Category: The Academy

Tenure and Promotion Portfolio

Eight days ago a senior colleague told me that my portfolio was due this year. The deadline for that is tomorrow.

So I stayed up late and worked on it and got up early and worked on it.

Then I found out that, no, it is not due until 2016. However, I thought that since I had already started it, I should just keep going.

My goal was to get it finished by the time it was due and then send it to some folks for review.

While it is not perfect, I think it is much improved over last year. I certainly took the recommendations to heart and worked on significant improvements.

So today I sent the link to folks to have them look at it. Hopefully it will be what people were looking for. (I thought it was last year when I did my pre-tenure review, but it wasn’t.)

Medical School Lures English Majors

NPR on May 27, 2015 has a story by Julie Rovner on a medical school revamping requirements to lure English majors.

Dr. David Muller is Mount Sinai’s dean for medical education. One wall of his cluttered office is a massive whiteboard covered with to-do tasks and memorable quotations. One quote reads: “Science is the foundation of an excellent medical education, but a well-rounded humanist is best suited to make the most of that education.”

At first it is about Mount Sinai’s own program. Eventually, however, they get to the relevant parts for non-Mount Sinai students:

The effort has worked so well, in fact, that Mount Sinai is expanding it, opening it to students in any major from any college or university. Eventually half the class will be admitted via a slightly reconfigured program, which has a new name: FlexMed.

The more often you tell me, the less I believe

Okay, I don’t think this should be applied to “I love you,” but other than that, yeah, I am starting to be a believer.

The more you tell me that “everything is awesome” and “we will have some storms,” the more I am sure the boat is leaking and a hurricane is coming.

Just saying.

Rhetoric of everyday.

“Summers Off”

Summer is a time when many academics do not teach. For some of us, particularly adjuncts, that is a time of financial hardship. But even for adjuncts without paid instructional work, and certainly for those in full-time positions, no teaching does not mean we have the summers off.

Academic work is judged on teaching, publications, and service or publications, teaching, and service–depending on the type of institution for which you work. Either way publications are an important part of the equation. Even community colleges, given a surfeit of applications, use publications to determine who to interview and hire.

Since teaching is a (sometimes more than) full-time job, work on publications is often shifted to the summer and Christmas break. We research and teach during the school year and write and submit over the summer. Or we revise and resubmit over the summer.

This summer, I have two book chapters, an article R&R, and a book to finish.

I also have to prepare my tenure and promotion portfolio.

No teaching does not mean I have summers off.

Academic Publishing

Hybrid Pedagogy begins its discussion of the digital humanities and the future of academic publishing by saying:

It is not enough to write monographs. It is not enough to publish. Today, scholars must understand what happens when our research is distributed, and we must write, not for rarified audiences, but for unexpected ones. New-form scholarly publishing requires new-form scholarly (digital) writing. Digital academic publishing may on the surface appear as a lateral move from print to screen, but in fact it brings with it new questions about copyright, data analysis, multimodality, curation, archiving, and how scholarly work finds an audience. The promise of digital publishing is one that begins with the entrance of the written, and one that concludes with distribution, reuse, revision, remixing — and finally, redistribution.

Digital publishing is a field worthy of rigorous research and deep discourse. In a post-print environment, for example, social media — Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, WordPress, or Tumblr — have supplanted the static page as the primary metaphors for how we talk about the dissemination of information. Digitized words have code and algorithms behind them, and are not arrested upon the page; rather they are restive there.

The most fascinating part of the article, and the one I really want to spend some time dwelling on at some point = “Traditional academic publishing is aimed at a scholarly process that is private and gradual, deliberate and uninterrupted by the memes and news of the day. Digital publishing is public work, packaged and poised for ready distribution.”

HOF: Everyone Helps

We all bring such different things to the departmental table. A wildly popular but not-too-rigorous teacher is essential thing for any department, because her courses entice more majors and satisfy the bean counters. A rigorous and stern teacher who students fear and only take because they have to is another valuable department member, performing an essential weeding function and providing cover for the rest of us. The professor does an adequate-but-perfunctory job in the classroom but cranks out eh grants and publications is a godsend at accreditation time and in raising the profile of your department. The colleague who is not a great teacher and has not published in years but does yeoman’s work in advising students how to graduate on time is solid gold.

