Bargaining for a relaxed semester pt. 2 or cont. (whichever you prefer)

This being the last official day of E.'s childhood (for he starts school tomorrow), we took the family to Disneyland. It was not as full as the normal summer crowd, but it was still hot and still full. It will be better in October or November. We rode lots of rides and stood in some lines. E was brave and rode Indiana Jones for the first time.

On our way home, I get a call from the Chair of the Division (PAJ).
Chair: "The Bowtie Prof, the Dean's office has agreed to the double overload, but there are some details. Are you near a computer?"
Me: "No, but I am on the freeway right near the school. Do I need to come in?"
Chair: "Yes. Right now."

So we turn around and head to the school. The short version is that I write a letter (email) that says I understand how my work is distributed this year. It is... four different classes and advising for environmental studies this semester. Next semester, I have to do advising for environmental studies. No classes next spring. The kicker is that this semester's classes are all on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I work about 13 hours each day and then don't have to go back to campus any other day. Now, because I have other work to do, I will go on Wednesdays and Fridays to grade and prep, but I don't have to. In fact part of the agreement with the Dean's office is that they cannot ask me to do service at all this year.

Maybe all of the bad feelings were necessary, according to the rules of Karma, so that I could have such a sweet deal. Either way, I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. The semester will be rough, but the payoff will be great.

Bargaining for a relaxed semester

Today, I was visited by the chair.

Chair: "Justin, I am just wondering, but it is just a wonder, if you would be able to switch one of your classes to 523 (a class that I taught last semester and summer)."
JT: "When is it scheduled"
Chair: "Tuesdays at 7-10pm"
JT: "Sorry, I have a class at that time."
Chair: "How important is that class"
JT: "It's in Environmental Studies and has 32 grad students enrolled with a waitlist"
Chair: "[expletive]!"
JT: "If you switch it to another night, I might be able to do it. But, I don't want to drop my 320 class because it is all set up and ready to go. I would have to take it as an overload."
Chair: "We can't pay you for it."
JT: "How about a course reduction in the spring?"
Chair: "Done"

Remember, school starts on Monday.

Later in the day, another class needs taught and they can't fill it. I write an email that says I have that one ready to go. I thought of it as a joke. He calls the Dean's office. About 5 hours later they decline to allow me to do it. I could have done it with a few slight changes to an old syllabus. I would have been busy, but not overwhelmed. If it would have gone through, I would be teaching 4 classes and have graduate advising responsibilities this fall. In the spring, I would have only had graduate advising responsibilities and no classes. It would have been a mini sabbatical. Here's the kicker... a 4 class load is the standard load for the college, and advising normally isn't a course load reduction (mine is a total fluke). In my wildest thoughts today, I envisioned life in the spring as a fully-funded dissertation-writing grad student; show up to your office, write papers, send them off for review, think, read, crunch numbers, write more papers, go home, repeat.

In the end, I have bargained a great schedule. I only have to be on campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They will each be 13 hour days, but people do that all of the time outside of the academe. While I have to teach 3 classes, only one is a new prep. The advising fits between my classes. I will likely still go in to write each Wednesday, but I will only write, not prep class or do advising. Mondays will be free for Disneyland and Fridays can be free if I need them to be.

The best part is next spring. I will teach one class and do advising. That's it! I will be a research professor! Lots of time to write and publish. At home, we will have a new baby, and I will have time to be there and not be grading.

My plans to take over the world... or just the department.

