Academic Taylorism

There's a very interesting post over on Larval Subjects about the academic assembly line:

These days, one of the more frustrating and tedious aspects of working in an institutional setting such as a secondary school, a college, or a highschool has been the shift to constant mechanisms of “quality control” that are implemented from year to year, semester to semester. What I have in mind are the constant calls to codify things such as student learning outcomes, assessment criteria, and curriculum across the body of educators. These mechanisms, in turn, lead to endless meetings, professional development seminars, and piles of paperwork that often have little or no connection to teaching or what really takes place in the classroom.

This post reminded me off another article on Deconstructing Faculty Work that highlighted the ways in which faculty work has become fragmented and subdivided in some damaging ways. It has now become commonplace for faculty to characterize themselves in their annual reports by how much of their time is spent on the various institutional components of teaching, research, and service.

We constructed the artifact of faculty assignment; a quantity set at 100 percent, and then partitioned that assignment into sections assigned to teaching, research, service, and other duties. Although most institutions do not explicitly quantify these assignments, the work recorded in our faculty annual reports make clear that we parcel out our actual effort into categories defined by what we do for teaching, for research, and for service. Our administrative work became defined by the released teaching effort traded for the administrative effort, further subdividing our faculty work. ... We designed accountability systems to measure the cost of teaching as an item separate from research so that we could calculate the return on the investment in teaching separately from the return on investment in research. ... These became the measurable quantities for effective optimization and management in our increasingly accountable world.

I myself am a 50% teaching, 25% research, and 25% service employee this year. My job is structured such that my full-time teaching load of 4 courses per semester is subject to reassigned time for various other duties, typically including one course a semester reassigned time for research (if I continue to publish well) and sometimes release time for other administrative chores. It has ceased to strike us as strange that we should be subdivided in these ways and to think of our work lives as the assemblage of discrete tasks, rather than as the life's work of a single person.

This subdividing of tenured and tenure-track faculty also tends to facilitate and justify the use of contingent faculty. It is the logical extension of a system organized around the outcomes of specific, and seemingly unrelated tasks.

For the institutions, however, the deconstruction of faculty work offered a great incentive to reduce their commitment to an inflexible work force of tenured faculty and increase their investment in short-term, highly efficient faculty dedicated to specific purposes for specific periods of time and whose productivity and performance could be reliably maintained.

If the teaching me, the research me, and the administrative me cannot actually exist separately and independently of one another, then it makes a certain administrative sense to seek specialized workers whose functions can actually be compartmentalized in exactly this way. Of course, I actually only do any of these jobs well because I do all of these jobs. But that complexity makes faculty assessment and management much more difficult. The pernicious fantasy of the fungibility of faculty work is only perpetuated by the current ways in which we evaluate faculty.

Virtual Whiteboard

By way of academhack, here's a new web-based virtual whiteboard called Twiddla.

Twiddla is a virtual whiteboard. I have been waiting for this to be done right, as it is an extremely useful tool, and not everyone has Mac OS 10.5 which allows easy screen sharing. Twiddla is extremely easy, as they say “no plugins, no downloads, or firewall vodoo.” (Firewall Vodoo? Haven’t heard that before, but think I will now use it regularly as a catch-all phrase.)

Give it a try. I can almost see myself using this in class with the digital projector. I've never really bonded to the smartboard interface that enables all the drawing tools. And using Twiddla would just be pulling up another web page. It allows you to have multiple users, or an entire class, collaborate using it. Very cool.

Rumor Has It

I have been told a very excellent rumor. And I have a blog. So I will do what comes naturally.

I have it on high authority from low sources, that Led Zeppelin will in fact be be playing at Bonnaroo this summer. Trust me. Professional philosophers know these sorts of things.



Since this is just another round for a rumor that has been bouncing around the inter-tubes at least since December, I don't really expect anyone to take the word of an obscure academic blogger seriously.

I'll try to remember to come back to this and fact-check my first attempt at rumor-mongering later this summer. We'll see how well I did...

Lumpen Haiku

The Doctor Isn't
finds a blog haiku machine
curious and strange

Haiku2 for lumpenprofessoriat
predations there are certainly problems with work in academia
@ aboutmylife.netadvogato.orgblogger.comblogs.gnome.orgblogspot.comdeadjournal.comgreatestjournal.cominsanejournal.comlivejournal.commyspace.comspaces.msn.com
Created by Grahame

No Redeeming Social Value

... but I think I was at this show back in '86.



I actually first heard Dino Lee much earlier with Los Whirlybirds, and since that time he's been one of my guiltiest of guilty pleasures. He is also one of the last folks on earth I would have pegged for a reunion concert.

He's Got Soul?

Unemployed Negativity has a post reviewing the film Southland Tales. I don't know anything about this movie, but this bizarre clip of Justin Timberlake singing The Killers' "I Got Soul, But I'm Not a Soldier" (All These Things That I've Done) has me intrigued.



Plus, evidently there's also a dance number with Sarah Michelle Gellar and the Rock. Very odd. I may need to rent this one.

