullying of faculty by those at a higher rank, the creation of unhealthy personal obligations, and character assassination of various kinds. What is the point of having a meeting if everyone attends already knowing what s/he will support and unwilling to listen to those who were not part of these extra-curricular discussions? What is the point of having an opinion if you will have to inevitably fear punishment from one faction or another? Particularly in departments, this kind of informal caucusing (inevitably encouraged by strong personalities who want to run things whether they are formally in charge or not) can lead to long-term damage from factionalization, and resentment from those in minority positions.

If You Try Sometimes, You'll Get What You Need: How To Think Like An Administrator

Gary Olson's recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, hilariously titled "How To Join The Dark Side" (hence my choice for an illustration) is a useful take on how to think about becoming a university administrator. What I like best about it is that it avoids a common stereotype (administrators are failed academics, or worse, not intellectually inclined at all when lacking a Ph.D.) and takes university administration seriously as a career that intelligent people train for and enjoy. Furthermore (and this is the kind of thing no one talks about in academia) it suggests that an academic career might entail several stages, in which one's life could be plotted as ambitiously as a Jane Austen novel. A career might begin with the majority of one's efforts devoted to establishing one's credentials as a scholar and a teacher, really learning those jobs inside and out as well as deriving satisfaction from them, and then one might, by design rather than failure, gradually turn (through committee work, chairing, and appointment as a dean) to learning how universities work and eventually running one of them.

Gordon argues that colleges and universities need to make such career paths available to faculty at the earliest stages of their careers, both through short stints that allow tenure-track and tenured faculty to "try on" administrative work, and through workshops that help them imagine their careers creatively.

Indeed, if you look at the careers of certain prominent women who have become college and university presidents (the ones I personally know best are Mary Maples Dunn and Drew Gilpin Faust), you can't help but recognize two things. The first is that both are well-respected intellectuals, who have great scholarly accomplishments to their credit. The second, if you take a look at their careers, is that both women had a plan. They didn't get stuck in the muck and the mire of struggling with administrators, but rather, took an interest in trying to shape and learn about the institutions in which they operated. Eventually they acquired the skill and knowledge to have a major impact on higher education.

This is undoubtedly on my mind since I had a big meeting yesterday with a group of administrators at Zenith about a set of important issues that I cannot, of course, go into. And yet, in tandem with the Gordon article, it caused me to think that there is yet another underrated skill in the academy that no one teaches you how to develop: how to think like an administrator.

This is not the same thing as, for example, being taken over by aliens, although many of your colleagues will tell you it is. Rather, it requires something good historians and other social scientists value enormously in their work, which is being able to see someone else's point of view and taking interests into account that are not a narcissistic reflection of your own local departmental issues or intellectual proclivities. It also requires the simple understanding that administrators are problem-solvers, and you, my colleague, can choose to be a problem solver too, contributing helpful and constructive suggestions that help move your agendas forward by persuading people that what you want can contribute to the larger vision. Or you can choose to be a problem. Take your pick.

To wit, the Radical's Five Basic Guidelines For Thinking Like An Administrator, a particularly useful skill in a time of declining resources.

Be firm and clear when expressing objections, but don't be abusive or accuse the administrator of bad faith out of hand. One former administrator I know told me that if s/he ever wrote a memoir it would be titled I Am Outraged That..! since a great many emails that s/he received began with those words. First of all, imagine if your dean, or someone from the provost's office, called you repeatedly to yell at you or tell you what an ignorant, lying ass hat you are. Wouldn't you be inclined to take official action? I would. You can take a firm position without accusing an administrator of bad faith, stupidity or personal animus. This will reward you in two ways. First, s/he will be grateful to you for acting like a colleague instead of a raging lunatic, and s/he will be more inclined to listen sympathetically to what you say. Second, it creates an opening for said administrator to provide a broader explanation for what is going on, and whether you are actually affected by it. This policy maker might either choose to acknowledge that the policy or decision in question sucks for you and that s/he is sorry about that; or s/he might explain some ways the policy doesn't exactly suck for you and how you might take advantage of it in some way you had not yet considered.

