- Always treat the people you work with as if they are smart; explain why you take a stand or make a decision in a manner that demonstrates that you know they are smart, critical, and open to persuasion by evidence and argument. Set high standards for yourself. Your institutional work should be at least as smart as your scholarly work.
- "it is better to be wrong than vague." - Stinchcombe
- If smart people are opposed to your idea, ask them to explain why. And listen non-dismissively and non-defensively. Remember, you goal is to get it right, not to get it your way.
- Do not put people in charge of cost cutting and budget reductions. Put them in charge of producing excellence within a budget constraint.
- Make sure everyone is able to say how many Xs one student leaving represents. How much will it cost to do the thing that reduces the chance a student will get fed up with things?
- If most of what a consultant tells you is what you want to hear (or already believe), fire her.
- Don't build/design system and policies around worst cases, least cooperative colleagues, people who just don't get it, or individuals with extraordinarily hard luck situations. Do not let people who deal with "problem students" suggest or make rules/policy.
- Be wise about what you must/should put up for a vote and what you should not. And if you don't know how a vote will turn out, they are are not prepared to put it up for a vote. Do your homework, person by person.
- If a top reason for implementing a new academic program is because there's lots of interest among current students, pause. Those students are already at your school. What you want are new programs that are attractive to people who previously would not have given you a second look.
- If you are really surprised by the reaction folks have to an announcement or decision then just start your analysis with the realization that YOU screwed up.
- Related: and don't assume it was just about the messaging; you might actually be wrong and you should want to know whether that's the case.
- If you or someone else's first impulse when asked to get something done is to form a committee, put someone else in charge of getting that thing done.
- Train folks to realize that teams and committees in organizations are not representative democracies. The team does not want your opinions, feelings, experiences, or beliefs; it wants you enrich the team's knowledge base by reporting on a part of the world you know something about. And that usually means going and finding out in a manner that is sensitive to your availability bias. In the research phase, team members are the sense organs of the team.
Showing posts with label faculty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faculty. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Ten Reflections from the Fall Semester
Notes from this semester. Each semester I jot down observations about organizational practices, usually inspired by events at my place of employment. Every now and then I try to distill them into advice for myself. Most are obvious, once articulated, but they come to notice, usually, because things happen just the other way round.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
"But even if they are not valid, they do tell you something...."
Remember, "validity" means "they measure what you think they measure." "Data driven" can also mean driven right off the side of the road.
New study adds to evidence that student reviews of professors have limited validity.
September 21, 2016
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing gender.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; tenure cases have even hinged on it.
What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”
“Whereas the small sample sized studies showed large and moderate correlation, the large sample sized studies showed no or only minimal correlation between [student evaluations of teaching, or SET] ratings and learning,” reads the study, in press with Studies in Educational Evaluation. “Our up-to-date meta-analysis of all multi-section studies revealed no significant correlations between [evaluation] ratings and learning.”
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
A Salary Plan for All that Addresses Income Inequality
Description of proposal at St. Mary's College in Maryland to establish a salary plan that would tie ALL employees' (faculty, administrators, presidents) salaries to the wages received by the lowest paid full time employees.
August 25, 2014
Colleges Could Narrow the Income Gap on Campuses
Growing inequality threatens our society.
A few years ago, such a provocative claim might have had limited support beyond a public park in lower Manhattan. Today a rising tide of voices warns of the ill effects of the increasing concentration of wealth and income. The warnings come from academics like Thomas Piketty, politicians like Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and, at times, President Obama. Now even the self-described "zillionaire" Nick Hanauer, in a recent Politico article, implores us to avoid what he characterizes as an impending rush of pitchforks.
...
At St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a public honors college, a group of faculty and staff members, students, and alumni have put together a proposal that would permanently cap the growing ratio between the top and bottom earners on the campus. The St. Mary’s Wages plan would establish a benchmark minimum salary for the lowest-paid full-time employees that would rise with inflation. Tenure-track faculty members would make at least twice that benchmark. Different groups of workers (for example, associate professors, professional-staff members) would be guaranteed wages above specified fixed multiples of the lowest salary.
