I went to Chinatown on Friday with my family. I missed a departmental meeting where they were going to finalize the 3-3 load and tie up some loose ends. It ended up being a major fight. They had three items on the agenda and two ended up being tabled for another time when tensions were less high. The flurry of emails after the meeting left a great record of the event and the underlying ire. There was at least one major threat made and a number of vicious glances exchanged.
I ate Chinese food, sheparded my children through downtown LA, and overall had a great family experience. I am grateful for field trips.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Cracked: Student Edition
When I first read Cracked, I didn't really get it. What I did get was that it had cartoons and a funny character, Silvester P. Smythe, the janitor of the magazine. It was banned in my house because my parents understood its subversive nature. Up until a couple of months ago, I still had that original stash from my tween days (before there was such a thing as a tween).
Last week, one of my students cracked. He asked me for a letter of recommendation on a Monday at 10:45am. I was driving home from Yosemite, and I never work on Mondays, unless I have to. By 2:45pm, he had written a reminder letter. Two minutes later, he send a mean email to me about a bad grade that I had given him (later we discovered that this email was wrongly sent to me and was intended for another professor). I replied at 6:45pm asking if he wanted me to write him an email after his mean comments. This set off a a raging tirade of emails. He sent a number of emails to the President of "Elephant U," other high level administrators, and some of the faculty. He skipped right over me and our program director and started raging. We now have the director of graduate studies trying to resolve the problem (babysitting him and us). If he would have just been kind to us and told us what we going on, we could have helped. it is too late now. He has set his sights on the guilty parties. I watch carefully at school in case he shows up. If you don't hear from me again, he is likely the culprit.
Last week, one of my students cracked. He asked me for a letter of recommendation on a Monday at 10:45am. I was driving home from Yosemite, and I never work on Mondays, unless I have to. By 2:45pm, he had written a reminder letter. Two minutes later, he send a mean email to me about a bad grade that I had given him (later we discovered that this email was wrongly sent to me and was intended for another professor). I replied at 6:45pm asking if he wanted me to write him an email after his mean comments. This set off a a raging tirade of emails. He sent a number of emails to the President of "Elephant U," other high level administrators, and some of the faculty. He skipped right over me and our program director and started raging. We now have the director of graduate studies trying to resolve the problem (babysitting him and us). If he would have just been kind to us and told us what we going on, we could have helped. it is too late now. He has set his sights on the guilty parties. I watch carefully at school in case he shows up. If you don't hear from me again, he is likely the culprit.
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Perils of the Academy - pt. 3
When we moved to CA, it was a huge shock. I had sworn off CA when I left in 1999. R and I came to visit months before I got a job offer here and I remember saying, "it is a nice place to visit occasionally, but I would hate to live here." This post has little to do with California or the real estate market here. It has more to do with professors, their peers, their salary, and housing prices generally.
Professors face an interesting problem in that they don't make enough to live near people with similar standards, interests, and goals as they have. Most of us have been in more school than almost everyone, we thrive on ideas, and we have a unique subculture. Maybe I am a snob, but I like living near people who are thinkers - analytical types. This is not to say that I am an education snob. One of the most amazing people that I ever met was a water well worker. He prided himself on thinking, but had little education. He taught himself physics and was well versed in scripture. He was a renaissance man who commanded respect, but was extremely humble. How I wish that I could be like him. I digress...
In my mind I see professors and their peers in Old Victorian houses, walking with briefcases to work, having summer parties, talking about the books that they read - you know, very aristocratic. I think of "Crossing To Safety" by Wallace Stegner. I see bowties, tweed jackets, coduroy trousers, a house with a library and a claw-foot bathtub. However unrealistic, this is my vision of an academic lifestyle.