Give people the benefit of the doubt: sometimes they lack knowledge for a reason. One of the things I find endlessly frustrating, as chair of an interdisciplinary program, is that after years of sending detailed memos to various administrators about the creativity and unique contributions of interdisciplinary programs (ok, I'll be honest -- our program), few of them (exactly one, in fact, who I currently work with) seem to to understand many of the basic facts about what we do and how we function. And yet, if you think about it, administrators change pretty rapidly over time, and we faculty are in charge of institutional memory. Ergo, we actually know things that they don't because we have written a couple decades worth of reports, but they haven't read a couple decades of reports. Like the patient with no long-term memory, every day brings exciting new information for the best administrators, because if they are fast-track they did something else less than five years ago. This requires patience, restraint and tact, as you explain the same things over and over. Take new administrators to lunch and explain what you are about before you end up in a room trying to negotiate an issue and explain what you do at the same time. I know this is a good tactic, because at Zenith, more often than not they listen -- and they buy the lunch.

Administrators are not failed academics. They are ambitious people who probably work twice the hours that we do, and who understand that their task is to create lively, well-organized structures that convert the research we do into the basic elements of the industry collectively known as education. Their work makes teaching concrete, converting it into commodities called curriculum, majors, and degrees that can be sold to students, whether at Yale, Zenith or the University of Phoenix. Oddly, faculty sometimes seem to think they could do these things entirely on their own if need be. Whether each individual administrator does a good job or not is another question, but often what seems like a poor administrator is only a symptom of a dysfunctional administrative structure. S/he could even be someone who just doesn't agree with you. No matter: does it help your cause to treat him like a Judas goat or a nitwit? No. It causes this person not to return your phone calls, which will really not help you get want you want. Which leads me to my next point:

You can't always get what you want. Sing it, Mick. Sometimes people genuinely disagree with you and you have to suck it up, and sometimes there isn't enough to go around. And honestly, why should you always get what you want? It may be all well and good at the department level to work avidly for the destruction of those who oppose you (not) but university administrations are like the state in one respect. They are arenas in which multiple interests compete to define the mission of the whole. There are winners and there are losers, but there is a third category too: compromisers. Don't forget that many administrators genuinely regret not being able to serve everyone's needs, and that when you can offer them a creative choice that allows them to make the most out of limited resources, you may achieve a partial victory. Don't forget either that although you may take your own needs very personally, the decisions they make aren't personal. Learning to lose gracefully can pay forward, in the sense that you might be perceived as a reasonable person down the line who is worth talking to and capable of compromise. In other words, you live to fight another day.

Administrators, like God, help those who help themselves. Get your reports in on time. Apologize when you can't. Asume that if someone doesn't understand what you have just said that you need to say it better, not that the listener is an idiot bean counter. Follow directions when you are asked to submit something, because whoever is asking for the document actually wants the information they are asking for: it is an act of respect to give it to them, not an act of integrity and your intense regard for academic freedom to withold it. Don't assume that, as a chair, it is beneath your dignity as a scholar to take the time to learn to read a budget so that you can explain at the end of the year where all the money went. Don't assume that your field is entitled to resources until the end of time just because you are famous, or because the field you are in has been around for a hundred years or so.

Oh, and let me provide what ought to be an unnecessary example of why no blog post, and few conversations, should be illustrated with actual descriptions of what happened in a meeting: you are likely to only represent your own point of view and your own interests in such a narrative. Furthermore, how would you like it if you went out of your way to try to have a meeting that was fair and collegial, and the administrator paid you back by leaving the meeting only to spread gossipy opinions about what an ass hat you are, or how the whole institution is doomed because of your hare-brained ideas about how things should be? You wouldn't like it, would you? And yet you would be surprised how often this happens to high level administrators. I suspect the root cause of this is often faculty wanting to claim inside knowledge of processes that they actually have no control over, covering up the fact that they have agreed to something that will upset some faculty colleagues, or wanting to enhance the myth of their own superiority. So think about that the next time you elaborate on some conspiracy theory as if it were actually true, or tell tales out of school to disassociate yourself from an outcome that makes institutional sense.

And remember: If you try sometimes, you just might find -- you get what you need.

What Works For Christians Could Work For Academics Too

Pastor Ed Young of the Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas has been urging his flock to improve their emotional well-being by having more sex. In fact, last Sunday he instructed the married couples in his flock to have sex every day prior to coming to church yesterday. The economic downturn (read: Republican trainwreck), in addition to the ordinary problems couples have (adultery, PTSD, child-rearing, exhaustion, quiet and/or open rage, working two or three jobs) are causing people to lose the intimacy that is the key to a healthy marriage, Young argues. In the longer term, the Seven Days of Sex should cause couples to at least double the amount of intercourse they have and “move from whining about the economy to whoopee!”