Today we had a four hour long department faculty meeting. None of us got mad at each other and everyone now recognizes that we should all have chest pains about the University. I offered to head an adhoc committee to develop a long term division strategy to reduce our course load and meet future class demands.
BACKSTORY (feel free to skip)
The backstory to this is that when I started at CSUF, I was asked what I wanted to teach and when I wanted to teach it. They just asked everyone without systematic regard to student needs. If a person wanted to teach 4 sections of the same class, they could generally do that. Thus, some classes that are very important, haven't been offered in a while because no one wanted to teach them. More interestingly, we have always been able to hire part time faculty to glean the wasteland of our semester schedule. There were no gaps in the schedule, but there was also no method to the madness. Those times are all long gone.
RESUME STORY
We can either react to the whims of the Dean's office, or propose a way to get our division through the crisis and into the future. The latter is the only one in which logic plays a role, so I offered to guide* the logical process. My committe will try to demonstrate that we can balance the needs of the department and the college with an increased class size in a few classes and a reduction of teaching workload from 4 classes per semester to 3. As an added bonus, I hope to provide a student needs assessment that will result in a general schedule of classes to offer at regular times. If a professor wants a different schedule, they will always know what is coming up. If they want to teach the same 3 or 4 classes throughout their tenure at CSUF, they could do that. if they wanted to switch it up occasionally, they cold do that as well. At least there would be a framework to follow where there is none now.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it isn't. I just have to listen to the committee members, crunch some numbers, get it to say what I want, and then sell it to the committee, the chair, and the college. They all want to hear it, so my pitch will only be difficult in that I have to have my numbers all right and the logic to be impartial.

[Evil laugh]

*see Plott and Levine 1977, Levine and Plott 1977, or Riker's 1986 "The Art of Political Manipulation."

Legos and a clarification, then a treatise on the likelihood of me not dying from a heart attack

My family saved most of my toys from when I was a kid. A couple of weeks ago, I pulled out a box of old G.I. Joe figures and Legos. For a few days I only let the kids play with the G.I. Joes, then I spilled the Legos and played for a couple of hours with the kids and my old toys. Now, the kids are free to play with them as long as they put them away at the end of the day.

Last night I offered to put the Legos away for the kids. They went to bed and I played for about an hour and a half. It was fun to relax and just build. The immediate gratification of having something tangible to show for your work was a nice change.

So, a couple of people have called about my chest pains. I appreciate their love and concern. I had significant chest pains the month before our wedding, a couple of months before the consulting stint ended, and occasionally when my stress levels get high. I doubt that it is a heart problem, but rather a psychological one. I have felt much better since I stopped worrying about the future.

Someone said "you should go to a doctor... you don't want to be THAT statistic." Since I know a lot about statistics, I thought that I would try to figure out my likelihood of a heart attack....

SHORT VERSION
At my age, I have a very low risk. One that I am willing to bet a lot of money on. Even my life.

LONG VERSION

• The most basic way to summarize heart attack risk would be to look at the annual incidence rate... 1 in 217 or 0.46%. The problem is that this rate includes all of the population in the rate calculation.
  
• A more precise way to determine a basic probability would be to use the mean and standard deviation and generate a t-score and associated probability.* While the mean age of first heart attack, 65.8, is broadly known, the standard deviation is not readily available on the interwebs. I am forced to assume the standard deviation based on other clues from internet information. Most sites argue that heart attack risk starts to become significant at around 45. If we assume that significant means greater than 5%, then 95% of the data of age at first heart attack is greater than 45, or alternatively, 90% of the data fall between 45 and 86.6 (65.8+/- the difference between 45 and 65.8). This gives us a t of 1.645 for age 45. When we do the algebra, we estimate the standard deviation be be approximately 12.6. We then use these to determine the probability of a 32 year old person (or younger) having a heart attack given that the mean age at first heart attack is 65.8 with a standard deviation of 12.6. The result is a t-score of 2.68 with the associated probability of approximately .0037 or 0.37%.
  
• Using those same estimates, the likelihood of me having a heart attack before I turn 40, has a t score of 2.04 with the associated probability of .0207 or 2.07%.
• Unfortunately, the above rates are for all individuals at all risk levels, which is a bad assumption. Using a very crude method of including risk factors, I found out that my 10 year heart attack risk is less than 1% (but probably much less than that).

What does all of that tell me. I am not likely to have, let alone die, from a heart attack. I have a 99.63% chance of not having a heart attack at 32 and a 97.93% chance of not having one before I turn 40. If anyone would like to bet that I am going to have a heart attack this year, I have $100k ready to wager.
More importantly, I am willing to risk my life.
But a nice gambling win would make it even better.


