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Showing posts with label higher education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label higher education. Show all posts

Complicity - #ComplicitNoMore

Wednesday, November 18, 2015 0 comments
Last Wednesday, a group of African-American students staged a public protest against racism on our campus. You can see video and read about it here. They chanted, "Silence no more," vowing to call out the racism that they saw.

As of yesterday, faculty response coalesced around the phrase "Complicit no more." There will be an in-person show of support today, posters to sign publicly, buttons, social media, and more.

I like this phrase very much, as it's aspirational and confessional. It acknowledges that each of us may be complicit in structural racism. It looks past specific incidents - a one student asked in class if they were talking to their drug dealer when on the phone (to use the calculator); a student in a suit asked if they had a court date; intimidation by security services - and pushes each one of us to get to work changing our campus climate. We are accountable.

Microaggressions matter. They compound. They exclude. And the fact that so many people think they don't matter is just a sign of the work we have to do.

Still more to come.


My Campus, Like Your Campus, Is Probably Racist

Monday, November 16, 2015 0 comments
UPDATE: Dominican Star article on the protests. Administration has been speaking out in solidarity with the students and we'll see what happens. Meeting today at 8:30 of Faculty to discuss actions.

Last week African-American students at Dominican University protested racism on campus. Here are two videos. The first is a short protest in the cafeteria. The second is long and outside the office of our President. Both videos are shared with permission of one of the protest organizers.





So what are the issues on our campus? That's a bit complicated. We've had several incidents of racist graffiti in dorms and at least one racist epithet uttered on campus by one student to another in a public space. These have been scattered over the years (and were well publicized on campus in both our student media and official condemnatory statements from administration). Students also speak of micro-aggressions in the classroom, from faculty, although I don't have permission to share these details. I expect in the week to come to have more information, hopefully a statement with demands detailing issues and demanding change. I promise to share them as appropriate, always mindful of the students' right to control their own narrative. I'm not a disinterested journalist here, but a white male tenured faculty member.

The protests came as a shock to some of my colleagues, judging from comments on social media, and even more so to alumni who viewed Dominican as a safe, nurturing, space. We are a relationship-centered university. We form close bonds among students, between students and faculty/staff, and are proud of our community. We are, or will be soon, a majority Hispanic institution, with 65% of this year's first-year class Latina/o. Our ties in the Chicago Latina/o community run deep (as I wrote about in this piece on our president's leadership on immigration reform). We also proud of our commitment to social justice. To be told of a campus climate of racism jars against our sense of self and mission.

It's also certainly true. There's no reason to question the lived experience of others, especially students taking the risk to protest publicly. Moreover, Dominican, like all institutions, partakes of the hierarchies of the society in which it exists. There is no ivory tower. Racism permeates Chicago, Illinois, and America (and beyond). Why should Dominican be exempt? Moreover, to acknowledge its truth does not erase the good things, the real change that our students undergo as a result of their education here, or the intense efforts of faculty and staff to make our campus safe, inclusive, and welcoming. Structural change is hard!

I take these protests as a moment to self-examine, first of all. I know my values and I know how I want to behave. But I, too, partake of the hierarchies in which I live. The pernicious nature of micro-aggressions is that the aggressor can be fully ignorant of his or her actions and be fully of good will, yet still turn a campus into a hostile space.

The inequalities run deep. Here are two recent pieces on structural racism in American universities, both written by African-American women with PhDs. Stacy Patton, for Dame Magazine, writes about the ways that American colleges and universities were never designed with racial equality in mind.
The irony is that many predominantly White colleges and universities appear to have the signs of progressive campus cultures with healthy race relations, especially in comparison to their 1950s predecessors...The problem is that they are signs of an alleged commitment that is rarely realized, and they give the false, and dangerous, impression that race relations on campus are much better than they really are. It is no wonder that so many universities lack even the basic data on faculty diversity or a plan to address systemic racism (much less define it). 
Tressie McMillan Cottom, in The Atlantic, writes:
Given the history of racism, wealth, and institution building on which all U.S. universities are constructed, the debate about Calhoun is specific but not unique. It may also be missing a larger point about the relationship between memory and politics. The legacy of racism is not just carved into the facades of university buildings; it is found in the persistence of inherited privilege that shapes the composition of the curriculum, the student body, and the faculty.
These things are true at Dominican University, for all its lack of fame and money. It's in a fantastically wealthy mostly white suburb of Chicago (River Forest), surrounded by West Chicago (Austin neighborhood), the African-American suburb of Maywood, and the heavily-Latin suburb of Melrose Park. Our buildings are gorgeous and gothic. As the forest preserve to our west adopts the fall colors, the campus glows in the late afternoon with reflected sunlight. We should not be surprised with our African American students articulate ways in which this environment is less than perfect for them.

I am grateful to these students for speaking out and for letting me share these videos. More to come.

The Fraud of Journal Impact Factors

Monday, November 9, 2015 0 comments
Elsevier, the giant journal-publishing monster, has always sounded to me like something out of Tolkein, a fallen Elvish city now inhabited only by ghouls and barrow wights, maybe. Yes, I'm a nerd (though not an exceptionally good Tolkein nerd; I never finished The Silmarillion). 

Here's a new article that argues academic journal "impact factors" are basically fraudulent, with no or little basis in reality.

Of course, open access, too, is frequently a disaster, extracting thousands of dollars from faculty for the privilege of being hosted on some website with a shiny layout and a promise that it will be around forever. That's fine if you're at a rich university with money to pay for it, but most of us aren't, so we dip into our own pocket or stick with the closed access journal.

The only way to win is not to play, except that people need jobs, and our imaginary prestige economy claims that these imaginary factors mean things.

