The Ache in My Frontal Lobes

Students with no grades. Zeros all the way across.

A student who says she’s “a little behind,” who’s submitted less than 10% of the assignments. The semester ends in a little over a month.

An administrator with vague, too-general requests, no framework, and a right-now deadline.

Parking in mud, racing to park next to a fence, circling and circling and going into work feeling like I’ve already been pushed, pulled and kicked.

A building in which every hallway, classroom and office suite is a different temperature, ranging from near balmy to Arctic.

A computer classroom where only 7 of the 20 computers work or are connected properly.

20+-page papers due in 3 weeks. That I must grade.

And all the rest.

Fucked-up Friday

I should’ve known when I saw the email in my inbox around noon that it would be fucked up. The email said that locks in my building would be re-keyed–there was a recent theft–and keys for offices would be available in DUFMB, a building I never heard of, after 4 PM. I usually leave by 2 on Fridays. I put my head back down into the 4-inch pile of grading I need to get through. About 1-ish, I heard someone at my door but then got distracted by an email and then a Blackboard problem. I got up to go check on a document in the main office and something told me to see if my lock had been changed. My key no longer fit in the lock. I said, Shit, and looked at my office–my wallet and keys in my unlocked desk, the heater on, boom box playing since my office computer has no speakers, my personal books, the printer that I bought because there was no way I was getting one from D’oh, and had to take the chance of leaving my door open to go find out what the fuck was going on.

I found out–yes, locks changed. The locksmith, a subcontractor, said the keys would be ready soon over in DUFMB. Once I figured out what fucking building that was, I walked over with another professor. And talked to one of the nastiest looking, rudest administrators around there, and that’s saying something. Her attitude was that we were being unreasonable expecting to get back into our offices in the middle of a work day. She lied and said a master key was being sent over. When? In a few minutes. She also lied and said the keys would be ready sometime today, she couldn’t “give [us] a timeline.” I walked down the stairs with the other professor dropping fuck, fucking and motherfuckers into every single clause. When I got back to the division office, I went off. Fuck this, fuck that, motherfucking bitch, ugly ass whore, fuck this place, when I get in my office, it’s over, this day and week are fucking DONE, lock me out my fucking office WHILE I’m sitting in it? Shit.

10 minutes later, the administrative assistant opened our office doors for us. I packed my stuff, shut down the computer, and slammed the door behind me.

25%

The number of faculty that will be cut. We do not know if that means 25% of us will not get contracts mailed to us Friday. If it is Friday.

If the cuts are equally applied, if every department has to lose one quarter of faculty, my department will lose about 3-4 people. The criteria are unclear.

Decider

Last week during spring break, the president decided, or decided it should be known that she’d decided, to move the Writing Center and other academic support, including counseling, out of the building they’re in. Instead of a week to recoup and organize while students were gone, the Writing Center staff and others had to pack. Or were packed, it’s not clear to me since there is no direct communication, just word of mouth. There is no new location for the Writing Center. The rest of the services, I don’t know. The president and no one around her thought about where to put these support services, to put these support services somewhere at all, while whatever, if anything, is done to the building. Meanwhile, D’oh students, who need academic support, who need a writing center, and have only a quarter of the writing center they need and deserve as it is, have nothing.

Dr. DSN, the chair, recently mouthed off in a meeting. His cousin works in the Writing Center.

The Numbers

In the fall, the executive vice president debuted about 5-8 minutes of a new recruiting/fundraising video the administration had had made. Science labs were heavily featured. Not one shot of the new theatre or the fabulous productions or the art studio or any of the mass com studios or the student paper or the summer journalism institute or any published authors. When someone from the Humanities asked the ExecVP why we didn’t see any of the arts, the ExecVP snippily answered that there “wasn’t time” to “show everything.” And that was that. Because he is looking at The Numbers, probably degrees awarded by year and, in sheer numbers, natural sciences wins:

2004: total degrees per division: Business = 67
Education and Psychology = 42 (25 of those Psychology)
Humanities = 70
Natural Science = 139
Nursing = 6
Social Sciences = 62
total degrees = 346

2005: B = 76
EaP = 46 (P = 28)
H = 60
NS = 117
N = 21
SS = 49
total degrees = 368

2006: B = 53
EaP = 65 (P = 31)
H = 77
NS = 106
N = 7
SS = 50
total degrees = 347

2007: B = 26
EaP = 28 (P = 15)
H = 28
NS = 55
N = 13
SS = 30
total degrees = 180

2008: B = 29
EaP = 32 (P = 17)
H = 30
NS = 49
N = 12
SS = 24
total degrees = 176

In Business, only 1 of its majors hasn’t awarded a degree since 2004. There’s one Psych degree and 18 education majors, multiple elementary and secondary degrees. 6 of those have awarded no degrees since 2004. In Humanities, 4 of 15 majors haven’t awarded degrees; one was discontinued in 2004-2005, I thought, and one cross-divisional major was eliminated by the other division. In Natural Sciences, 4 of the 16 have awarded no degrees. Social Science, only 1 of 9.

The Humanities, including the arts, is said to have Bad Numbers and Be in Crisis, not like Science, Business, Law or Accounting.

How has this happened? According to [Frank] Donoghue [author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities], it’s been happening for a long time, at least since 1891, when Andrew Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.”

Industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness . . . are those who are useful.”

The opposition between this view and the view held by the heirs of Matthew Arnold’s conviction that poetry will save us could not be more stark. But Donoghue counsels us not to think that the two visions are locked in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. One vision, rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it. [emphasis added]

The best evidence for this is the shrinking number of tenured and tenure-track faculty and the corresponding rise of adjuncts, part-timers more akin to itinerant workers than to embedded professionals.

