admin Faculty, Higher Education

Day in the Life, Day 3

Day 3, Wednesday. Kids back to school, but buses running late so off to a late start today.

7:00am: Wake up, coffee. Wait with son at bus stop until 7:45 (bus 30 minutes late)

To 8:30am: Shower, dress, eat.

To 9:00am: Check email, pack

To 10:00am: Stop at dry cleaners, post office on way to office

10:00am: Arrive at office at last.

To 11:30am: Check emails, respond to request for input from dean, update faculty on issues, deal with departmental fax machine, schedule meetings

11:30am-1:0pm: Train interns and compose email to on-line submission system designer.

1:00pm-2:00pm: Chat with previous chair, fight fires, emails, phone calls.

2:00pm-3:00pm: Conference call with journal production desk regarding transition, and follow-up emails

3:00pm-3:15pm: Phone conversation with colleague from another college

3:15pm-3:30pm: Email class about assignments for tomorrow

3:30pm: Depart office

To 4:10pm: Pick up tennis rackets to string from tennis center

4:20pm-6:00pm: Watch kids basketball games

6:00-7:00pm: Dinner with family

7:00-9:30pm: Send emails to kids teachers, eBay people, departmental colleagues, friends; research new tennis rackets on-line

9:30pm: Customize and string tennis rackets

11:30pm: Scotch and put together order for tennis supplier

1:00am: Bed

Total hours worked: 5.5 hours

admin Faculty, Higher Education

Day in the Life of a Tenured Professor, Day 2

Day 2, Tuesday. Historic day: First half-Kenyan to be inaugurated as President of the United States. Is the dream still alive?

Had an inch of snow overnight, so kids home from school because of school closure, and university opening is delayed until 10:30a — for some folks. Not me.

6:15am: Wake up, coffee, shower, dress, read Sunday New York Times, check gmail and eBay.

8:15am: Arrive at office. Only one here.

To 8:45am: Check work email, organize for day, eat two muffins at desk.

To 11:00am: Write letters of recommendation for students, check in with departmental admins

11:00-11:40am: Meet with student re honors thesis project

To 1:15pm: Prep for and teach class

To 2:20pm: Eat lunch in dining hall with students

2:30-3:40pm: Write letter of recommendation for colleague at another college who was nominated for an award

To 5:45pm: Prep for and attend chairs’ meeting with dean

6:00pm: Leave office

To 10:30pm: To indoor tennis center for tennis night

To 11:00am: Email kid’s teacher, eBay, check email, finish blog

11:30pm: Bed (hopefully)

Total hours worked: c.10

admin Faculty, Higher Education

Day 1 Work Log

What is a week in the life of a slappy tenured professor like? Here’s Day 1, Monday. Kids home from school because of Martin Luther King Holiday so was able to sleep in:

8:00am: Wake up, coffee, shower, dress

8:45am: Quick check of emails and pack up computer and work stuff

9:00am: Drive to indoor tennis center and drop off rackets strung over the weekend

9:30am: Arrive at office

To 10:30am: Review documents for and email correspondence with class I am teaching, honors student I am advising, independent study student I am working with, and miscellaneous chair related business.

To noon: Review on-line submission system being developed for the journal I edit, prepare for meeting with editorial interns, and prep for chairs’ meeting with dean tomorrow.

Noon – 2pm: Train interns on on-line submission system for journal I edit

To 2:30pm: Check mail in office, do scheduling

2:30-4:40pm: Eat lunch in dining hall, bring laptop to write up evaluation of on-line submission system testing, 10 minute phone conversation with friend

To 5:30pm: Meet son back at office, make dinner for him, lay down in break room and watch Australian Open tennis

5:30-7:45pm: Work on documents for evaluation of department faculty for salary review (as chair), intermittantly check email and do scheduling

7:45pm-9:45pm: Show movie to intro. class (“Hoop Dreams”)

To 10:00pm: Log assignments completed by students during the movie, follow-up with intro. class on enrollment issues by email, reschedule meeting with student for tomorrow

10:00-10:20pm: Check eBay auctions, email tennis coach, close down computer, wash dishes, straighten office to get ready for tomorrow

10:35pm: Home

To 11:15pm: Unpack from work, eat muffin, drink scotch, finalize eBay auctions, update blog

To 11:30pm: Change clothes, get clothes ready for tomorrow, pack tennis bag

11:30pm: Bed (hopefully)

Total hours worked: c.12

admin Faculty, Higher Education

Tenure!!!