Well yes indeed. Of course, Young is not the first Christian to suggest this. From Henry Ward Beecher's gospel of love through Marabel Morgan's advice in the Total Woman that women should try sexy tricks like greeting hubby at the door wrapped in Saran Wrap, Christians have emphasized the critical role of sexual intimacy within monogamous marriage. And if you were Henry Ward Beecher, not to mention a few fallen televangelists too, outside of marriage too!

But what about the neglected sex lives of the less devout? I suggest we academics jump on the band wagon too, and apply this concept to the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in New York City, January 2-5, 2009. I hereby command seven days of non-stop sexual activity prior to the meeting: we can drop the monogamous marriage part -- it won't be appropriate, politically correct or legally possible for everyone. This should put smiles on a few faces, shouldn't it? I'm thinking friendlier preliminary interviews, kinder comments at panels, maybe even a little graciousness toward that unfortunate fling-person you did at last year's meeting who turned out not to be in an open relationship after all, or who told everyone you knew that it didn't....really....work....out....so good.

Of course, you have to work up to Seven Days of Sex. So let's all start practicing now. And who knows? Could lead to higher grades for your students, as well as better faculty-administration relations, even in a budget-cutting environment.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.

A Meditation on Change: the Radical Wears Her Administrator's Hat

Recently I have been involved in one of those academic negotiations that involves calling on powers of persuasive argument normally reserved for one's scholarship (sprucing up old ideas with new evidence, adding a dash of original thought culled from new reading) in an attempt to make a case for intellectual and institutional change. It is a case that I have made before, many times, sometimes to great applause from allies of various kinds. It is a case that others have made before me, and along side of me. But it is a case that, although partial results have been won over time, has never succeeded as it should. It is a change that makes sense, but it fails -- over and over -- to be approved. And what I want, although it seems to have puzzled some people at Zenith over close to two decades, doesn't puzzle me -- and in fact is not an unconventional feature of institutional life elsewhere. In other words, Other People Do It. Smart People. Prestigious People. Why Not Us?

As I am now fifty, and have approximately thirty years left to live (thirty-five if I am lucky and careful) a maximum of fifteen of which will be spent at Zenith, I am at the stage of life when it seems reasonable to question any expenditure of energy that seems not to be getting results. Or at least, if I am going to dedicate myself to something difficult, maybe it should be finishing final revisions on the book that got trashed during the Unfortunate Events: better yet, world peace, racial equality, universal health care, the global refugee issue, affordable higher education, world hunger, an end to illiteracy in my community, or a full-frontal attack on the standardized testing industry. All of these issues could use another set of hands, a quick wit and a big mouth.

And yet I continue to work on This Thing (not, of course to the exclusion of other things, as I write, teach my courses, and occasionally contribute my energies to stumping for a political candidate), in part because This Thing is so close to being successful. And yet it is not successful.

As the steamroller of administrative labor caught up with me this week, the scholarly work I am supposed to be doing in what is a remarkably short summer got sand kicked in its face by the institutional version of the Bully on the Beach. The Bully is not a person, but an unwelcome problem -- the kind of task they pay me to do as chair, that has to be done whether I like it or not and that can crop up unexpectedly. And part of how I got dragged into this set of negotiations is not just because it is work that Must Be Done, but because it involves changing This Thing -- my own personal Sisyphean task. As I considered buying myself a Charles Atlas course of some kind so that in the future my ninety-seven pound weakling of a writing self won't be chased away from my bathing beauty scholarship by a big, strapping administrative task, my mind wandered to how difficult it is to change the system.


To say that I wish to change the whole system by doing This Thing would be going too far. I don't have that fantasy. After all, I know the system well, I work it fairly effectively, it benefits me to some degree, and barring revolution, it is the system we have. But as I said, the rub is this: although the change being proposed has been presented in many long documents it is considered in many places not to be terribly radical. As a matter of fact, I know it isn't even radical at Zenith, because the mode of response has shifted from resistance to avoidance. In other words, it has been acknowledged that this change is something to which no one is opposed, intellectually or practically. And yet, Change fails to occur. Why?

Now partly I am being discreet about the issue under discussion because negotiations of various kinds require discretion, and also because History Shows that people dislike being written about without permission. Temporarily, at least, I would prefer to retain my status as well-liked. But partly I am being deliberately abstract, because if I told you what the issue was you, Dear Reader, would do what all academics do, which is offer solutions for that particular problem, your sympathy, or similar tales of woe (I actually have a friend who, every time s/he writes a request that addresses a similarly long-awaited change tells me "Yeah, I sent in the tale of woe again.") But I'm also after something grander here. Why is Change so difficult to achieve in the academy?

Oh go ahead, blame tenure. But I think we need to think more creatively than that.

