Monthly Archives for May 2011

Should the Nanny State Intervene to Fix Commencement?

Remember the “African proverb,” “it takes a village to raise a child,” Hillary Clinton borrowed for a book title? One would think this month that the village wise men and women would be out in force to congratulate the children they have nurtured with their tutelage. One would think. But one would be wrong.

My last post, about faculty workload, landed me in deep doo-doo with the academical set, some of whom resorted to ad hominem attacks when my arguments left them sputtering (check out Chandra’s comments). So rather than offering opinion on the matter of faculty failing to attend Commencement, I’ll let the professoriate speak for itself.

First, though, I’ll credit the source, David Galef’s essay “Showing Up” in the May 27 edition of Inside Higher Ed. Galef takes on the growing number of faculty who don’t bother showing up to watch their students graduate; he enumerates and handily dismisses the reasons faculty offer for their behavior. Since he is a seasoned academic Galef I am sure was 100% prepared for deluge of criticism that came his way.
Leading the charge was “erinna,” who self-identifies as an award-winning “highly rated faculty member”:

I don’t go to graduation for several reasons. First and foremost, I just don’t want to. I find it pointless, and I feel like a crowd extra in a biblical epic — there’s masses of people and I’m just one more. So I don’t feel like this is an impactful use of my time.

… the graduation ceremony ….[is] purely symbolic with no real use.

Finally, my school has repeatedly expanded the scope of my duties without expanding my pay. When you do that, people will start to pick things to dump that are not not important to them and for which there will be no reprisal. Ceremony is at the top of that list for me.

I’d love to know what (award-winning) Professor erinna teaches; given her take on symbols I’m guessing (hoping) it’s not mathematics or a humanities or social science subject.

Pop quiz: Is Professor erinna reviewing her awards or her excuses for not attending Commencement?

I’m also wondering what constitutes an “impactful use” of her time, and my guess here is that it’s probably the hours she spends deciding which of her “duties” she can “dump” without “reprisal.” Like the self-respecting and award-winning academic that she is, erinna takes principled action—skipping out on the one ceremony in the academic calendar that has real meaning–only when it won’t get her in trouble. Admirable.

Next, “20-year adjunct” pats herself on the back for attending Commencement:

I did go once because I had a student graduating. It was a miserable experience. We sat in the football field on folding chairs. The wind blew, it was hot, the process took too long, and I felt like wallpaper.

Since my husband and I share a gown, we do not have to pay rental costs. But I got tired of staring at the board of trustees, few of whom even have a graduate degree, handing out diplomas, and the administrators, most of whom are new to their job, overpaid, and have not earned my respect.

Perhaps if the trustees took off their regalia, 20-year wouldn't mind the view.

If I had tenure-level pay, maybe I’d show up more, but so long as I am seen as a temp, I am not really motivated to spend an afternoon sitting like a lump when there is still grading to be done.

Usually I have tremendous sympathy for adjunct faculty. They do the heavy lifting of intro courses for laughable pay and no respect whilst their tenured and tenure-track colleagues fret about missing the last episode of The Jersey Shore. But in “20 years”’s case I’ll curb my feelings. She attended one graduation exercise and was so fatigued by it that she vowed never to set foot on an athletic field again. I understand her point of view, though, after all the newly minted baccalaureates she so recently taught didn’t “even have a graduate degree” yet, so why get all hot and bothered? Admirable.

At least Steve Thulin, professor of history at Northwest College, doesn’t cite lack of eye candy on the podium as his reason for ditching Commencement. “I have worked at a small college here in Wyoming for over 20 years and until recently would not have missed a graduation,” he boasts, then delivers his zinger, “But I did this year and last because my administration crammed our finals ‘week’ into a ‘Wednesday-Thursday-Friday’ format (it was convenient to their needs?) and insisted that graduation would be on a Saturday morning — and grades are due on Tuesday. Some of us did not even get most of our finals until the day before graduation — and for myself, I was still under a pile of term papers when they arrived anyway.”
It’s hard to untangle Professor Thulin’s stream-of-consciousness rant, but I think it boils down to he’s mad because Commencement takes place on Saturday morning. God forbid a faculty member be asked to show up on the weekend. Thulin also takes a gratuitous shot at those vile 9-to-5 Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday administrators. They had the temerity to schedule a six-day work-week for themselves so that families members of the working class kids whose ranks make up Northwest’s enrollment could watch their sons and daughters graduate without the fear of lost wages.

Thulin goes on to say he’s watching Commencement on TV from home, where he’s correcting papers so his grades can be turned in on Tuesday. Admirable.