Monday, April 21, 2014
Meeting as Wasted Time: Made, not Born
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a very long time. We academics completely miss the mark when we decry the number of meetings we have to attend. The problem is not the number of meetings, it's how abysmally run they are. Both our colleagues and our administrative sisters and brothers waste scads of institutional resources (read our time) by poorly thought out, poorly prepared for, and poorly managed meetings. We tend not to help much: few of us really know how to attend a meeting and almost no one actually does any "homework" before a meeting.
One solution I have been trying to sell is the budgeting of faculty time. Anyone who calls a meeting has to "pay" for it and in any given semester there is only so many "meeting person-hours" to go around. Another is to have ongoing training in how to do meeting. It's one area where some for profit companies have figured something out : they respect the idea that time is money and so they try to waste less of it.
Read more at Chronicle.com
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Decreasing Teaching (Course) Load at Swarthmore College
Note: This makes for an interesting pairing with the previous post. It does not take too flexible a mind to think of expanding admin ranks as effectively reducing the work load in those precincts. General pattern is clear: when duties expand, in some areas workforce expands, in others workload.
Several years ago faculty and administrators at Swarthmore College started talking about reducing faculty teaching load from 5 to 4 courses per year. The college is presently in the midst of a multi-year transition to a 4 course load. Some initial discussions are captured in their 2009 Middle States Reaccreditation Self-Study (which also mentions a "Teaching Load and Faculty Development at Peer Institutions" document) and in their 2011 Strategic Plan.
A 2012 article from Swarthmore student newspaper contains an excellent summary of the motivations behind as well as analysis of the implications such a switch. Among the phrases that might grab your attention:
"One of the consistent things we heard [in Strategic Planning sessions] was that people felt a need for time in order to do what they considered to be the professional minimum… Not only are people doing more work in order to deliver excellent instruction, but some of them are plausibly close to the line where they can’t do that. If we’re so close to the edge, then that’s something to take seriously."
"most of us are scrambling" "running on fumes" "long-term sustainability of the teacher-scholar" "creep of time commitments" "acceleration of change and an expansion of how we learn""subtle, fundamental, and inevitable shift in professors’ job descriptions" "intensification of professor responsibilities"
Students also penned articles suggesting the plan was not in their interest
The plan was, apparently, eventually put into place, though not with immediate effect. Here's a summary from another student newspaper:
Monday, February 10, 2014
Who's a Cost Center? : The Higher Ed Work Force Report
The Delta Cost Project, a research group under the American Institutes for Research (AIR) that looks at higher education costs, has released a report titled "Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive? Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education."
Unfortunately some of the analysis in the report is easy to misinterpret because it moves back and forth between headcount, FTE, and dollars. Sometimes a trend toward more part time employees looks like growth in workforce, sometimes not. Thus, their figure 1 (here truncated) might indicate growth in workforce at private master's and bachelor's institutions or it might reflect a shift from full time to part time employees.
Still, I think the report deserves a close reading and that the appropriate folks at my own institution should inquire about where we stand on each of the metrics described and then initiate some critical conversations on whether we are pleased or not by the answers.
But in any case, this quote : "You can’t blame faculty salaries for the rise in tuition. Faculty salaries were 'essentially flat' from 2000 to 2012, the report says" from the CoHE article below will probably engender some interesting conversations.
See Also
- Marcus, Jon. "New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators" Huffington Post
- Schuman, Rebecca. "Doing Higher Ed Right: Increasing education funding! Hiring full-time professors! Are these places for real?" Slate
- Krogstad, Jens Manuel. "Iowa State bucks trend in faculty hires: It's the only U.S. university to both increase faculty and make cuts in all other areas" Des Moines Register
Props to Maia Averett for calling HuffPost to my attention.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Do Faculty Matter? Effects of Faculty Participation in University Decisions
This paper models the effects of faculty participation in university decision making. Its findings suggest that by affecting academic quality, faculty participation provides a net benefit to the institution compared to scenarios in which faculty are excluded from decision making.
The model's assumptions about institutional quality and how enrollment depends on it strike me as too simple even if a good starting point and I'm not enough of a modeler to assess the quality of the model, but it is nice to see the question framed formally. The benefits of clear thinking may outweigh shortcomings. It might be more of a conversation starter than exhortations based on things like representation or the right of participation.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Recent Pieces from AAUP
May/June2013
- H-J Tiede. Faculty Communication with Governing Boards
- R G Ehrenberg, R W Patterson, and A V Key. Faculty Members on Boards of Trustees
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