My basic theory: Nearly everyone is doing outstanding work nearly all the time and our rankings are meaningless.




Medievalists in Public! (Writing about the Humanities)

Friday, November 6, 2015 0 comments
Yesterday at The Conversation, Cecilia Gaposhkin, a medieval historian at Dartmouth, wrote a piece arguing that STEM are not distinct or in competition with the liberal arts. They are the same thing.
The idea that STEM is something separate and different than the liberal arts is damaging to both the sciences and their sister disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
Pro-STEM attitudes assume that the liberal arts are quaint, impractical, often elitist, and always self-indulgent, while STEM fields are practical, technical, and represent at once “the future” and “proper earning potential.”
First, let’s be clear: This is a false and misleading dichotomy. STEM disciplines are a part of the liberal arts. Math and science are liberal arts...
Advocates of STEM are missing the point. The value of a liberal arts education is not in the content that is taught, but rather in the mode of teaching and in the intellectual skills that are gained by learning how to think systematically and rigorously.
Gaposhkin concludes with a discussion of the specific ways in which a liberal arts education is necessary for an engineer or doctor to truly thrive.

Today, at Inside Higher Education, Paul Sturtevant, who works for the Smithsonian and runs The Public Medievalist, makes a similar argument about how to promote our worth in the public square:
There is a different unifying principle for most non-STEM disciplines -- among them English, history, politics and civics, languages and literatures, education, the arts, philosophy, psychology and sociology -- which I call the human disciplines. All of the subjects within human disciplines are fundamentally interested in people and with subjectivity. Our disciplines not only illustrate esoteric questions of the meaning and purpose of life but are also uniquely well suited to explore questions of how to live and work with other people. In practical terms, if the job requires being able to work with and understand people -- particularly those different from yourself -- these degrees can, and should, make you better suited for it. They promote empathy, and require students to regard problems, and people, with complexity and the understanding that no single answer is right.
These kinds of jobs exist in all walks of life and include CEOs, kindergarten teachers, judges, advertisers, curators, coaches, social workers and many others. They form the linchpin of our society. They not only drive our economy but also make our country a better place to live by having good, well-trained people doing these jobs.
In my heart, I fear that making instrumental arguments about the humanities is a losing game. If we try to play the "gets you a better job" - even if it's true, which it is! - we're going to lose the rhetorical fight to defend the humanities. People - from Barack Obama to the random parent who comes looking at my college - just don't believe it. 

But it is true. People who learn a set of technical skills without the critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, and systematic analysis to expand those skills as circumstances change, are merely being trained for yesterday's job. I'm so pleased to see two colleagues making that case in public.

Sunday Roundup: Four Important Posts on Disability

Sunday, November 1, 2015 0 comments
I finished a major corporate (disability-related) project this week and am hard at work on a major non-profit (disability-related) project now. That, plus teaching, plus the book, has slowed me down in terms of writing for mainstream media, but I trust that the depth of these bigger projects is more than worth it.

In the meantime, though, instead of blogging less, I'm taking ideas that might have made for publishable essays and placed them here. This week featured four posts that I think matter.
  1. How Not to Kill Someone in Mental Health Crisis. This is a video, from the UK, of a person with a machete not being killed by London police. It's instructive and important.
  2. Disability, Trauma, and the Assault at Spring Valley High - If 25% of all American children have experienced trauma, it means we have to rethink fundamental systems in our schools.
  3. Peter Singer's Tells - A controversial philosopher who argues that the correct ethical decision in the case of disability is euthanasia/abortion, reveals that he doesn't think those positions should be such a big deal. To him, they're old news.
  4. Adventures in Universal Design: Handwriting Notes and Take-Home Tests - My approach to universal design for learning. We're learning the wrong thing from the research on handwriting.
Thanks, as always, for reading.

Adventures in Universal Design: Handwriting Notes and In-class Exams

Monday, October 26, 2015 0 comments

Last night I had a long twitter argument about universal design in the classroom. Here's my position:

I do not intend to ever give another in-class exam, even though I acknowledge there is research that being forced to memorize and study may have beneficial results on learning. I will also not ban laptops in the classroom (I have experimented with turning off wi-fi in the classroom, but I'm not convinced that's the right away forward), despite the research suggesting that handwriting is better for learning than laptops.

The problem is that we, as teachers, make these decisions based on surface-level reactions to highly mediated studies. We see - handwriting better! We respond - ban laptops! And since we don't really like our students clacking away on keys and using Facebook, having a study to confirm our pre-existing biases against laptops. And similarly many of us found the process of having to study for exams then sit them in a classroom clarifying and powerful

But there are problems - First, technology is becoming so deeply embedded in our lives that it's increasingly unlikely we can hermetically seal the classroom from it. Sure, we can ban laptops. But not "fingernail computers" or "eye contact computers" or whatever the future holds.

Second, whatever comes next tech wise, right now there are millions of disabled students for whom handwriting is either sub-optimal or impossible. The ADA gives people with clearly diagnosed conditions the power to accommodate, and that's an awesome power indeed, but first it leaves people out, and second it suggests that disabled students are doomed to a "second-best" pedagogy. That's not acceptable to me.

Importantly, I think these studies (if true. Remember the replication issue in psych) do not demand we limit our pedagogy to reward one type of neurotypical student. Instead, these studies say figure out WHY in-class tests have advantages and figure out WHY handwriting and has advantages - then work very hard to achieve those advantages in diverse ways.

For my take home exams, I try to replicate some of the pressures of the in-class exam, because my understanding of the research is that the in-class exam is a useful way to push students to internalize information. For note-taking, I discuss why and how

For note-taking, here's Josh Eyler (a man who knows vastly more about the scholarship of learning than I do):
There's nothing magical about a pen and paper. What happens is that when using a pen and paper, students can write less, so they think harder about what to write, and thus take better notes and begin the process of internalizing what's important. This can be replicated with laptops.

