Overheard from the backseat of the Free-Ride hoopty as we were driving the Free-Ride offspring home from a visit to the Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment:
Younger offspring: Do you want to play dolls?
Elder offspring: No.
Younger offspring: Do you want to make fun of me playing dolls?
Maybe this is progress?
My fellow university faculty, have you ever felt that your official commencement faculty marshal badge is just too pedestrian to command the respect it deserves?
Me too.
Luckily, it’s the kind of thing you can remedy. Observe:
For those of you muttering “Free-Ride has finally gone round the bend,” let me put a few more facts into evidence:
1. All the graduating students at commencement who commented on my badge embellishments were also quick to comply with the lining-up, filling-out-photo-cards, and marching instructions I issued. (And, since they didn’t look scared while so complying, I assume it’s because they respected my marshaling authority, not because they thought I was about to snap.)
2. Two full professors in my college (both male, if that matters to you) borrowed similarly embellished badges from me so they could step into the faculty marshaling fray. (Bringing extra credentials to commencement is always a good idea so you can deputize other faculty members on the spot.)
3. Neither of them have yet returned these embellished badges. I’m betting I’ll see them again next May.
(My better half, of course, insisted on referring to my spiffed-up faculty marshal badge as my “flair”. We’ll be meeting at Flingers for lunch to settle the matter.)
Two Fridays ago, I was poised to jump into what I hoped would be a very productive summer. I had submitted spring semester grades with time to spare (and then submitted the change-of-grade form for the one I had computed incorrectly). I had gotten my online course ready to be switched on for the summer session. I had gotten through some necessary committee work and made a plan to keep the rest from encroaching too severely on my research and writing schedule.
And then, walking my younger offspring to the car after swim practice, I turned my ankle, fell hard, watched it swell up for awhile, then looked away when the pain and nausea got to be too much.
I found out the next afternoon at Urgent Care that it wasn’t fractured, just badly sprained, and that probably, if I was good, it would be better within four weeks.
I found out that if you injure yourself after 7:30 on a Friday evening Urgent Care will close before you can get there. I also found out that it doesn’t matter much if Urgent Care opens Saturday morning when the only other licensed driver in the house now has to be two places at once (owing to my inability to get the kid to the swim meet and work our shift timing the heats, since being upright still provoked nausea).
I found out that it’s worth hanging on to that old pair of crutches, but that propelling myself on them is a lot harder than I remember it being 20 years ago.
I found out that most of the tasks that were part of my daily routine are a lot harder on one leg than on two, especially when my hands are busy clutching the crutches for dear life. Making breakfast for the kids, or packing their lunches, suddenly requires serious planning just to get food items from the fridge to the work surface without mishap.
I learned that a bath feels less like a luxurious indulgence when a shower is not an option.
I learned that I have a hard time asking for help, or remembering that an egalitarian household arrangement probably shouldn’t require that one do 50% of the labor when one is incapacitated.
I learned that my offspring are capable of operating the washer and dryer (and changing the settings as appropriate for different loads of laundry). I also learned that instructing them to avoid overloading the washing machine by leaving an empty space big enough for a particular stuffed animal will lead my younger offspring to use that stuffed animal to do quality control before starting each load.
I found out that using FaceTime to participate in a committee meeting from home is a mixed blessing.
I found out that my relatively high pain threshold makes it harder to remember to take regular doses of ibuprofen for inflammation.
I found out that making a serious effort to stay off my ankle has made the muscles and joints in the rest of my body angry with me. This week, as I eased back into Pilates to avoid total bodily collapse, I discover that it only took a week and a half to develop serious asymmetries that weren’t there before.
I found out that I have some gnarly bruises that may persist even after my mobility returns.
I found out that my sprained ankle doesn’t interfere terribly with doing tasks that don’t require too much thought, like grading, or editing pieces of writing that are close to done. However, it seems to have made it harder for me to write anything new, or to do any coherent project planning. I found out that I feel bad about this because there doesn’t seem to be an obvious physical reason why my messed up ankle should mess with my head.
