...a solid soul and the blood I bleed...

It's been a productive office hours day so far: a recommendation letter written and sent, tomorrow's lecture prepped, my reservations for an upcoming conference checked and modified appropriately. It's amazing really, since my colleagues are swarming the hall today, having conversations about sweaters and injuries and the like.

I'm tempted to close the door. But that feels a little wrong to me, having complained more than a few times as a student about walking down a department hallway and getting treated to a sublime exhibit of Far Side cartoons, newspaper headlines, and event announcements, but rarely ever actually seeing a faculty member. It was especially acute when I was supposed to catch them in their office hours but found only that well-decorated door. I wonder at what point this happens - is it a change that I'll one day go through? Is it like academic puberty? One day my voice in department meetings will change, and I'll slink off to my office and shut the door, grumbling about how no one understands me? Is the sabbatical nothing more than the equivalent of getting the keys to your first car?

Hipster music may be one of the forms of music that the academic adolescent blasts to drown out crude authority figures who just don't understand. Think about it.

So, it's with some irony and distress that the album I'm listening to today is one that came across on a number of "Best of.." lists recently. Today's disc is "Merriweather Post Pavilion" by Animal Collective.

Let me be upfront: I bought the album because it turned up on so many lists. And unlike many of the things from those lists that I passed over, it seemed like it was worth a listen to me because it wasn't quite like what seems to be the dominant indie/hipster musical preference d'jour: whiny voice, coffee house guitar, I'll try to channel Connor Oberst if you'll tell my ninth grade girlfriend she was a bitch sort of feel. You know the sort. I love lo-fi as much as the next guy, but when it turns into a formula, well...it's like the anarchist I saw in grad school who smashed out a turn signal while the driver was still in the car, then cried for the police when the guy got out of the car to give him his own version of street justice. I don't care if your formula started out with some cred: once it reverts to type, it's less than interesting. It's I loved you but you jumped the shark funny.

The songs I checked out from this album before picking it up had a sort of experimental feel to them. My suspicion is that Animal Collective would fail the "does the album sound like them live" test that is one of my more trustworthy musical tests. It's all well and good if it flies in the studio, but does it feel the same at the show? I saw Modest Mouse a few years ago, and to this day, feel like I saw someone masquerading as the band who I might have liked better than the band whose album I'd been enjoying.

Maybe it's the same for Animal Collective: the album's got a little bounce but not so much to burst your working quietly vibe, but perhaps the band brings a little more menace to the show. I feel like it's a background noise album, rather than something that has an anthem or a song that I'll find myself quoting or humming or even wanting to sing along with.

Maybe that's why it works so well for moments like this at the office: not just because sometimes you need background noise, but maybe because the pre-tenure process functions similarly. If pre-tenure is your safe time to be produced and made to sooth the masses, post-tenure could be your moment to revisit your menace? That hardly seems the case, but it's an interesting possibility.

They sing "I'm in love, what's that song?"

Office hours are a nightmare this week. Actually, this week is a nightmare, and office hours is a angst ridden bit of respite. This says something, because between weird departmental duties (like hosting a workshop and touring a candidate around campus and showing up at a presentation I don't get to voice my opinion on), I am only managing about an hour of my office hours anyway.

Still, that should be enough time for me to delve into a little bit of music to help pass the time. The album for the week: "Pleased to Meet Me" by The Replacements. If you've not heard them - or the album - it's worth checking out, and a fortunate choice on my part for an afternoon where I'm pretty exhausted from the chaos of the week.

The Replacements turn up in odd places these days. They've got a song in "Rock Band II" now - probably more - but I've had more than a couple of friends who've played the game pause because while the song - "Alex Chilton" - was familiar, they couldn't place the band to save their lives.