*we could be forced to assume an approximate normal distribution, but the central limit theorem would argue otherwise

Go away grumpy Gus...

Yesterday was pretty rough between university budget and personal housing issues. My wonderful wife recognized my stress yesterday and took me out to dinner without the kids. (She either felt the stress, or maybe it was my complaining of chest pain that prompted her.) We talked quietly and thought about the future. It was nice.

I have decided that I can't do anything about what is going on, so I need to let it all go. All of the calculating, all of the strategizing, all of the overly analytical stuff that I do really well... I have to let it go.

I made cookies for my department to apologize for my bad attitude. I bought flowers for the PAJ office ladies and the Dean's office ladies. Life is much more difficult for those administrators than it is for me.*

My chest pain has subsided (mostly). I am working. Life is good.


*our Dean retired early due to health reasons. The interim Dean has tried very hard to make life bearable for the faculty during the budget ordeal, but the politics of the situation may have gotten the best of her. After one of her memos leaked to the press, the Vice President over Academic Affairs posted the position announcement to replace the Dean. A little slap in the face from above for her help to those of us below.

Media attention may screw me.

So, the news picked up the enrollment story and campus was full of reporters on Friday. KTLA ran a story, KPCC ran a story; the media applied pressure and the school will try save face by reopening the classes. Reopening the classes and opening enrollment only prolongs the budget problem. If we reopen all of the classes that we cancelled (or had scheduled to cancel) it adds another $150k to our costs this semester. From where will that money come? I have an idea.

It seems to me that the class cutting would have saved the budget. It would have been painful, but tolerable as a solution. Now, we will suffer deeper cuts in the spring. Students have traded a win this fall, for a loss next spring. Instead of a media frenzy surrounding classes being cut, the classes simply won't be offered.

Deeper cuts next fall?

The California Problem...

In case no one has been watching the news, the recession was deeper and more prolonged than we have experienced in the recent past. Because of all of the lagging indicators and the nature of my job, this year the recession had only a slight impact on our budget. In sum, we had a hiring freeze that happened after we hired someone in our division. (this is a really good thing for me, but I will explain that later.)

The recession's impact for the 2009-2010 academic year will be pretty severe. All of the staff in the CSU system have taken a furlough that amounts to a 10% pay cut. The faculty have done the same. We are required to have all of these furlough days approved by our department chair and Dean. We are required to sign a certificate that says we know what a furlough is and that we WILL NOT work on those days. Since most academics don't work every day of the week, this shouldn't be a problem, but it has caused many discussions in the hallways.

A couple of weeks ago, we fired all of the part time lecturers (adjunct professors) and some full time lecturers. That means that our faculty (in the division) went from around 70 to around 30. I had considered them my buffer, because according to the collective bargaining agreement, they had to go before I do. Oh, yeah, I forgot, all of the faculty are subject to the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) which dictates the rules for hiring, retention, work load, promotion, and obviously... firing. So, I know who will get fired next if the budget gets worse. It is projected to get worse. So, first will go a full time lecturer, then the three part-time retired faculty, then the tenure track guy they hired last year, then me and my colleague who were hired together. I am a little edgy because I don't know how deep the cuts will go next year, but if the faculty start to fall, I know the order. This is only of partial assistance to me because the job market for professors has a one year hiring lag. I have to be on the job market right now in order to get a job one year from now. If I get a job offer, I would have to accept or decline the offer without knowing whether my job is secure where I am. There is no way around this information problem because of the budget problem that California always seems to face.