Are you in the mood for some word problems? Let’s go, and please remember to show your work for full credit!
1. Read this passage from Inside Higher Ed:
University of California administrators announced Thursday that the system will centralize payroll and human resources for its 10 campuses and five medical centers at a new site in Riverside. The new center is part of a system-wide initiative designed to save $500 million in administrative costs and direct them back toward the university’s academic mission. UC officials said the new center would save “as much as $100 million annually” and create up to 600 jobs when fully deployed, which they hope to be within three years. Part of the savings will come from eliminated positions on the individual campuses, but officials would not say how many people would be losing their jobs.
(a) Assume the scenario where the net change in jobs is zero (that is, where each of the HR jobs lost at another UC campus is completely offset by a job created at the new site at Riverside). Also, neglect non-salary costs (on the assumption that salaries are a much larger total cost). Calculate the average salary of the 600 HR employees required to save $100 million annually.
(Hint: Let the average pre-consolidation HR salary equal x.)
(b) Now assume the best-case scenario where the new site at Riverside results in net creation of 600 jobs in the UC system. Again, neglect non-salary costs (on the assumption that salaries are a much larger total cost). Calculate the average salary of the 600 new HR employees required to save $100 million annually.
(c) Propose a strategy for recruiting HR specialists willing to work for the salary you found in (b). For bonus points, propose a strategy that does not require the use of Schedule I drugs.
Extra-credit: Explain why it makes sense to describe this cost-cutting plan as “creating jobs”.
2. Read this passage from California Watch:
In the first test of the California State University system’s recently approved executive compensation policy, the presidents appointed to lead CSU East Bay and CSU Fullerton are slated to each receive the maximum salaries allowable under the new rules.
After CSU trustees approved a large pay increase for the new San Diego State University president last summer on the same day that they raised student tuition, the university system faced a chorus of criticism from legislators, the media and the public. Trustees approved a base salary for SDSU President Elliot Hirshman of $400,000, including $50,000 from the university foundation. That’s $100,000 more than his predecessor’s salary.
In response, the CSU trustees in January approved a new executive compensation policy [PDF] that limits new presidents’ base pay to no more than 10 percent above their predecessors.
In a pay package [PDF] slated for review at this week’s Board of Trustees meeting, newly appointed CSU Fullerton President Mildred Garcia will get $324,500 in base pay, plus housing and a $12,000-per-year car allowance. That’s exactly 10 percent more than her predecessor, Milton Gordon, who in 2011 had a base salary of $295,000.
It’s also 10 percent more than Garcia earned in base pay at her previous post as president of CSU Dominguez Hills, according to CSU’s executive compensation summary [PDF].
Leroy Morishita, the new president at CSU East Bay, will get $303,660 plus $60,000 per year for housing and a $12,000 annual car allowance. That’s 10 percent above predecessor Mohammad Qayoumi’s base pay in 2010, as well as a 10 percent raise for Morishita, who had been serving as interim president in Qayoumi’s stead since July.
(a) For a CSU campus whose outgoing president has a base salary of $300,000 per year, what is the minimum number of new presidents that must be hired before the base salary reaches $1 million?
(b) Given 23 campuses in the CSU system, and assuming an average presidential base salary of $150,000 per year, how many years of hiring a new president at each campus annually would it take to double annual presidential salaries?
(c) How many lecturers could you hire per year with the amount of money required for each of the 23 CSU campuses to hire a new president at the maximum 10% increase of base pay? (Assume an annual lecturer salary of $36,000.)
(d) If a new CSU campus president gets a 10% increase in base salary and faculty on that campus cannot get a 1% increase in base salary, what percentage of the faculty’s grading should the campus president take on?
Extra credit: Not all compensation for campus presidents comes in the form of salary. If housing renovations are included in campus executive compensation packages, and if such renovations can be paid for out of campus Foundation funds, explain why Foundation funds cannot be used for faculty salaries or for non-salary compensation for faculty (e.g., to pay for house or car repairs).