I was a late comer to the Replacements, having heard bits of them before - I'm sure I saw their (in)famous Saturday Night Live performance - it resulted in them being banned from the show. But I really didn't hear them until a friend introduced them to me in grad school. Critics back in the day loved them back in the day. Like Bon Jovi, who once asked how the Replacements could be the best bands of the 1980s if he'd never heard of them, I missed the boat. And that's a shame, not just because the boys from Minneapolis were a band destined for - maybe even built for - self-destruction, but because lead-singer Paul Westerberg had - no, that's not correct: has - a way with words.

And that great, rock and roll vibe is perfect for the week which has felt like a bus with only two wheels doing 90 mph. It's been a workload equivalent of a flogging. And having limped through a workshop on how one might use technologies in the classroom, I'm inclined to wonder if, in the same way doctors make the worst patients, teachers don't make for the worst students. At least my years of doing tech support weren't wasted: always good to remember how to properly growl the phrase, "Sir, please stop clicking."

One of the more surreal moments of the week came when I mentioned being tagged to lead a candidate around campus for their informal tour, and another young faculty member felt slighted. I guess the grass is always greener: I wish I hadn't had to do it, and they felt bad because they weren't asked to.

And yet I'm here in the office - just down with "Skyway" and onto "Can't Hardly Wait" on the disc - and the little bits of resentment are seeping off, and the day's feeling fine. I'm due for a beer or two with a friend tonight. It's the mark of a good disc, even if it means office hours and the job have been less than successful.

If the Replacements - the 'Mats to their friends - taught us anything, though, it's that you take those bits of success when you can get 'em and don't worry too much about the rest.

End of Term Follies

Yesterday, a minute before I was to leave my office, a student stopped in to ask if I could be the third member of her honors' thesis committee, who would be "meeting tomorrow for the defense."

It's a busy end of the term here, not just because of it being my last term, but also because of the workload. I've already served on two honors committees. I'm supervising 17 senior research projects. I've got portfolios from 21 students, and essay exams from 12 others. Also, I have an article to restructure. I've no business on last minute committees.

Naturally, I said yes.

The topic seemed interesting, and I've known the student through some of the causes happening on campus this year. It felt wrong to say no.

And now I've read the thesis, and I realize that there's a reason there was no third committee member. And worse, I don't think they could have been thinking about what my own research and interests are or they wouldn't have asked me to be on this because there's almost no way I can avoid shredding this.

What's frustrating, though, is that I tried to speak with the chair about this, and there seemed to be little recognition of the problems and even less interest in hearing out my difficulties so they might either prepare the student or their own defense of this. Because at the end of the day, a failed thesis defense - and that's what I think this might wind up being - is a failure of the committee.

Still, I Will Compalin

Okay, I know that probably there is no time of the week that would be better. I know that no matter what time you choose, some large group of faculty will complain. But, honestly, there has to be a better time for a faculty meeting than 4:00 pm on a Friday afternoon, doesn't there?

This "Bright Gumdrop Unicorn" is about solutions not just problems

Continuing the thought process about junior faculty looking for other jobs (that began here, and continued here, and summed up nicely as a sort of Hotel Californication by Maggie May, and today blew up with this Rate Your Students post and the beginnings of the responses),
here are a few thoughts that I'd like to see addressed. And at the end, a proposed solution.

Having followed the posts, it's interesting to hear that "senior faculty" (by the way, if "junior faculty" get painted as a single brush, so do you, gramps - this post is going to take the same tone I'm seeing from the "senior faculty" in hopes that by speaking their forked tongue language, they'll get the point a bit better) really are as insular as Abe Simpson. First, because it seems they can no longer distinguish between reasons for leaving. In none of the posts above that brought this up has anyone given any indication they're doing a one year and out situation, and yet this seems to be the assumption made by the "senior faculty" posting in response. Second, because they can't quite imagine that people don't love everything the same way they do, they seem to take someone doing typical job things - trying to find positions that fit better, pay better, etc. - as some sort of personal affront. It's great that you love your town, your university, your country, your 7 pm bedtime after "Matlock" is over, but honestly, hegemon, that doesn't mean everyone has to.

