The Resignation Letter

So, one detail that had fallen to the wayside of this whole New Job Business was the formal resignation letter. I'd never had to write one before, and since there are some outstanding matters between the University and myself at the moment, writing it wasn't easy.

I don't know that this is necessarily a model, but the strangeness of it - combined with a need I felt to address some things, however tactfully - made me think that maybe it'd be worth posting here.

Dear ___________,

It is with no small amount of regret that I offer my resignation as Assistant Professor in the Department of ________________ at the end of my contract year.

My time in the Department of _____________ has been extremely rewarding. The program that has been developed here is amazing, fulfilling an important role in our field and in the world. The things that I have learned while working with this excellent faculty cannot be stressed enough. The delicate balance they have struck so successfully - not content to just teach _____________ but to graft those skills to a vision of social justice - is to be commended. In the coming years, I have every confidence that you will find other departments working for a model that has been present here all along. Working with them has inspired and instructed me, and I hope to carry the seeds of this department into my future endeavors I cannot praise the department and my colleagues enough for their commitment to creating something dynamic, unique, and equitable.

My departure is bitter-sweet as _____________ is taking important steps towards becoming a university that truly represents social justice for all. Such steps are rarely easy, and it says something that the University is risking them. I hope that in my time here I have helped with those steps, and that, just as the _______________ department asks of its students, I have made the department and the University a better place. I regret that I cannot continue that work here, but I hope the University will continue with it, even when it isn’t easy, and I will follow the changes and lend what support and well wishes I can.

I wish the University all the success in the world. I’m grateful for my time here. Thank you.

Certainly, the letter is longer than it probably needs to be for a resignation. But it feels like one of those rare moments where the young, untenured faculty member has something like the attention of those above. I tried to make the point on a different issue that, unfortunately, sometimes the only voice university structures allow young faculty is heard in the quiet syllables of feet on pavement. My leaving isn't entirely about that - though it certainly is a part. But the lesson is important.

It is probably entirely unrealistic to hope that anyone actually pays attention to these things, but since the letter was to be sent to the V.P. and my Dean, it seemed worthwhile to take the shot that things the school has been struggling with are important - and not easy - but that it shouldn't be taken as a sign that it's okay to quit on them.

Checking In

Okay, so maybe I'm just not in a bloggy-space right now.

Last week, periodically I'd think of something I wanted to blog about, and then the day would mop the floor with me. The next thing I knew, it'd be half past midnight, and I barely capable of spelling my own name. And then the week was up, and I was still struggling along.

It isn't that things are going okay, though I've got one class where a literal 95 percent of my students are half-assing it so badly that they're going to be lucky to pull C's. My focus is just not where I want it. I'm trying to help the department find my replacement - an odd moment, to be sure - and I'm trying to finish setting up for the conference we're helping to co-host with the new caveats that the school we're co-hosting with has no budget and my university has given us money provided we can pay for everything before the conference actually happens (though the parts of my university that are actually involved with giving us a bill won't respond with prices).

I've also found that I've managed to - in very short order - make myself a thorn in the side of one of the more important administrators here. Mostly this seems to have happened because there comes a point in any meeting when I tired of beating around the bureaucratic bush and either ask for what I think we need or suggest what I think needs to happen. A colleague described me as "prickly" in these meetings, which made me laugh with more than a little bit of pride.

I have, though, managed to start back to the gym. I've been four times since the last post, and (of course) every time, it has been packed with my students. But that may well be the price I have to pay right now.

So that's things. I'm still committed (ish) to trying to blog fairly regullarly, but we'll see how it goes. I am, as always, open to suggestions for topics.

We Interrupt This Vacation...

I probably should be either more offended by this or more concerned with the implications of it, but mostly I'm just amused by how silly - and what a weird statement about priorities - it seems to be.

Today's the last day of my vacation. I've spent the morning sitting with my family watching DVR'd Olympics - more on DVR and my family soon, thee I do assure - when the phone rings. It's a colleague (and not my roommate) calling. Evidently, there's some confusion about the event I was tricked into attending. Now, it appears, my services are no longer required; some university official whose name I don't know (and so presume to be tucked away in some higher-up position) would rather my colleague make the appearance.

This is all fine by me, as the event is both a pain in my ass and a waste of my time, being as it is poorly ventilated, spottily attended, long, and involving multiple prayers. But it is intriguing to me that it was deemed important enough that they made said colleague seek me out, find my number, and do his own hatchet job while I was on vacation.