We can do this. We can focus on ends - better learning - and not the means we figured out in eras past to achieve those ends.

Disability Studies at Toledo!

Tuesday, October 20, 2015 0 comments
Kim Nielsen, professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo, has a new blog post up at the Beacon Broadside (note: from Beacon Press, also my publisher) announcing their undergraduate major in disability studies. It's the first such major in the country.
“I’ve never been this excited about my education before,” my student said as we discussed his undergraduate B.A. degree in Disability Studies. Then he laughed at himself with astonishment. Because of his commitment to the topic, he also was working harder in his college coursework than he ever had before; and he’d never imagined that academic hard work and excitement could go together. This student, like all of our students, came to the University of Toledo’s Disability Studies Program seeking a future job (for himself) and justice (for all).

This fall the University of Toledo (Ohio) launched the nation’s first undergraduate, interdisciplinary B.A. in Disability Studies. Enabled by a significant endowment from The Ability Center of Greater Toledo, and with support from our campus leadership, we’ve hired marvelous faculty. We’re drawing in marvelous students. We’re hearing from interested employers who want our students as interns and future employees. Our courses prepare students for employment by enabling them to better understand the world around them, think about the future, and solve problems. We offer courses on literature and poetry, history, public policy, law, health care systems, and sexuality through a disability analysis. Some of our students are disabled; some are not.
I met Nielsen and her colleagues last week. Nielsen attended my public writing workshop, then they hosted me for a talk on police violence and disabilities. I'm thrilled with the work they are doing there, modeling how to center disability studies in an undergraduate context. Congrats to everyone at Toledo!

A Medievalist Goes Public - Laura Michele Diener writes for Yes! Magazine

Tuesday, October 13, 2015 0 comments
Laura Michele Diener is an associate professor of history at Marshall. She works on medieval textile history, and I first met her when she gave a terrific presentation on using textile creation in the classroom. Recently, though, I've become aware of her public writing on contemporary issues.

One of my theories about academics turning to public writing is that we don't have to limit ourselves to writing about our narrow subject areas. Yes, if something directly related to our formal expertise emerges in the news, we really should engage. But the process of becoming an expert, a teacher, a writer, a thinker, builds habits of mind and habits of articulation that can serve in countless endeavors.

Diener's experience exemplifies the possibilities. She's written two terrific pieces for Yes! Magazine  - First on mountaintop removal and second on rural women and domestic violence. In the latter, she writes:
Transformations like Howard’s are not easy to pull off in rural Appalachia, where poor roads, low incomes, and a fiercely traditional culture combine to leave women facing domestic violence in physical and emotional isolation. But a handful of nonprofit shelters and advocates have managed to make progress in this difficult setting.
The secret of their success seems to be listening carefully to the women they serve and then handcrafting programs for those women. The advocates have found that when it comes to domestic violence, a one-size solution does not fit all. It is important to consider community and culture in order to make real differences in the lives of domestic violence survivors, a lesson for shelters everywhere.
I spent much of the month of May visiting some of these rural shelters. Even though I’ve lived in West Virginia for eight years, as I drove into the state’s southern counties I felt like I was entering a different world. The six-lane highways turned into narrow roads curving around mountains. Trucks carrying lumber hurtled past me on the switchbacks. Densely green woods surrounded me with cool, still beauty, and the towns were few and far between. I lost cell service almost immediately. For me, the solitude seemed idyllic. But this kind of isolation can be deadly for a woman trying to escape from an abusive home, especially if she is responsible for children and animals.
I spoke with Diener and asked her a few questions about the process of writing these articles.

DP: How and why did you decide to start writing about contemporary issues in West Virginia?

LMD: I've been teaching Women's Studies classes at Marshall University since I arrived there in 2008. At first I kept those classes focused on ancient and medieval women, which is what I know best, but as I got to know my students, I realized what incredibly rich narratives they had to tell, and how rooted their experiences were in place. Through their stories, I started getting interested in contemporary regional issues such as the impacts of coal on the history and environment of Appalachia. 

Then in January 2014, there was a chemical spill in the state capital that poisoned the water of 300,000 people in nine counties. People were left without water for weeks, and questions about water safety still remain. It was a horrifying situation. I wanted to know how the water crisis affected people differently, depending on their situation--their age, income-level, etc . . . Being someone who likes to research, I started traveling around, interviewing people and taking pictures. It was a way for me to get to know my new state and to make sure that people's stories were being recorded. Each person I met opened up new questions for me and I've been writing about these questions ever since.

DP: How different was the process of writing the domestic violence story from your historical research?

LMD: I started by speaking with people I knew through my work with Women's Studies. We held a Women's Studies conference at Marshall last spring and I listened to a fantastic paper by Mandy Sanchez, a sociologist at WVU, about rural women and domestic violence. Her paper was focused on the positive steps that a shelter in Cambridge Ohio were taking to reach out to rural women. Her research reminded me of some of the shelters we had been working with through Women's Studies, particularly SAFE in Welch, WV, and the idea for the article came to me during the conference. So, I immediately called Mandy, and asked for some references, and then I started calling around to different state coalitions on domestic violence. 

Once I made some contacts, I drove out to the organizations and met people for interviews. In that sense, my process was pretty different from what I do as a historian, because it was all about making connections with living people. One conversation would lead to another, because everyone would say, "oh, you must talk to this person." At the same time, my historical research process is not that different, just with books instead of people, where one book leads to another.
DP: How did you decide on Yes! Magazine? 

