Off Again

Off again. Our administration is now "stepping away" from most of the extraordinarily time-consuming and ill-conceived program prioritization that took center stage last year. There will now be a brief intermission while some top administrative jobs are reshuffled, and then next year we will see if this plan re-emerges or simply disappears.

Prescience

Now this has happened. The fifth and final step that moved us full circle was only hypothetical last week. Now that the semester is over and faculty are away it's been announced and made official. Decade officially wasted.

How To Waste a Decade

Here is a brief chronology of my academic life so far at my bizarro university:

1. Interdisciplinary department with faculty lines, one degree, multiple concentrations.
2. Department eliminated and programs separated, no faculty lines, multiple degrees. 
3. Individual programs given some faculty lines, multiple degrees.
4. New interdisciplinary department formed with faculty lines, multiple degrees.
5. Interdisciplinary department with faculty lines, one degree, multiple concentrations. 

*headdesk*

Reorganizing Again

I'm back.

My university is once again engaged in its periodic and inscrutable reorganization of my academic life. So once again I find myself in need of a creative outlet. So, blogging it is.

Freud Lives

In a previous post, I recounted the sad tale of opposition to a course I had proposed on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. I predicted eventual success despite this opposition, but that it would require many hours of tedious and contentious committee meetings. This turned out to be the case.

After wending its way through the program faculty, the advisory board, the curriculum subcommittee, the college council, and finally the university policy committee, I am pleased to announce that there is now a course on Freud at my institution. By a single vote, my colleagues decided that perhaps there was still some reason to teach Freud – despite assertions that his theories have been discredited, that his ideas may harm vulnerable students, and that lawsuits against the university would be imminent. It was a sad, frustrating and time consuming series of debates, but at least it is over now.

The process has taken its toll on my enthusiasm, and left yet another bad taste in my mouth concerning campus politics. However, I will strive to enjoy the new course. There are a surprising number of students who seem to be very excited about the class already. I find this charming and I imagine their enthusiasm will soon rekindle my own.

Warhol's Freud

FML

Here is the reaction from my colleagues in the psychology department to a proposed undergraduate general education course on Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams:

We would be concerned if students had an academic experience at [our University] that endorsed psychoanalysis as a viable approach to personality and the meaning of dreams in an era where psychological inquiry has for decades relied on scientific methods that have dismissed psychoanalysis along with phrenology, astrology and other invalid explanations of human behavior.

Salvidor Dali's 1939 sketch of Freud.

It's not that the psychology department itself has any interest in teaching courses on Freud. This we knew already. However, the fact that they wish to prevent any "academic experience" of Freud by students anywhere at our university is new.

I don't believe these objections will prevent the course from being offered, but it will consume the time and energy of many people around campus. This is the level of intellectual debate that occupies much of my time as an academic. Some days it strikes me as comic. Other days, it just makes me sad.

Perhaps the next course I propose will be "Psychoanalysis, Phrenology and Astrology." That should make for some entertaining committee meetings at the very least.

Resisting Infinity

Dead Voles has nice post on the Infinity Standard.

1.) In the work of doing good, effort causes good. 2.) All possible good should be done, and 3.) all foregone effort is foregone good. 4.) In principle, there is no condition one can be in where slightly more effort is not possible. 5.) With infinite effort, infinite good can be done. 6.) Therefore, infinity is the standard. Anything short is deplorable dereliction.

Reading this sparked the post below on the need for a personal mission statement. My current academic unit has recently been remade by upper-level administrators. What this means in practice is that everything needs to be redone now. The absence of very basic things, like faculty governance, promotion and tenure documents, student degree-checks, and even computer support for faculty, are all starting to become acute. Every one of these gaps is a crisis that needs immediate attention. Part of restructuring of my unit entailed streamlining, so we are now an eighth the size we used to be. This means that all the details of running an academic program have to be recreated by a very, very small group of faculty. We are busy reinventing many wheels.