On housing... We were warned about our house before we bought it that a drug dealer lived next door. We had looked all over the area and couldn't find anything in our price range that would put us where we wanted to be. We bought a house near my sister (which has been great), on the edge of a not so nice neighborhood, with a great view, next to a drug dealer, at a price that we could afford (if $190K is affordable). It was likely the cheapest house we looked at and an undoubtedly good deal. We remodeled the house and it is nice... inside. The problem is that my neighbors aren't like us, and it is difficult to find comfort here (besides my wonderful sister and her family). It is awkward to get home from school and try to share an experience from work or some useful insight on regulatory strategies with my nice neighbor when she never graduated high school, has 25 teeth, and spends her day caring for her children and grandchildren (all of the same age - more on that upon request). Most of my neighbors struggle to get their children through high school, let alone college. Needless to say, we share little common ground.
We have been looking for a housing upgrade. The places where we want to live start around $350k. Those aren't all that big, and they are still 30 miles away from my school. I could barely make that monthly mortgage payment even with our very substantial down payment. The houses that are cheaper in those nice areas have been snatched up by investors who can pay cash and ask no questions. I am the analytical type - always trying to calculate the best move, but slow to decide. Each time I calculate, I end up with the same conclusion - Strong Sad is adopted.
Maybe all of this isn't true outside of major metropolitan areas, but it is true for me, and that is all that matters right now.
Professors face an interesting problem in that they don't make enough to live near people with similar standards, interests, and goals as they have. Most of us have been in more school than almost everyone, we thrive on ideas, and we have a unique subculture. Maybe I am a snob, but I like living near people who are thinkers - analytical types. This is not to say that I am an education snob. One of the most amazing people that I ever met was a water well worker. He prided himself on thinking, but had little education. He taught himself physics and was well versed in scripture. He was a renaissance man who commanded respect, but was extremely humble. How I wish that I could be like him. I digress...
In my mind I see professors and their peers in Old Victorian houses, walking with briefcases to work, having summer parties, talking about the books that they read - you know, very aristocratic. I think of "Crossing To Safety" by Wallace Stegner. I see bowties, tweed jackets, coduroy trousers, a house with a library and a claw-foot bathtub. However unrealistic, this is my vision of an academic lifestyle.
On housing... We were warned about our house before we bought it that a drug dealer lived next door. We had looked all over the area and couldn't find anything in our price range that would put us where we wanted to be. We bought a house near my sister (which has been great), on the edge of a not so nice neighborhood, with a great view, next to a drug dealer, at a price that we could afford (if $190K is affordable). It was likely the cheapest house we looked at and an undoubtedly good deal. We remodeled the house and it is nice... inside. The problem is that my neighbors aren't like us, and it is difficult to find comfort here (besides my wonderful sister and her family). It is awkward to get home from school and try to share an experience from work or some useful insight on regulatory strategies with my nice neighbor when she never graduated high school, has 25 teeth, and spends her day caring for her children and grandchildren (all of the same age - more on that upon request). Most of my neighbors struggle to get their children through high school, let alone college. Needless to say, we share little common ground.
We have been looking for a housing upgrade. The places where we want to live start around $350k. Those aren't all that big, and they are still 30 miles away from my school. I could barely make that monthly mortgage payment even with our very substantial down payment. The houses that are cheaper in those nice areas have been snatched up by investors who can pay cash and ask no questions. I am the analytical type - always trying to calculate the best move, but slow to decide. Each time I calculate, I end up with the same conclusion - Strong Sad is adopted.
Maybe all of this isn't true outside of major metropolitan areas, but it is true for me, and that is all that matters right now.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Perils of the Academy - pt. 2
Another way to hustle some money in the academy is to look at outside jobs. I have the added advantage of wanting to move away from my drug dealer neighbor, so an outside job search comes naturally. [I really love my colleagues at "Elephant U" so leaving is also a difficult proposition.]