If we're not happy, if we're far from the things we care about, if we're not getting what we need then we have two choices: we can wait for you to finish your victory cabbage, your 40 mile walks through the snow with no shoes, and your stories about how FDR beat Superman in a footrace and help us fix it , or we can do something to fix it ourselves. From the posts thus far, the choice is obvious. And if that's the way we feel, why do you want us there anyway? If we're as selfish and egotistical, why cry when we leave? Wait - that would mean you'd have to teach those intro courses you hate, serve on more committees, do more research, reprep old lectures, stop peddling your cars with your feet and enter the modern world.

Most importantly, recognize that you've got more than a little blame in this, old folks. You've perpetuated a system. You've done job hires the way they've always been done, you've hired junior faculty out from under other departments and been glad to have them. You've passed off the duties you don't want to the person at the wrong end of the career ladder. So change how you hire, change who you hire, or hush up and relax - I'm sure "Lawrence Welk" will be on soon, and then you can take your naps and dream of shooing kids off your lawn.

And you know what? I know why you want me to stay. I've just spent parts of several days watching your poor argumentation - name calling, castigation, the need to resort to profanity and sad stereotypes - to bolster your points. I've seen your weak logic, your reliance on strawmen arguments, your inability to think critically about the system you're in, and your strange assumptions that everything is either/or. The whole point of this post, after all, is designed as both argument against and satire of how you "senior faculty" are coming across. You need me to teach you critical thinking as badly as your students do from the sounds of it. Just because I'm looking for a new job doesn't mean I don't appreciate and want to help students, that I don't like the university, or that I voted against social security or whatever it is that's really got your Depends in a wad.

Oh, and that solution: for all of you more curmudgeonly-than-thous who think junior faculty shouldn't leave one job to go to another, put that in your ads. If you really think that badly of someone trying to find a situtation that is good for them and good for the school and their students, own it. You write the job ads. Because I can tell you, if that's your attitude, I don't want to work with you anyway, you narrowminded, judgemental, sanctimonious windbags.

The woes of the job market?

New Kid on the Hallway in this post (found via Tenured Radical in this post) has me thinking about the whole job prospect question. The underlying question that we rarely get to ask is about whether the whole shebang of these jobs actually makes us happy.

I remember when I entered my Ph.D. program, there was an annual start-of-the-term new kids on parade moment where all the incoming students had to address the sea of obviously not-ready-to-be-back faculty and explain what they wanted to study and why they wanted the Ph.D. When my turn came up, I explained my area of interest and then said "I'm getting a Ph.D. because I always wanted to see if I could get one." This comment was the only one I recall causing anyone to stir. Later at the "reward you for being good monkeys" dinner, not one but three faculty members pulled me aside to caution me that my answer was, at best, politically dubious. One even told me I'd never make it if that was my reason.

Of course, he didn't realize just quite how far I've been willing to go for spite, so maybe I owe him thanks now that I've got the degree.

But still the question gets buried now that I'm out. And it's interesting to think about - particularly in light of the looming question of whether my mode of providing job application materials might actually be seen as somehow contentious - whether I want to be a member of this particular club or not. My parents were shocked recently when I expressed such a strong to desire to be out of this locale that I'd consider jumping the academic ship (or is that the academic shark?). Of course, I haven't been able to get them to look at the blog though it answers oh-so-many of their questions about my doubts about this field.

So I still don't know what I'll do about the job packets. But I've got more food for thought.

The grand experiment...

It's amazing how picky academics can be.

I say this in anticipation, though I could certainly offer more than a little evidence. As I've noted previously, I'm hitting the job market this year. After a few years teaching - typically (at least for those of us just starting out) we're advised to wait until our third year of teaching someplace to apply elsewhere - I've decide it is time for me to see what the jobs out there are like. And while looking for jobs is never fun - even when you've got one and can look just to see - looking for academic jobs is about the worst experience I've ever had.