“We’ve spent years figuring out how to do more with less. It’s time for us to figure out how to do less.”
— my department chair, circa 2008
I have recently arrived at the suspicion that operating in crisis conditions undermines one’s ability to make objective judgments. My hunch is that the effect is especially strong when it comes to evaluating whether an on-the-ground response to an extreme reduction in resources will help or hurt the broader goals one (or one’s institution) is trying to achieve.
And indeed, this hunch is something I am just articulating to myself (rather than leaving it as a miasma that envelops my head and my workplace) as my assistance has been requested in devising a radical curricular response to “the new normal” of hundreds of millions of dollars cut from the budget (with more to come!) that we have been told are never coming back. The radical curricular response, as I understand it right now, would have the virtue of saving a significant amount of money. However, it would do so by taking particular pedagogical goals that it is difficult to achieve well in a 15 week semester and cramming them into about 5 weeks of another semester-long course — and by delivering the whole thing completely online to all of our incoming freshmen. This latter detail concerns me in terms of the workload it will entail for the faculty teaching the course and evaluating student work (since, in my experience, the time required teaching online has never been less than teaching the equivalent course in a classroom, and indeed has always been substantially more). And, it concerns me in terms of the challenges it will create as far as getting new college students to engage meaningfully with the course material, with their professors, and with each other. (My experience teaching upper division students online is that even keeping them engaged is a challenge.)
There is a piece of me that loves problem-solving enough that I have been thinking through topics and readings and assignments that might efficiently achieve the pedagogical goals in question. There are people I respect, people I like, who believe this goal is attainable and consistent with our educational mission.
But, there is another part of me, one whose voice is getting louder, that says this is an exercise in patching a boat that cannot, cannot stay afloat under these conditions. This part of me argues that we need to recognize this radical curricular response for what it really is: a signal that we have passed the point where we can actually deliver a quality college education with the resources we will be given.
If that’s what it is, can it be ethical to proceed as if we can somehow deliver something close enough to a quality college education? Should we not, instead, call it as we see it and identify the resources we need to do the job we’re supposed to do?
Obviously, asking for appropriate resources does not guarantee that we will get them. It may result in our doing the job right but for fewer students. Conceivably, it might also result in the administrators finding ways to clear out faculty who say the job cannot be done with less (by eliminating our departments, for example, or by ramping up class sizes and cutting salaries to the point that the job becomes intolerable) until the ones who remain are the ones willing to play ball.
I have tended to view adaptability as a good thing, but I have long been suspicious of the assumption that we should regard the environment to which we might adapt as an immovable object — especially when that environment is made up of people making policy decisions. I think I’m ready to find out whether university system administrations can adapt when faculty take a stand for quality education.
I am generally a patient person, sometimes more patient than I should be. I am also usually optimistic about people’s potential to learn and grow, which is probably a good thing since I am in the business of educating adults and since a good bit of my job also involves being on committees.
But darned if I’m not starting to believe that there are some issues that are black holes of dialogic suck, around which people are absolutely committed to killing the potential for learning and growth where it stands, and where any speck of patience is likely to be rewarded with a punch to the gut.
I refer you to this steaming pile of fail that posits that college professors do not work hard enough.
Others, including Zen, and DrugMonkey, and Crooked Timber, and Echidne, and Lawyers, Guns and Money, have gone into some of the dimensions along which the author’s model of what’s happening in non-R1 colleges and universities (and what, therefore, should be done) veers widely from reality.
And there’s part of me prepared to jump in to lay out what kind of time it takes to teach college students well — the time that is invisible because it happens out of the classroom, when we’re prepping classes, and updating classes, and designing assignments, and refining assignments, and grading assignments in ways that actually provide students with useful feedback that helps them figure out what they can do better on the next round of assignments for twice as many students as the same number of classes had not ten years ago, and seeing students in office hours, and answering their emails, and providing websites with announcements pages and periodic email blasts to one’s classes to keep them on track — and these are just the demands on time and effort of teaching, not even starting in to what research and “service” activities or various sorts pile on.