One place I would start is a colleague of mine, now retired, who was a Very Famous Scholar. He was also a conservative in the grand old meaning of the term before it got highjacked by David Horowitz and Pat Buchanan. A Goldwater conservative crossed with a Buckley conservative, if you will. I would be in meetings with Dr. V.F. Scholar, and someone would propose some kind of change -- say, in the sequencing of courses, or in how one might simplify the form that admitted a student to honors work. And he would smile gamely, as if on the brink of tears, and say, "I don't think that is a good idea at all. You might be right -- it could be better to do it that way. But it might be worse." And with that, we would usually abandon whatever petty reform we had embarked on and leave things as they were.

As time moves on, however, I find that my former colleague was unique only in the sense that he was honest and open about his belief that change -- in and of itself -- was not necessarily a cause for optimistic anticipation. Instead, it was -- well, ominous. Because if things begin to change, where would it all stop? Would untenured scholars begin to say what they really thought, and write what they really wanted to write? Would it become possible to have an idea that was worth pursuing, publishing, building a program around, without it being vetted by eight anonymous referees, six university committees, a self-study, an outside review, sending it to a seventh committee and requiring a vote of the full faculty? Might students insist, as they did during that Terrible Time we call the 'sixties (even though a lot of it happened in the 'seventies) that they wanted some authority over what and how they learned?

Yes, these things might happen. Alhough probably not, particularly now that students have been so completely cowed by the college admissions process that they too regard change as something unobtainable and punishable by exclusion from the Elect; and untenured scholars are so bullied by the job hunt and tenure process that they would write on the sidewalk if we assured them it was the only way to acquire health insurance and secure their livelihood as intellectuals. More and more, I think my former colleague hit the nail right on the head. When you make a change it might be better. Or it might be worse. And there is no way to know.

Except to try.

Department of Odd Coincidences

So after yesterday's post condemning tenure (again) I get back to work on the talk I am supposed to give on pornography (again) and I drift off onto the internet (again), clicking around to the sites listed on my sitemeter from whence people arrived at Tenured Radical. Eventually, I come up with a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about:

Pornography and Tenure.

Go ahead. Make my day!

To make a long story short, a married couple out at New Mexico State University was just denied tenure, and they are charging racial bias. What they also reveal, however, was that shortly before they were denied tenure, John -- the husband part of the married couple -- received an e-mail from an associate dean that contained a "graphic sexual image." He complained to the dean; and shortly afterwards, the chair of the couple's department decided that neither member of the couple should receive tenure (in what world does the chair make this decision all by himself?). The implication -- as both the dean and the chair have stepped aside pending an investigation -- is that the two men were in cahoots in the porn e-mail cover-up, and clumsily trying to get rid of the only other people who knew about it. Well almost the only people -- apparently someone else in the department is a witness to the harassing e-porn too. S/he will probably have to be killed, since denying people tenure clearly does not shut them up in New Mexico.

Confusing, isn't it? Almost as confusing as the most recent governor of New York, David A. Paterson, letting us know, minutes after the swearing in, that he and his wife have been having affairs (in an ungentlemanly moment, towards the end of the story, Paterson suggests that Michelle, his wife started it.) And in case you were concerned about it, he did not use campaign funds to rent hotel rooms, only the campaign credit card. And the affairs ended a year or so ago, and everything is alright now in their marriage, thank you very much.

But back to the couple who didn't get tenure in New Mexico. I have to say, I think it was clever of the dean to send the pornography to the husband, not the wife, because it means he can't be charged with sexual harassment. Unless it's gay porn, in which case the dean is way out of luck and should consider being nominated for lieutenant governor of New York, because his academic administrative career is over. And in case you think, because of my last post, that I have lost my sense of humor about tenure (I never lose my sense of humor about pornography), read the comments at the end of the CHE story. Comments, written by ordinary people like you and me who are supposed to be working on a talk or something, are often the best part of odd stories published on line. This is the one that cracked me up: a guy who calls himself Art Vandelay (perhaps because that is his name) writes,

"isn’t that the way it always goes in academe? you open your email and …there it is…porn from your dean. you know what that means: no tenure. that tragic scenario is, unfortunately, repeated hundreds of times each day."

The Progress of the Radical

Early September: invitation issued by the Provost's Office for a meeting to be held from 11-1 (groan) on a Friday (groan), to help new chairs of programs and departments get on the same page with our friends at the office of Academic Affairs. Lunch will be served (ok, this partially makes up for coming in on a Friday and ruining a whole day for writing or any other kind of intellectual/creative activity.)

