0 Wisconsin Republicans Rethinking Shared Governance in University of Wisconsin System

At a meeting of the Regents today, Representative Robin Vos suggested that the Wisconsin Legislature Republican caucus is rethinking the faculty's role in governance on UW System campuses, out of a sense that they are keeping the System from being "nimble."  I am concerned that Representative Vos may be unaware of economic research that indicates that faculty involvement in decision-making through shared governance appears to contribute to the containment of college costs.  Reducing faculty power in favor of increasing the administration's relative power could make college less affordable for Wisconsin students.  These unintended consequences of Vos's short-sighted idea deserve close examination, and I urge him to attend to these before pursuing it further.

Here is the document from the Republican working group.

Here is the video from the conference.  Vos begins speaking at the 1:17 minute mark on the first video, and these comments come just after the 1:18 minute mark. 

0 The Illusory Appeal of the UW-Madison MOOCs

It was only a matter of time.  The anticipation was palpable when a group of about 50 concerned faculty, students, and staff from around UW-Madison gathered last summer to talk about the governance crisis at UVA.  The president of that flagship university had just been ousted for failing to quickly embrace MOOCs-- a sign some UVA board members thought meant that she was failing to embrace the "disruptive innovation" that will purportedly transform higher education.  While President Teresa Sullivan was reinstated some weeks later, after a period of alumni outrage, the writing was on the wall.  MOOCs were established as an especially hot new trend with broad appeal among the powerful who find "shock and awe" scenarios the best way to promote change-- and it wouldn't be long before UW-Madison lept into the quicksand.

This morning UW-Madison is going public with the news that we're joining with Coursera to offer four pilot MOOCs.  Our administrators have apparently decided MOOCs are "compelling"enough to jump on the bandwagon.

This is a pretty remarkable turn of events, for several reasons. Let's set aside for a moment that relatively little open, public discussion of MOOCs has occurred on campus, especially discussion involving faculty and students.  But frankly, I can't even pretend surprise about that anymore. As usual, the University Committee and "numerous" faculty were engaged in discussions with administrators, but obviously that's small potatoes on a campus of 2,000+ professors.  If surveyed, I'm willing to bet that 50% or more of the professors at Madison don't know what a MOOC is, despite the presence of this "thought piece" crafted "for considering if MOOCs are right for UW-Madison at this point in time" and placed on a website most faculty don't know about.

Instead, I'm a little more surprised at the apparent willingness of the Madison administration to engage in the illusions/delusions of grandeur posed by the MOOC movement. Sure, this is just four courses, a small step forward, and it's framed as a pilot effort to "learn by doing."  It's not as if the entire campus has gone for MOOC madness.  But "learning by doing" is often akin to a gateway drug--once you've done a little, you might as well do more-- after all, you've already make the investment.  Furthermore, if you're really learning by doing, you build in continuous assessment of both intended and unintended consequences-- and the administration's documents don't mention of this sort of work at all. (Fingers crossed that the evaluation plan is among a detailed set of documents we'll soon get to see.)

The rhetorical flourishes of MOOCs abound, with talk of great public service and institutional branding. But in some key areas, the reality seems far grimmer.  Consider this:

1. MOOCs cost money and apparently generate little in return. We are constantly told that financial resources are scarce on campus, and hard to come by.  But as Madison's administrators know very well, MOOCs "require upfront investment without directly generating new revenue."  The business model for MOOCs is simply unclear.  What even the administration suspects is that it likely threatens the employment of our teaching assistants.

2. MOOCs take faculty time. There's rampant complaints of "overwork" among Madison faculty and yet at the same time demand by our students for access to more courses with us.  MOOCs require time to develop and teach.  If course releases are provided to do this, it pretty much has to come at a cost to UW-Madison students-- or involve further overloading the faculty.  This leads me to wonder, why would we release our professors,  paid with state appropriations and student tuition, to teach students elsewhere?  While it's grand and laudable, expanding their influence and potentially improving our rankings, how is this any different than funding a course release for a professor who flies off to teach at Harvard or in Shanghai?  We don't do that, so why do this?  Professors can and do engage in such things on their own, but they aren't paid by us for it. Why should this be different?

3. MOOCs don't address the core problems we face as a state institution.  MOOCs will neither strengthen our relationships with the Wisconsin legislature or rural communities or help us deliver greater economic development returns to the state.  While these are not all we are tasked with doing, or have the ambition to do, by investing energy in MOOCs rather than those other activities, we are revealing our priorities.  There are opportunity costs to every effort, and this one is occupying our time.