Of course, this is from the folks who ask junior faculty to RSVP for things they won't be attending ('cause that's a nice list to sign your name on when you're worrying about tenure and promotion), so I probably shouldn't be surprised.

...What the Moral of the Backstory Could Be...

So amidst the bi-annual chaining of Curmudgeon to his desk to advise students (read: sign forms, pick out classes, and do other irritating busy work that comes of the hand-holding service model of higher education), I managed to squeeze in an interview with a student for one of the various campus newsletters.

It was the typical sort of fare. Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you do here? Very "getting to know you," very "journalism 101." And it had some local peculiarities. I've never heard an interview in this region that didn't, at some point, include a some version of "tell us why we're not so bad for living here" - mine was "What do you like about the students here compared to the other places you've taught?" And there are some good answers to those questions - I do like the students here for particular reasons (though not because they're somehow better or worse than the students at other places: because they're distinct).

And then two questions that threw me:

• why did you decide to teach at this university?
• are you planning on staying?

Part of why I was thrown was obviously because of how close to home those questions are to current considerations for me. And I wondered whether it was transparent to my students. Do I look like I'm watching the metaphorical door while I'm instructing? Does the bedlam that is my office somehow convey that I'm trying to pack my bags? I hope not, because that seems like it would be shafting these students a bit.

But the other reason it came across strangely was the realization that I couldn't tell the whole truth in my answers. I couldn't say "Yes, I want to leave so badly I'm clawing at my own skin." or "I came here because it was here or a year of unemployment." This interview was very much a PR moment. For the part of the school that will publish the article. For me. And I'm living in a pretty small fishbowl, as it were, and I can't afford to piss off the bigger fish.

But I've got to say, I've never felt quite so unprofessorial as that moment.

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.

There's trouble right here in Academic City

Big discussions happening over at Dr. Crazy's place. Check out the useful post about approaching the job market after you've got a tenure track position and the useful comments about what the considerations might be once you do.

One of the thing I've noticed in my brief time in the blogging world (this go-round, at least) but also in academia at large is that there's a tendency to look at problems in a very particular way. Take this for example:

EdSmithers said...
I can't believe not a one of you has been a senior enough member of a faculty to know the damage that this "casting around for a better gig" does to a department.

The junior faculty of present day academe is made up of people like you, uncaring and selfish, not giving a shit about the students and colleagues you leave in the lurch with your pretty "look at me, love me, and miss me" announcement of departure in April of each year.

Ignoring the assumptions about why people leave, there are some things missing. The point that I never see mentioned at moments like this is that the people in question - in this case, junior faculty - are entering into a world with rules made by senior faculty.

Structurally, the university system is made up in such a way that faculty would be crazy not to leave. The April departures edsmithers bemoans happen because of a structural process senior faculty, organizations, and universities have much more control over than do individual faculty. Do I want to have to wait till late in this school year to give my departure notice? Not really. Do I have to? If jobs are posted in the Fall, interviews are done in Winter, and hiring in Spring, then there isn't much say that the person being ired really has in the process. Now, consider this gem:

Webmaster said...
Imagine our delight in imagining you might deign to stay here in Pudknocker town another year or two!

We will certainly forget your casting around for a better gig when tenure and promotion loom.

Who'd want to stay at a job where "senior faculty" condescend and stereotype junior faculty in such ways as edsmithers or who are threatened with retaliation for exercising an option in the labor market as advocated by webmaster?

The other thing that neither/both/the same seem to ignore is that sometimes leaving is the responsible thing. It is entirely possible that one could land a job that seemed perfect only to discover they are a poor fit for that department's needs. By the logic shown in those threads, you don't ever get to part gracefully; you can only be shown the door. But that's not the way the job market works anywhere.

It's also intriguing to hear "senior faculty" (this keeps going in quotes because the only evidence I can find of an academic edsmithers seems to be teaching one course a year in the Santa Clara University Law program) who (if they are, in fact, senior faculty) would've come in at a substantially different pay scale relative to inflation than new faculty. I can imagine it would be easier to marry yourself to a place if you were making the sort of money profs who started in the 70s or 80s are getting paid. Come back down to my pay scale, though, and I'm betting you'll rethink it.

[Addendum: if we must keep using this marriage/career metaphor, then sooner or later, complainers must cope with the fact that, just as in real life, a lot of times when say "it's not you, it's me", it's really you.]

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.

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.

Education on the clock...

I'd never thought about it before reading this article from the New York Times, but education in America serves, as much as anything, as a sort of calendar marking time. I didn't think about it when, as an undergrad, I mentioned to my interim advisor that I didn't have a plan for my electives - at least not a plan that he'd agree involved any forethought. Instead, I told him, I was going to take the courses that sounded interesting. This was clearly a foolish, wasteful idea in his eyes: the sign of a student set to drift along through college and probably not even make it out.