LMD: I went to a rally called The People's Foot that was organized by a number of local environmental organizations that was held to call attention to the environmental and health impacts of mountaintop removal mining. It was really inspiring and I wanted as many people to know about it as possible, so I decided to write an article and just searched via google for a magazine that might be interested. 

After that first article, my editor at Yes! asked if I would be interested in writing a story about Appalachian women. I knew I wanted to write something that addressed pressing issues but also demonstrated some of the positive work that people are doing. 

Go read Diener's work!



Kelly Baker on Academia as a "Cult."

Monday, October 5, 2015 0 comments
One of the principles of this site is that language has power. Language and the world exist in close, multi-vectored, relationships, and the words we use to define the world shape some of the ways in which we act.

I use the word "cult" in the context of the "cult of compliance." I chose the word deliberately because it has a certain kind of pejorative power (as opposed to "culture of compliance" which would be weaker, but less contested). I thought hard about my studies as an historian of medieval religious movements, the "cult of saints," and similar phenomena before coining that phrase. At any rate, the complexities of the word "cult" have long been on my mind.

At Chronicle Review, Kelly Baker has a new piece - "Is Academia a Cult." It may be paywalled eventually (CHR is paywalled but pays authors pretty well, so I've no problem there). Here are a few highlights and comments:

Baker cites lots of examples of people using "cult" to describe academia in her piece, and I won't rehearse them here. The crux of her argument is:
Many but not all of these comparisons are made at least partly in provocative jest by writers I read and admire. But the cult label puts me off because it understates academe’s allures and mistakenly casts academics as passive victims.
Baker is one of my favorite writers on gender in the academy, but I've always known her academic expertise was in "new religious movements," which she informs us is the correct phrase for what we once called cults. "Cult" is pejorative, and while some "new religious movements" might deserve a pejorative nomenclature, not all do. Moreover, cult implies, "indoctrination, brainwashing, charismatic leaders, obedient followers, special clothing, mental and emotional harm, separation from the larger world, and the inability to break free from the system."

That's not accurate for academia.
For all the analogy’s rhetorical cheap thrills, it’s misleading. It also shuts down conversation before it’s even started. It’s a cult, and that’s all we need to know, right? Explaining away the plight of adjuncts as brainwashed dupes ignores the structural realities of the disastrous academic job market. Sometimes, if we love an intellectual arena, all we have are bad choices; brainwashing has nothing to do with it.
Finally, she suggests a better frame - the "total institution."
In seeking a better metaphor, I find myself drawn to Erving Goffman’s vision of the total institution, "a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society … together lead an enclosed, formally administered form of life." ...Total institutions are in our worlds, but separate from them. They are "training stations" consumed by bureaucracy and chains of command, with a "work-payment structure" different from the rest of society. They untrain us in what we know, so that we can learn their system of being.. Other roles are lost to us because the particularity of what the total institution wants us to be. They treat us as less than adults by wearing down autonomy and freedom of action. There are rewards and privileges for obedience, yet little loyalty from the institution... 
Academe is an all-encompassing institution that comes to define our lives. It is high time to think about what we give up to be a part of it, what we expect from others who do so, and what we might do to reform it. What are we perpetuating by our participation?
When I encounter the "cult" language for academia, I've wanted to argue against it, but as an insider have been reluctant to do so. Mostly, I feel that academia has been filled with choices, often bad choices, since day one. Academia is also often solitary, devoid of the charismatic leadership and clarity of purposes that I associate with religious movements. How can one be in a "cult" if one spends all the time wondering - what am I supposed to be doing? Isn't the whole point of joining a religious movement to be given clarity of purpose?

The total institution, though, makes a lot more sense.

The ways academia totalizes and turns our "jobs" into a "life" has long seemed destructive to me, at least for those who don't in some way achieve the pinnacles of their careers. I am trying to be a full-time non-totalized academic, and to do it publicly. To be both "ac" and "alt-ac" at once (and a dad and musician), a position of privilege to be sure, but also one with both risks and rewards (there are grants and jobs for which, having gone public, I will never be able to compete. And then there's the trolls).

At any rate, I appreciate Baker's thoughtful critique of academic culture here, one not relying on the easy "cult" language, but also not letting academia off the hook.

We Cannot Arm Our Way To Less Gun Violence

Sunday, October 4, 2015 0 comments
Image Description: Me on CNN. Michigan Ave/Chicago River behind me.
David Perry: Associate Professor, Dominican University
Headline: Oregon Massacre, Campus Shooter Kills 9, Wounds 9
I went on CNN on Friday, 10/1, to discuss the terrible shooting on a community college campus in Oregon. CNN hasn't released a clip so I can't show it to you.

I'm glad to have had the chance to go on the air and say some of the things I believe. I was originally supposed to be paired with John Lott, a man who believes that more guns equals less crime (they don't). The show decided instead to separate us and so by the time I came on, the host wanted to talk about other things. I had about 90 seconds and said three sentences. I described our upcoming active-shooter drill at Dominican, about which I will write next week. I said that I do not want guns on campus.  I said that I do not believe adding more guns in the form of armed civilians will make us safer. Then my segment ended fairly abruptly.

At any rate, 90 seconds is a difficult time to make one's stance perfectly clear. Here are four things I wish I could have said more clearly on CNN.

1. I have no problem with highly-trained law enforcement positioned appropriately near campuses. Some universities are basically cities unto themselves, so they likely need their own armed police. My small suburban campus needs to coordinate its security with our small suburban police, the tactical units assigned to our area, and other highly-trained law enforcement officers.