Typically for an academic job, you're putting together a fairly lengthy packet of information: a letter, your C.V., references and/or their letters as a start. Then you might be asked for samples of your research/writing/production (depending upon your field). Possibly they want syllabi. Maybe they want statements of your teaching philosophy and your research intent. Maybe they want evaluations. Oh, and while you're at it, it couldn't hurt to send your transcripts (official, of course). Sure, send both the graduate and undergraduate transcripts.

If they want all of that, it's a pretty sizable packet. For me, the full packet can reach 200 pages., of which the average search committee member will look at maybe 10 (letter, C.V., references, and maybe a syllabus of interest). I'm told the smaller packets used to be very popular, but it hasn't been my experience. Now everyone wants everything, and frankly, it's a pain in the ass.

Sure, I can come up with a justification for why someone might want to know what my GPA was fifteen or so years ago in courses I might not even be teaching anything about today. I had to reach for that explanation, but I found one.

It still doesn't make this process any easier to swallow.

So this year, I'm going to experiment. Instead of printing and somehow binding together 200+ pages so someone can subjectively knock me out for my choice to talk about research before teaching on page three of a CV that chronicles everything but my shoe size (14, depending on brand), choice of beverage (Coke Zero if we're talking non-alcoholic) and a brief description of my ideal mate (thank goodness, because my answer still changes daily on this one). So before the University of Southern Nowhere You Want to Live asks me for a printed letter telling them whether I like Pina Coladas and walks in the rain, I've decided to let them do the work (or at least the printing) by sending them a CD with all the documents they could ever want.

Here's where things get nervous though. It's entirely possible though this would be a good, applicable, environmentally friendly use of technology to solve a problem, it may be seen entirely otherwise. After all, we all had professors who seemed so ancient they probably wore sundials on their tweed-covered wrists, right? And that hasn't changed. So what I risk with this approach, designed to save me some effort while demonstrating some tech savvy (which I like to think would be important for the sorts of things I want to do), is that it may land on the desk of someone more curmudgeonly than yours truly.

Imagine, doing all that it takes to make a CD-Rom that'll run on PCs and Macs (and maybe Linux/Unix machines) with 200 pages or so of documentation in some way that's both easy to follow and interesting, only to have it be the excuse someone doesn't call for an interview?

Wish me luck.

And now, back to our program...

Thanks to A. of Pop Tart fame, a few more tales of academic woe: professors unable to make it on their salaries. Not a new theme here - in fact, it's the theme that got us going - but the cases here are particularly distressing to hear about because they do a better job of giving real numbers.

It's interesting, sad and frightening to hear that average wages for professors have only come up .25% - yeah, you're reading that right - over the last 20 years when inflation is accounted for. There are very few careers that can match (and obviously, people in those careers should be glad they don't) that atrocious number. What the article doesn't discuss as it offers these tales is what the average cost of education is. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average student at a publicly funded school has $13,000 per year to cover for school attendance (note that doesn't include actual living expenses), which means just educational costs for someone getting a 4 year Bachelor's, a 2 year masters, and a 4 year Ph.D. would run $130,000 before they paid for food, rent, etc. The other interesting point in those stories is the number of times people were able to go to their families for help. I do wonder what happens to those students who don't have parents who can give them $100,000?

I've not gone so far as to work a second job, though I've considered it (teaching a 4/4, I'm not sure how it would work), I've not done it. And one thing I have decided is that if I can't find a job that puts me in a better position, then it won't be long before I have to leave this career behind.

I'm ready for my close-up, Professor DeMille...

Here's an academic dare for you: would you put your course up on YouTube? According to this article from Inside Higher Education at least one professor is willing to give it shot, having created a class that will, at least for the first half, be filmed and posted on YouTube. You can check it out here.

There are some interesting ideas raised by this type of course. YouTube is certainly a growing part of our culture, though we might be over-emphasizing just how big a part it is. Last term I spent a considerable amount of time talking with my students about Lonelygirl15 and the drama surrounding her YouTube videos (not sure what this is? Here's the first Lonelygirl15 video - you can watch the rest from there). Taken in by articles in the New York Times and other major news sources about the popularity of LonelyGirl15, I entered my class confident in the assumption that my students were rushing back to their dorm rooms to see what the latest YouTube offerings were.