Why did I do it? In high school, I'd been assured by guidance counselors, by well-meaning teachers, even by friends with the same concerns that college was to be different from high school: we'd all get to do what we were interested in, not what the state or school board or our parents told us we needed. No more Calculus if I didn't want it, no more Government and Economics. College was about my desires. And though college wasn't the land of milk, honey and free academic choices I'd been promised it wasn't so far from it either. And so, I spent electives on things like World Literature courses, a First Amendment law course, a Jazz history course, even a feminist theory course (not because I thought I'd meet chicks there, either). When it was time to graduate, my school only allowed you to have one minor. But I'd jumped around enough without ever abandoning my major to have had five.

A lot of the same thought drives my views on education today. I'm happier because I got to explore. I even wound up taking more of those pesky Government and Economics courses than my high school career (largely spent drawing pictures of my Econ teacher in various embarrassing costumes) would have suggested. Along the way, I learned not just about cultural anthropology, not just about media history, or even about the practice of experimental psychology but also about smart decision making, about how differently people I thought I understood viewed the world, and even a bit about where I needed to be in the world. It was, as college is often assumed to be, my first real taste of freedom.

But it also took me five years and a summer session to graduate, and today I've got the student loan debt that reflects that particular desire. Even looking at that debt didn't spur me to this new thought: education is a form of Taylorism (if you're not sure what that means, see the definition offered here). What my first advisor had been trying to tell me was that taking longer than four years in college intentionally was a waste of time. It was unproductive.

What that article made me think about was a sort of cultural norm about when we become adults and what it means to be an adult in this society (look: a term from my cultural anthropology course!). At the end of high school, we assume people become adults: they're ready to make decisions, to serve their country, to pay taxes, etc, etc. But most importantly, they're ready to contribute in the most basic way: by getting a job. And if you're not ready to get a job, then the only excuse is to go to college. Why? So that when you're done, you can get a better job (huh - that course in sociological theory doesn't seem so crazy now...).

These are assumptions, of course (okay, so that logic course did pay some dividends). And perhaps unfortunately, we've normalized them - we've made rules based on those assumptions. And the modern academic system is built around them - it even penalizes "bad" decision making. A college education is assumed to take four years. If it takes more, you can find your access to financial aid diminished, you're guaranteed to have to answer in interviews why it took you so long to get out, and you may even take a hit to your reputation with friends and family ("Oh, you know he just drifted about awhile. I always thought he had more direction...").

But what if, as the New York Times article suggests about high school, a longer time spent in college might offer a different set of benefits than simple productivity?

Just a few days ago, I was in advising a student, and I found myself making the assumption for them that they need to be done in four years. And the student, not surprisingly for someone just entering college after years of having older authorities pass down unexplained proclamations, accepted it. Maybe I should have asked what she wanted to get out of her college career? Was she in it for a job? Or was their something more? And if she answered that she wanted something more than the quickest route to a slightly better job, how would the system have to work differently?

As I prepare for the first week of classes, I think I may have just hit on the first essay for my freshmen. I'll let you know how they answer.

Son of Shameless Self-Promotion

So this morning, I attended the annual welcome back faculty breakfast where we get to briefly gawk at new faculty who're made to pirouette while the higher-ups get attempt to use their vitas as part of a comedy routine. Meanwhile, while we - the entrenched, bored, on-our-best behavior old faculty - stuff our faces with free cafeteria food (I am increasingly convinced there is nothing more enticing to academics than the notion of a free lunch). Also this is where the University president traditionally exhorts us to some grand "moral" goal (the quotes are there because I don't necessarily equate the morals the president espouses with my own). And over the last two years, they've also started introducing us to the university's new marketing plan. That's right, kids, greasy bacon and academic commercials!

Oddly enough, most of us don't ever think about how universities market themselves. I'd imagine if you wanted to sell a university, you'd have to choose the best way to reach your ideal demographic. You'd probably edit your information to appeal to a 19 year old. Or maybe you'd even suggest, in addition to the official information, that someone try to figure a way to make the kids who're already at your university make their own commercials.

First, you target them, then you infect them. Viral marketing has come to the university.

Pause a moment and think about what that would look like. Would it say much about education, amidst all those fast edits and off-center camera angles? Would you even want to? Ever search for your university's name on YouTube? Could be worth looking at whatever turns up.