Mid-September: notice goes out that the putative meeting has been extended to three hours, 11-2. Suddenly the offer of lunch is failing to allay my sense of impending Doom. Call to unnamed administrator is made by the Radical to express sense of Doom, and is sympathetically received, perhaps because they Know Doom Well over there.

Today: Message that the meeting has been cancelled is received. Cheers break out in isolated locations around campus. Once again, Good has prevailed over Doom.

All is well once more in Zenith's hallowed halls and within her ivied walls.

Life as a Broker: The Role of the Committee Chair in Faculty-Administration Relations

In order to stay better informed, your Radical has signed up for the free daily updates from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Like every other periodical and newspaper that comes into this house, I can't read all of the update, much less all of the Chronicle, which is why I did not use my remaining research monies to buy a horrendously expensive on-line subscription. But I do like scanning the update for items of interest: I also started scanning Inside Higher Ed when they started linking me, which may be part of their strategy for linking bloggers: "Bring 'em into the light, boys!" Sometimes what I see in my daily scan are items of great interest, sometimes they are small pieces that cause me to think. And when I think, I blog. It's inescapable.

Today's food for thought was by a fellow named Gene Fant, who was a department chair at a small southern college, recently became a dean there, and is writing about how one is transformed in the eyes of one's colleagues upon becoming an administrator: you can read it yourself here. One thought that struck home was his description of a colleague watching him cut a piece of cake to see if, as a dean, he cut it differently. Ouch. One imagines folks peeking in the bedroom window to check how he is putting his pants on too. This is a good reminder that one of the down sides of taking on administrative responsibilities above the level of chair means having one's colleagues remind one of the possibility of pariah status that is imminent should one come to be perceived, as we say at Zenith, as "a tool of the administration."

In Tony Soprano's world, some of the things that are said to administrators, or faculty consorting with administrators, would cause a person to sleep with a semi-automatic under the pillow. I know this because although I have never been a dean (not at Zenith, anyway), I have been a chair of a major university committee. And after I became chair of the committee, I cannot tell you how many senior people came up to growl in my ear, "Just remember, you are there to defend the faculty from the administration." I was still an associate professor at the time, and it has occurred to me more than once that the Unfortunate Events were not entirely disassociated from the fact that I did well on this committee, which generated fear that I might Do Too Well and Rise Too High -- higher than a Radical ought, in any case. Some of the whisperers, and their cronies, were critically involved in the Events, and the connection seems - well, odd, shall we say.

But who's counting? As the working class kid in The History Boys says to one of his teachers, " 'Istory's just one fuckin' thing arfter another, in'nit Miss?"

Anyway. My experience differs from Dean Fant's in many ways, in that I was not in charge of budgetary matters. Specifically, Fant refers to the pain of having to say "no" to so many people, and worries -- in a play on the "girl who cain't say no" in the musical Oklahoma -- that he will be perceived as "The Dean Who Just Says No." When I look back on my experience as a committee chair, "no" would have been easier than some of the difficult things we had to figure out as a committee. I was in charge of trying to make policy and implement policy, mustering faculty votes on items of greater or lesser consequence (what changes are *not* seen by the faculty as matters of great consequence? I ask you), keeping a university committee moving as quickly as possible through an agenda without jamming my opinions down their throats, and making sure that the appropriate people were consulted about things.

Committee chairs are also in a strange position for which there are very few rules or customs. They are not administrators but, on a faculty that imagines it wants to govern itself without being told what to do by "the administration," they occupy numerous roles that could be described as "deaning lite": they are buffers between policy makers and those governed by policy; in a leadership position where they are more or less making policy on behalf of the faculty and persuading administrators to go along with it; conduits for administrative desires that the faculty is being asked to variously address or accept; and receivers of all opinions, great and small, about virtually everything. My committee had broad oversight of what was loosely termed "educational policy": this sometimes included what was taught (authorizing new majors, and major changes in existing majors); the conditions under which teaching occurred (schedules, grading modes, instructional computing that had a direct impact on faculty work); and shifts in pedagogical philosophy or strategy.



Without going into the details of what I did, let me say that it was a huge learning experience that has forever changed how I understand university politics and how universities work. And while, unlike Dean Gene, I did not have to say no to people who wanted money, I did sometimes have to say no to my different constituencies: no, that won't work; no, I can't put that on the agenda; no, I can't let you make that change because it will contradict other policies we are already committed to; no, you can't agree to one thing when you are alone with me and then go tell your friends, when it proves to be unpopular, that I am a shill for the administration and you never went along with that policy in the first place.