But I’m not going to lay out all these details because the people who are reading David C. Levy’s op-ed and nodding approvingly just don’t care.
They will simply deny that my workload could be what it actually is.
Or, they will insist that I’m somehow exceptional and that everyone else in a tenured position in a teaching-focused state university is doing much, much less (and that those slackers at community colleges are doing less still).
But I’m pretty sure the ugly truth is that these people believe that my students, and the community college students, do not deserve quality education at a reasonable price.
And, I’m pretty sure they believe that professors at teaching-focused state universities and at community colleges (not to mention public school teachers, too) do not deserve to make a middle-class wage. Never mind that we sometimes work so many hours that it’s hard to find time to spend it (for example, to get to the grocery store to buy food for our kids, or OTC medicine for ourselves so we can drag our lazy, sniffly asses in to class to keep teaching).
It matters not a whit to these people how many years we have devoted to our education and training. A Ph.D. program (or two) is obviously just a multi-year exercise in sloth.
Verily, to these people I and my entire sector of the workforce are a problem to be solved. We are doing something of which they do not approve, and even if we were giving it away for free and living on alms, they would hate us.
I can’t argue with committed ignorance of that magnitude. I cannot counter such thoroughgoing selfishness.
So this time, I won’t even try. Instead, I’m going to fix myself a drink, make dinner for my family, and brace myself for as many more hours of work as I can manage before my eyelids refuse to stay open.
I have just returned to Casa Free-Ride after a few days at a thoroughly engaging conference about which I’ll have more to say soon. Getting home required air travel, this time on United.
There are many airlines that have so many levels of premium member stratification that they have run out of precious metals and gemstones by which to identify them in calling them to board. However, United is the first airline I have noticed that gets really tetchy about precisely which lane the non-premium members queue up in for their approach to the gate agent who scans the boarding passes even after all our betters the premium members have boarded. See, the premium lane has this special blue carpet on it that, it seems, is only to be trod upon by the feet of those special in the eyes of United Airlines. Indeed, on more than one leg of the trip I just completed, the gate agents actually halted the boarding of a plane to move everyone in the passenger-group-now-boarding from the fancy blue-carpeted premium lane to the economy lane.
Gate agents, the premium passengers have already boarded! They will not see the great unwashed swarm of economy travelers stepping on their blue carpet of awesomeness!
Anyway, on the last leg of my travel, the amplified gate agent (who was announcing which groups were invited aboard) was both distinct from the gate agent scanning boarding passes and several yards away from the boarding lanes for the gate. Thus, she tried to direct people to the appropriate lane by reiterating that the premium lane was the one on the left and the economy lane was the lane on the right.
It turns out USian air travelers cannot (or will not) distinguish left from right any better than your typical U12 soccer player. (How well is that? As a soccer coach, let me tell you: not very well at all.)
In short, it strikes me that United is:
I fear both of these attempts are doomed to failure (although maybe for different reasons).
Given that some presidential hopefuls think it’s elitist for President Obama to support universal access to higher education, and given that I work in higher education, I figured this might be a good time for me to tell you about some things I think are elitist.
It’s elitist to decide “college isn’t for everyone” — not that people who choose not to go to college don’t deserve guff for that (I agree, they don’t), but that the people you’ve decided are needed to do the manual labor in your society shouldn’t go to college, because really, what would be the point?
Perhaps the point is that some of the people who attend to your manual labor needs want to go to college. Maybe they would find immersing themselves in higher education for a while enjoyable, something that feeds their needs as human beings. Just because higher education is not a requirement for workers in a particular kind of job does not mean that it would be “wasted” on those workers. Making the blanket assumption that it would be wasted on them is elitist.
It’s also elitist to decide that, even if it’s not strictly necessary for a career path, college is a fine way for people of means to spend their time and money, while deciding in the same breath that it’s an extravagance for people without lots of disposable income to partake of it. This attitude casts higher education as a commodity that only the wealthy deserve. It’s the same attitude that scolds college students for accumulating lots of student debt studying “useless” subjects with which they will not be able to secure big salaries upon graduation and swiftly pay off their student loans. It’s the same attitude that motivates tax payers to lean on lawmakers in their states to get rid of “frivolous” subjects in state university curricula (usually humanities, but pure sciences — and really, much of what isn’t business or engineering — regularly make these lists of curricular frivolity), the better to turn publicly supported higher education into no-frills trade schools.