2. I do not believe that allowing civilians, whether teachers, staff, faculty, or just random visitors, to carry arms on our campus is the right response. First, college campuses are sacred spaces to me, and I do not want to see them further profaned by these weapons of murder. More importantly, though, we cannot arm our way out of this crisis. If we turn every school into a fortress, mass shootings will move to the malls. Arm the malls, killers will go the churches. Arm the churches, then it will be little league games. We can take appropriate measures to defend against copycat killers, but cannot stop gun violence by reacting to the specifics of the last attack.

3. Around the world, there are people who are angry and potentially violent. People hate other people. People get personally slighted. People have mental health breakdowns (though people with mental illness are vastly more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence). It's only in America that these individuals are likely to react to their anger by using a firearm to commit an act of mass murder.

4. The only solution is to find ways to make access to firearms more difficult for people in those moments. There are simple steps - ban assault weapons, close gun show loopholes, expand background checks and waiting periods, share information across state lines, slow down the ability to purchase lots of handguns at once (used to buy from suburban gun shops and bring to illegal urban markets), and remove the Congressional ban on government-sponsored research on gun violence. None of these steps will restrict the ability of Americans to acquire firearms to hunt, for home defense, or even for conceal-carry purposes. But it will slow the flow, and that's what we need right now.

We cannot arm our way out of this crisis.

Some resources on gun violence. Whitehouse.gov on gun violence.

Sunday Roundup - Back on Blogger

Sunday, September 27, 2015 0 comments
Well, my move to Wix was a disaster. I did, however, defeat sunk cost bias and moved back here. I'll be writing more about the lessons of the disaster in the next week or so.

Here's what I wrote this week, even as I continue to work on my book and other long-term projects.
Should be a published piece or two next week. Thanks for reading!

Happy Eid from a Rude Professor at Rutgers

Thursday, September 24, 2015 0 comments
The above tweet details a snotty response to a student asking for an excused absence for Eid Al Adha. It's rude. It's arrogant. It's demeaning. It implies that the student is a liar and a slacker and insists the student brings in a note from their religious leader.

It also violates Rutgers' religious holiday policy:
It is University policy (University Regulation on Attendance, Book 2, 2.47B, formerly 60.14f) to excuse without penalty students who are absent from class because of religious observance, and to allow the make-up of work missed because of such absence. Examinations and special required out-of-class activities shall ordinarily not be scheduled on those days when religiously observant students refrain from participating in secular activities. Absences for reasons of religious obligation shall not be counted for purposes of reporting.
Students are advised to provide timely notification to instructors about necessary absences for religious observances and are responsible for making up the work or exams according to an agreed-upon schedule.
I hope the student formally reports this professor.

Jesse Leaves Wisconsin

Wednesday, September 23, 2015 0 comments
(Reposted from 9/9/15) 

Jesse Stommel is leaving a tenure-track job at Wisconsin to go take a job as a faculty development director at the University of Mary Washingon. He wrote a powerful blog post about the descision, which you should read.

I want to highlight just one point, out of the many, skipping the issue of the Wisconsin GOP attack on higher education (which is the main story): Jesse writes [his emphasis].

My work — the work I was hired to do — has not been supported. While I was initially assured that digital work for broad public audiences would count, I was later told I should wait to do that work until after tenure and focus on traditionally peer-reviewed publications for academic audiences. In January, the following bolded words were sent to me in a letter for my official file: “The Committee wants to send a clear message that what matters is tenure, what matters for tenure is peer review, and work posted on the web is not considered peer‐reviewed.” 

Jesse is an emerging leader in digital humanities,  pedagogy, alternate forms of publication, and more. This kind of work is what makes him a nationally-known voice in higher education. It increases, well, increased, UW Madison's reputation. It matters.

That his department/committee couldn't figure out a way to count that work is an indictment of their inflexibility. 

Tenure and Activism

0 comments
Here's a great piece from Conditionally Accepted about the way being on the tenure-track makes us conservative. It's wide-ranging and important, thinking about identity and many related issues. Read it all. Here's the bit that especially dovetails with my interests on public writing, activism, and the academy [my emphasis]:

More generally, I bear the burden of fear and doubt because the institution itself does not explicitly reward activism, advocacy, and community engagement.  I appreciate informally being told teaching a community-based learning class looks good, or that open access research is the way of the future for scholars.  And, at a minimum, there is little sense that such efforts would hurt one professionally (though I remain skeptical when such claims are made regarding activism).  But, formally, these initiatives are not valued; they are not explicitly mentioned in the tenure expectations outlined in our faculty handbook, nor is there a longstanding tradition of favorably evaluating community engagement and advocacy.  As I told my colleague, it’s great that the Center offers so much to faculty who engage the community in their work — even offering a small stipend to those who go through training on community-based teaching; but, short of the institutions explicit valuing of such efforts (i.e., counting it toward tenure), only a few brave souls will venture into them.

As I've said many times -  If we believe that something is important, we have to make it count for tenure, promotion, and hiring. 

Dominican University - We're Doing Something Right

Wednesday, May 20, 2015 0 comments
In my recent CNN piece, I wrote about my university with both pride and realism. We are a relatively low-cost private school that does some things exceptionally well. Those things that we do well cost money, though. I wrote:
The Pell Institute's publication "Moving Beyond Access: College Success For Low-Income, First-Generation Students" lists advising, tutoring, mentoring, and intense interaction in the classroom as among the key features necessary to retain first-generation students. In other words, it's not enough just to help students get into an affordable college. Once accepted, we have to help them succeed. I've seen advising, special programs and small classes work wonders at Dominican University, where I teach, and we're just one of many student-oriented universities that provide great supports for students who need it. But such programs and low student-to-faculty ratios cost money, and across the country, cost-cutting is making it harder for such students to thrive.
In an original draft, I received some pushback from my editor for seeming too promotional, so I added the vague "we're just one of many ..." clause. Since the theme of the piece is "quality matters" not "Dominican is great," I didn't argue, but I had the sense that we really are pretty good at Dominican and that it's not an accident.