Have you ever been called a liar in public? I have. Actually, it was in an email written by one of the authors of the Events, so it was more or less private. Try less.

To conclude, except for a few really nasty people, it was actually a pretty positive experience, since there aren't a lot of opportunities in university life to learn something entirely new. I can't tell you everything I learned, but here are a few things that should be useful to all faculty, regardless of rank, when thinking about their relationship to the daily struggles we are involved in:

1. I was blessed with an extraordinarily thoughtful committee, including two wonderful students who had great ideas and were not shy about about expressing them, and who represented their constituency well. I also worked with some really good administrators, who were terrific resources at important moments. But even if you aren't working with the people you would have chosen, remember: everyone, absolutely everyone, has strengths that can be relied upon, even people you have had a dim view of previously. Find out what those strengths are and encourage them to employ them. Furthermore, those to whom you have been historically ideologically opposed have a point of view too, and often they share that point of view with a great many others. Hence, such people are an important liaison to that community. Try not to let discussions get polarized, and focus on converging points of view whenever possible. Taking the time for individual meetings to discuss what similarities can be assembled on any issue, before people take sides in public, is well worth it.

2. Because of the above dynamic, I would propose a theory that most universities operate in a huge ideological middle ground that has a tendency to isolate those on the left and on the right. Part of your job, when in charge, is to preserve that middle ground and help people on the margins make compromises; the other part of your job is to preserve the intellectual and pedagogical freedom of those on the left and on the right, and make sure that their interests remain connected to and supported by the broad middle.

3. Never allow a vote to be taken unless and until you know how it will turn out. I learned this from Lyndon Johnson.

4. You are in charge of preserving features of academic freedom on most committees you might ever be elected to or chair. That said, some of your colleagues will try to get away with all kinds of shit in the name of academic freedom that are really about bettering their own lot, or shutting down a discussion that they don't want to have. There are two ways of handling this, and saying "no" is rarely an option, because you really have no authority other than what people will consent to give you. One way to get around such an obstacle is to say, "Look, this is what I need from you and why. Now, here's something I might be able to do in return." It was always my philosophy that you should never go into a meeting without something on the table that you are willing to give away, even if you have put it on the agenda deliberately so that you can throw it away. And you should never go into a meeting without something that the other person hasn't thought of that they might really like: for me, these things never cost a dime, because I had no budgetary power -- but my committee did have the power to shape people's lives. And when you have a chance to do someone a favor by bending the rules appropriately, do it.

OK -- but when someone is trying to get away with something stupid and obnoxious, sometimes you just have to tell them to stuff it. This is -- and needs to be -- very, very rare. At one point I had to point-blank tell a chair s/he was going to make a certain change if I had to make it myself since *both* of us knew that the reason presented for not making the change was utterly ridiculous and designed only to block the policy on principle: a dean, and two people from the provost's office looked at me with horrified pleasure as I did something for which they would have been crucified on the college Great Lawn. I cannot tell you what this thing was because it breaks my final rule, which is:

5. Discretion. Never do or say anything that you would be ashamed to admit, publicly, in front of the entire faculty, but also -- part of brokering deals with people, or even forcing their hand, is not going out and making them look stupid or weak afterward. I learned this from the British Raj. In fact, you need to go out of your way to thank those who have conceded what you want from them and give them credit for the outcome, even if the negotiation has been very unpleasant. If your policy, once brokered, is to not founder at the point of implementation, your best move can sometimes be to present what has occurred in such a way as to put the other person in the best light possible and minimize your own role. This becomes particularly difficult at times because, I am sorry to say, people will lie, or say that you lied (see above) about what they have said or done to protect their own reputations at the expense of yours, and you have to suck it up. Defending yourself puts you in a position of weakness: move on to the next thing, and if the policy you have implemented is a good one, people will soon forget.

Lifting As We Climb (with all due respect to Anna Julia Cooper)

Today's thoughts are about Leadership.

Dean Dad has a new post up about mediating an emotion-laden disagreement between a faculty member and a fellow dean. It is an extremely lucid account of how he became aware of the conflict in the first place, how he collected information about it, and how he came to know that the two people had misunderstood each other and had acted on that misunderstanding, thus setting up a contest over authority. He then describes the actions he took to set everything straight. Because students were involved, and graduation requirements at stake, it was potentially quite messy (and even messier, I can imagine, at a community college where, unlike Zenith, students are often juggling a full work schedule, the college schedule, course availability, and graduation requirements.) The kind of conflict he describes is one that everyone will recognize having participated in at some point, regardless of where they work, and the description of it demonstrates that every bad situation offers an opportunity for leadership, as well as less good choices which are often easier to make. Or as Charlie Brown used to say, "You can be the Hero. Or you can be the Goat."