Back to this year's budget. We took the pay cut to manage part of the loss, but our campus has overshot our enrollment numbers for a couple of years. It was a growth strategy that the Chancellor had tolerated because we have problems with our funding formula. (Besides significantly subsidizing education for Californians, the campus subsidizes healthcare for students; thus over enrollment is not a matter of exceeding fixed costs, but significant costs for each additional student.) It is a long story that can be summed up by saying that the Chancellor won't tolerate it during bad budget years. We are expected to return to the approved enrollment numbers, nearly 5000 students less than we have now. The most recent strategy is to stop enrollment and cut classes. This wouldn't be a problem, except that some of the students hadn't enrolled yet, some of the classes cut were fully enrolled, some of the classes had already started, and the combined effect of these actions together kicks some students out of class without the ability to re-enroll in open sections. A number of people who thought that they were going to graduate this fall, won't be able to get into the classes that they need. They won't get into any classes because they chose the wrong section, which randomly got cut.

The interim solution to the problem is to offer courses during the summer and intersession (January). These are not funded by the state, so they don't count against our enrollment targets. Instead, they are directly funded by enrollment numbers and higher class costs to the students. Sound great, right? I am sure that there is more to come, but this post is long enough.

3 June to 11 August

• At the first of June, I was starting my summer school session on Research Methods. 6 weeks was not long enough to cover the material, but the students were much more engaged than I had expected. Overall it was a good experience. I worked hard on projects, but they all seemed to fall to the wayside amid the torrent of summer class.
  
• We returned to Kansas to witness the marriage of good friends. A couple of days alone and near our old digs was refreshing.
  
• R had a business meeting in Las Vegas (a weekend away for planning and relaxation).
  
• I replaced a colleague's toilet (doesn't appear relevant, does it?).
  
• We had the left driveshaft seal on the Jeep fixed ($200).
  
• The last day of class, I boarded a west-bound train to Gallup New Mexico, where my lovely wife met me at the station. We had a nice long drive to my in-laws house. I had planned to remodel their bathrooms, but plans changed. It was a short trip, but just long enough for E to scratch the side of my father in-law's Karman Ghia with his bike.
• We drove from New Mexico to Flagstaff to enjoy the company of friends for the night. the next morning we at at "the Place" (better known as Mike and Rhonda's). Their breakfasts were better than I had remembered.
  
• We raced home from Flagstaff so that we could drop off the kids with a sitter and then continued on to Los Angeles for a Coldplay concert. Normally, I would have never gone to a stadium type concert of a band that I hardly know, but the tickets were a gift from the colleague whoes toilet I replaced. Karma magic
• R had her annual reunion with her college roomates in OC.
• That catches you up to July 23rd, when I started to work again in my office
  
• I have been trying to write a developmental narrative for RTP, a couple of papers, and get my feet under myself while learning my new position as Graduate Advisor for Environmental Studies. It comes with a course reduction, so it was worth it to me.
• Our department let go all of the part time faculty as part of the budget solution. Where there were 40+ people in line before me to get fired, this now leaves 5. It is unlikely, but not totally out of the question that we could go through these people before the budget is solved.
  
• I am back on the job market.
  
• And I got a 10% pay cut (i.e. a furlough). Luckily the summer money will help offset the income lost.
• We had the air conditioning system replaced in the Jeep ($850). It went out on my way home from work. I was in bumper to bumper traffic. It was 100+ degrees. It took nearly 2 hours to get home.
• We started the paperwork to buy a new house. We got preapproved from one lender. We inquired about a few properties. We got a desperate email from a faculty member trying to sell her house in the University subsidized housing. We went through the paperwork with the approved lender. We went through the paperwork for the city. To meet the lending and subsidized housing requirements, our monthly payment must be between two numbers whose difference is only $50. If it happens, it happens, if not, it doesn't. But it is a source of stress. Whoever thinks that $318,000 for a 1640 sq ft house is subsidized housing, has lived in California for too long.
  
• E and I went to a colleague's production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" at their synagogue. It was really fun to watch E watch the show. As a special treat, I took him to see the Disneyland fireworks after the show. We stayed and rode Alice in Wonderland and the Teacups. He was tired. I was tired. But an occasional, exceptional experience makes all the difference to how a child feels about their relationship with their dad. That's at least what I tell myself.