Indeed, I don’t know how it isn’t elitist to decide for loads of other people you don’t even know (let alone for people you do know) what it’s worth their time to study. I have no problem if you decide that you don’t want to explore Latin American philosophy, or German literature, or interior design, or forensic chemistry, but once you tell someone else that she shouldn’t? You’re deciding that you know what’s best for her with no clear basis for this judgment beyond your commitment that people like her don’t need to study [X] (and thus shouldn’t).
And the cherry on top of the elitist sundae is for anyone — professors, politicians, parents, whoever — to decide that it’s appropriate to remake someone else in your image. No other human being, child or grown-up, is a lump of Play-Doh whose role is to take your impression. Treating others primarily as fodder for your attempts at self-replication is deeply disrespectful and elitist in that it singles out certain people as appropriate impression-makers and everyone else as an appropriate impression-taker.
My job as a liberal arts college professor is to give my students the tools to set their own paths in life (to the extent one can in a world in which we share space and other resources with other people, and have to pay rent, and such). I’m not going to tell them who to be. I don’t want to tell them who to be. I want to help them find the space, and to have the freedom, to figure out who they want to be, and then to set about being that person. And, I believe that all of my students (and all of the humans who are not my students) are entitled to this without regard to socioeconomic class.
If that’s what’s passing for “elitist” these days, then I’m going to need a new dictionary to keep up.
In the ancient (written circa 411 BCE) Greek comedy Lysistrata, the character of the title attempts to end the Peloponnesian War by getting the women of Greece to leverage what power they have to influence the men in charge of that society. These women agree that until the war is over, there will be no sex.*
It strikes me that in the year 2012 we are seeing in the U.S. a political war waged against women’s personhood and bodily autonomy.** As part of this war, lawmakers have required women to endure waiting periods (in the span of days) to obtain a legal medical procedure which becomes progressively less safe the longer it is delayed. As part of this war, lawmakers will require that women who seek a legal medical procedure be subjected to a medically unnecessary procedure that, when conducted without consent, amounts to rape. As part of this war, other lawmakers are seeking to remove the legal right to this medical procedure altogether (and to treat doctors who perform it as criminals). The warriors rolling back bodily autonomy elide termination of pregnancy with prevention of pregnancy, and frame as a matter of religious freedom the desire of members of certain religions to restrict the bodily autonomy of people who do not even adhere to those religions.
This is a war in which, in the year 2012, the very availability of contraceptives (which, by the way, have reasonable medical uses besides preventing pregnancy) is now up for grabs.
I don’t know about you, but my plans for 2012 ran more to jet-packs than The Handmaid’s Tale. And I’m starting to wonder if it might not be time to go Lysistrata to end this damn war.
You see, the fact that in the U.S. women make up more than half of the voting age population doesn’t mean that women make up a proportional share of elected lawmakers (or judges, or presidents of the United States). And members of the U.S. House of Representatives apparently think it’s just fine to convene hearings on contraception coverage featuring 10 expert witnesses, eight of whom are male, and none of whom testify in support of contraceptive coverage. And politicians from the party that’s supposedly carrying the progressive banner think it’s politically smart to use our bodily autonomy as a bargaining chip — to get stuff that’s more important, apparently.
What’s more important to you than autonomy over your own body? If you can make a list here, I’m guessing it’s not very long.
What if we declared a sex-strike until the people who purport to represent us came around to the view that our personhood and bodily autonomy is non-negotiable?
Sure, such an action is unlikely to reach the forced-birth theocratic extremists, since they are pretty open in their view that women are lesser creatures, not to be trusted with decisions about their own health or lives.*** My guess is that these people do not care terribly about the wishes of women with whom they are partnered**** (or, if they do, that they regard these women as exceptional compared to the women against whom they seek to use governmental power). Persuading these extremists of my personhood would be about as rewarding trying to have a dialogue with a hexagon, and significantly less likely to succeed.