The infinity standard resonates for me right now. Like the vast majority of academics, we care about our teaching and our students and our research. They are important to us beyond simply being our jobs. This creates many problems, but right now it means that everyone sincerely wants to fix everything and they want to fix it now. It will in fact be good to fix these things, and there is nothing on our to do list that can't be accomplished by just a little extra effort. The problem is that our to do list is so long and we are so few that all those extra efforts add up to more than can possibly be done this year. Trying to prioritize and resist some things in favor of others can feel like, and be perceived as, a dereliction of duty.

I Need A Mission Statement

My university has a mission statement. My college has a mission statement. My (former) department and (current) program both have mission statements. These documents all tend to be vaguely noble, yet also strangely nebulous. However, that doesn't seem to stop all manner of policies from being implemented in the name of these mission statements.

I think I need a mission statement too.

I need a mission statement that "encourages and fosters the growth of" my sanity.  A mission statement that "advances the twin goals" of lowering my blood pressure and calming my nerves through the "creation and cultivation" of peaceful working environments. I need a mission statement that "recognizes the continuing importance" of my ongoing financial well being and "seeks to achieve these goals through the development and implementation of creative and innovative policies and practices."

Do you think I should post my mission statement on my door underneath my office hours?

No Coffee For You

Today was our beginning of the semester General Faculty meeting where, due to budgetary constraints, there was no coffee.

That pretty much sums up the message of the meeting as well: expect more nothing this year.

Faculty Handbook

WTF?! This is what I get when I click on the link to the faculty handbook at my bizarro university. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Academic Transgressions

Transgression is a prerogative of rank. We in the lower orders have to obey. Sometimes it just gets a little frustrating. – Confessions of a Community College Dean

This wonderful line is in response to a post from Easily Distracted on re-imagining the liberal arts curriculum (this discussion also continues on Reassigned Time as well). CCCD notes that his own community college isn't free innovate or experiment with ways to reinvent the college curriculum because of its place within the academic food chain. Instead, it is constrained to fill the requirements set by four year institutions. CCCD is exactly right: "Transgression is a prerogative of rank."

But this insight holds true not only between institutions, but also within institutions.

At my own Bizarro University, we are currently in the midst of a "reorganization" which has meant that faculty who for decades had been able to envision and implement an interdisciplinary program of study not unlike the one imagined by Easily Distracted, have instead been disbanded. The ability to transgress and innovate has been moved higher up the chain of command and is now the demesne of Provosts and Vice Chancellors. This is simply one of the most recent manifestations of the corporate university structure as it is being played out on my campus. Now, rather than curricular decisions about interdisciplinary programs being made by the faculty and implemented by the administration, the order has been reversed. The administration decides, and the faculty is supposed to implement.

The problems with this structure will no doubt plague us for many years to come. And as CCCD correctly notes: "Sometimes it just gets a little frustrating."

Insult to Injury: Revenge of Bizarro U

There must be some very special gene we academics have that helps us find unerring ways to piss off our colleagues and breed subterranean resentments in ways no one would imagine possible. We really are geniuses at this if nothing else.

From our previous installments, readers may remember that administrators at my Bizarro World University, having worked diligently behind the scenes to discredit and disband my interdisciplinary department, bizarrely decided to create a new interdisciplinary college – all without any substantive faculty input.

Now news comes by way of an inadvertently forwarded email, that a vote has been scheduled on a formal resolution to dissolve my department as a last minute addition to the agenda of our college's curriculum committee. Apart from the fact that the administration has discovered that disbanding an academic department requires a vote by a least some faculty body, the vote was scheduled without notifying anyone in my department that it would be taking place.

This has had the completely predictable result of reminding everyone in the department of just how badly they have been treated throughout these events and further cementing their bitterness, anger and disaffection. Adding this gratuitous bit of insult to injury seems so unnecessary. A simple, courteous notification of the upcoming vote would have been so easy and appropriate. Of course, it also would have been appropriate for the decision to have been made by this faculty committee rather than for it, so perhaps that's the real reason behind the secrecy.

You must excuse me now; I have to go practice my ax grinding. Clearly it's a skill I will need to master as I continue to learn my proper role as tenured faculty.