4. Despite their name, there is little chance that MOOCs will serve the masses truly in need of free educational opportunities. The Madison document suggests that MOOCs will "improve lives" and increase "access to education" and thus help fulfill the Wisconsin Idea. This is the grandest claim of all, and yet it's the most far-fetched.  There's no evidence to suggest that the people taking advantage of learning from MOOCs are the under-educated-- but rather they are the highly-educated seeking to learn a bit more in the process of lifelong learning. An assessment of one of Duke's MOOCs found that just 11% of the MOOC enrollment came from students who hadn't attended college-- and the tiny percent of course completers usually held a BA or higher.  MOOCs aren't a substitute for postsecondary education; they are a continuation of it.  They represent not our core mission but the "extras" that we hope to provide at Madison-- if only we can afford to do so.

So let me conclude with this. I love UW-Madison and I love it when we try new things as a university.  Pushing the envelope is a sign of bravery, and our faculty are nothing if not fearless.  But jumping onto an already-moving train just because our peers are onboard, at a time when we have scarce resources and much to lose, well, it looks a bit insane.  And it's really scary to think that some of our administrators subscribe to a shock doctrine approach to educational change, awaiting a "sufficient sense of urgency" to reach the campus to get it engaged in MOOCs.

Let's really debate the MOOCs, sifting and winnowing our way through the process. Let's talk about how to assess this pilot effort, and what sorts of outcomes must be measured.  Let's figure out a plan to put an end to these pilots if they are costing us more than they're worth.  As my colleague Kris Olds has put it, "There are political and economic machinations associated with the stirring of interest in, and coverage of, MOOCs. Given this, and given the stakes at hand, it is important to address the MOOCs phenomenon is a serious, sustained, and reflective way, not in a knee jerk fashion, one way or the other."  Agreed. And now Olds is creating one of Madison's 4 new MOOCs.

With that,  I invite you to a conversation about MOOCs taking place during ED TALKS Wisconsin, Friday March 15 at 7 pm at the School of Education.  Our keynote speaker is Anya Kamenetz, and Kris Olds will be responding to her, along with Chancellor of UW Colleges Ray Cross.  It should be a really good time-- hope to see you there!


ps. Need a laugh? Check out what North Korea's up to regarding MOOCs. (H/T Gary Rhoades)

0 Shared Governance in UW System

One week ago, a group of concerned faculty, staff, and students organized a forum at UW-Madison to discuss shared governance: what it is, how it's been challenged in the past, and what current risks it's currently facing.  The forum, held at 5 pm on the Monday before Thanksgiving, drew more than fifty people to the Wisconsin Idea Room in the School of Education. Speakers included former chair of the University Committee, Judith Burstyn, Professor Emeritus of History Jim Donnolly, Professor of Political Science Don Downs, David Ahrens of the Wisconsin University Union, and Chad Goldberg, Professor of Sociology.

There was a robust conversation about the precedent set by the famed Spoto case in establishing the importance of joint decision-making in shared governance, a process that in the University of Wisconsin System goes well beyond simply advice and input.  The key takeaway: when faced with an impasse between faculty and administration on an issue over which faculty have primary domain (e.g. academic affairs), both parties must continue to negotiate until an agreement is reached. Until then, no action can be taken by either side.

My sense is that leaders all over campus-- administrators, faculty, staff, and students-- misunderstand this key attribute of shared governance. The buck simply stops without agreement. There is no right to "move on" without compromise.  Simply collecting input, providing information, holding listening sessions, etc, that's all wonderful but also entirely insufficient without explicit agreement.

It's nearly impossible to overstate the importance shared governance to the University of Wisconsin System, to maintaining high academic standards, crafting an engaged body of teaching and learning, and ensuring operations that are high quality and cost-effective.  We have no faculty union -- no collective voice-- while shared governance is a collection therefore of individuals, it is what we have.

I will end with a wonderful talk given by Chad Goldberg during the forum. He's quite the wordsmith, so I'm grateful to him for allowing me to post it in full.

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"Current Challenges to Shared Governance at UW-Madison" 

Chad Alan Goldberg

November 19, 2012

"I’ve been asked to speak about current challenges to shared governance. I will talk about two kinds: external challenges, from outside authorities, and an internal challenge, from faculty disengagement. Ultimately, I will suggest, the latter encourages and reinforces the former.

The external challenges, though predating the current HR Redesign Project, have been thrown into stark relief by the Administration’s handling of it.

To be sure, the HRDP has been participatory in a certain sense. The Administration formulated the “Strategic Plan for a New UW-Madison HR System” based on the recommendations of eleven work teams on which many employees served, and it followed up the release of the plan with information sessions at which further feedback was elicited. Notwithstanding the problems that David Ahrens and others have noted, including disproportionate representation of OHR on the teams work teams and dependence on their technical expertise, this attempt to gather input from employees was commendable. I availed myself of some these opportunities, as did many others. However, providing feedback and input is no substitute for shared governance, especially when people must rely on an atomistic and aggregative mode of producing public opinion that demobilizes them.