The follower of this sporadically updated blog will notice a change in its title and description. These changes reflect the fact that I earned TENURE in the spring of 2008 and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor effective last July.

The landmark moments in the life of an academic are few, but all are quite significant. Completing the PhD, getting a tenure-track job, publishing your first book, and so on. But there is probably no moment more significant than earning tenure. (Tenure being the contractual right of faculty not to be terminated without cause, and particularly not to be terminated because of the particular ideas being taught or topics being researched, hence associating tenure very closely with academic freedom. I think the Wikipedia entries on both of these subjects are pretty sound.)

In my case, the victory was bittersweet because my decision was twice delayed. First, when I left Our Lady’s University prior to standing for tenure there. (See early postings for more on that.) Second, when my colleagues here insisted that I wait until 2007-2008 to stand for tenure, rather than considering me in 2006-2007 (which was my 8th year of continuous employment since earning my PhD in 1998).

Putting together my tenure portfolio was both CATHARTIC — allowing me to see that I actually had accomplished some things as a junior professor — and FRUSTRATING — because I knew my friends (and “aspirational peers”) had long since crossed over the tenure and promotion threshold. I had a hard time accepting that I had been consistently productive over a period of nine years and still had to worry about whether I would get tenure or not (more on that in a later post).

In any event, tenure was granted and I began the 2008-2009 academic year with all of the security it affords. I also found myself having to defend the rationale for the tenure system. Why should I as a faculty member have job security when others do not? And having tenure only compounded the beliefs of some of my friends that faculty don’t really do anything anyway. If we didn’t do anything before tenure, why would be do anything after tenure?

Of course, there is some “dead wood” in every forest. And there are certainly some faculty who use tenure as an excuse to slack off. As for me, I find myself busier than ever, in part because I became chair of my department on January 1st (more on that later). To give anyone interested a sense of what a week in the life of one faculty member looks like, beginning tomorrow (if all goes well), I will post a log of how I spent my time each day for the coming week. I only hope I have enough time to do that! Stay tuned.

admin Books, Culture, Students

Why are my students so DOUR?

Dour. If I had to use one word to describe my students, that would be it. Maybe I’ve already blogged about this. I can’t remember. But it bears repeating.

On more than one occasion, I have looked out at a room full of students and yelled, “Why are you so DOUR? You have EVERYTHING!”

I met women selling bags of water on the streets of Accra, Ghana who were happier than these students. Students who watch TV on plasma screens in their dorm rooms, then drive their BMWs to eat sushi for dinner, before getting a couple of hours of studying in between IMing, BBMing, texting, and Facebooking their friends. OK, so that’s an exaggeration. Sort of.

I thought of these dour students recently when I was listening to an old interview with David Foster Wallace on “Fresh Air,” the NPR show. Wallace has recently committed suicide at age 46. I haven’t read his fiction, most notably his novel “Infinite Jest,” but his essay on “Roger Federer as a Religious Experience” in the New York Times magazine a couple of years ago was amazing.

In any event, in the interview with Terry Gross, he talks about the inspiration for his novel “Infinite Jest” being his realization at age 30 that despite having been grotesquely privileged their whole lives he and his friends were also extraordinarily sad. He attributes this in part to the fact that “success” in our culture means: make alot of money, have an attractive spouse, and become (in)famous in some way — i.e., experience as much pleasure as possible, which ultimately is empty.

Viewed through this lens, binge drinking and random hooking up (for example) is a symptom, then, not a cause of a generation of college students who are privileged, sad, hollow, and dour.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

admin Clothes, Culture, Faculty

Frump and Circumstance

At the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association meeting in Toronto in August 1997, I was riding the escalator down into the atrium of the conference hotel with my fellow sociology graduate students Josh Rossol and Black Hawk Hancock. Black Hawk noticed alot of people milling around, so he turned to Josh and me and asked, “How do I know which ones are the sociologists?”

To which Josh famously responded, “They’re the ones who are dressed like flood victims.”

Of course, this flood victim chic is not limited to sociologists, as pointed out by Tim Gunn of “Project Runway” and former chair of the department of fashion design at the New School of Design (interviewed in the Chronicle of Higher Education):

But for so many people in the academic world at large, I really believe that disdain for fashion is something that they are quite proud of, and that they want to demonstrate in what they’re wearing and how they’re wearing it. It’s a kind of an intellectual snobbery that says: My brain is important to me, and how I look is not, because it goes beyond the clothes. They’re poorly groomed, they’re schlumped over and practically drooling. I mean, I’m making some exaggerations here, but when I go to meetings with the rest of Parsons, I look around and think: Just comb your hair!

