Monday, August 30, 2010

The End of Summer Sessions and the End of Summer Sessions

We are wrapping up the third summer session on campus.  We have three summer sessions and we also have a very active and heavily enrolled day camp which helps utilize our facilities during a time when there are fewer students on campus.  In addition to there being fewer students there are also fewer faculty, and summer classes which are typically held early in the day or in the evening tend to leave afternoons free of classes and also unfortunately free of faculty and students on campus.  Yes, there are certainly some faculty on campus in the afternoons and there are some students as well, but the environment lacks the intensity and dynamism present during the fall and spring semesters.  Most student clubs are dormant, few speakers visit the campus; governance slows down and a campus has a very different feel.  In the early weeks of the summer I welcome this tempo since it allows me to both catch up and also provides time to write personnel recommendations for tenure and promotion.  As the summer progresses, I more and more miss the faculty and the students.  I miss the collegiality and the collaboration and I am anxious for the fall semester to begin.  There is no life to a campus without the continuous presence of faculty and students.

The history of summer sessions going back to when I was an undergraduate always had classes clustered in the morning or in the evening.  Two reasons for this split scheduling.  Originally, when classrooms were not air-conditioned, holding classes either early or late helped assure that classes were not held when temperatures and  classrooms were at their hottest.  Second many students worked during the summer and others wanted to take advantage of the beach and other recreational activities.  Holding classes in the evening and the morning allowed students to combine work/recreation with furtherance of their education at off times.  But the winds of change are descending on summer sessions for just the reasons listed above—work and recreation – and these winds will remove more students and faculty from campuses during the summer.

There is no substitute for the fall and spring semesters educational experiences for our undergraduates.  Distance learning will always be a second best alternative during these time periods and the overwhelming majority of undergraduates and faculty will demonstrate with their presence the value and the popularity of this experience.  The summer, however, is very different.  I may be trying to accelerate my education or I may be trying to catch up but most likely I am doing this in addition to working or just relaxing and having a good time.  If I can take these credits via distance learning, it will be attractive – and more and more the norm – for me to do so.  I believe we are entering the twilight of summer sessions.  In not too many years, we will end a summer session and it will also be the end of summer sessions as we know them.  On some level this is progress—education will be a better fit with a student’s needs.  When this happens, a campus in June, July, and August will make today’s summertime campus look like a hotbed of activity by comparison.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Transparent

I have been spending the last few days reviewing my tenure and promotion recommendations to the President.  Each tenure and promotion candidacy has a file that has multiple recommendations, starting at the department level after the candidate has presented his or her tenure/promotion portfolio.  Once that portfolio is prepared and submitted, the candidacy is reviewed and a recommendation is provided by the department chair, and the Ad Hoc Tenure Committee or the Promotion Committee.  The process continues at the college or school/division level with another faculty review followed by a dean’s review.  After that review, if there are disagreements, the candidacy is referred to a University Appeals Board followed by my review, the president’s review and action by the Board of Trustees.  Copies of the substantial recommendations are always given to the candidate and the candidate is always given an opportunity to respond.  So far the transparency is clear.

However, for the process to work well expectations also need to be transparent and known from the point in time that the candidate first joined the University or first considered submitting for promotion. And here we are also doing well—the standard of teaching excellence and how we measure that excellence is well known and well established.  In regard to scholarship, we have reached the point where each department has clearly stated the qualifications (e.g., expectations in terms of number and quality of journal articles/books/presentations/grants/performances) for tenure and promotion.  The one area where there is still some ambiguity is service.  We want every faculty member to be involved and recognize that for a college or university to move forward, there needs to be a culture of faculty service.  However we have not spelled out specific service expectations in detail  but everyone recognizes that the service has to be significant.

What helps further minimize this ambiguity is the annual evaluation of every full-time faculty member (other than first year faculty members), which asks every faculty member to memorialize in detail what the person has done the previous year and then provides an opportunity for a chair and dean to comment.  If the faculty member is in disagreement with any of those comments, the person can add comments to the record.  We also have for untenured faculty regular reappointments which provide extensive feedback.  Therefore, not only is there a comprehensive tenure and promotion review process, but there are frequent (at least annual) reviews that serve as an important barometer of progress and lack of progress.  And there are clear expectations of what a person is expected to do.