To translate: you can be a Leader or you can watch two people fight to the death. Dean Dad chose to be a Leader.

It is quite a graceful post, and I recommend it to all, particularly since Dean Dad argues that one criterion for someone becoming a department chair is the capacity to contain the impulse to go nuclear at imagined, or even real, slights. This is a particularly good moment for me to muse on this topic, since those individuals currently in charge of the Program and the Center to which it is attached are getting ready to hand their jobs over to me, and that process begins today at lunch. Coincidentally, before I logged into Dean Dad, I had been driving home from my rowing club and listening to Morning Edition on NPR. One of the segments addressed cynicism in the workplace (another informed us that wearing flip-flops and clothing that reveals your underwear to work is inadvisable. Take note, Zenith grads: no visible boxers or bras.) The segment offered a number of useful pieces of advice: encourage colleagues to speak up and ask people for solutions, rather than cultivating their criticisms and complaints, were two of them. What particularly stuck for me was this advice to what business people call the "team leader," but what we in academia might call the chair, the divisional dean, or the President: "Don't convey cynicism or pessimism yourself. Leaders of teams can have a strong positive or negative influence on team morale."

Followers of this blog know that, directly and indirectly, the Program has taken some hits this year (yet another landed in our laps yesterday) and may take more before the year is out, hits that endanger a carefully built and nurtured curriculum to which we are very committed. We have gradually seen those gains eroded, although probably not permanently, and rebuilding is a daunting, discouraging and difficult task. My recently established blogging ethic forbids me being specific about what has happened but to characterize, while our current leadership has ably guided us through a difficult year, it is I who will have to pick up the pieces, with very few faculty (because of leaves and losses) to help.

But this is where I have to take to heart some of the advice I have received by chance today. First, the loss of faculty when they do not get tenure and you don't agree with the decision may make you want to roar out of your office and start (metaphorically, of course) knocking heads, but I have come to believe that acting on that kind of rage is very stressful for me and accomplishes little. And of course the hiring of temporary faculty to cover losses is time-consuming and often unsatisfying (when was the last time you tried to supervise between two and four more or less novice teachers at the same time as running not one, but two, administrative units?) so if you really think about it, that is enraging too. But that we actually have the faculty available to us is one ray of light or, as my financial advisor would say, "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick." Furthermore, it signifies that our dean recognizes our plight and has helped us staunch the flow. And I have to take the perspective that it is *his* budget that is on steroids at this point, not either of mine. Here I would extrapolate, both from Dean Dad and the NPR piece, and say: this is the time to go visit the dean, acknowledge how he has helped us so far, and ask for his further help in staying on top of this situation and conveying its gravity to the provost's office. To not do so risks him believing that his efforts to date are underappreciated; to do so incorporates him, his resources, and his intellect, in my -- our -- struggle.

So after I finish lunch, I shall do just that: make an appointment for my next lunch. With the Dean.

But I would like to make another point too: it is wise, I have found, to disaggregate administrators one from another in everything one says and does when in a faculty leadership position, and to do otherwise is inevitably polarizing. So if you are annoyed about a policy or a decision, target the person who actually made it if you must, but do not curse "the administration" as a whole. This is not only strategically quite imperfect, but it alienates a lot of people who aren't responsible for your problem and feeds a resentment of faculty by administrators that is pretty intense on its own. One feature of this I have noted is that, as my blog is more widely read on my own campus, I have heard from a number of my administrative colleagues about ways they feel slighted by various posts -- not as individuals but, as we might say in Radical-speak, a *class.* I think this is quite telling, particularly since these have not been posts which were critical of administrators (as opposed to my posts on the T & P, a body which I criticize openly, relentlessly, and without remorse. Disaggregate yourselves, why don't you?) But the criticism was inferred all the same. Furthermore, the people who have had the courtesy to write and say what they are thinking are those people with whom I would say I have good relationships. So if those folks are on edge, Goddess knows how many other administrative colleagues are fuming about your beloved Radical.

To return to cynicism and leadership: if ever there was a moment for the director of the Program to be cynical, this would be it, I've got to say. So it was very helpful to be reminded that if I lose my common sense, so goeth a great many other people who will be better served next year by some confidence, no matter how thin, that I, and we, are doing something constructive to repair the damage and move on. Because really, unless we are going to sacrifice the joy in what we do, it's the only choice.