Signs of Life

I find this news very encouraging:

Boston University students have won what one lawyer hailed as a "David and Goliath" victory after challenging one of the recording industry's most aggressive tactics: lawsuits targeting people who illegally download music.

US District Judge Nancy Gertner ruled this week that the university cannot turn over the names of students to several major record companies that sued for the information until she can do a more in-depth review. The ruling, for the moment, quashes the companies' efforts to hold the students liable for copyright infringement, which could have resulted in thousands of dollars in fines. Lawyers who supported the students said the decision would make it harder for record companies to win some 20,000 similar cases they have brought nationwide.

"This is definitely a step in the right direction," said Raymond Sayeg, a Boston lawyer who represented one of the four BU students who challenged the record companies. "The court has recognized the right of privacy of the students."

I have been appalled at how eager most universities have been to rat out their students to the RIAA. A university should have been fighting this battle on behalf of their students, but I'm glad to see at least someone is fighting.

Wikification

There's post about a very interesting, and very ambitious, student Wikipedia assignment over on Posthegemony. The project involves students writing and editing articles for Wikipedia from their semester's work with the aim of getting their articles to "featured article" status. Posthegemony writes:

I decided to include wikipedia as a central part of a course I was teaching in the belief that it was only by actively contributing to the encyclopedia that students would learn about its weaknesses, as well as its strengths. ...

the assignment was that, in groups, the students should edit (and in a couple of cases create) wikipedia articles on the texts and authors that we were covering, and that over the course of the semester they should bring these articles up to what in wikipedia parlance is called "featured article" status.

When setting that assignment, I had not really comprehended how ambitious it was. Wikipedia defines a "featured article" as an article that "exemplifies [its] very best work and features professional standards of writing and presentation." And its standards are, in fact, impressively high. Indeed, it is a central paradox of wikipedia that its standards are impeccable, even as its actual performance so often lags far behind these standards. To give some indication: fewer than 0.1% of wikipedia's articles are featured articles. ...

I liked the idea that students would be engaging in a real world project, with tangible and public, if not necessarily permanent, effects. In the end, an essay or an exam is an instance of busywork: usually written in haste; for one particular reader, the professor; and thereafter discarded. ...

I declared from the outset that a group that turned its article into a "featured article" would receive an A+, no questions asked; and that groups that achieved "good article" status (a lower hurdle, though good articles still account for only about 0.15% of wikipedia's total) would receive an A. The assignment grade, in other words, would be determined by collective, public, peer review. ...

As of April 1, 2008, with still a couple of weeks of the class to run, they have now brought four articles up to this standard: The President (novel), The General in His Labyrinth, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. ... I can't tell you how proud I am of these students.

I think this is a wonderful, and wonderfully useful, course project. I've been guiding students through the process of writing a large wikipedia article this year. Next year, I may consider having the next class aim at improving the article to "featured status."

Raising the Bar

And lest we think concern about ever escalating tenure standards is overblown, here is an article from today's Inside Higher Ed:

When assistant professors talk about the ever more stringent standards for winning tenure, one of the favorite metaphors is of colleges “raising the bar.” At Baylor University, assistant professors who came up for tenure this year believe that not only did they face a higher hurdle, but they were forced to jump while blindfolded.

That’s because, several university officials said, senior administrators have come to believe that departmental standards were not rigorous enough and so applied new standards, which have never been shared with faculty leaders, let alone with those who submitted tenure portfolios under the old standards. Largely as a result, tenure denials at Baylor this year — which have been about 10 percent annually in recent years — shot up to 40 percent.

Twelve of the candidates were denied tenure this year, and while some are always denied, two statistics are raising particular concern at the university:

• Nine of the 12 rejected candidates had the support of both their departments and the universitywide faculty committee that reviews candidates after the departmental evaluation. In the past at Baylor, it has been rare for the president to overturn recommendations that had solid backing at all the levels of faculty review.
• The rejection rate was particularly high for women. Of the nine women up for review, six were rejected.

Matt Cordon, chair of the Faculty Senate and a law professor, said that this year’s tenure cases raise significant issues on both fairness and the faculty role in shared governance. “The administration determined that the departments’ standards weren’t enough, but the departments used them, and the tenure candidates used the standards,” he said, adding the no one knew of the new standards until deans reported being told of the change by the president and provost.

My own tenure experience had a similar thrill injected into it when our new administration took up the torch of raising standards and unilaterally created new standards for tenure.

In my case, because I had already spent a dozen years teaching and publishing, I was able to meet these new, surprise, tenure standards imposed from above without much additional worry. Others were not so fortunate. Sadly, those of us who could jump over this higher bar have been used as evidence that the new standards are both possible and fair.

What always gets left out of these discussions is how many years of work it actually took to meet those standards. Very few of us had been brand new Ph.D.'s only six years ago.

Custom Time

I need this.

"The entire concept of 'late' no longer exists for me. That's pretty cool. Thanks Gmail!"