The bottom line, which is inherent in transparency, is that there should be no surprises.  And we have come a long, long way in making this a reality that is fair to all concerned.  Higher education isn’t perfect in this regard but overall we are doing well. If you go back to when I started in higher education, there was a very different culture – little transparency, few expectations clearly stated, and a much greater ability to adjust the “standards” to fit whether you liked or did not like the person being judged.  Years ago, in going through some old files in the Provost’s office, I came across a personnel recommendation from a senior administrator that simply stated “Good guy.  Should be tenured.’’  We can all take pride in the progress we have made.  More work remains to be done but the commitment  in the higher education community is strongly in support of clear standards,  a transparent process, continuous feedback: all adding up as it should, to a fair chance to succeed.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Tabletop

Hurricane Katrina helped convince much of higher education that there is a tremendous need for emergency planning.  And many of us developed sophisticated plans to do what we need to do if an emergency strikes—resume full operation or get as close to that as possible, and do it in the least possible time.  But what has happened to those plans since then and how prepared are we?

Earlier this week the Provost’s Office, working with the University’s emergency preparedness person, undertook a tabletop (simulation) exercise to see how well our plans would work in the case of a severe (at least category 3) hurricane.  Overall, the plans were solid, but there were clearly lapses even though most were very minor.  For example, there had been some personnel changes but our notification information was not updated accordingly. Clearly, this would not have been a significant issue since all of us were aware of the changes and knew how to quickly contact anyone involved in the office.  But as we need to contact faculty, students, administration and staff, issues like this clearly magnify many fold.  How often do we proactively reach out to all the campus constituencies to make sure our contact information across the board is as accurate as it needs to be.  Likely not often enough.

Last year, when we were developing contingency plans for the possible flu pandemic, we reached out to all faculty to provide information on the tools provided by BlackBoard to help a class continue to meet if on -campus meetings were not possible.  But emergencies can be less or more predictable depending on the type of emergency and we should  regularly update the faculty on all the features of whatever classroom management system we use.

In the course of our discussion, we talked at length about how we would do all we can, remotely if need be,  to maintain the academic functioning of the University in a serious emergency.   Two areas where we spent considerable time were grant applications and payroll.  For grant applications, we cannot—especially if the emergency is very local in nature—assume that grant deadlines will automatically be extended.  For payroll, if an emergency comes at the beginning of a semester, it is not likely that every faculty member’s (or every employee’s), especially every adjunct faculty member ‘s, paperwork is already fully processed  on our payroll system and yet it needs to be a priority to get everyone paid in a timely manner.  At this point the discussion was going well and we seemed to have everything under control in terms of what needed to be done until… the lights went out.  When the simulation included the loss of electricity (which could be a very local problem or a regional problem) we were not fully prepared.  Our laptops might be fully charged but what happens after a few hours? Or what if internet service was down...how would we connect to this communication’s lifeline.  In the first case of the battery running low, the fix was easy.  If we all had car chargers, we could charge the computer batteries by using our cars. The loss of internet service was more difficult but could still be resolved with an aircard.  What matters most is that our simulation forced us to confront difficult issues and work through the resolution of key problems.

No one is looking for a serious emergency to happen.  On the other hand, ignoring the possibility of an emergency make us much more vulnerable.  We should all make sure our plans are as up to date as possible and regular tabletop simulations should for all of us be standard operating procedure.

Monday, August 9, 2010

3D Education

Within the last two weeks, I have taken my older daughter to see Eclipse in IMAX as well as Toy Story 3, Despicable Me, and The Last Airbender all in 3D.  You haven’t “lived” until you have seen vampires and werewolves in IMAX, and 3D makes animation more fun and people and events more real.  Having first seen Avatar in 2D and then subsequently in 3D, the difference for me is very much worth the difference in price.  And yet, of the five films I have mentioned above, 2 were excellent, two were good, and one was fair.  IMAX and 3D enhance but can’t overcome a weak story line.

