Failed Systems and Systems of Failure

There's Socialism and Communism and Capitalism
said Neal,
and there's Feminism and Hedonism,
          and there's Catholicism and Bipedalism and Consumerism,

but I think Narcissism is the system
that means the most to me...
- from Tony Hoagland, "What Narcissism Means to Me"

---

Like much of the country, they're predicting ridiculously cold temperatures here. Radiating "orphan," at least six people have stopped me in the last two days to warn me of the temperatures and to tell me to keep warm as though this weren't an intuitive behavior to a boy from Texas.

As ever, I am amused at how the cold and the snow changes things. It's come to serve as the key idea in much of what I don't understand living here. There are peculiar rules here that run counter to what you've learned about living in the snow elsewhere. For example:

snow + hazard lights on a car = ability to park anywhere you want

or

snow + 4 wheel drive = no need for extra distance between driving vehicles

or

snow + sports = no need for clothing

It's very strange how the snow trumps common sense. Today, I watched one car unload in that "not parking space" next to handicapped spaces, and another car pull in, turn its hazards on, and break out the cell phone to have a conference. This only seems to happen when it snows.

I'm tempted, each time I see it, to simply walk over the car as it blocks that space or to find a bat and break out their headlights.

---

My roommate has scored an on-campus interview.

In the notification, the committee chair mentioned that they remembered him as a student, and this sparked an entire evening's scavenger hunt to determine just when and how this person knew him because he was convinced he had to say something back about how he remembered them, too.

I suggested going vague but affable: "I hope you just remember the better moments." No.

I suggested avoidance and deflection: "I'm looking forward to catching up with you and meeting the department." No.

I suggested embarrassed honesty, clever trickery, vapid flattery. No. No. No. I ran out of adjectives. I ran out of interest. I ran out of the room. This morning there was a knock on my office door.

"I think he made a mistake," he said. "I don't think he knew me. I'm just going to accept."

All I could do was nod, thinking of how much preparation time had been lost searching through year books and transcripts and departmental web sites. Committees, be careful what you say. The tensions are high this year.

---

I've been struggling to finish a syllabus, wanting an assignment that might generate something students could put in a portfolio. Some courses, I am concluding, simply are not meant for this type of idea. Or maybe some professors aren't geared up for it. The thought of having to force this to something that I don't do myself and so wouldn't know quite so well how to judge anyway just didn't make sense.

But I'd been hearing and reading hither and yon about the need to try and help students relate things to real world job possibilities. We're student-centered, I heard. Students are consumers, someone wrote, and must be treated as such: give them what they want.

Hooey.

My class will be worth the trip because it's going to make them think of something in a way the business world doesn't. And it isn't exactly a commonly mentioned point of view anywhere else either.

Employers, here's what you can expect: a well-researched argument that considers the unpopular opinion. That's my contribution. Thank you. Bye bye.

Grappling with Post-Election Racism

One of the lurking undertones of the past several days has been the flurry - yes, a flurry - of racist activities that have played out on my campus and what to do about them. As I mentioned previously, there was at least one incident of racist graffiti here. I'd thought us fortunate that we'd avoided some of the more high profile problems that have happened at Lehigh. But there's certainly plenty of evidence to suggest that the problem is pretty wide.

As I mentioned in the most recent Job Tracking posting, the university's response has been a big focus of mine over the last week or so. And it has been a positive experience - maybe the most positive experience - of my dealings with the university. Let me explain, and maybe offer some food for thought about what I'm learning about dealing with this as we go (and, of course, I'd love to hear what others are doing).

Following the scrawling of the graffiti, I found myself more frustrated than ever about things here. And a few colleagues and I began to talk about that frustration. Thankfully, one of my colleagues wasn't content to wallow and began rattling chains of the powers that be. Very quickly, those powers responded. More quickly, in fact, than I've seen them respond to anything here ever before. A group of concerned faculty convened, many of whom had expressed similar concerns and all of whom had ideas about things that could be done and frustration that the university hadn't done enough (it's response was essentially to have the graffiti quickly removed and to send an e-mail condemning the act and promising an investigation to the university).

Let me pause here because the group demographics are interesting. This isn't meant as an indictment, but I did find the demographics interesting: the entire group consisted of untenured faculty and all from the Liberal Arts side of things. Make of it what you will.

Part of why this excited me is that it's the first time I feel like there's some sense of community among the faculty here - even if it is just the young faculty. But it was also the response of the administration which felt like a first to me: they admitted that they were caught flat-footed, that they weren't sure how to best deal with it, and that they'd not done a good job of integrating the faculty and student life responses to the problem. And then, the ideas were heard and the group of young faculty were given a blank check (at least from a policy standpoint).

Some of the ideas we're proposing:

• a signed statement from concerned faculty, making a stronger statement and discussing our ideas and asking for input
• a retreat with student leaders - particularly from varying political viewpoints
  
• workshops for RA's and other student life leaders
• a day where faculty would be asked, in unison, to take some time from class to tell a personal story related to these divisive tensions
• asking for some of those stories - and from any interested students - to be put in a series of campus media outlets to help personalize the consequences
• a similar set of mediated statements about why the election of an African American matters to a similar variety of people
• a rally in honor of MLK and the inauguration
  
• a series of brown bags and discussions over the next few months to continue this discussion

What I like about the range of ideas, in particular, is that it suggests the university realizes this is not a one-time problem and that one event isn't going to come close to dealing with it. And I like that it seeks ways to bring students into the discussion rather than relying on lecturing to them or the hopes that they'll all magically turn up at some amorphous campus event. I like that it invokes a sense of unity - among faculty, where it's lacking; among students; and among the campus as a whole.