My Dean saw my CNN piece and sent me an essay by education reformer Michael Danneberg (his bio) that specifically praises Dominican for our graduation rate. Graduation rates cannot be compared just by numbers, of course, because they have to be normed against expectations. High achieving highschool students are, obviously, more likely to graduate. According to Danneberg, "Dominican has the highest completion rate of similar colleges nationwide that serve similar students with similar levels of academic preparation."

That's pretty exciting and is also news to me. We have wonderful students and I knew we were crushing the expected graduation rate (normed for wealth, race, first-generation, etc.), but not to this extent. Here's the whole section from in which Danneberg compares us to a rival school (sorry St. Xavier) that is not doing so well: Dannenberg writes, speculating about where a hypothetical Midwestern philanthropist should give his or her money [my emphasis]:
Our Midwestern philanthropist should consider contributing scholarship aid forundocumented and other needy students only to needy individual colleges and universities that make a “meaningful commitment to diversity” and education equity. In higher education, that means schools that serve minority and working class students and gets them through — to degree completion in comparable numbers.
It just so happens there’s a great example of such a school in the Chicago area and a nearby example of a not-so-great school when it comes to educational equity.
Workbook1
Both Dominican University and Saint Xavier University are pretty good non-profit, private colleges when it comes to access and enrollment of students from low-income and working class families. But check out Dominican’s completion rate as compared to Saint Xavier’s. Not only is Dominican higher, but there’s virtually no education equity gap between white and underrepresented minority students. In fact, Dominican has the highest completion rate of similar colleges nationwide that serve similar students with similar levels of academic preparation.
Our philanthropist, all education philanthropists, should consider giving to Dominican University and similar schools doing a relatively good job on educational equity. And in the process they should challenge nearby Saint Xavier University and similar schools to do a better job.


So how is this happening? I have some guesses.

We have a shield!
First, our students are great. But I assume that our peers also have great students, though perhaps some aspect of the admissions process comes into play. There could be some micro-demographic that shapes outcomes.

Second, we have robust systems that create links between advising, tutoring (academic enrichment), student services of all sorts (under the Dean of Students) and faculty. People do fail at Dominican, but no one falls through the cracks unnoticed. We notice. We intervene. We often succeed in helping people get back on track.

Third, as a professor, I can say that since my first day on campus, I've been inculcated in a culture based on "relationship-centered" teaching. That doesn't mean easy, but it does mean treating each student with respect and the attention they deserve.

Fourth, we have small classes and only teach 3 per term, not 4 or 5. That costs money, of course. It's money well spent according to these outcomes.

Fifth, we have great leadership, from our President on down. Here's a piece I wrote last summer about her decision to make Dominican a leader in educating undocumented students. She has a fine sense of the balance of mission and business. I don't always agree with her (no one should every always agree with their leaders!), but I do trust her.

At any rate, I'm thrilled to have the things we do well noticed by an outsider. Dear Anonymous Midwestern Philanthropists - we're ready for you to fund us!


Low Cost and High Quality - One without the other is meaningless

Tuesday, May 19, 2015 0 comments
NOTE - This piece has been updated to remove a sentence in which I attributed ideas to Goldrick-Rab which she doesn't hold. I regret the error.

Yesterday I wrote a new piece for CNN, offering my take on the expanding debate about the cost of college.

Today, Bernie Sanders is going to file a 70 billion $ bill in the Senate to offer free public education to all Americans. That will be the latest move by Democrats to make the cost of college one of their issues. I expect to see Sanders debate Clinton (and whoever else) on debt-free vs free college. That's a good debate to have as the plans are different. I trust Sara Goldrick-Rab, who I quote in the piece, that we need to make sure to concentrate resources on those who need it most.

My mantra - Without investment in high quality education, lowering costs won't help those most in need.
I hope that the cost of college becomes a major political issue. But let's remember that low cost must be paired with high quality. High quality means providing good jobs for the people asked to prepare students for good jobs of their own. It means building educational structures with lots of face time, individualized education, and support systems for those new to learning. Otherwise, we can cut costs down to nothing, but we won't help the people most in need. To fix higher ed, the focus on savings must be accompanied by a massive public reinvestment in teaching and advising.
I'd like to ask for your help in making sure that when politicians start talking about cost, we ask them - who will be doing the teaching? Who will be doing the advising? Who will make sure that vulnerable students don't fall through the cracks?

Let's get to work.

What Institutions Owe Public Scholars

Friday, May 15, 2015 0 comments
Almost a year ago, I wrote about Steven Salaita being un-hired by the University of Illinois. I argued:
I come to this topic not as a partisan in the specifics of Salaita’s situation but as an advocate for faculty engagement with the public. Over the last year, I have written periodic columns for The Chronicle about the ways that academics can and should write for general audiences. Recently, I even suggested that "sustained public engagement" of any sort should count for hiring, tenure, and promotion.
When I write about this topic, I often get told that the real problem is that academics are snobs. We like living in an ivory tower, goes the argument, and we look with disdain on getting our hands dirty in the public sphere. There’s plenty of snobbery to go around, it’s true, but the Salaita affair shows a different, and I think more powerful, force that keeps many academics from commenting on important contemporary issues: fear.
I am a believe in and advocate four public engagement. But I try to overlook or understate the risks that public engagement brings, and regularly ask for universities to do more to support us. Unfortunately, it's going the other direction.
We need more public writing, not less. We need to open pathways for more academics to speak out in public, not punish Salaita for doing so in ways that have provoked such strong feelings. But we can’t ask scholars to embrace the risks of engagement in a system in which partisan bloggers and local papers can push timid administrators to fire, or in this case unhire, academics who leap into public debates.
Now Tressie McMillan Cottom, one of the smartest people around, has written a must read essay - Everything But the Burden in the context of Saida Gundy. She writes:
I have written about institutional marginality and neo-liberal appeals for scholars to “publicly engage”. If I could rewrite that article today I would ask how it is that there have been at least a dozen articles written about toxic black feminism on social media and black twitter but almost no articles on things like Twitchy. But, I digress.
What I really wanted to point out is how yet again we have an example of how woefully underprepared universities are to deal with the reality of public scholarship, public intellectuals, or public engagement.
She says: public scholarship means pissing people off.