Not a single student out of 70 had heard of Lonelygirl15, and as is only possible in the mathematics of student apathy, even fewer actually cared. But I pressed on, confident that we were exploring something they'd find useful to know about. But as the term went on, I had to ask myself was I just one more professor (with an admitted desire to study technology) sucked in by a gimmick?

Recently I was asked by so members of my institution to explain why I don't use Blackboard. I had a whole host of reasons, most of which boil down to Blackboard's ability to make everyone who uses it lazier. There's an appropriate way to use that technology, but me posting my lecture notes doesn't seem to be it. Too many students come to rely on that as a means of keeping up with everythng, and hence, they can't or won't keep up with anything themselves.

With technologies like YouTube, the question is a different one: is this technology so important that it should warrant the focus we sometimes give it? As a professor, I'm often tempted to run wherever my interests lead. Sometimes that's a good thing; sometimes not. I'll be curious to see how the YouTube course goes, and I'm sure I'll be posting about it again.

Blame Canada

For a little bit, after I'd complained in a previous post on the blog and with friends about the low pay of faculty members, I began to think I was off my nut. Years of swallowing the rhetoric of a pure market economy had me a little dazed. If I wasn't making good money and couldn't afford to rent an apartment as a new faculty member because I was saddled with debt, wasn't that my problem? How could I even think that the market might be weighted unfairly.

"Time to move on to other issues," I thought. I almost faltered.

Until I saw this article about assistance to new professors working at Canadian universities. Briefly, momentarily, I'm given hope. Now I see that it's possible that an employer recognizes all those costs and actually wants to help. What an interesting model helping with housing suggests to American universities. Here's something small schools might try to think about when they're wondering about the third year bleed of good faculty who've been there but won't stay.

Now if I could only get a job in Canada....

Teachers who make a difference

Fair warning: this post could also be titled "One More Reason I Should Get Out of Here" or, after reading my last post, "Nothing Goes Up That Does Not Come Down".

So yesterday, I was out hobnobbing with other faculty around a field throwing things to each other. And during a break, we did what faculty often do: we began to talk about students in classes, comparing notes, horror stories, and the all-too-rare success story. Somebody was telling us about a student who from day one of his very difficult class - and I say this with a twinge of envy: I want my class to be as difficult as his is reputed to be - just got it. The student could offer a good definition off the top of her head, could argue a point, and most importantly, felt not one iota of shame for being smart and liking it.

Incidentally, feminist friends, this is the next mission. Body image aside, let's start to deal with the fear of being seen as smart.

It was at this point that another faculty member chimed in.

"You've got to shut that down," he laughed. And we weren't - or at least I wasn't - quite sure what he meant.

"You've got to shut that down," he repeated. "I had a student once who had their hand up at every question. They answered them all, 10 for 10, perfectly correct. So I said to him 'Man, you've got to get a social life.'"

Awkward laughter and a bit of stunned silence.

"He got up and left the class, and never came back. Never saw him again." And he was beaming proudly. Proudly! He thought he'd done a good thing. Why is it that if a dog craps on my carpet, I can smack it, but when a colleague does it, we're forced to be polite? I can only hope he recognized the sarcasm and bitterness in my voice when I said "Yes, teachers who make a difference" and walked away to get some water.

Argh.

Heresy 101?

Remember that faculty breakfast and dog and pony show? Well there was more to it. One other interesting point in the recent faculty breakfast and cattle show was the address by the university president Without giving too much away, the University president is among other things, a fairly good natured person, concerned with faculty ideas (or at least that's the sense I get based on his regular invitations to take faculty and students to lunch or dinner), and a Catholic priest. And in his address to the incoming and old faculty, he did something not so surprising, all things considered: he suggested that it wouldn't be a bad idea for faculty to begin classes with a moment of prayer.