…Universities under increasing financial pressure, [Donoghue] explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.”

Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (and the student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and “as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins . . . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”

…

The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.

In this latter model, the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs. Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, their credentials and publications (if they have any) are beside the point, for they are just “delivery people.”

from “The Last Professor”–Stanley Fish, NYTimes blog

And easily, so they think, replaced. D’oh’s academic affairs cannot get the administration to pay to advertise open tenure-track positions. This has beeen going on for years. But with the budget issues, adjuncts are now also verboten.

Ethicals

We have a code of conduct. We all sign a statement that we’ve read and not or will not violate the code. We also have to report annually on conflicts of interest and such. I don’t know when this started but I don’t remember it before the Floods.

The office of undergraduate research has a director. This director has no graduate degree or classwork of any kind. This director has her job because her husband is a vice-president. I suppose it passes muster because she doesn’t work directly under him. But don’t we all work under the executive vice-president?

The Final Lap

I’ve been charged with gathering syllabi from several faculty members. It would be easier if policy had been followed—a copy of every syllabus is supposed to be sent to chairs and the division office. Dr. DSN never followed up in our department so most of the missing syllabi are from our department. I’m waiting for one professor to find, send or finally blow off the request for 4 syllabi, for courses only he has taught the past couple of years. Since he said, I’m working on it!, he hasn’t looked me in the face or talked to me and the documents, all our SACS documents, are due in 2 days.

This professor is also rumored to be the only one interested in taking over as chair after Dr. DSN.

Park This 2

Warning Bell

D’oh is up for reaccreditation. D’oh is also on probation for financial irregularities. We have to get reaccreditation. 95% of our students get some kind of financial aid. Without accreditation, all federal aid, from grants to loans, will be unavailable to students who attend D’oh. And without accreditation, will that 5% paying $26K/year stay?

By next week, hundreds of documents need to be scanned and sent to SACS for review. Our new Provost left for an overseas trip today and will not be back until well after the SACS due date. Even though this scanning job was a topic of conversation between administrative offices and a faculty committee, no action was ever taken and the player—yes, the one person charged with doing all the scanning and uploading—is confused and now “concerned.” This player heard nothing from November 2008 until he got an email in January asking if he “needed assistance.” He still has not received “the equipment and items in the initiative.” Sounds to me like the man needs a scanner or 3 and the boxes of documents that have been compiled and, hopefully, reviewed and organized by the Provost’s staff. He can get started once he gets “the items.” And he sent this out Tuesday.

The documents are due in 11 days.

Park This

Where we started: When D’oh had almost 2000 students and a full set of faculty, campus parking could be tight.

Post-Hilton: The first semester and a half back on campus, parking was free and, with half the enrollment and around 2/3 the faculty, pretty easy. Faculty’s biggest complaint was campus police not enforcing the Faculty and Staff Only zone right behind the building where I teach and my office is located. It wasn’t that far a walk from the other small lot or the overflow lots; it was more about people who’ve been pushed around and maligned and misused clutching at the crumb offered. Around spring semester midterms, the administration decided to enforce parking rules—well, sort of for a day or 3–and start charging for parking. You could buy a decal for $100 for about 6 weeks of parking in spring and parking all summer. Many were pissed, some called for civil or not-so-civil disobedience, and a good number capitulated because they lived on campus or worked nights or didn’t want to walk or couldn’t. The parking changes were openly about “revenue” and we were “reminded” that we had been “allowed” to park for free for a semester and a half. There was plenty of parking and no need to charge to restrict it. I was one of a good number of faculty, and even more students, who parked across the street or in the surrounding neighborhood and walked to campus. One afternoon, a former student and I passed crossing the street and he said, “You didn’t get a sticker either, Professor E?” I said, “You see me walking?”

Where we’re at now: This year, I bought a parking decal for $200. Parking was fine. Near my building, there are 2 large overflow lots and 2 smaller lots, one, the Faculty and Staff Only lot, right behind the building. The back of campus has 2 large parking lots. Then the big lot behind and to the left of my building was commandeered—new construction.

At the beginning of this semester, one Monday, the 2d overflow lot and 2 of the three rows of the Faculty and Staff Only lot and half of the other small lot were fenced off—more new construction. Campus parking has shrunk by more than half and it’s a nightmare. Cars are everywhere—in the lanes, in fire zones and blind driveways, on grass, against fencing, along the dumpsters. And we share much of this parking with the construction workers. Others discovered my parking spots in the alley so now I play musical cars, drifting in a circle until I see something open up or decide to make a space.

Today, early afternoon, dozens of cars were booted. A senior faculty member came around warning anyone she could find and I followed her out, grousing with her about the indignity of the parking fiasco and the lack of concern or planning by the administration and the lack of respect to us, faculty. I said I was tired of it. She said, Oh, I know, yes, I know. She pointed out that some boots had been removed, that there were fewer than there had been just 15 minutes earlier. Random enforcement, random pull back, unclear circumstances. Some with parking decals were ticketed and booted, some not, some on grass, some in the lane, places where cars have parked for weeks.

I know every faculty member, student, staff member on every college campus complains about parking. This isn’t about just parking. This is about a lack of leadership, lack of planning, lack of consideration, lack of sense. About making a toxic work environment, like the fifth circle of hell, the deadwood bobbing underneath while the still somewhat-sentient fight over campus mail envelopes, email accounts, and parking spaces.