But leave it to a greybeard to sum things up. “OldCommProf” takes aim with the most predictable arrow in the faculty quiver—he blames somebody else for his behavior:

I’m considering skipping graduation, even though we’re encouraged to go and know all the arguments about honoring the grads. And I’ve been to 28 of the 32 that have been held since I’ve been here.

The reason I’ve come to this point is that it has lost all sense of decorum and dignity. The kids do handstands on the stage, hoist the chancellor in their arms instead of shaking his hand, hold up the line as they take multiple pictures with their pocket digital cameras (the let’s-get-our-faces-really-close kind that that they usually take in bars and at parties) and sometimes even kiss him.

It’s a mess and I’m embarrassed to be part of it.

With seconds to go before they never have to deal with the likes of erinna, 20-year adjunct, Thulin, or OldCommProf again, is it any wonder graduates are turning handsprings?

Before we put the Pomp and Circumstance CD away for another year, let’s let JE, Prof at Private U, have the last word, for his is a call to civility:

I think what is lacking in this discussion is a mutual respect for people’s individual decisions- faculty and student alike. I admit I don’t attend ceremonies. I didn’t as a student and I don’t as a faculty member. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this decision regardless of my reasons, just as I do not think there is anything wrong with choosing to participate in or even enjoy ceremonial events on the part of others.

In JE’s private universe “mutual respect” is defined as: “I do as I please. The rest of you can sod off.”
Sometimes I think Thomas Hobbes wasn’t writing about all of mankind. Just the professoriate.

When faculty speak for themselves: two outta three ain't bad.

Afshan Jafar: Gen Xer, Professor, Cry Baby

You know the sound that a piece of errant chalk makes on a blackboard? Ever wonder what that sound, translated into words on a page, would read like? I can help you out with that.

If you cruise on over to Inside Higher Ed and read “The Life and Work of a Professor,” by one Afshan Jafar, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Connecticut College, you’ll have your hands covering your ears in no time flat, just like you do when the chalk meets the blackboard.

Professor Jafar’s topic is one near and dear to the hearts of academics: how hard they work and how misunderstood they are. Here’s a sample from Jafar’s essay:

[W]hile my non-academic friends can take a break to watch Jersey Shore, or The Apprentice, or Dancing with the Stars, should they feel like it, I find myself spending most of my time between 8 pm (when the kids go to bed) and midnight (when I go to bed) staring at stacks of students’ papers, keeping up with the readings, or preparing for class for the next day. There are many nights when my husband finds me asleep at the laptop or with a student’s paper in my hands: my body finally giving in to the exhaustion of a long work-day as well as a long commute (we are an academic couple and commute in opposite directions).

Now try squeezing in research and service commitments to this model. Most of my summer and winter break is spent catching up on my research and even some on-going committee work. But research and service are such intangible concepts, especially to those outside of academia. People don’t understand how time-consuming conducting research, applying for funding, or pursuing publication can be. When I explain to my friends, that my husband and I go for several weeks sometimes without turning on the TV, except for the kids to watch their PBS shows in the morning, they gasp in disbelief. But clearly, my situation is not unique, since some of my fellow writers at University of Venus [Inside Higher Ed’s column for and by “GenX Women in Higher Ed, Writing from Across the Globe”] find themselves leading a similar lifestyle.

So I find myself quite frustrated when people casually imply that we have an easy job. Not only do they not realize what our day to day lives as academics entail, but they also don’t understand the sacrifices involved in being graduate students for the 6+ years after college: living on meager stipends, having minimum healthcare (if we’re lucky!), not having any savings…

Professor J has this on the wall in her office, right next to her diploma from UMass.


Even I can be sympathetic to somebody who defines a job as not “easy” because it precludes her from watching the “Jersey Shore, or The Apprentice, or Dancing with the Stars,” and I am sure that you probably can, too, but I draw the line at feeling sorry for somebody who is so hopelessly inept at time management as Professor J. “What most people fail to realize,” she opines

is that our jobs as full-time faculty have at least two other components to them besides teaching: research and service. But putting that aside for a second, even if we look only at teaching, the time and energy we put into it goes far beyond the “contact-time” we have with our students in the classroom. Even when I am teaching only three courses in one semester, the reading, preparation, grading (oh, the grading!), the emailing back and forth with students, take up many, many, more hours.

Okay. She’s teaching three courses. Let’s do the math. A typical course meets for 150 minutes per week, or two and one-half hours. Multiple 2.5 hours for each course by 3, the number of courses she’s teaching. That comes out to 7.5 hours per week. Now, subtract 7.5 hours from 40 hours, the length of a standard work-week, and you see that the professor has 32.5 hours remaining in her work week to attend committee meetings, advise students, correct their papers, keep up on her research and reading, and perform her “service.” I have yet to meet a sociology professor who assigns a paper a week to her students, let alone one due after every class, so the idea that night after night Professor Jafar is missing Dancing with the Stars or her other favorite programs because she is correcting papers just doesn’t fly. And even if she did assign a weekly paper, presumably she could arrange to have it due on a day other than when DWTS is on. Problem solved.