Furthermore, the language in the “Strategic Plan for a New UW-Madison HR System” was itself problematic. Shared governance was redescribed there as giving “input” and “feedback.” We did not want to see this definition of shared governance fixed in place by the plan and, worse yet, endorsed by the Faculty Senate itself.

We moved to postpone endorsement of the “Strategic Plan” at the November 5th Faculty Senate meeting for two reasons. First, we were asked to vote on a plan before it was finalized. As my colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab put it, this would be like signing off on a master’s thesis before it was finished. Second, we were asked to endorse a plan despite ongoing controversy about and significant resistance to specific changes affecting the job security and wages and compensation of other university employees. Vice Chancellor Darrell Bazzell’s comments to some of the Faculty Senators calling for postponement were revealing. The Vice Chancellor asked why we were doing this, and he expressed concern that postponement would deprive the faculty of a chance to vote on the plan before it was sent to the Regents. Not only did these remarks reduce shared governance to a plebiscite, they also implied that the plan’s executive sponsors can act unilaterally, without agreement from the faculty.

I see these external challenges to shared governance as part of a broader erosion of the rights of faculty, staff, and students to participate in decision-making on campus. Another instance of this erosion is the evisceration of collective bargaining rights by Act 10. While the Administration cannot be held responsible for Act 10, it can be criticized for its unwillingness to commit itself to a “meet-and-confer” process in the absence of collective bargaining. In addition, current disputes over WISPIRG funding indicate that students are also facing an erosion of their rights. As I understand it, WISPIRG funding requires, in addition to student approval, a contract with the University, which has been signed by previous chancellors in the past. Interim Chancellor David Ward has yet to grant the contract that the Associated Students of Madison requested almost a year ago to keep WISPIRG in existence. His refusal appears to stem from a legal dispute about the process by which student government should identify student needs and act to meet them. Should the Administration prescribe this process on the basis of its interpretation of the relevant statutes? Surely students ought to have the right to determine how best to identify their needs and to decide where their fees go. What do students learn about democratic citizenship when those rights are denied?

Alongside these external challenges to shared governance, the HR Design Project has also underscored an important internal challenge. Insufficient faculty engagement in the HRDP is symptomatic of what, many years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville called individualism: the tendency that “disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.”

Insufficient faculty engagement in the HRDP is a kind of abdication of responsibility for the university’s public affairs—not an abdication by all faculty, and certainly not by the University Committee, but by a significant portion of the faculty and even, I suspect, by some members of the Faculty Senate itself.

There are many reasons for this abdication. Faculty are extremely busy people, which leads to a desire to delegate: let Pushkin do it, where Pushkin in this case is the Administration or OHR or perhaps the UC. The perception that the HRDP affected faculty less than other university employees also no doubt discouraged faculty engagement. And we generally trust the groups to which we seek to delegate such matters. Trust is not a bad thing. As a sociologist, I know institutions and organizations cannot operate without it. Still, it’s worth bearing in mind the old Russian folk saying: trust but verify.

I’m not suggesting that faculty have the time or expertise to design the university’s personnel system ourselves, but we need to be engaged in the process, and not just as individuals but collectively, as a body, through the Faculty Senate.

Why is individualism a problem? Because the alternative, as Tocqueville pointed out, is guardianship and tutelage. Bad guardians use their power to make decisions with which citizens may not agree and which may even be detrimental to their interests. But even in the best case, when benevolent guardians have our best interests at heart, guardianship gradually degrades our capacities to think, feel, and act for ourselves in matters that affect us and for which we have a legal responsibility."

0 Shared Governance at UW-Madison -- In Jeopardy?

Since last week's Faculty Senate meeting, my email inbox has grown cluttered with letters from faculty, staff, and students who are experiencing violations of shared governance at UW-Madison.  All are afraid to speak out with their names included, fearful of responses from the Administration.  I can't tell you how upsetting this is, especially given my own Biddy battles during the term I was up for tenure.

In any case, one brave soul has decided to allow me to quote from his letter.  I hope you'll consider his words (below) and then decide to join us next week for a discussion of the past and future of shared governance at Madison.

There will be a FORUM on these issues held on Monday November 19 from 5-630 pm in the Wisconsin Idea Room of the School of Education. Sponsors include WUU, TAA, WISCAPE, and UFAS.  You can rsvp here.

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Hi Sara,

The biggest issue for me now is the apparent demolition of faculty governance. Wisconsin has a long history of egalitarian democracy and shared governance. It's one of our hallmarks compared to other universities.

The HR redesign process has been most offensive to me in its top-down dictatorial nature. It's like someone asking for you to sign a blank check and saying "trust me" when asked what dollar amount and payee will be written in.

That's like when Noah Feinstein says "the devils that lurk in the details yet to come."