Two weeks ago I had a phone interview and was immediately invited for a campus visit. That night my wife and I had a long discussion about living in 'rural-land' and the school/job. When I mentioned the salary range, the discussion was over. I turned down the job interview there. It is much prettier there. It has seasons, snow, an active tourism economy, etc - overall a very nice but secluded place. I found out one day after turning down the interview that it ranked significantly higher than "Elephant U" in the US News and World Report Rankings this year. I still have one job application pending elsewhere, outside of a metropolitan area of ill repute on the east coast. That job is at a good liberal arts college. I will seriously consider it if offered.
This is one of the most difficult processes for me - the choosing, not the interviewing. I love interviewing for jobs and thinking about all of the possibilities in the world. I love the feeling of meeting new people, presenting my research, and interacting with new types of students. When it comes to deciding if I would move, it kills me. I learned a couple of years ago to not interview at a place where our family would not move. I was offered a sweet teaching gig at a prestigious all girls school. Guess what we chose - a mining consultancy.
The strategy in searching for jobs is that if you get an offer, you can end up at a better school, or you can take your offer and bargain a better compensation package at your current school. You could even get the schools counter-offering and pushing up the salary or assigned time benefits. I have actually seen this in practice and it is a marvelous thing. Unfortunately, "Elephant U" is a union school and I fall under the collective bargaining agreement. Thus, I cannot bargain anything - even with a really good offer. When I talked to my current department chair about my interview, he provided this insight "we are like major league ball players, except that the money isn't good and we can't just tear up our old contract and negotiate a new one when we want." At non-union schools, this is not correct, but where I am, this is true. This leaves me only with the exit strategy. Not much of a strategy to improve your salary, huh? In case I haven't said it before, I hate unions.
Two weeks ago I had a phone interview and was immediately invited for a campus visit. That night my wife and I had a long discussion about living in 'rural-land' and the school/job. When I mentioned the salary range, the discussion was over. I turned down the job interview there. It is much prettier there. It has seasons, snow, an active tourism economy, etc - overall a very nice but secluded place. I found out one day after turning down the interview that it ranked significantly higher than "Elephant U" in the US News and World Report Rankings this year. I still have one job application pending elsewhere, outside of a metropolitan area of ill repute on the east coast. That job is at a good liberal arts college. I will seriously consider it if offered.
This is one of the most difficult processes for me - the choosing, not the interviewing. I love interviewing for jobs and thinking about all of the possibilities in the world. I love the feeling of meeting new people, presenting my research, and interacting with new types of students. When it comes to deciding if I would move, it kills me. I learned a couple of years ago to not interview at a place where our family would not move. I was offered a sweet teaching gig at a prestigious all girls school. Guess what we chose - a mining consultancy.
The strategy in searching for jobs is that if you get an offer, you can end up at a better school, or you can take your offer and bargain a better compensation package at your current school. You could even get the schools counter-offering and pushing up the salary or assigned time benefits. I have actually seen this in practice and it is a marvelous thing. Unfortunately, "Elephant U" is a union school and I fall under the collective bargaining agreement. Thus, I cannot bargain anything - even with a really good offer. When I talked to my current department chair about my interview, he provided this insight "we are like major league ball players, except that the money isn't good and we can't just tear up our old contract and negotiate a new one when we want." At non-union schools, this is not correct, but where I am, this is true. This leaves me only with the exit strategy. Not much of a strategy to improve your salary, huh? In case I haven't said it before, I hate unions.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The Perils of the Academy - pt. 1
The last few days of the semester were rough. I had two stacks of math homework (I didn't grade the first half at midterm), 95 papers grad and undergrad, and finals from two classes to grade. Oh, and two theses. I took my time because grades weren't due until January 4th.