But maybe a sex-strike would grab the attention of our fair-weather feminist allies, the ones who pay all kinds of lip service to our personhood and bodily autonomy when there’s an election to win, then turn on their heels and start bargaining it away for their own political advantage.
These folks might change their ways if they had skin in the game — or, as they case might be, if they got no skin and no game.
Far be it from me to suggest that men are more vulnerable to their desire for funsexytime than are women. They are not. However, I reckon it’s easier to be in the mood for funsexytime when your very personhood is not up for debate.
I find legislative threats to my bodily autonomy a real mood-killer. And, I’d much rather share funsexytime with a partner who takes my well-being seriously enough to view the war on woman as a war that needs to be stopped in its tracks, now. Someone who wouldn’t see it as politically expedient, let alone clever.
Because guess what? I would never presume I was entitled to funsexytime with someone whose personhood and bodily autonomy I didn’t step up to fight for when it was under threat. Heck, I would step up to fight for the personhood and bodily autonomy even of people with whom I have no desire to have funsexytime because that’s what decent human beings do.
And my choice is to refrain from funsexytime with anyone to whom my interests do not matter at least that much. People who cannot manage to see me and others like me as fully human do not deserve to get any action that might not also result in a repetitive stress injury.
Not being all-in in the fight to protect the bodily autonomy and personhood of women and others with uteri is a deal-breaker for me. Is it a deal-breaker for you?
_____
*Including no “Lioness on The Cheese Grater,” a sex position upon which we can only hope SciCurious will one day blog.
**This is also a war against the bodily autonomy of other persons with uteri.
***And yet, to be entrusted with babies that they may not want. If ever there was a non-standard logic …
****This does raise the question for me of how men of this sort can have sex with women who they view as not-fully-human by virtue of the very fact that they are women. Wouldn’t such sexual congress amount to bestiality, the next step on the slippery slope after gay marriage, which they are generally against?
This week has been (and I daresay will be) sort of discombobulating.
Late last fall we discovered that we had hardwood floors hiding under the ratty wall-to-wall carpeting in Casa Free-Ride. We also found out from our friend who refinishes hardwood floors that if we were to refinish ours in February, we could get a deal on it. February, being part of our rainy season (to the extent that we have anything describable as “seasons” in the Bay Area), is part of the slow season for floor refinishing.
Given that we have held the carpeting in contempt for some time (did I mention that it was ratty?), it sounded like a great idea to us, even though it would mean completely clearing all the rooms in which carpeting would be pulled up and floors would be sanded and finished. Yeah, it meant boxing a lot of stuff and moving a lot of furniture, but we’d have time to get on that …
After the holidays.
And after the kids went back to school.
And after ScienceOnline.
And after my semester got going.
Yesterday was the day of reckoning. The rooms were not quite cleared by 7:30 AM, but we had the last one emptied by 11:00 AM. By the end, we pretty much abandoned organizational principles in favor of getting it done, which means some of these boxes will be … interesting to unpack.
We are lucky enough to have a place to stay within a couple miles of Casa Free-Ride (which is especially convenient given that the rabbit is still holding court in her backyard run, and demands regular water, kibble, carrots, and watercress stems as tribute).
I keep hearing how going carpetless leads to a remarkable decline in airborne allergens. I expect I’m likely to experience our return to Casa Free-Ride this way whether or not it’s true; the place we’re staying for the duration has enough residual cat in it (possible in time-release form) that my eyes have been scratchy and my throat itchy for the 30-odd hours we’ve been in residence. When I get that stack of papers today that will need grading, maybe I’ll take them to the cat-free cafe. However, the cafe has wifi, which our current lodgings do not, which might make the grading harder.
In any event, I’m hopeful that the sock-skating we’ll be able to do when the floors are finished will make the trouble of being dislocated totally worth it.