At the last faculty meeting, after the sham representation we received from the University Committee, I thought this whole vote is a sham. They are saying "it's like a courtesy we are being asked to render an opinion, but don't expect to play more than an advisory role."

My immediate thought was to make a motion to postpone so they have to show their cards and reveal it's a sham. When Chad Goldberg beat me too it, and so eloquently too, and you made the ten-faculty-needed-for-a-paper-ballot motion -- well it was one of my happiest days at a faculty senate meeting in my life!

So, I think the bigger issue here is the move by the administration to subvert faculty governance. More people will be outraged by that that the HR redesign.

I liked Noah's statement that faculty governance is the ability "to approve or reject policies - not merely offer advice and input to some uncertain end."

That to me is the crux of the issue.

0 New Research: Shared Governance Promotes Cost-Effectiveness

Good news for UW-Madison faculty, staff, and students:  a new study suggests that shared governance lowers institutional costs per student.  The disintegration of shared governance across the nation's universities has contributed substantially to rising costs, according to these economists.  But not at UW-Madison, right folks? We are keeping shared governance alive.

There is more good news.  The study also says that the optimal ratio for cost containment is 3 tenure-track faculty for every 1 full-time administrator.  At many places there are now twice as many administrators as faculty.  But not at Madison. This year, Madison has 1,986 tenure-track FTE faculty compared 406 FTE administrators, a ratio of 4.86 to 1.

However there may be some need for closer attention to what lies ahead.  The study also suggests that we need to take into account students (imagine that!) and think about our staffing relative to students, not merely one another. And there, the evidence suggests potential problems.  Between 1987-2008, the study reports that nationally at public research universities the number of administrators per 100 students increased 9%, while at Madison the data digests show that growth was 34% -- with another 5% growth occurring since 2008.  In comparison, nationally the number of tenure-track faculty per 100 students grew by 3%, while at Madison it declined by 3%, then rebounded for a total net gain of 2% in the last five years. Admittedly, Madison started with a higher baseline for faculty-- almost 0.5 more tenure-track professors per 100 students than the national average-- and a lower baseline for administrators--about 0.6 fewer administrators per 100 students than the national average.  But even so, this change over time is not necessarily about striking a better balance, and  given the trends we in shared governance need to ensure that's the sole motivation.

Punchline? At the moment, we seem to be in a good spot.  This study contradicts the "popular hypothesis [that] intransigent tenure track faculty prevent costs from being minimized by cost conscious administrators."  The shared governance metric (the ratio of tenure track faculty to full time professional administrators)  is not correlated with cost. Instead, "costs are convex in the ratio of tenure track faculty to full time administrators and the models suggest costs are lowest when the ratio is approximately three tenure track faculty for every one administrator."

The problem is that "the ratio goes higher or lower costs per student are higher." If anything, this study suggests that we may have too many faculty at Madison given the numbers of students we are serving-- a great case for increasing enrollment, and maybe, growing the size of the administration a bit too (whew, never thought I'd say that).

0 UPDATED! UW-Madison's Community Speaks Out on HR Design

Tuesday morning at 11 am, my colleagues and I initiated an online petition requesting that the Director of Human Resources at UW-Madison, Bob Lavigna, put his good intentions for revising the HR plan in writing before shared governance groups are asked to vote on the plan next week.

Just one day later, we had 223 signatures and counting!  Two days later we crossed the 300 mark.  This includes dozens of faculty, including many prominent, senior members who know and love the place.  Clearly, in this town people care about having information at hand and in writing before they're asked to vote.  As Marcia Schiffman of the Department of Opthamology and Visual Science put it, "How can you make an informed decision either way without the actual proposal, changes and all, in front of you?"

One of the best things about an online petition is that signers can leave comments, and as a sociologist I'm finding their words full of insights into how we struggle to make public higher education a better place.  Consider what this effort means to them.

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"The HR redesign plan will have deep, long-run implications for the climate and values at the University of Wisconsin. Often such institutional redesigns have significant 'unintended consequences.' Only if the details are clear and explicit is it possible to assess these implications."

Erik Olin Wright, Professor, Department of Sociology

"There are reasons why people work for corporations or work for the University. I've worked at the UW for 20 years and I always felt the employee had a voice. This has not been the feeling in the last few years. We need to bring that back and now is the time to start."

 Mark Mears, Graduate Coordinator, Department of German

"As an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison, it is imperative to me that the process and outcomes of the HR Design plan reflect our campus values and commitments, and that this process be as transparent and open as possible."

Edward Hubbard, Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Psychology

"I sign this petition because I love this university and am so proud to work at a university that values faculty governance and values every one of its employees. The HR design can strengthen or weaken this incredible institution."

                          Nancy Kendall, Associate Professor, Department of Educational Policy Studies

"We don't need to move backward, we need to move forward. This effects all employees of UW-Madison. Everyone has a voice and should be heard. We should be able to work coopertavely, together."