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 Undying Art of Shameless Self-Promotion

It's around this time each year that U.S. News and World Report issues its annual college ratings. This is a bigger deal for colleges than for anyone, even the people who use them because it helps not only in recruiting students but in pushing for external funding.

What most people don't realize is just how tricky (read: near-crooked) the ratings are. For example, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal reported that when two colleges corrected information on their alumni-donation rate, their ratings slid. [Edit: they've since corrected this - only one of the two schools' ratings slid].

But what isn't so widely reported is that part of the rankings are based on the perceived status of the college or university by other colleges and universities. In other words, what other schools report they think of your school can determine your school's ranking. If just parsing that sentence takes a moment, you can be sure there's more fun in the works. Clearly, that sort of system seems like it shouldn't be a problem, right? In a world where education becomes more business than anything every day, we can count on truth over the bottom line, right? I mean, if we asked Coke executives to tell us what they thought of Pepsi, of course they'd be honest with us. The method is more than a little suspect, and it has resulted in some schools boycotting certain parts of the system (often leading to falls in their own rankings) and to ask for more information about the methodology itself, even claiming the system favors private schools.

It's amazing how often these things occur, though. Recently the school I'm at sent out messages to employees about a regional survey seeking to find the best places to work. There's no self-promotion there, I'm sure. What's interesting is that I've never heard anyone report on the ten worst places to work in a region though it seems like knowing that could be just as important.

Looking for love in all the wrong places...

Not so long ago, one of my relatives sent me a gift card and a note wishing me well. This was especially kind of them as I've not been in touch the way I should be, and I certainly haven't managed a visit. Tucked in the card was a note asking about my well-being and about that most typical of my family's concerns - am I seeing anyone.

I've been struggling for months with how to answer the question, and it may seem strange to address it here rather than across the dinner table or by the tried-and-true "reach out and touch someone." But bear with me. Let's ignore for a moment my own dating idiosyncrasies (and there are a lot of them, to be sure). Why talk about it in light of my career as a fledgling academic? The reason is relatively simple economics. What my relative doesn't understand - in fact, what many friends and family don't quite get (and what is never addressed directly) - is that I simply can't afford what they think I can. Not only am I not visiting (and rarely calling), but dating itself becomes a dicey proposition at best because I live on an income that's decidedly smaller than you'd expect.

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out that while for the first year in quite awhile faculty salaries have grown at a pace that is higher than inflation and cost of living, it's only one year out of many. And, it notes, there are pretty wide disparities by discipline, rank, and type of institution.

Let me take a moment for anyone unsure of how life in academia works to help explain the notion of rank and type of institution.

In (American) academia, there are a variety of ranks which are largely invisible to anyone not actually involved in some way with this career ladder:

• adjunct/instructor
• assistant professor
• associate professor
• full professor

Generally speaking, as you move from the top of that list to the bottom, job security and pay increase. One hitch in this is whether a position is a tenure-line or not. Typically adjunct/instructor positions are not tenurable. In some cases, this is strictly a financial decision on the part of the institution; in other cases, such positions are offered because the person in question hasn't completed a step in the process (and academia does love its process).

For example, it isn't uncommon for someone who is still completing their Ph.D to be hired as an instructor with the understanding that once the process is complete, they will jump to the next rung. The lack of the Ph.D is often a distinguishing feature for the adjunct/instructor position.
Moreover, quite often adjuncts and instructors carry a different workload - sometimes less, sometimes more - as a cost saving measure. At some institutions, for example, adjuncts are only allowed to teach a limited number of courses because exceeding that number would require the institution to offer health insurance to them. It is worth noting that at many institutions, a large percentage (often a clear majority) of undergraduate coursework - particularly large courses and introductory courses - is taught by people employed at this level.

It should also be noted, though I'll keep this part brief, that it isn't uncommon for institutions to hire someone at any of the above ranks as a fixed-term faculty member, which denies them the chance for tenure but tends to pay better than the typical one-year or term-by-term adjunct or instructor position.

With that in mind, one of the perks of academia that seems well-ensconced in the public consciousness is the notion of tenure. Typically this is understood to be a perpetual sort of job security that once achieved makes the holder invulnerable to being fired, etc. This isn't actually true, and it also ignores the process both pre- and post-tenure. In the typical case, tenure requires a six or seven year process (it varies slightly by institution and by the individual worker).

In order to get tenure, the typical faculty member must:

• produce enough research (measured in books and articles published, conferences attended, etc.),
  
• taught to acceptable standards (a particular number of courses with acceptable student and peer evaluation)
• served at an acceptable level for the university in other capacities (serving on committees, helping get the university's name out into the academic and civic communities, etc.)