Both my daughters now expect that, if we see a movie, we will look for the 3D version.  They have already looked at a demonstration of 3D TV and asked that we make this a priority purchase. My wife and I have responded in 3D that we are sticking with 2D TV for the foreseeable future. Technology has given my kids a very different growing up experience than I had.  On a car trip, in my youth, you would look to see how many different state license plates you could spot or you would sing songs or you would read. I list reading last here for a reason—reading would lead to car sickness for me which would lead to ….. .   Singing and license plates wouldn’t really carry the day for a long car trip and were supplemented by “how much longer until we get there” being asked more and more frequently.  Now, for any car trip over 2 hours, we take along the DS, the DVD player as well as the always present IPODs.  Yes, we also take along books, but on car rides this is hardly the first choice (and both my kids enjoy reading).  However, as the technology has increased, the complaining has decreased.  Another clear benefit of technology. On a recent “non-stop” ride back from Niagara Falls of over 600 miles and about nine hours, there were no complaints heard (except from the grownups).

We all know that technology has changed our lives but for many of us and especially our kids, technology has also changed our expectations and our patience level.  We expect more, and most certainly, we expect to be more entertained. And if the entertainment and the technological sizzle aren’t there, there is a real risk of being turned off by what we are looking at and/or doing.

In education, we constantly strive to harness the benefits of technology to enhance the quality of education.  Vastly more accessible and robust sources of information are clear examples of technology’s crucial benefits.  But reading, writing, thinking, reacting, and assimilating are critical on-going building blocks of a good education that are not fundamentally tied to technology.  But they are tied to patience so that learning has the time and the concentration to happen all through a person’s formal education and life. This is not an easy lesson but we all need to remember that if “let me entertain you” becomes our highest priority, we may have stripped away the essence of good education.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Essays That Lie

I was very pleased to read the recent news article in Inside Higher Education describing the new essay service that has been made available by Turnitin.com to uncover plagiarism in admissions essays. The article presented some compelling statistics for utilizing this service including that “36 percent [of the 450,000 admissions essays scrutinized] had enough in the way of ‘significant matching text’ to make it reasonable to suspect plagiarism or the use of purchased essays.”  I am clearly pleased that we will have a new tool in the fight against plagiarism.  Academic dishonesty should always result in serious consequences and imposing consequences can only happen if there is knowledge of what transpired.

But does this go far enough?  A number of years ago, a friend was talking to me about his son.  The son was in the process of applying to the top five national graduate programs/ schools in his subject area.  This friend talked about his son’s GPA, and his score on the standardized test and both were very impressive.  The dad also talked about his son’s essay which he felt was also very compelling.  The essay outlined a series of activities undertaken by the son to help economically disadvantaged youth.  I commented to the dad that I was enormously impressed by both the quality and quantity of the son’s community engagement.  The dad’s response, which surprised me, was that he wasn’t sure that his son had done all that was claimed but that the essay was nevertheless very compelling.  I very quickly responded that I have zero respect for someone who takes credit for important work that the person never actually did.  And the friend responded just as quickly that his son had done all the work claimed.

Did he actually do the work?  I accepted what the friend said but I’m not sure I believe it. And the reality is that we often have no basis to conclude whether an admissions bio or an admissions essay is true or is not true.  But we would be very safe in assuming that both alternatives are well represented in the typical pool of admissions essays.  Therefore, even if we can spot plagiarism, we may not have made the overall progress we need to make if major league lying is not detected.  What should we do?  Rethink the admissions essay and be careful that what we ask can help limit puffery.  But if a potential student talks about service or accomplishments and if this service or these accomplishments can make a difference in terms of the admissions decision, the student should be asked to include a reference from a person familiar with this aspect of the student’s accomplishments.  We should give credit where credit is due for a student’s accomplishments.  And we should do all we can to make sure that credit is not given and a penalty is imposed, if the reality is that there is no reality in what the student is claiming.