Offleash

A report on the latest survey from TIAA-CREF on job satisfaction among the professoriate can be found here As the article notes, though, the survey is based on full-time faculty.

Basically, it seems, we like our jobs.

One of the great things about working at CSUSM is that people generally really do care -- about the place and about one another. So, it's not surprising that during and after the firestorms of two weeks ago, people checked in, emailed one another to see if they were each ok, reached out to students, and even invited colleagues (and in some cases near total strangers) to come evacuate with them. It was the CSUSM community at its best.

Over the past week I've heard from lots of students (and eavesdropped on others) that they think their professors are reacting well --- being compassionate and well, HUMAN. Most students and faculty I know appreciate how quickly and decisively the leadership team acted to close the campus. Except on Tuesday morning when the campus server was down briefly (and frighteningly to those of us who evacuated out of the area) communications were good. At a hard time, knowing what was going was actually pretty easy ---- as long as you had access to the internet and to your email. Well done.

It's probably too much to expect that this feeling of solidarity will last much longer. For most, the immediate danger is over, for those who have lost more (in some cases much more) than a few days on a syllabus, they will be awfully busy and pretty stressed. For the rest of us though, it's back to business as pretty much normal. That means all the usual interests and conflicts will come back for us to deal with.

It's good to know that at some moments we all fundamentally share ideas about what's important. Still, let's not lapse into a too-extended group hug.

As we move forward there are things like budget and other choices that need us each to be honest and vocal about our priorities. Just so you know --- it will soon be officially announced -- there is another budget forum which is currently scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 27 (the Tuesday after the Thanksgiving Break) from 12-1 in ARTS 240 (let's fill this room too!). The theme of the meetings will be about 'how we spend our money'. My understanding from UBC (University Budget Committee) is that there will be an effort to get materials into peoples' hands prior to the meeting.

I will miss UBC this week because of a conference I need to go to San Francisco -- the North American Conference on British Studies. Sometimes you have to remind yourself why you are in this business. NACBS has its oddities, but it's actually a pretty fun and interesting conference.

If you haven't yet, remember to get your ticket to the Fall Faculty Research Colloquium. This year's selectee & speaker is Professor Ann Elwood and she will talk about her research on Rin Tin Tin. It's got everything: movies, dogs and glamour!!! Tickets are $16 at the faculty center.

The talk is on Friday, Nov. 16 starting at 5 p.m. in the Grand Salon of the Clarke Field House. Please contact the Faculty Center for more information.

After a long conference weekend in San Francisco, I have some catching up to do on the blog -- and I will over the course of the week.

There is a lot going on and I've got notes on much of it, but just haven't had a chance to sit down and actually write about it.

In the meantime, I did want to thank those of you who continue to send pictures of your pets. Today's offerings are from Lisa Bandong in the Faculty Center and Belinda Peters from the History Department.

So, I give you Sissy Bandong and Vincent (aka Vinnie) Peters. The latter is yet another "Hound of History" ---- if anyone in University Advancement is listening, that sounds like a calendar to me. Hounds of History dressed up 'Wegman-like' in period dress depicting the subfield of their human companion . . . . . . Its says 'winnner' to me!

Anyway: Sissy Bandong

And Vinnie Peters:

At last week's Senate Meeting, President Haynes reported on her participation in a system-wide group designed to improve the reporting of accountability at universities. The notion, as the President outlined it, was that 'we' need to be in charge of defining what our measures are, or someone else (Margaret Spellings, I guess) will do it for us. So, we're going to be ahead of the curve and thus stay in control of the process.

Read about "College Portrait" the new system that was launched this week here.

Yes, yes, I know the arguments. But I'm so bloody sick of the con game that passes for assessment. It's making someone rich --- consultants mostly and faculty development professionals -- but there's no proof that it's improving anyone's education anywhere. Nope -- what it really is is a blanket for parents worried about the cost of education (as well they should be), some way of saying to them 'you got your money's worth'. I imagine in a few years that I (along with many others) will be saying 'we told you so' when it turns out that this system we have somehow created so that we can 'control' it, bites us in the ass. It will, too, because the CSU is so craven and so ashamed of being a university that it will perform whatever tricks it thinks the Legislature and the Trustees want it to learn (even if they never ask). The CSU is a large and not very nimble or creative bureaucracy: mark my words -- the CSU will find a way to screw this up and hurt itself. It just will because we are the CSU. On the disaster this will become, see here.

During the fires, one of the phrases I remember reading (and I may well have used it myself) was one that asked faculty to consider their learning outcomes in revising their syllabi for the remainder of the semester. Well, I'm here to confess that I don't have learning outcomes in my courses and won't. I have ideas I want students to think about, some factual information I think they should know but mostly I figure the 'outcomes' are up to the students. How do they want to use the information they encounter and grapple with during the semester? How will it help them build their own lives and become the people they aspire to be? I honestly don't care about controlling or measuring those outcomes.