These are very different things, and a strong department needs them all. And if you are really, really good at one or two things and proud of that, it is way too easy to disparage and diminish the essential roles played by your colleagues–particularly if it is someone you dislike. You mentally count the number of times you see students waiting outside the door of your colleague who often misses his office hours, forgetting that he also took a van full of undergrads to the national conference the week before.

It is also true that there are colleagues who bring nothing to the departmental table. But in 15 years at two different institutions, I have never worked with such a person. I have had colleagues I disliked, who let me down or blocked me on important projects or otherwise offended. But objectively speaking, they all contributed to the department. There are very very few genuinely negligent colleagues.

From larryc

HOF: Academia Sucks

asian teacher at white board martinAre you waiting for someone to seek you out and praise you? That’s not going to happen.

Instead, I get a lot of motivation from doing the fascinating things and the interactions that come with the doing.

Publishing sucks. I hate writing papers. I hate editing them. I hate doing the revisions for them.

Reviewing papers sucks. I hate all authors everywhere and filling out editorial forms.

Prepping for classes sucks. I hate having to think “how will people manage to screw up this very simple task?”. I hate doing the same stinking problem with a bazillion steps so that anyone who tries can follow it.

Grading sucks. How could anyone mess up copying a fact from the book? How could anyone not be able to do arithmetic? How could anyone not being able to write a coherent sentence in legible penmanship?

Committee work sucks. I hate my colleagues who cannot attend a meeting on time, didn’t prepare for the meeting, and can’t make a decision even with a gun to their heads.

Research sucks. As soon as I get good at something, I have to learn something else. My hard drive crashed and it’s three days to put the system back into working order. I’ve lost 10 programs that I wrote in the past month and all the data as well. And, as soon as I really know what’s going on, then I have to write a damn paper or make a presentation.

Presentations suck. I can see half the room is reading the program to see if something better is coming up and I spent roughly five hours to make a presentation that is over in 10 minutes.

Yet…..

student_raising hand computerWhen students get a topic, then their pleasure is my pleasure. All is forgotten about prep and grading and all that remains is that shining joy that someone learned something and I was there to help it happen.

When my research is humming along, I looooooooooove the feel of being in the groove and will snap at anyone who mentions the weeks, months, or years of drudgery to get to that point.

Nothing is better than the spirited give and take with colleagues about our common interests. I’ve gotten a lot of trophies, medals, certificates, and A’s, but I would trade all of them for an afternoon of spirited conversation in one of my areas of interest where ideas are shared and everyone goes away with new things to try.

I do have mentors for particular aspects of my career, but they are often people who push me hard to try new things and revise whatever one more time before submitting instead of praising me.

I am seldom praised by anyone for the things of which I am most proud. Instead, I often infer praise from people inviting me to be a collaborator, be a reviewer, and be a speaker, or asking my advice in some area of my expertise. Clearly, they appreciate my efforts, but few ever come right out and say, “You’re doing a great job, Polly. Keep it up!” You, too, will have to learn to take pleasure and motivation in the doing instead of seeking praise, or you will be very unhappy waiting for praise that will be too little with huge gaps between instances.

from polly_mer

Teaching, Learning, and Cost: Universities Today

Kevin Carey writes in his last Think Tank column for The Chronicle of Higher Ed:

The standard research-university model—autonomous professors rewarded for scholarship, untrained in teaching, and unaccountable for student learning—dominates every aspect of modern higher education, including the vast majority of colleges, which have no mandate for research.

professors waiting in line eutress public domain WCIt may dominate, but it is not the only model. While my university requires scholarship (research), teaching is of primary importance.

Measuring teaching ability is a problem when you are trying to support teaching, however. Student evaluations may not be the most efficacious way of determining teaching ability, but it is a common one. What else could we use or how else might we determine whether someone is or is not an effective teacher?

Colleges can’t forever continue raising prices, shortchanging their teaching responsibilities, and clinging to pre-technological models of organization.

iStock professor lecture small group white boardWhile I am unsure what pre-tech models he means (perhaps face-to-face classrooms?), I think that the rising prices and the teaching responsibilities are two different factors that will have distinct and separate impacts. The average consumer of higher education is aware of cost, but unaware of the differences that good teachers can make. Therefore the cost will hit the higher education model first and hardest, with the strong teaching universities perhaps being able to recover faster.