Then there are office hours, which faculty members are expected to hold so that students in their classes can visit them with questions about the subject matter. Again, the rule of thumb is one hour per course taught. So we are now up to 10.5 hours accounted for in the work week, with 29.5 left to fill. I’ll even give the good professor a pass on whether students actually show for the office hours. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. A wise professor would TiVo the Jersey Shore to watch while she sits in solitary splendor in her faculty office, waiting for students who may never arrive. Or maybe even use that time to correct papers from students in her courses, which according to Connecticut College’s fact sheet, average no more than 18 per class.

Snooki was inconsolable when she learned Professor J missed an epsiode of Jersey Shore.


Research can be as grueling and time-consuming as it is exhilarating, and to do it well demands an uninterrupted block of time, which is why sabbaticals were invented. Even so, most faculty do not teach five days per week, so let’s be generous and give Professor J eight hours, one full work day, for her research during a given semester. She has a remaining 21.5 hours to fill in her full-time work-week. Most colleges have a two-hour block of time built into the week for “governance,” the time when committee meetings are scheduled. Let’s for the sake of argument double that, and assume that Professor Jafar spends four hours per-week in committee meetings (which is what the typical academic defines as “service”). This arduous schedule leaves her 17.5 hours per week, two full days and then some, to prep for class, correct papers, email students, and do all those other always unspecified things that busy, busy professors do. Keep in mind that “prep for class” means reviewing material you have already prepared or should have prepared if you care enough about your students to have given them a detailed syllabus, reading literature related to your research and professional interests, and thinking about inventive tactics to keep your students engaged.

In the end what irritates me about Professor Jafar’s rant is not simply its lack of originality–if she thinks Gen X faculty are the first to think they are misunderstood, she is grievously uninformed or self-absorbed or both–but rather her willful misunderstanding of what non-academics mean when they make envious comments about her job. She is clueless about two realities: 1) most people work forty-plus work-weeks with little or any variety let alone flexibility in their schedules, whereas the life of an academic–even one who works that same forty-hour-plus schedule–is blessed with flexibility unheard of in the rest of the working world. Of her “full-time job” Jafar has to be at a specified place at a specified time exactly 12.5 hours per week. How she uses gainfully or fritters away the remaining hours is left completely to her. If she chooses to correct papers at night so she can work out in the afternoon is her decision–and a choice many working stiffs can only but dream of having.

So why is Professor J falling asleep over her laptop? Because she has a long commute she makes two to three days a week? Because she expends incredible energy worrying about being laid off? On this count too I’ll give her a (temporary) pass, because she probably doesn’t have tenure, but once she does, then her worries are over. I don’t know why she’s falling asleep. But one thing I am very sure of—when she’s dozing she’s not in Never-Never Land, because that is the landscape she inhabits in her waking hours.

Artist's rendering of Professor J's awful working conditions. Where's OSHA when you need them?

Commencement: Higher Ed’s Last Chance to Think Critically on Behalf of its Graduates

The envelope, please. Broadway has the Tony Awards; Hollywood, the Oscars; and then of course there is the eponymously named Booker Prize. As a species we are fond of handing out honors for accomplishments small and large. Higher education is no different, and this month begins the academy’s own silly season of awards. I am speaking of course of the honorary degrees colleges and universities dangle in front of celebrities, generous donors, politicians and on occasion worthy scholars and artists.

Universities will tell you that they award honorary degrees in order to call attention to the more important occasion of the graduating class’s big day. This not a total fabrication because often times a famous or notorious honorary degree recipient will bring the press to an otherwise lackluster ceremony at a lackluster campus. But it is a rather cruel exploitation of the graduates and their families, because in truth celebrity degree recipients suck time and attention out of festivities that ought truly to focus on the graduates alone. When I graduated from university, my alma mater had a policy, long since abandoned, of not awarding honorary degrees for just this reason: the graduates were the stars of the show.

I confess that all these years later hearing Pomp and Circumstance brings a nostalgic tear to my eye and reminds me of the young woman I once was—full of excitement and wonder about what next the academy had in store for me. That girl hasn’t been around for a while.

Inevitably every year a campus sets the bar for who qualifies as the recipient of an honorary degree at a new low. Some time back, plucky Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, for example, awarded auteur Michael Moore not an honorary degree per say but a platform from which to address the assembled multitude. Moore took his text from an assemblage of half-truths and factual manipulations that managed inflict several wounds in the hands of the administrators oblivious enough to have gone along with bringing the porcine documentarian to campus.