Although I am no particular devotee of Harvard (ask me, my most entertaining job search story comes from my 1988 interview with their History Department) and though I think that the NY Times would be a much better paper if its coverage of higher education was not almost entirely limited to being a de facto alumni magazine for the university, I was nevertheless impressed by the recent inaugaral address given by Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's first woman president. On the question of assessment and accountability, she said this:

Universities are indeed accountable. But we in higher education need to seize the initiative in defining what we are accountable for. We are asked to report graduation rates, graduate school admission statistics, scores on standardized tests intended to assess the “value added” of years in college, research dollars, numbers of faculty publications. But such measures cannot themselves capture the achievements, let alone the aspirations of universities. Many of these metrics are important to know, and they shed light on particular parts of our undertaking. But our purposes are far more ambitious and our accountability thus far more difficult to explain.

By their nature, universities nurture a culture of restlessness and even unruliness. This lies at the heart of their accountability to the future. Education, research, teaching are always about change – transforming individuals as they learn, transforming the world as our inquiries alter our understanding of it, transforming societies as we see our knowledge translated into policies – policies like those being developed at Harvard to prevent unfair lending practices, or to increase affordable housing or avert nuclear proliferation – or translated into therapies, like those our researchers have designed to treat macular degeneration or to combat anthrax. The expansion of knowledge means change. But change is often uncomfortable, for it always encompasses loss as well as gain, disorientation as well as discovery. It has, as Machiavelli once wrote, no constituency. Yet in facing the future, universities must embrace the unsettling change that is fundamental to every advance in understanding.

If one doesn't buy into the whole assessment/accountability con [and how come it's only ever faculty who are asked to be accountable or to assess the results of their efforts?] you are accused of being arrogant or uncaring or lazy. Somehow it means that you (secretly or not-so-secretly) want to coast on what you've done for years. You oppose innovation. Perhaps. What I oppose is academic and pedagogical fads. So on this whole assessment thing -- consider me a dinosaur and count me out.

Many congratulations to Professor Ann Elwood for her wonderful talk last night at the Faculty Colloquium Dinner. Her presentation of her work on Rin Tin Tin made all of us in the audience laugh (that dog could out-act all the human actors and could even steal scenes from children!) and think about the manufacture of celebrity and the human animal bond. Despite the admonitions of WC Fields never to work with children or puppies, Ann 'survived' the encounter and treated us all to a lively look at her really interesting research. After last night's talk, I don't think I'm the only one out there now waiting for the book to be out!

Also thanks to Carmen Nava and Lisa Bandong (also to the ever-creative Mark DuBois in the catering department) for a lovely event. Although dogs, alas, were not allowed to attend (wouldn't that have been a great picture: dogs gathered to watch Rin Tin Tin movies!) , Gus did enjoy the milk bone party favors strewn on each table which I brought home to him. The food and dinner table talk were great!

For those of you who have never been to a Faculty Colloquium Dinner, you really need to come sometimes. Faculty do very few things for themselves at CSUSM and this event is one of them -- and easily the most fun. On a large campus such as we now are, you get to see people whose path never cross yours anymore. You get to meet new people who you might otherwise not ever meet such as the great Nursing faculty I got to sit with. You go home remembering what great colleagues you have. And the event itself never disappoints.

The Faculty Center sponsors one each semester, so please do come out next semester and join the fun.

Ok, I know I spelled it wrong, using the Bush-ism for the concept of strategy, but I am feeling sort of confused.

I hope as many of you as possible will visit and comment on the Academic Affairs website displaying the mission, vision and (strategic?) goals for Academic Affairs. It is located here. The Town Hall meeting last week was interesting and informative. Thanks to Kathleen Watson, Jennifer Jeffries and Mark Baldwin for facilitating it in the Provost's absence. Both AALC and BLP have worked hard on this and made a lot of progress.

It's always possible to wordsmith such documents to death -- as academics that's something we know how to do and also something at which we excel. Usually when someone is trying to do that, it indicates that they 'don't see themselves or their work' in the words. Sometimes this is about huge gaps in thinking that is central to us all, sometimes it is just about a person wanting whatever document it is to be about them. We ignore suggestions to wordsmith at our peril and sorting through the valid suggestions from less substantive ones is a worthy task for the wordsmiths-in-chief.

However, my concern with the goals as they stand now is that they are too diffuse. They are constructed to allow for anyone to 'write' to them when proposing ideas for the various strategic initiative funds that are available by employing the correct buzzwords, tugging the right heartstrings or using whatever you've got to try and get the money you need to do whatever it is you need to do.