Now this prompted all the usual responses:

• you can't make us pray, we take public money
• you don't have to pray, you can have a moment of silence
• we're at an institution with a religious bent - and with a priest as president - so you can't really be surprised at this
• etc, etc, etc.
  

Part of the president's point was that it wouldn't be strange to ask one part of a university to support another part of the university's mission. My thought, choked down as so many of them have to be considering my own views on religion, was "Great. I'll pray at the start of class when you spend 5 minutes at the beginning of each mass talking about proper grammar and punctuation."

But in the interest of charity, Christian or otherwise, I want to try and avoid the usual negative rant that this might inspire. After all, in some ways the sort of debate discussed in this New York Times article becomes so strangely polarizing as to be useless. So instead, let me set the stage with a bit of background.

Like many people I know, I've got a distrust of religion that's deep and glaring. I'm not comfortable saying it is because I'm liberal - I think it would be interesting to see what a liberal religious movement would be capable of politically. I've even debated tackling a book that would play with some of those ideas. And I don't think it's because I'm well-educated. I know plenty of well educated people who have some strong faith or other.

The roots of my distrust that I'm willing to point to come from direct experience with religion. I spent some time in a middle school affiliated and run by members of a particular religion, and the experiences there were more than enough to make me shudder at all manner of things. It's because of my time there that I don't trust big groups clapping at the same time. It's because of my time there that I feel a little nervous any time a large group of people does anything in unison. And there are later experiences that have only deepened this distrust. And I would be remiss to ignore that I do feel like I benefited from being dragged to church as a child when the choice was still my parents. There were moral lessons that I take from there that I think were quite valuable. And there were communal lessons as well.

But sniping aside, there's a big question that wouldn't hurt to play with. Let's assume for a moment religion isn't going away. Not here, not in the larger culture. If that's the case, sooner or later, those of us who are liberal, well-educated folks are going to have to offer some notion of how to integrate religion of all varieties into education (in the same way that I think the left must sooner or later claim some religious space as well).

Part of the difficulty seems to be the assumption that the only way to be sensitive to religious beliefs is to facilitate religious practice. Why is it that the notion of appropriateness of timing seems to fly out the window in the American context (perhaps it does this elsewhere, but I couldn't say)?

I suppose, as a colleague of mine noted, we could do simple things to bridge the gap. In his case, it was designing a syllabus that was so frightening even non-believers would hope for divine mercy. That's one solution.

Off to the races?

Just for the sake of completion, I should mention that today I let both my Dean and department chair know that I'm planning to apply for jobs this school year. I'm hoping that both will contribute a letter of reference for me - of course, if they for some reason say no, then I'm in a bit of a quandary.

Last year I did a very small job search, mostly in hopes of landing someplace near my aging parents. And there was some oddness with my department chair over the matter of reference letters. It wound up being something of a semantic game: "You asked if I'd be willing to write a letter; you didn't actually ask if I would write one." that ultimately worked out, but that gave me a scare about the whole process. For a moment, it felt like my battleship was in a wading pool and someone just dropped a torpedo in the water with it. My career - where I lived, what I did, and all the things that extend from that: happiness, a social life, health - could be tanked because I forgot to say "Mother, may I?"

Life in academia carries with it a continuing sense of indebtedness in a way that I've never experienced as acutely anywhere else, even in my several years in the kiss-ass or die corporate banking area. Obviously there's intellectual indebtedness - that's why we cite things so religiously. And certainly I owe a lot to the various faculty and colleagues who've asked me to read something, who've challenged what I asked them to read, who argued with me over drinks at the bar on Thursday nights. But it goes beyond that. Having done both hiring in both and firing in the corporate world, I remember all too well how references worked there. When I was at the bank, checking references was essentially limited to calling an employer and asking "Did Person X work there?" There can be all sorts of legal hassles if they try to tell you that Person X was a bad employee, plus most people find someone who isn't going to hang them anyway.