She says: In academia, where twenty readers is a big deal, 200 angry emails can feel like a tsunami of public opinion (it isn’t). When three members of a committee can constitute a quorum, seeing 142 retweets of a negative opinion about your new assistant professor can feel like politics (it isn’t). Five whole think pieces at the online verticals of legacy media organizations can feel like the powers-that-be are censuring your institution (they aren’t).

Then she comes up with a series of steps you should take before publicly engaging. Demand your institution protects you if they want you to engage publicly. Read this one carefully.




A User's Guide to Live-Tweeting the International Medieval Congress

Wednesday, May 13, 2015 0 comments
Image: The word "Love" in red
stamped over the word "tweet." 
This weekend around three thousand medievalists - scholars and fans alike - will descend on the 50th Annual International Medieval Congress, a massive, interdisciplinary and relatively egalitarian academic gathering. It features a whopping 567 sessions, an outstanding book exhibit with new and used books from trade, university, and specialty used book stores, and many opportunities to network, socialize, and otherwise perform acts of conclave.
lovely campus of Western Michigan University. This is the 50th annual conference and I'm very much looking forward to it.

I will be in session 115 in Schneider 1140 (Thursday 3:30)
The Public Medievalist: A Roundtable on Engaging the Public with the Middle Ages 
Sponsor: Medieval Academy Graduate Student Committee
Organizer: Richard Barrett, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington
Presider: Stephanie Marie Rushe Chapman, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia
 A roundtable discussion with Bruce Holsinger, Univ. of Virginia; David Perry, Dominican Univ.; Susan Morrison, Texas State Univ.–San Marcos; Sandra Alvares, medievalists.net; and Paul Sturtevant, Smithsonian Institution
My remarks will, in a form, be published as part of a forum with postmedieval, at which point I will have more to say about that. I'm going to talk about the public/private register, what it means when you place yourself in the public one, and the obligation not to force people out of the private without permission.

I will be live-tweeting at least some of the time, and expect others of the medieval twitterati to do likewise. Live-tweeting is still a somewhat contested activity, I think because it changes a conference paper - a medium-stakes activity - into something with a more public and permanent register (the subject of my remarks, too). To defend against inadvertently doing this, I think the live-tweeter needs to limit himself/herself to relaying content, linking to relevant other material, perhaps asking questions, but not assessing the quality of talks on Twitter.

Here's Dorothy Kim from In the Middle - "A person live-tweeting a talk is...not your enemy." Please read it if you are going to Tweet (and her related The Rules of Twitter.) I also recommend reading it if you are concerned about other people Tweeting your talk.

One of the things I like about Kim's first piece, especially, is this:
The peculiar thing is, DH-style, intense live-tweeting reminds me most of medieval commentary practice. As a manuscript specialist, I spend a lot of time looking, reading, transcribing, and thinking about the physical manuscript medium. I am obsessed with the marginal and interlinear glosses and commentary as I am with the main text in a manuscript. If the medieval manuscript is a recording medium that allows scholar now to see the conversations and connected marginal glosses of individual readers, then twitter is the digital medium that replicates this practice the most but with comments all the time and in real time for individual thinkers. And like the medieval manuscripts that many of us work with (though we clearly don’t put in our own marginal commentaries anymore), twitter also records our short, marginal thoughts. Twitter as a medium also allows us to archive and record these conversations (vis-à-vis storify, etc.). For all these reasons, I adore twitter.
I like thinking of a live-tweet as a kind of first-take gloss. But remember that it is just a first take. If you really don't like the paper, if you think the paper is being delivered badly, if things seem disorganized, either close your laptop/ipad/phone or sit on your hands. If you can't tweet something nice (about a conference paper in this specific context), don't tweet anything at all.

And be mindful of power. The worst thing you could do is shame a graduate student or someone on the job market, making your off-the-cuff snark part of their permanent online record.
  • Tweet content: Person says ... 
  • Do not Tweet your personal critiques or make ad hominem remarks
  • Do link/raise questions that might lead off from the talk
  • Do not check your email or read facebook or whatever (it distracts your neighbors, just like students doing the same in your class)
  • For Kzoo, always use con-hashtag and session hashtag. I.e. mine is #kzoo2015 #s115 (this was a mess last year)
See you at the 'zoo!

Penn State: Shared Governance Only When Faculty Comply

Saturday, May 2, 2015 0 comments
Larry Backer is a named law professor at Penn State and a former chair of the Faculty Senate. These credentials matter, because when he attacks the faux system of shared governance at Penn State, as he does in this blog post, it might get taken seriously.