Marsha Abrams, Medical Associate, Department of Psychiatry

"Working for the UW used to come with shiny bells and whistles. The shininess has been replaced by rust in the matter of a few years. People are talking more about leaving the UW than staying. I don’t want to feel as if I am expendable, nor do I want my fellow co-workers to feel that way. It is only fair and just to be fully informed, not just be shown what are to be the benefits of the new OHR system, but what is hidden in the dark corners as well. A well informed community is what is needed in order to make a wise decision towards any investment, and this would be a huge investment for our University. Our place of work, our lives, our family’s lives, the student’s lives, and the city’s heart will all be impacted."

Kristina Kendall, Accounts Payable

"Effective faculty governance requires full access to information."

Jon McKenzie, Associate Professor, Department of English

"As encouraged by George McGovern, I wish to be a voice of conscience."

Teryl Dobbs, Assistant Professor, Department of Music Education

**********

Finally, as we look forward into our future-- and our new chancellor-- I leave you with these words of warning issued by Jay Stamper, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis: "It is best to go into the future with a well developed plan." 

Join us--sign now-- and tell us what you think.

0 Human Resource Directors and Employee Unions

Tomorrow afternoon, the Faculty Senate at UW-Madison will hear from Bob Lavigna, the institution's Human Resources Director. Lavigna will be discussing HR Design, a new plan I've covered several times recently on this blog. It's a controversial proposal, in part because it shifts the focus on setting compensation from internal equity towards external markets.  It also reduces some of the benefits held by classified staff, who are currently unionized, and for whom perks like substantial vacation time slightly dull the pain stemming from the terrible wages.

I was therefore intrigued when this morning I delved into my Inside Higher Ed backlog of reading and found the results of a brand new national survey of HR directors and their opinions about the future directions universities need to take.  The results help to at least partially set the broader stage on which HR Design is occurring.   (Partially: the response rate for this survey is 15% and with just 324 participants, 42 of whom were at public research universities, who knows if Madison is represented.)

Here are some key highlights related to HR Design:

• Concerns about salary equity are losing ground. Nearly 32% of HR Directors at public research universities said they are paying less attention to equity in faculty and staff salaries than they did five years ago, and just 17% are attending to those issues more often, despite the strong likelihood (given austerity practices) that inequities are growing.

• Almost all HR Directors take a dim view of unions. Close to 90% of HR Directors at public research universities contend that unions inhibit their ability to re-deploy people and define job tasks, discourage pay for performance, and inappropriately protect poor performing employees.   Less than 1/3 of such Directors acknowledge unions' demonstrable roles in securing better salaries and benefits and ensuring fair treatment of employees.

• Few HR Directors seem able to ground their assessments in data. Just 28.6% of HR Directors at public research universities report that they have good data on employee performance, productivity, and satisfaction, and only 21.4% say they use such data in campus planning and policy decisions.  (Sidenote: Oh. My. God.)

• And yet somehow, HR Directors are able to attribute low morale among employees to recent budget cuts. 74% of those at public research institutions agree that budget cuts did major damage to staff rationale, and 20-30% say their offices are unfairly blamed for cuts to employee benefits and services and even layoffs.  The frequency of these statements is twice as common at public research institutions as compared to elsewhere.

These will undoubtedly form a nice backdrop to tomorrow's discussion. I'm hoping Lavigna keeps his statement short and sweet, to allow plenty of time for questions. I'm told this hasn't been the case at recent campus events; for example at last week's Academic Staff Assembly meeting the members were not given responses to ASEC's previously issued comments.  But I'm sure tomorrow will be different-- faculty like to talk, at least as much as we like to listen.

0 Faulty Inside Higher Ed Survey Demonizes Faculty

This morning's Twitter feed was rife with news of a story from Inside Higher Ed directly relevant to the UVA fiasco. President Teresa Sullivan was reportedly canned for failing to push an agenda for online education at UVA, standing in the way of so-called "progress."  Is this because she catered too much to faculty, who are increasingly described as the main obstacle to reform?

It seems some people want you to believe yes-- the real problem isn't the rampant excitement over a fairly untested pedagogical approach to education, but the resistance of the educators.  So today IHE shares a new survey: Conflicted-Faculty and Online Education, 2012.  The story's lede reads: "Faculty members are far less excited by, and more fearful of, the recent growth of online education than are academic technology administrators."  Professors are described as lacking optimism, having a "bleak" view of the quality of online education.  The survey report wonders "why"-- rather than praising profs for their skepticism, something faculty are widely known and respected for.