In academia, the reference can be everything. You don't have to look far to find someone in academia who owes their career (or their lack of it) to the person who chaired their dissertation committee. When I first looked for an academic job, one of the interviews I had owes no small debt to the friendship between my undergraduate advisor and someone working at the school in question. Academics aren't afraid to call someone they know where you worked and asked for all the dirt. And they're not afraid to share with anyone and everyone who'll listen.

Increasingly (at least in my experience) potential employers want detailed reference letters at the outset of an application process. It used to be - or so I'm told - fairly common to just list contact information, and if an employer wanted more details, they'd contact references. But in the years I've been jumping from place to place and job to job, the majority have wanted letters.

Where this really becomes problematic is when you're casting a wide net. My first year of job searching, when I was A.B.D., I applied to 108 jobs. Imagine if even a quarter of them wanted a full letter (and I'm fairly certain it was more than that). Now imagine that you've somehow done someone wrong (or that they think you have).

Scary, huh?

So presently, there are four jobs out that I'm interested in. The theory is that since I've got a couple of publications and a book contract plus good teaching evaluations, that this is my best year to jump to a new ship. I'll keep you posted how it goes.

Wish me luck.

The Devil's bargain (or contract negotiation for dummies)

Those of you trying to learn how to successfully negotiate a contract from the management side, take note: a key to ensuring a strong bargaining hand in negotiation is to redirect mistrust and frustration.

I've mentioned a bit about contract negotiations here, and in my previous post gave some example of how the proposed contract effectively pits faculty against each other on the way to a more equitable pay rather than against the university. Today, the conversation has shifted to something more interesting, and (again) the argument is coming between faculty.

As with many colleges the size of the one I teach at, the faculty workload is an issue. Here, faculty teach four courses per term. This is then cluttered up in terms of preps. For example, I might teach a term with two preps, but four total courses. There are a few competitive opportunities to get the number of courses reduced, and there are reductions built in for things like chairing a department and teaching certain numbers of graduate courses. Now it's worth noting that the majority of graduate courses at this school happen in the Business and Education programs (coincidentally (?), these are the same programs that have the highest pay). Making matters worse, the college's core curriculum - the courses that all students have to take at the undergraduate level, regardless of focus - are taught in programs that are on the low-pay, high-prep end of the scale. And the more courses you teach, the harder it is to do research which is one of the keys to getting that most holy (though it isn't what the average person on the street thinks) of academic goals: tenure.

Imagine having to prep lectures for four courses a week, grade the papers for all those courses, advise students, serve on a committee or three, and then try to figure out time to write papers for conferences and publication. Effectively, under a 4/4 load, the only research that gets done happens on your (unpaid) vacations, so you can imagine that workload is an issue.

The proposed contract has received some concessions on this score. Over the course of four years, the workload will be reduced to 3/3, with the number of course reductions decreased correspondingly. Seems like something everyone could get on board with, right?

Wrong.

Remember those reductions I mentioned that some people get for teaching graduate courses, etc? Well, those reductions become harder to claim if workload declines. The problem is this: while the number of courses that a faculty member has to teach go down, the number of courses that have to be taught doesn't. So you either have to hire new faculty (or adjuncts) or you give up reductions. This is where the faculty today's faculty-on-faculty aggression has hit. You see, in the short run, those people who have been able to get reductions based on graduate teaching - often to a 3/3 load under the current system - will lose those chances and will have to teach what the rest of the faculty have to teach.

Effectively, these faculty who are already paid more and teach less find themselves in the position where they're being asked to work more than they're accustomed for less of a raise than they might get otherwise. And faculty in the areas that pay worse are confronted with the fact that they teach more and earn less. There have been inferences made that graduate faculty work less, that helping one group is hurting the other.

And the University? Well, it's an interesting note that in none of the communications that I've been privy to has the University itself even been referenced.

How I spent my summer vacation, 2007...