What they don't allow us as a division or us as a campus to do is to decide which ideas among these many ideas to fund. In many respects the whole strategic initiative process makes very little sense anyway so perhaps this is ok. As a campus, we still lack a strategic vision or direction that points us in the direction of things we must do, things we should do, things we positively choose to do, and things we'd like to do (if we won the lottery).

I don't see how the strategic goals (or the strategic goals for the campus for that matter) get us closer to that. If the President (presumably with some buy-in from her Executive Council, if not from the Senate which wasn't consulted) thinks the things that she espoused at Convocation are worth doing by 2010 are worth doing -- for example increasing the number of degree programs to 40 -- then shouldn't strategic goals be about getting us there?

Where in the current strategic goals is any kind of commitment to quality or excellence? One of the strategic goals is explicit about 'expanding' experiential learning opportunities; another sort of commits us to expanding new programs and yet another suggests that in 'actively engaging' in multiple communities we will increase the number of community partners (or so that's how it appears to me). But the emphasis on just doing 'more' begs several questions: 1) should we be doing this particular thing as opposed to something else? -- which things advance the strategic direction of the campus? 2) can we do it well --- or are we just going to add things and then leave them to fend for themselves once they get started? will we support the things we add (not to mention the things that are aleady here, which feel like they were abandoned a long time ago) ? 3) how will merely doing more of some things get us where we want to go?

At a President's Cabinet meeting last spring we starting talking about the concepts behind 'good to great' and I innocently (ok not so innocently) asked the question, how do we know that even if some unit (not just in academic affairs) 'could' be great at something (given enough resources) whether or not it 'should' be great at it? What are our standards to decide these things? I refer you to Patrick Callan's recent op-ed at Inside Higher Education. Now, Callan has his own hobby-horses and you won't find me endorsing all of his ideas (at least uncritically) but in this piece on "looking under the hood of public higher education", he does raise important questions about why we spend the money we do spend on the things we choose to spend them on. Anyway, even if you don't agree, it's worth a read.

Last year, an administrator who shall go unnamed told me that my "problem" was that I always saw the glass as half empty. Well, that's sort of true, but my considered response would be 'well, you just try being at CSUSM for 17+ years and see how 'half-full' you see everything'. There is a fine line between being skeptical and being cynical and I admit I don't always succeed in doing it.

Finally, I'd say that a lot of things are happening that might make strategic goals for Academic Affairs a bit premature. For example, there's the task force on structure [is there anyone out there that doesn't think that at some point we are going to have to commit to the area of health as a core activity of the university?], the whole foundations of excellence discussion, there's the looming recession which might make us think about one strategic goal being making sure the next round of cuts don't eviscerate programs that have never been funded to recover from the last downturn --- etc.

If for example, we make some operational commitments (a College of Health and Human Services, more tenure track faculty -- full stop -- or more tt faculty teaching first year courses, etc), then finding a way to do these or other things might more accurately described as tactical, but in large measure they map out the strategy of the campus for the future. I don't see how the current strategic goals get us there.

Finally, for this has gone on long enough, I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the strategic plan for Academic Affairs ought to be the strategic plan for the university itself. I guess that's not particularly university-first thinking ---- but my fuddyduddyness dictates my belief that actually we are first a university.

I hope you have been having a restful and happy Thanksgiving holiday. It is always difficult to contemplate coming back to campus after 4 days off, especially when it is so late in the term and there is so much to do between now and the end. It's long weekends like this that convince me that I'm going to absolutely love being retired!!! Anyway, I hope you're ready to come back and that you have enough energy to get through the next 3+ weeks until the end of the semester.

Right when you get back there are two important events you need to know about:

Campus Budget Forum --- held Tuesday, Nov. 27 at University Hour in ARTS 240. Please come. More on this tomorrow.

Vigil for World AIDS Day -- held Saturday, Dec. 1 at 6 on campus. Please stop by the Senate Office and buy a candle for the vigil. Last year this was a very moving and life-affirming event. All proceeds go to Michaelle House, a care center for people living with HIV/AIDS

Do you remember the old Far Side cartoon where a lady is wagging her finger at her dog admonishing him for something in great and excruciating detail BUT what the dog hears is "Blah, blah, blah, Fluffy, blah, blah".

I was thinking of that when the Executive Committee tried to talk about Access to Excellence yesterday. This 'son' (or is it 'demon spawn'?) of Cornerstones is the CSU system's current stab at a strategic plan. There are some good things in it, really, --- but it's much more about access than excellence -- which probably doesn't surprise anyone. "Hey, California -- c'mon down! We can't/won't pay for it, but even though you will, please enroll anyway. Just don't expect much."

You want to care, you should care, but . . . . . let's face it, my brain hurts when I try to. All I keep thinking is "Blah, blah, blah, Access to Excellence, blah, blah" Like I always say, the Far Side never gets old.