So-- big finding, right?  WRONG.  This story doesn't belong in a respected publication like IHE.  Here's why:


The survey, conducted by a team known for its studies of distance learning, and including advertisements by online educators, obtained a 7.7% response rate among faculty, and a less than 10% response rate among administrators. 
Yes, you read that right. About 60,000 professors were surveyed and just 4,564 provided enough of an answer to be included in the study.  For real? This isn't nationally representative of anything. It's a horribly biased little subsample, and yet the RR isn't even mentioned in the reporting!

Moreover, look at the questions-- where'd they get the "fear vs. excitement" answers? Because they only provided those two options.  Gee, am I fearful or excited about a new untested pedagogy being pushed on me?  Well...neither. But I'm not stupid enough to jump on a bandwagon, so I will choose "fearful." By which I mean skeptical.

I have such respect for folks like Doug Lederman and his crew at IHE, that I am honestly shocked this is running in that publication at all. It shouldn't.


Take it down.


Update: I have already heard from Doug Lederman, and he will be adding the response rate to the text of the article and to the PDF of the study. He feels a low response rate is a non-issue here, doesn't imply selection bias, and it is an achievement to get 4,500 faculty to do any survey at all. Moreover, he does not agree that the study demonizes faculty.  We can agree to disagree on that. 

0 Faculty Involvement & HR Design at UW-Madison

As I recently described, UW-Madison is currently going through a process of Human Resources Redesign.  Today at Faculty Senate there was an unexpected and lengthy discussion of the recommendations of the HR working groups that was at times a bit acrimonious (I say unexpected because it was listed nowhere on the posted agenda). The exchanges between the faculty and the administrators--especially Darrell Bazzell and Bob Lavigna--were fraught with apparent frustration and visible annoyance from both men.  At several points, Lavigna said that faculty had been asked several times to participate in the working groups, but few had. Nothing that had transpired, he seemed to suggest, should be construed as an effort to circumvent shared governance, and transparency in the process was always the aim.  Moreover, he responded to faculty questioning, we should know that "our colleagues" had worked hard on the recommendations, and that he, at least, respected that work.

Driving home afterwards, I had a few reflections and observations I hope it's productive to share.

First, it seems all-too-common for our administrators to mistake faculty critique for dismissal of their hard work.  As if when someone says "I disagree or don't like your idea" they are really saying "You didn't try hard to come up with it."  That strikes me as a defensive posturing that's entirely unhelpful, since the critique is leveled at the idea not the person or their effort.

Second, it is also all-too-common for our administrators to bring forth proposals to the community without providing evidence to support those proposals.  The documents from the New Badger Partnership were heavy on big claims and light on data, and the same can be said for the HR recommendations.  As researchers, this is excruciatingly hard for us to accept.  After all, we spend our days seeking proof for ideas.  As such, we expect from anyone bringing forth ideas to say things along the line of "Based on a thorough review of evidence such as X, Y, and Z, we have concluded Q."  Instead, what we were told today was basically "Believe us, we did research--we talked to people in the community at many forums."  Well, that's not research-- it's a convenience sample of anecdotal evidence.  Where is the literature review? Where are the systematic methods? That's what we need to know.

Third, a favorite refrain appears to be "but we asked you faculty to be involved, and you wouldn't do it. Now you can't blame us."  Well...sorta.  But a key  problem underlying faculty non-participation is how administrators treat advice from faculty.  See above-- would you want to participate in meetings where the people you're having discussions with act as though your difference of opinion with them is an assault on their effort? Where they want to have policy discussions based on anecdote? Where they pull the common punch of "this isn't your area of expertise, so what would you know?"  Where requests for data and evidence are consistently met with suspicion?  This is the environment many of us faculty encounter when we serve on university committees.  So some rightly ask, why bother?

Sadly, that creates a vicious cycle-- out of frustration, we don't spend the time on these key administrative tasks that govern our daily work lives, and in turn we become increasingly disenchanted with the place. That goes to simply prove the administrators' point-- when the going gets tough, where are we?

My honest question is this: Does the administration genuinely want the faculty involved? If so, then the kinds of questions we asked at today's Senate meeting should be welcomed. No one should respond defensively when asked for further information -- instead, it should be sought and provided.  Instead of redirecting well-informed questioners to other people, people not present at the meeting, those who proffered their ideas for questioning should offer to promptly ascertain the information and respond.  Data should be plentiful, evidence brought forth, and open debates should ensue.  That's how academia works.  Despite the wishes of some, UW-Madison remains at its core an academic enterprise, not a business. Thankfully, some professors stood up today and  reminded us of that. 

0 A Post-Racial Era?

A fellow professor at an institution that shall remain nameless (truly) just forwarded me an email he just received. It has been modestly modified only to protect the professor and the university.