The piece is a long discussion of a recent issue in which the administration rejected Faculty Senate recommendations. It's a well-sourced piece, with links to many important pieces about the failures of Faculty Governance, and I recommend you read it. Here are a few quotes worth highlighting:
The administration had taken the decisions it announced at the meeting well beforehand, and had taken the time to craft a carefully constructed explanation, neither the decision nor a copy of the remarks were made available to Senate leadership before thew [sic] actual presentation.
That's faux-shared-governance. It's announced at the Faculty Senate, but decided in closed meetings long before. The Senate becomes a place where decisions are read at Faculty.
The role of the Senate appears increasingly to receive information rather than engage with it in the context of policy making (discussed here).
This is not shared governance, but the Faculty senate as a human email list, where memos are distributed.
Shared governance increasingly appears to mean the forms through which selected faculty chosen for their technical proficiency or other attributes, are appointed to committees directed by and for the attainment of administrative objectives. Short comment opportunities may be afforded the institutional voice of the faculty, but the understanding is that the policy has been chosen and only technical corrections will be entertained. Policy is beyond the reach of the faculty (Discussed here).
This is my concern about the task-force model that my university is increasingly using. It frequently involves un-elected faculty being appointed to consider important things (for no compensation/time off). It's a model that dodges shared governance. At Penn State, a "large and complex" institution, these issues are even more acute. Talented faculty - and PSU has lots of them - are plucked out to run various things or lend their expertise, but there's no real governance.

And speaking of "large and complex..."
The phrase "this is a large and complex institution" is not meant as a description of an institution, it is meant as a barrier to effective engagement. Administration is now the domain of specialists who, through their intense and superior knowledge, have become the high priests of the cult religion of university operation.
Nothing to add here. Or here [his emphasis]:
Policy is for the administrative apparatus--for the faculty there is only an opportunity to engage in technical review. The mechanics of power nicely masks its objective--to produce an optics of complicity in policy formation stripped of any authority to actually contribute to policy.
Finally, on a note of non-optimism:
 Penn State, of course, is neither exceptional nor notable for these changes.  It represents merely one illustration of a much more profound development in the organization and operation of academic institutions....It is unlikely that, except at the margins, the process is either reversible or likely to change course.  
It is important, I think, to recognize the lack of shared governance lying behind overt principles of shared governance, to call them out for what they are, and to try to work at the margins as best as one can.
 

Love Song for a Neoliberal University: StarbucksU

Wednesday, April 22, 2015 0 comments
The May edition of The Atlantic has a long article on the first batch of students to go to StarbucksU (I wrote about it for CNN last May, troubled by the notion of employment-based education). Overall, it's a solid article in terms of reporting and structure. It tells the stories of people struggling to finish college. Starbucks comes off pretty well here, trying to do its part while getting good PR and not spending too much money. So far, about 1500 people have enrolled, and some will undoubtedly finish, and good for them.

And yet, the article has a kind of casual anti-intellectual and pro-corporate voice. In short, it's an advertisement for the neoliberal university.

Here's an example.
We assume that people drop out of college because of the cost. But that’s only part of the explanation. Listen closely to former students, and you’ll hear them tell stories about bureaucracies losing their paperwork, classes running out of spots, nonsensical tuition bills, and transcript offices that don’t take credit cards. The customer service is atrocious.
Simply put, many Americans fail to finish college, because many colleges are not designed to be finished. They are designed to enroll students, yes. They are built to garner research funds and accrue status through rankings and the scholarly articles published by faculty. But those things have little to do with making sure students leave prepared to thrive in the modern economy.
Notice the slash at scholarship. Here's another.
"Arizona State still relies upon many standard college practices, and some faculty members remain more focused on winning grants and publishing than on teaching. But over the past decade, the university’s leadership has gotten unusually creative about circumventing these models and finding new ways to reach students."
Those damn faculty members who want to do research. They are the problem, not a bureaucratizing corporate system that extracts wealth from students in exchange for the lowest possible standard of education that for-profits like ASU Online can provide. Yes, there are lots of problems with our system. Yes, I think the ways in which our prestige economy rewards research over teaching is an issue. But I am quite sure that faculty members pursuing grants is not what's threatening higher education in America today.

Moreover, the forces driving the kind of quantitative assessment of scholarly productivity, where all that counts is what can be counted, are the same forces that create massive over-bureacratization, the for-profit wings of ASU, drive college costs ever higher, and otherwise contribute to a world in which StarbucksU looks like a solution. It may be, but it's coming out of the same world that created the problems in the first place.

But no fear, the university is creative.
“ASU Online is a profit venture,” said Goldrick-Rab. “And basically, these two businesses have gotten together and created a monopoly on college ventures for Starbucks employees.”
Creative! You think you're getting an ASU education, but what you really get are Pearson functionaries and incredibly overworked instructors. Welcome to the future of Neoliberal University.

This article speaks to a number of problems, but I want to focus on this one. We, as a profession, have failed to explain (and keep explaining and keep explaining) why having professors who do research matters. We need to work on that, and by we, I mean everyone, especially people who do more specialized research than I do. 

In the meantime, we have this
Since Starbucks announced the program in June, 20,000 people who have applied online for jobs at the company have cited the college benefit as a reason for their interest. One barista I interviewed had quit her office job in Dallas and taken a $4-an-hour pay cut to attend college for free through Starbucks. The company does not have data yet on whether employee retention has increased, but so far, it has spent very little and received significant PR and HR returns.
That's a failure of our national system, and something I wrote about for CNN in my piece. When we make college contingent on employment with a certain company, as we do now with healthcare, we limit mobility, we limit choice, we limit career development, we limit risk-taking and entrepreneurial spirit.

So, the challenges are clear.
  1. Articulate why specialized research is not in opposition to good teaching, but is in fact complementary.
  2. Resist linking college to employment (in the way that linking healthcare to employment has been a disaster).
  3. Continue to fight the development of a two-tier college education model, in which elites get access to individuals and ideas, thus being prepared for tomorrow's jobs, while everyone else is offered training only for yesterday's.





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