Bring 'em On

A recent post from Slaves of Academe on stalking her former grad student peers and colleagues online linked to my post on academic deadwood. Taken along with the post below on the status of women in Philosophy and my own recent involuntary relocation from my interdisciplinary department at Bizarro U back to my disciplinary homeland of Philosophy has occasioned me to do some online prowling of my former academic homes as well. It's been sobering.

I don't actually recognize my graduate program any longer. It is one of those top 20 schools included in Haslanger's statistics below. I'm saddened to see it is well below average even among that dismal company with only two women remaining on its very large faculty, or less than five percent (or put another way, in the last twenty years they have failed to tenure and retain any new women faculty). Almost all of the members of my dissertation committee have either moved on or died. The entire continental program has disappeared and left the field clear for all analytic philosophy all the time.

As I contemplate what life will be like back as one of the boys in the Philosophy department at my present institution, I find it doesn't fill me with quite as much revulsion as in years past. There is one simple reason for this change... tenure.

Bring 'em on. I'm ready to rumble.

Return of Bizarro U

Here are the latest happenings in the ongoing tales of academic life between the disciplinary cracks at my Bizarro World university.

Faithful readers may remember that in our last episode, administrators at Bizarro U were busy dismantling my interdisciplinary department and sending all of the faculty back to our various disciplinary homes – all while anticipating that interdisciplinary research, teaching, and service would continue on campus unaffected by these trivial changes.

Now we have just been informed by our leaders that our interdisciplinary programs are to be resurrected and reborn at Bizarro U, not as simply another academic department, but as a brand new college. This is astounding. And not only has the creation of this college been conceived and decided since January, with barely a whisper to the faculty, it will be in place starting July 1. Truly bizarro.

I'm thrilled by this new development, although still less than happy with the continuing lack of faculty consultation. At this point, though, I'm willing to be cautiously optimistic about the future of interdisciplinary work on my campus. I think, against all odds, we may see a dramatic increase in institutional support for interdisciplinary research and teaching.

There is one very large catch in the current plans for the new college – it will not have any tenure lines of its own. This means that all the faculty working in the new college will have other masters to please who hold the strings of tenure, promotion, and merit raises. However, this may be a temporary situation. The complications of such a system may outweigh the difficulties of shaking lose tenure lines from other colleges. We shall see.

In any case, things are looking up at Bizarro U. Not only do I have tenure now, but I may get to teach in a shiny new interdisciplinary college. Bizarro.

Bizarro U

Here is another timely post from the Tenured Radical. Sadly, I seem to be working at the bizzaro world opposite of the institution TR inhabits. TR writes:

Here's the good news: my dean (I think of him when he does good as *my* dean) is trying to get the provost to approve putting tenure-track lines in programs. This is a very good move ... making The Program less vulnerable to departments screwing up or getting shirty on us or not tenuring people because they only hired them as a favor to us in the first place but they don't like them enough to really want to keep them. And frankly, most departments don't "get" interdisciplinary work and we have to spend endless hours explaining what The Program does, and that it is really A Field, with Journals and Graduate Programs and Stuff. I don't know why they don't ever seem to understand this, but they don't. Or they do, and then they say, "Yes we'd be happy to hire with American Studies as long as the person can teach two sections of statistical analyis." It's a lot like saying, "I'd love to hire someone who can teach History. And Physics. Whaddya say?"

Tenure-track lines in programs IS a very good idea.

Sadly, at my bizarro world university, the Dean and Provost are busy dismantling and demoting our interdisciplinary department, with its own tenure-track lines, into an assortment of disconnected programs with no tenure-track lines. The current faculty is being dispersed and sent back to our various disciplinary homes where no one will "get" interdisciplinary work, and where hiring, promotion and tenure for interdisciplinary work will take a backseat to disciplinary requirements and needs.

I'm not picky about the titles given to our interdisciplinary programs -- they can call us a department, a program, a center, an institute, or a posse for all I care -- but without faculty control of hiring, promotion, and tenure the academic quality of these interdisciplinary programs will suffer as will the simple quantity of hours devoted to teaching and research in these areas. It's a real loss for our institution, and a giant step backwards for faculty governance on our campus.