"Hello, I see from the Latino Studies Department website that you are a faculty member .  I’m wondering if you would be able to translate something for me?  At our cafeteria we are in the process of naming several of our new food venues.  At our “Mexican Grill” venue, where we will be serving Tex-Mex food items, we are considering some different names for this food venue.  We are considering using Comida Rica or Que Rico for the name, along with “Mexican Grill.”   Does Comida Rica mean Delicious Food and Que Rico, Delicious?  We want to make sure that we are using words properly and have also seen these words associated with “Rich Food” “How Tasty” or “How Rich.”  I would appreciate it if you would let me know  the definition when used with food."

Yes, the professor is Latino.

Is this really the 21st century?

0 Students Occupy Colleges

In a sense, this movement was inevitable.

Higher education has been transformed over the last 50 years, reshaped in many ways that bring into question what it's for, how it works, who should lead it, and most importantly who it is serving. It is the failure of colleges and universities to sufficiently grapple with and address those key questions that led students to Occupy Colleges, and faculty to stand with them, and set up college administrators to be largely inept in response.

The experience of postsecondary education today is highly polarized. Among those attending college are the kinds of students who have always attended college--those who parents and grandparents have degrees, who expected them to go, and ensured they were financially, academically, and otherwise prepared. These are the students who dominate enrollment at the private colleges, take advantage of liberal arts institutions, and who not only earn bachelor's degrees in large numbers but also graduate and professional degrees. But in addition, there is a wide swath of students for whom college was not entirely planned-- it may have felt expected of them, and they did work hard to get ready, but they were unaware of how unprepared college would be to meet their needs. Little did they know that most colleges and universities act as if it's the students' job to get "college-ready," rather than the colleges' job to be prepared to meet the needs of all who enter.

These are the students stunned by the high and rising costs of attendance, and the lack of grant aid available to them. These are the students willing to work long hours to make ends meet, but continually surprised that the faculty and administrators don't respond in turn to accomodate their needs with flexible scheduling, remote advising, and timetables for timely degree completion that don't require full-time enrollment. These are the students who attend the vast majority of our public colleges and universities, and our community colleges, and these are the students at the heart of Occupy Colleges.

Higher education is not sure about these students. Sure, the initial shots were fired long ago, during the Free Speech Movement. But that was about far more than how higher education would work; it was about how society would work. And since that time, colleges and universities have become less--not more-- hospitable to what they like to call "nontraditional" students. Those that some have labeled "tenants" rather than "landowners," decried as "academically adrift," and said to care far less about the hard work of studying. Serving these students has evolved as a speciality, rather than the primary function it ought to be when they comprise at least half of the undergraduate population.

The evidence is everywhere. The growth of the student services industry has segregated the job of meeting students' needs to administrators, letting faculty off the hook. The shift to part-time, contingent labor has lessened the ability of professors to spend the kind of time required to really get to know and address their students' needs--thus creating a stronger rationale for relying on administrators. It would be far better for people to serve dual roles, as teacher and administrator, rather than to continue to pretend the two can be effectively performed in isolation from one another. States have disinvested in public higher education at the same time that the children of the nation's leaders are more likely than ever to opt for private higher education. Public colleges and universities point to those declines in state support and rationalize that since they must have money, they should move to a more "efficient" model of high tuition/high aid, a model that works only in theory. In practical, political life, real world families take sticker prices as real, and mistrust discounting. Politicians and university administrators rarely have the appetite to tie their own hands and fully commit to increasing aid whenever tuition rises. And almost none consider the sharp hypocrisy in their support for free public k-12 education, juxtaposed against their refusal to demand free higher education.

Many, but not all, students are catching on. And therein lies the rub. The move to Occupy Colleges is not a unified front: for every student supporter, there is a student who thinks it's stupid. The students I observe decrying the effort are those who have been well-treated by the current system. Same goes for faculty: those who interact all the time with the so-called nontraditional student and know intimately how we are failing them much more often support this movement. The others, especially those who put research first, often do not.

It's clear who has long been most successful. After all, there is now a move to slash a federal financial aid program (Pell) whose costs have risen (a) because it is doing its job in serving the needs of many students from low-income families and (b) because powerful interests have ensured that government considers to subsidize private and for-profit higher education. If Occupy Colleges could end (b) then the costs of the Pell program would fall dramatically. It won't happen--because higher education refuses to even consider being more about the economically disadvantaged student.

Students are laying these issues at the feet of college administrators and they are stumbling and mumbling in response. Their power-hungry allies, including their overly-compensated athletic directors and boosters and police forces, are doing everything they can to stop it.

It should not be stopped. Students should Occupy Colleges. Let's try that again. Students should occupy colleges. Not administrators. Students, and their educators, should occupy colleges.


NOTE: This post was amended on November 23 in response to a very cogent comment submitted to the blog.

0 A Few Thoughts on Faculty Productivity

Richard Vedder isn't an easy guy to get along with, but he's good at one thing: pushing the agenda, sometimes in students' best interests.

