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.

And now it's Miller time...

Today I got to dig in a bit more deeply with classes. Part of that was a sort of improptu manifesto on education and its merits to a group of mostly freshmen. I explained to them a bit about my own educational background - I was the first person in my family to get a degree. I'm the only one with a graduate degree. I did it on student loans and a whim. It was that sort of deal.

And part of what I told them - maybe I should have held over the "Heresy 101" title - was that I believe in Education the way some people feel about Religion. Now note - and I'm sure most of them didn't get this impression - I didn't pick out a particular religion. I didn't compare education to any savior, philosopher, or writer of a tome that attracts tons of Hollywood money. Instead, I told them something personal. Education, I told them, has brought me more than tons of debt, and even if that were it, then every dollar I'll be paying back till my 70s was worth it. That feeling, I said, is what I hope to help them come away with four years from now. I told them that what you get out of education is about what you're willing to risk. I said that they're only going to get out what they put into it. And that to get the most out of it, they have to confront things they don't like, things they fear, things nobody thought they'd ever possibly care about. You have to be okay with being wrong sometimes. I told them I'm not out to shock them or convert them. They don't have to agree with me because, among other things, I'm wrong almost as often as I'm right. I told them going to college to get a job is like going to the pool to only play in the shallow end. I told them I hoped they'd find some way to enjoy their education, and that I'd help them if I could.

It was, I think, the best lecture I've ever given, and I barely said a thing about the subject at hand. It was one of those moments where I felt like if they took even one thing I said out of the lecture, I'll have succeeded for the entire term.

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.

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.

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...

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.