 

I think it has to do with the academics’ perception of lifestyle in general, which is that they drive beaten-up, rusted-out old jalopies of cars, they tend to live in environments that are messy, piled high with stuff-mainly books-and covered with dust. I say it comes from a disdain, but in some ways even that can be cultivated, though, so that is looks almost studied, like: Gee, did you buy a bag of dust and spread it around before I came over?

 

admin Higher Education, Students, Teaching

Work Hard, Play Hard?

Many students at elite colleges and universities in the United States adhere to the motto, “Work Hard, Play Hard.” I tell my students applying this motto to higher education creates a false dichotomy between work and play. I insist that my courses will require them to work, to be sure, but that we will have fun at the same time. So, in my version of the motto – which I give it to them in Latin, Laborate valde, ludite valde – I unify what they dichotomize by insisting that learning itself is fun.

Whether I’m successful or not, that’s a good question. I like to think so.

admin Higher Education, Students

No Poor Folks at Wake Forest

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, of the 75 wealthiest private universities in the United States (those with endowments of $500 million or more), Wake Forest University ranks 74th (second to last) in the proportion of undergraduates who receive Pell Grants. This is a rough measure of the proportion of students who are low income. And the proportion is dropping, from 7.9 percent in 2004-5 to 6.3 percent in 2006-7.

See the article and related table.

admin Higher Education, Sport

Title IX, Properly Understood

As a sort of follow-up to my previous entry on college athletics, a few thoughts on the infamous and badly misunderstood “Title IX.”

(1) “Title IX” is actually part of the Education Amendments of 1972 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It specifies, quite uncontroversially, I hope: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

(2) Although most visible in higher education, Title IX also applies to elementary and secondary schools, as well as to federally-funded education programs in correctional institutions, health care institutions, etc. and to federally-funded programs such as internships and school-to-work.

(3) Although most notable in sports, the original Title IX legislation did not even include a reference to athletics. Rather, the Education Amendments of 1974 called on the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to develop guidelines for the application of nondiscrimination regulations to intercollegiate athletics. But Title IX also — and perhaps more importantly — applies to bands, clubs, health facilities, dorms, dining halls, etc.

(4) I said there were two, but there are actually three tests that are used to determine compliance with nondiscrimination by sex in intercollegiate athletics. According to a 1979 document from the Office for Civil Rights of Office of the Secretary of Housing, Education, and Welfare:

(a) Whether intercollegiate level participation opportunities for male and female students are provided in numbers substantially proportionate to their respective enrollments; or

 

(b) Where the members of one sex have been and are underrepresented among intercollegiate athletes, whether the institution can show a history and continuing practice of program expansion which is demonstrably responsive to the developing interest and abilities of the members of that sex; or

 

(c) Where the members of one sex are underrepresented among intercollegiate athletes, and the institution cannot show a continuing practice of program expansion such as that cited above, whether it can be demonstrated that the interests and abilities of the members of that sex have been fully and effectively accommodated by the present program.

Reasonable people can certainly disagree about whether men and women should receive equal numbers of athletic scholarships for Division I and II athletics. But this is just a small part of the overall purpose of Title IX, just as scholarship-granting intercollegiate athletics is a small part of the overall purpose of colleges and universities.

Considered in the context of the larger purpose of Title IX and higher education generally, I favor a broad interpretation and strong enforcement of these statutes when applied to the very specific case of college sports and scholarships. And I say this as someone whose opportunity to play college baseball was taken away due to cutbacks in men’s sports back in the 1980s. Participation in college sports, for both men and women, is a privilege, not a right. But if we’re going to have them, it is a privilege that should apply equally to men and women.

admin Higher Education, Sport

College Sports — Yay or Nay?

The New York Times last week ran an excellent series of articles on the chase for N.C.A.A. scholarships, the scarcity of athletic aid, and the challenges facing coaches and scholarship athletes

The articles confirmed my uneasiness about “big time college sports.” On the one hand, I am an avid fan of many college sports and like the college athletes who I know from class or campus. On the other hand, I don’t know that I would want any of my children to play sports in college, at least in Divisions I or II. The academic sacrifices seem too great.

The series has articles called “Expectations Lose to Reality of Sports Scholarships,” “It’s Not an Adventure, It’s a Job” and “Divvying Scholarship Dollars Can Divide a Team,” as well as interesting data on the maximum number of scholarships available per sport and the actual average value of scholarships by sport and gender.

Check it out and see what you think: The Scholarship Divide