I totally disagree with the guy when it comes to financial aid-- there's no way it's making students lazy on average, or causing them to party. On the other hand, he asks some good questions about our college-for-all movement that offers no alternatives for students who don't want to go to college right away, and he also raises good questions about institutional resistance to change.

In his latest piece, he takes on faculty. Boo-hiss, I know... The guy has the nerve to suggest that on average we don't teach enough. His analysis comes from Texas A&M (so popular these days, eh?) and finds a “sharp disparity in the teaching loads for individual faculty members” at UT. Strikingly, they find that the top 20 percent of “faculty with respect to teaching loads teaches 57% of all student credit hours” while the bottom 20 percent teach “only 2% of all student credit hours.”

His point, while overly aggressive (heck, I know something about that), is mainly that we established a way of putting students and teachers together a long, long time ago-- and since then colleges and universities have tried to save money on that approach by shifting to a part-time contingent workforce (reducing average teaching load), allowing more and more professors to buy out of teaching with grant money, and keeping class sizes about the same even while enrollments expanded dramatically and technology made other solutions possible.

When Richard says it, people freak out. A rebuttal from a Texas A&M political science professor tries to bat down the accusations. But he seems to miss the point of Vedder's approach, which is to say that every decision about staffing matters-- so we should lump together faculty in different categories given that theoretically the distributions could be changed. Case in point: "First, much of the skew in teaching duties observed by the CCAP report authors is simply a function of the fact that UT employs a large number of part-time faculty." Well, yes, but that's part of the point-- and a big problem. Universities do that NOT to serve students better but to save money on benefits. PT faculty are perfectly good at teaching but are overworked and underpaid so don't have time for out-of-classroom interaction. His second point, that there's a potential consequence for education quality is right, in theory, yet he cites not a single study showing that large class sizes are associated with diminish instructional quality in higher education. And that's because he can't-- such studies don't exist. Doug Harris and I covered this at length in our La Follette working paper released last year. I do agree that there should be adjustments by field, but this needs to be carefully done because decisions about offering fields with lower enrollments are also strategic decisions and institutions have to be accountable for them. I'm not saying don't offer them, but you can probably only do it if you high-demand fields are very productive. Finally, I see nothing about the use of our resistance to technology, especially blended learning, about faculty in the professor's rebuttal. Technology breaks the iron triangle between access, quality, and costs -- it makes it more possible to offer a high-quality lower cost accessible education. I'm on-board with that and it may be one thing that sets me apart from most other professors.

All that said, Vedder's analysis is far from perfect. It doesn't introduce the issue of impacts on students in any rigorous way. It doesn't take on strongly enough the political and economic reasons why part-time labor is being exploited across higher education. It doesn't question a business-style approach to measuring higher education "outputs." And it doesn't take seriously the need for faculty to LEAD this discussion so that reforms stand a chance of really being implemented.

I've long wondered why I teach today in approximately the same way my colleagues did a half-century ago. Why stand in front of classrooms of 30-50 undergraduates several times a week, rather than meeting with 300 of them twice a month and the rest of the time online? Some will inevitably say that will produce lower-quality instruction but they have nothing to point to-- studies of blended learning are strongly suggestive of positive impacts. Forget online-only, I'm not talking about online only and neither are most proponents of bringing technological advances into university teaching.

And let's get real: right now there are hundreds of professors who have to cancel classes in order to attend conferences, meetings, and such. They resent the requirement to be in-person all the time to teach, when nothing else in their lives requires that anymore. Some of them never reschedule, others hold makeup classes, and some use Skype to teach. The latter is a very low-tech approach and it's used because we're not given other options. What if we were? What if faculty could teach more students, more flexibly, and even with better pedagogy (for example by getting more regular feedback on student performance, rapidly, to use in our teaching) -- and this, together, helped preserve public investment in higher education because it demonstrated productivity gains? Why not?

I suspect part of the reason "why not" is because when you hear "online" you think "for-profit" or "business." When you hear "big classes" you think "community college." When you hear "improved pedagogy" you think "someone's going to tell me how to teach?" And when you hear "productivity" you think "neoliberalism, market-driven education." I know, I sometimes do too.

This is a problem-- professors are thoughtful, careful people and it's essential we not have knee-jerk reactions to ideas that aren't yet being shoved down our throats in propaganda-spun-out policy proposals. This is one we can help shape and get in front of, and make it our own. Or, we can wait until the Republicans bring it to us, and tell us what to do.


PS. One more thing. Richard's claims that faculty can do more because he's done more--juggling research and teaching--that's just plain silly. There's been a major change in the faculty workforce--it's feminized. Something I know for sure-- Richard never juggled teaching, research, breastfeeding, and taking care of small kids. We can and should do more, but there's no reason to base the model on Richard Vedder's style.