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For those of you who didn't know, Michael Berube is back and bloggin'! Welcome home, Professor B.

Dean, Dean -- Who's Got The Dean?

One of the biggest laughs I ever heard in a Zenith faculty meeting was several years ago, when a member of our administration was explaining a number of strategies the institution was exploring for raising extra cash. The final one was a patent on discoveries made under the auspices of the institution. A colleague from one of the humanities departments said she didn't understand (thinking, "Hmmm- I wonder if my examination of the Lack in contemporary French poetry is worth more than I know?"), and the administrator said, "Well, for example, the discovery of a new gene." Drat.

At which point the semi-comatose Dr. Grumpo awoke, came to full consciousness and shouted from the back, "WHAT? CAN'T HEAR YOU!" The administrator repeated himself. And Dr. Grumpo shouted, "AH! I THOUGHT YOU SAID YOU'D DISCOVERED A NEW DEAN!" Needless to say, everyone howled and added to the fun while the administrator fidgeted and waited out our capacity to act like your average eighth grade. We haven't heard of *that* plan again.

But here is what is not so funny. As followers of this blog may recall, the Zenith faculty is organizing for better pay and benefits, and finally doing a good job of it. We may even start an AAUP chapter which, as denizens of other schools know, can -- despite the Supremes' precedent setting decision in re. Yeshiva -- serve as a bargaining unit when a school or university agrees to treat it as such. Despite constant reassurance from Zenith's top brass that we really are paid fairly because we are paid what they can afford and not what the market might establish as fair, a newly organized faculty continues to push forward in its efforts. We had a big meeting the other day at which the university continued to insist, despite the fact that they have come up a little in next year's offer, that they simply haven't got the money to pay us decently, nor have they got the money to give administrative staff a raise that will even cover inflation next year. And they say this even when presented with figures that suggest the longer all of us have to work at Zenith to ensure that we aren't living off dog food in our nineties, the more it will cost the university in the long term. In fact, according to members of our math and economics department, it will cost them about half a million dollars per tenured faculty member not to pay us more now so that we can retire decently when we are 67.

Sometimes they also say that if they pay us more the only place they can get the money is from the financial aid budget, and if they want us to admit stupid, rich students we should just give them the word.

And here's the kicker: they seem to create well paid administrative positions a mile a minute. This fall they hired two new deans in Student Services, brand new positions, probably at 80-100K each. Now, everyone knew they were hiring one new dean, a much talked-about position to try to stop the students from pulling racist and homophobic pranks on each other, and talk to them sternly when they do. But it appears, as I see from a recent announcement, that they have broken this position into two positions-- one for co-curricular programming and workshopping, and one for what they are calling "academic support."

Hence, I would argue -- they do have money. They are just spending it elsewhere.

Can I say that this pisses me off a little? Heck, it's my blog -- I will! And it isn't just these deans -- we have added vast amounts of staff in our development office, in academic affairs, in admissions (because Zenith has so succeeded in making itself sought after *and* exclusive that we are barraged with applications every year), our continuing education department and in our finance section. If I were to guess, I would say that our administration has doubled in my 15-plus years at Zenith, while the faculty has not only not expanded but our salaries have slowly crept to the bottom of our comparison group.

Meanwhile, all these bureaucrats have raised our quotient of busy work unbelievably. Almost non-stop, we file reports, requests for research money, justifications for spending the research money they gave us, course justification forms, and we write endless "recommendations" for our expanded study abroad programs and the internships prestigious universities make available through alumni. An untenured colleague, who has courageously joined our movement, observed, "Of course they give us more to do for them -- they have to justify their own jobs. And it used to be you had to stuff envelopes to require the faculty to do an administrative task. Now you just hit a button and send them an email. There's no pain for them in that." On top of all this extra bureaucratic hoo-ha that comes our way, a great many faculty I know are also teaching extra courses because the cost of living ordinary middle-class lives is not keeping pace with salaries.

In a big meeting the other day which, I am proud to say, about 95% of our faculty attended, the current VP of Finance (yes, everyone has a corporate title now) berated us by asking how we could dream of asking for a bigger raise when the university had to pay such unexpectedly high energy bills last winter. What nobody said was -- so did the faculty! With the result that several people I know had to teach a summer course because they used their property tax money to pay the oil company instead. That is how little money people can save because they are not paid enough, and because the prudent among us are committing as much as we can afford to pensions that the university hasn't committed enough resources to.

Can you tell that Dr. Radical is getting revved up for a return to the trenches?