Apologies for being away so long. It was summer, and I stopped reading some things in favor of reading other stuff, and that didn't translate into good blogging material. Plus my summer courses didn't take, so I've not really been around the university (or around anywhere, really, as I've had big things to save up for - see the end of the next paragraph). But it's almost time to get back to it, and so, back to the blog.

Ignoring for a moment that academics don't really get summer vacations - we just get to stop teaching and drawing paychecks in favor of trying to do the research we've not had time for during the regular terms - summer vacation has been pretty good. I've managed to get two papers ready to be pitched, a couple of proposals coming up, one of my students got a job in her field and another is applying for graduate school, and I spent two weeks in Paris.

That ending clause is so nice, I'll say it twice: "and I spent two weeks in Paris."

But the really interesting bit (after spending two weeks in Paris, calling anything interesting this town is a stretch, but we'll run with it) is that the small school I'm at is in a contract negotiation year. The faculty here are unionized, though the union was described to me in orientation as a "company union." I've since been assured - though not by anyone actually representing or actively involved with the union - that such a description was an unfortunate choice of words and simply not true.

Last week the proposed new faculty contract was presented to a meeting of about 40 faculty members, and a few interesting things happened. I'm only going to tackle two major things here, though there were more. Best to leave something for future blog entries, right?

First, there was considerable distress - particularly from "new" faculty (who make up a majority of the faculty here) that they weren't included in the process. A quick check for e-mails (and I should note that I'm at a school where e-mail is THE way of communicating - on an average day, it isn't unheard of for someone to send an e-mail announcing they have extra staples they don't need and, 10 minutes later, an e-mail saying the staples have been claimed) shows that there has been no mention of the union since Fall term when a social was announced, at which more information was promised. It never came. So imagine the surprise when given the response was that faculty simply didn't care enough to get involve; if they'd really cared, they would have found the working groups they had no idea were being formed and continued.

But the second interesting thing was the proposed raise schedule. At this school, faculty raises are set for whatever period the contract stipulates - usually three years. And faculty raises help to determine the raises for staff at the university. I'm told that typically what the faculty get, so do the staff. The proposed raise this year is 3.5% (incidentally, that's less than the rise in cost of living according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). But the way it breaks down is a little strange and is the second bone of contention about the proposed contract.

Before breaking it down, some things to keep in mind:

• different areas in academia tend to be paid at different levels (for example, faculty of business tend to make considerably more than faculty teaching liberal arts courses). The typical reasoning for this that business faculty would make high salaries in the business world and so need to be paid more to teach (there are all sorts of flaws with this logic, but that's not today's point)
• schools of different sizes and research levels tend to pay differently. For example, Research I universities tend to pay more than liberal arts colleges. In part, this is because they tend to be more successful at drawing external grants. See the AAUP Faculty Salary Survey, available from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
  
• faculty hired recently tend to make comparatively less than faculty hired 10, 20, or 30 years before. If you adjust incomes for inflation, the more recently a faculty member has been hired, the more likely it is that they're being paid relatively less.
  

With that in mind, here's how the new contract proposes that raise would work. All faculty members will get a 2% increase on their base. The university will then total all faculty salaries, give that total a 1.5% raise, then take the new total and divide it equally among all faculty.

So imagine Faculty member X, who has been at the university for two years, makes $45,000 and Faculty member Y, who has been at the university for 25, makes $100,000. If the raise were a straight 3.5%, X would make $46,575 and Y would make 103,500 (before taxes, of course). With this proposed raise (assuming these two were the only faculty members), it would work out like this: X gets $46,600 and Y gets $102,700. I'm betting you can see what the bone of contention is here.

Here's a moment for you game theorists out there. What do you think will happen? Faculty who feel largely unincluded in the negotiation process are given the choice of whether to approve a contract that effectively closes the gap between faculty members by pitting faculty member raises against each other. Think it'll pass? And before you place your bets, you should know that whether the contract is approved or not is determined by a simple majority of voters with no requirement of how many voters need to turn out. And the faculty have a little under a week to approve the contract.

Place your bets...