Where I'm concerned, however, is that I and other colleagues have continued to talk with students while these things are taking shape, and we're hearing a number of student concerns. First, students are upset because events are still happening - these actions are more pervasive than any of us thought. But the other student concerns about what's been done are telling, and I think should be factored in anywhere that is dealing with this sort of problem. What students have told us so far boils down to the following:

• sending an e-mail was seen as a weak response, particularly as few students check the campus e-mail accounts. One student noted that there's an entire system in place for the discussion of parking problems and inclement weather, but the best we could muster was an e-mail for this
• little discussion of what an investigation entails or what the consequences could be has been problematic
• that discussion has been something quotes, at best. While these events have been talked about in class, most students feel like they've been talked to rather than with. They don't feel like they've been given a voice, and many of them are frustrated that they don't know how they should deal with problems like this on their own.
  
• timeliness is a factor. One frustration that they've expressed is that when it has been addressed, it has been days or even a week after, and that disappoints them
• there's a fear that the same racist fears might be shared by faculty. As one student put it, "I had a faculty member talk about 'you people' to me. And you expect me to take the university's commitment to stopping racist behavior?"
  

Hearing these things has been a lot of unpleasant food for thought for me. In the next meeting I'm attending, I'm going to push even more for some speedy interim actions to be taken, particularly actions that give students an entry into the discussion. We've forgotten, I think, that this generation of helicopter-parented kids.

They want input and direction. They're used to participation. Of course, they're going to require a different mechanism for dealing with crisis.

And so it is up to us to plan accordingly.

So glad this isn't the positive thinking week

So I'm proposing a course for my department.

This has become one of the big advancement objectives of late, and the school is all about objectives. Maybe this is happening everywhere. On my syllabi now, I not only have to list my objectives for the course (a good thing), but also the department's overall objectives (a questionable thing), and the university's general education guidelines (much more questionable). My syllabus, on average, has gained a page and a half due to various objects and explanations of objectives and explanations of how thing X satisfies objective C. I remember this from the business world, and I recall from my days managing there that it didn't do much to create the "excellent customer service opportunities" it was meant to because really, who wants to listen to ten minutes of that crap just so you can check your balance.

A syllabus works the same way, kids. I remember in grad school being given a 42 page syllabus from a professor who was teaching a course that I desperately wanted to take. The syllabus though was Exhibit A - in 10 point font and excruciating detail - of this professor's mania. Somewhere around page 13 of our in-depth reading of it, I found myself so disinterested in the course and the topic that I politely excused myself, went to drop the class, and began to rethink whether this was the thing for me to study or not.

Maybe this was the professor's point. And actually I don't have a problem with them designing a syllabus that way if it was their goal. I'm fine with the quick reading I got of the prof and all their issues, faults, and quirks. A good syllabus should probably do exactly that. But I do have a problem with being forced to represent someone else's manias in my syllabus. If I'm going to look crazy, it should at least be an honest representation.

All of which leads me to the course I'm designing for the department. There's been a lot of pressure lately for our department to participate in an interdisciplinary Master's program being toyed with here. Calls have been made, edicts passed down, discomfort has been registered. But I like designing courses, and I want the chance to work with graduate students again, so in I jumped. Thinking that the first course we should have would need to be flexible, I put together a pretty flexible special topics course that would allow whichever of the limited departmental faculty who could find time to teach a course a way to either tie to an existing course (and thus manage an extra prep somewhat more easily) or to do something related to their current research and interests.

As part of the exercise, I had to design a syllabus for this course which isn't on the books (and help me out here, that is the point of this right? To get a course on the books so that someday it might be offered?). And I received the committee's comments and requirements for making the syllabus for this imaginary course. Among the easy to fix but utterly silly gems was a demand for office hours to be listed. Okay, it's silly and nit-picky, but alright. I can make up fake office hours for a course that hasn't been approved in an as-yet undetermined term.

The amusement goes on. One comment says they can't make sense of how grades are tabulated. I work on a points system. All the work in any course is always worth a total number of points (let's say 500). Each assignment has an assigned point value (let's say there are six assignments, two early ones worth 50 points, and the other four 100 points each). Confused yet?

I guess math is hard, Barbie.

But more irritating was the continuing attendance policy question. Out of the eight changes that were requested, three of them have to do with attendance policies. Random people from random departments will call me at least twice a term to ask how Student X's attendance has been. They never ask how their work has been. No one has yet called to ask me how a student was doing with the actual business of a course; they only ask if they've been spotted in a chair in recent memory.

My university loves attendance policies. It seems to have a passion for attendance policies that I can only compare with my love for my bed on a Sunday morning.

To be clear, attendance policies irritate the hell out of me. As I tell my students - in my syllabus and in the opening day lecture - attendance is assumed. You'd be stupid not to come to every class, mine included, at every available opportunity. You're paying enough for it, after all - and that's what you're paying for: not a grade, not a good grade, not for me to listen to your problems and solve them, not for me to give you warm and fuzzy feedback, not for me to agree with your views or to hide my own. You're paying an entrance fee to be exposed to ideas, to have me help you evaluate and use those ideas, and to have me use those ideas in the evaluation of your work.

Let me repeat (as I do in that opening lecture): I'm not here to be your mommy. I don't care if you attend. In fact, if you can't show up interested and prepared, I'd rather you didn't so that the students who were smart enough to take advantage of what they're paying for don't have to suffer your disruptions.

How do I grade on attendance? I grade your assignments. If you're not attending, it will absolutely affect your grade. I'm not going to give you points for your ability to sit in a chair. And I'm not going to waste my time taking points off if you come in late or leave early. My time is worth more than that, honestly, and deserves to be better spent. It will come out on its own, thee I do assure.

What could be clearer than that?