Michael Moore waits patiently on the platform to deliver his Commencement fabrications at Hampshire College.


But if the thought of having to listen to the likes of Michael Moore drone on ad nauseum is enough to make you want to graduate in absentia, then consider the poor men and women about to begin their post-baccalaureate journey through life taking with them their college parting words of one Winnie Mandela.

Winnie Mandela. You read that correctly. The wife Nelson Mandela dumped because there was no reconciling the savagery she rained down upon her opponents. The Winnie Mandela whose bold fashion statements included fiery necklaces of burning tires for her “enemies.” The Winnie Mandela who just last year had this to say about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Bishop Tutu and her ex-husband:

‘What good does the truth do? How does it help to anyone to know where and how their loved ones are killed or buried?
That Bishop Tutu…turned it all into a religious circus came here. He had a cheek to tell me to appear.

‘I told him that he and his other like-minded cretins were only sitting there because of our struggle and me. Look what they make him do. The great Mandela. He has no control or say any more.

Let's hope Customs officials at JFK confiscate Winnie's jewelry before she gets to JCSU.


That Winnie Mandela will receive an honorary degree this month from Johnson C. Smith University, an institution according to its website:

Founded in 1867 under the auspices of the Committee on Freedmen of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A [the university] is an independent, private, coeducational institution of higher learning. Located in the rapidly growing metropolis of Charlotte, North Carolina, “Queen City of the South,” this historically African-American university has a residential campus with a familiar atmosphere in which students are stimulated and nurtured by dedicated and caring faculty and staff.

One hopes Winnie is not introduced as a role model for stimulation and nurturing.

One hopes whoever introduces Winnie from the podium has the good sense not to mention the university’s mission, which reads in part

Consistent with its Christian roots, the university recognizes the importance of moral and ethical values to undergird intellectual development and all endeavors. …

The mission of JCSU is to provide an outstanding education for a diverse group of talented and highly motivated students from various ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographical backgrounds…

…, [JCSU] provides an environment in which students can fulfill their physical, social, cultural, spiritual, and other personal needs through which they can develop a compelling sense of social and civic responsibility for leadership and service in a dynamic, multicultural society. Likewise, the university embraces its responsibility to provide leadership, service, and lifelong learning to the larger community.

I take this mission statement at face value. There is no question in my mind the faculty at JCSU have done their very best to deliver to their students and soon-to-be graduates the promise of the university’s mission. No students work harder for their educations than the ones attending urban universities, and no faculties must help their students overcome more mountainous barriers than the faculty who work at urban universities. I have nothing but admiration for these men and women.

This is why I am so thoroughly disgusted that in order to get a passing mention in the newspaper, the suits at JCSU thought it was a good idea to bring this terrorist to campus and in so doing undo in the space of a single commencement what four years of undergirding “moral and ethical values” sought to instill.

Johnson C. Smith University wins the 2011 prize for lowest bar for a Commencement speaker. Which college will win in 2012?

Former College President Russell Davis Forges Ahead

From the April 29 update on nj.com:

The recently-resigned president of Gloucester County College Dr. Russell A. Davis has been charged by the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office with 11 counts of forgery.

The charges were served on Dr. Davis when he agreed to appear at the GCPO offices today. He was released on his own recognizance.

Ten of the charges accuse Davis, while he was employed by the college, of signing the name of a Gloucester County College official responsible for authorizing the submission of loan applications to the college pension fund. Pension funds allocated to Dr. Davis were, in fact, obtained, according to the prosecutor’s office.

An eleventh count alleges the same signature was forged for a hardship application to withdraw funds from Dr. Davis’ pension account. The acts alleged occurred between Feb. 9, 2010 and March 14, 2011, the prosecutor’s office said.

“There is no allegation that funds belonging to the college were taken and no indication of other criminal wrongdoing,” Bernie Weisenfeld, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. “It should also be noted that the charges filed do not allege any misuse of the college president’s office to obtain pension funds.”

Stop for a moment and ponder Spokesman Weisenfeld’s comments, which you can also read on the Prosecutor’s Office website. To his credit, former President Davis did not engage in forgery to steal from the institution he led. He engaged in forgery to steal from…himself. I can’t decide if this is delicious or pathetic, but I know that somewhere there is a how-many-college-presidents-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb joke just dying to be cracked. I think it would go something like this: How many New Jersey community college presidents does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: None. They need it to be dark so that nobody will see them emptying the college’s coffers.

Diogenes searching for an honest community college president. No light bulb needed.