In practice, this is the first step to moving up the career ladder. Once tenure is achieved, some small reward is given (at my university, it is a one time pay raise of about $1,000 - I'll let anyone reading this offer other figures), then you begin the process again to move from assistant to associate, and then from associate to full professor with fairly similar pay increases.

Pay also changes by the type of institution - whether the school is large or small, whether is has endowments from the State or outside business, whether it produces only undergraduates or graduates (and if so, what kind - schools that grand doctorates tend to pay higher wages). For more information, see the Carnegie Foundation's explanation of its classification system and uses.

In my case, I'm at a small, non-doctoral granting institution with a fairly small outside resources (State assistance is minimal as it is private, business support is limited because we're in an economically depressed area and the university hasn't done a good job at tapping alumni or seeking outside connections). I'm in the liberal arts side (which tends to pay less than the hard sciences and business sectors, though it is consistently the area that most employers indicate helps future employment the most). And my university doesn't pay well (this will come up again in this blog, I'm sure). So my pay is going to be smaller than it might otherwise be.

Let's put it in perspective: most people in this career path are going to have roughly ten years of higher education in order to get such a position. Think about that a moment and jot down or make a mental note of what you think that career must pay, considering the cost of higher education, the limited number of degrees, the importance consistently placed on education by employers, government policy, etc. Got your number?

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the average starting salary for someone with that education is roughly $55,000 a year at the typical Master's granting liberal arts school.

And that, my friends, is why I'm so rarely dating or visiting.

No more teachers' dirty looks?

I'm thinking about quitting my job.

This morning one of my students confided in me. She said, fumbling for words, that she's wrestling with the things most of us wrestle with - family issues, big questions of life, how to balance desire and duty. Her monsters were, to be fair, bigger than most. On her arms are the scars of someone who's cut themselves or been cut in the distant past. She's witnessed things no one should, and she's coming out the other side. Facing the end of her time at a university must feel like - as it did for so many of us - looking down into a big blackness we never before imagined.

Like most of my students - honestly, like most students (myself included) - she isn't particularly brilliant. But she is amazingly talented, and it is her work ethic that sets her apart and that will push her on to brilliant things. And I do believe - and I told her so - that she will go on to those brilliant things. I told her that some selfishness is warranted - sometimes you have to do what's best for you so later you can do what's best for someone else. I told her that I'd juggled the same questions about whether to even get an advanced degree or to simply find some quiet middle management job so I could tend to the calamities of my own family. Maybe it helped.

This isn't why I'm thinking about quitting my job.

I tell you this story because it is moments like this that are the best part of my job: not when a student is struggling, not when I can tell them that they're going to be amazing. It is the moment where a connection is made that makes this job worthwhile. Teaching is a bit like standing at the crossroads and hoping a car will pass your way at just the right speed to see you waving. It isn't about making the car stop, though sometimes it does. It isn't about making the car change directions though that happens sometimes, too. Most days, teaching is just about helping someone to notice the things outside of their own car.

Seen from that perspective, which sounds pretty good I think, it might be hard to see why I'm thinking about quitting my job. So why then?

Here's the story. I'm 35 years old. I'm going into my fourth year of teaching at a small university somewhere in America. I get to discuss big ideas and controversial notions on an almost daily basis. I get to ask questions, and watch people go past that crossroads, stop, look around, check the map, change directions and change themselves on a regular if not daily basis. There are worse lives to lead.

But I'm 35 years old. I'm looking for a roommate because I can't afford my bills let alone the loans it took to get the education to get the job that allows me to do these things. The job pays, as many university teaching jobs do, just a little more than I might make as a middle manager at a call center or a small bank. Each Christmas as my students depart, I spend my first day of vacation balancing my checkbook to decide whether I can spare the few hundred dollars it would cost me to go see my own family. I've spent the last two holidays in my ramshackle bachelor apartment with my dog, re-reading old favorites and assuring my aging parents that I'll be home next year, I promise. Sometimes we open presents over the phone. Sometimes there aren't any because it doesn't seem right if I can't get them much that they should get me something.

Now I haven't said I'm a particularly good teacher. That a student confided in me at the beginning of this entry doesn't tell you much, really. But the thing is, I'm not alone. I know more than a few people in the same job with the same problem. And at least one of us is bound to be good in the classroom even if I'm not. And more than a few of them are having similar thoughts.

It makes me wonder if any one is thinking about whether the idea that you get what you pay for might apply to education.