Unfortunately that was also the first day of intersession. I have taken to calling it wintersession because I think that calling it 'intersession' is misleading if not outright false advertising for students who only briefly glance at the schedule then immediately sign up, only to be disappointed later. Wintersession is good for my pocketbook, but not my psyche. Imagine 16 weeks of class material crammed into 3 hour classes 4 nights a week for 3 weeks. The students get to take another course in a very short amount of time, and I get an additional 10% of my salary. I found that most students take the class knowing that they won't have to remember much and they can tolerate almost any subject if it is only 3 weeks long. I teach one of the more boring and dreaded classes, so I ended up with a full room on January 4th. Honestly, it wasn't as bad as I make it out to be, but I am not my wife who had to put the kids to bed each night while I was gone. I also signed up to teach a graduate class this summer for environmental studies, "Environmental Law." It is a class that they all need, and I want to prep it, so it may work out just fine. I also was awarded a fellowship to work on the newly formed Center for Sustainability at school. It is in no way free money. I have to help coordinate outreach activities and move all of our students into an online portfolio system.
Each of these classes or fellowships ends up adding another 10% to my salary. Even with the furlough (I'm currently making 90% of my salary), this year I hope to make right up to the salary cap of 125% of my salary! While this sounds like I'm rolling in cash, you must remember that this amount, 125% of my salary, is approximately the same amount of money that a 5 year veteran of the LAPD makes with a language bonus. It is much less than an entry level consultant in D.C., but significantly more than a k-12 teacher in Utah (#47 of 50 states for average educator salary). Oh, and I live in Southern California, which is renown for its low cost of living.
Normally, I don't think that I would sign up for these winter or summer school classes. Those times are reserved for thinking, writing, working on tenure, and spending time with my family. The main problem is that my salary isn't enough to support a family of 5 without help, and the furlough hasn't made that any easier. I have become a hustler - constantly looking for some new scheme to make a couple more bucks. I don't have any fancy clothes, or look like Snoop Dogg, but I feel like a slimy character nonetheless. This academic hustling is what I call prostituting your brain.
You see the sad part of the entire story is that Academics don't have much else going for them besides their brain. I for instance have lobbied every semester to have someone place a chili beside my name on ratemyprofessor.com. Each semester, the students shoot me this look that says "I pity you for asking, but I still can't sink that low." We are all geeks with poor physiques, stupid jokes, overly analytical worldviews, and no self-censoring mechanism - the perfect blind date nightmare. We can't sell anything else of worth except our brains. I imagine that prostitutes think the same thing as most academics - "I'll stop doing it when I can just save enough to stop." The honest truth is that we are addicted to the little bit more money that we can bring in as we get better at performing our tricks. We work hard to make ourselves look better for our clients, hoping that the next step will bring a little more of a payoff. Yet we have to admit in the end, we have traded ourselves for something of less worth. Maybe I'll stop selling my brain for 10% of my salary per trick. Probably not.
Unfortunately that was also the first day of intersession. I have taken to calling it wintersession because I think that calling it 'intersession' is misleading if not outright false advertising for students who only briefly glance at the schedule then immediately sign up, only to be disappointed later. Wintersession is good for my pocketbook, but not my psyche. Imagine 16 weeks of class material crammed into 3 hour classes 4 nights a week for 3 weeks. The students get to take another course in a very short amount of time, and I get an additional 10% of my salary. I found that most students take the class knowing that they won't have to remember much and they can tolerate almost any subject if it is only 3 weeks long. I teach one of the more boring and dreaded classes, so I ended up with a full room on January 4th. Honestly, it wasn't as bad as I make it out to be, but I am not my wife who had to put the kids to bed each night while I was gone. I also signed up to teach a graduate class this summer for environmental studies, "Environmental Law." It is a class that they all need, and I want to prep it, so it may work out just fine. I also was awarded a fellowship to work on the newly formed Center for Sustainability at school. It is in no way free money. I have to help coordinate outreach activities and move all of our students into an online portfolio system.
Each of these classes or fellowships ends up adding another 10% to my salary. Even with the furlough (I'm currently making 90% of my salary), this year I hope to make right up to the salary cap of 125% of my salary! While this sounds like I'm rolling in cash, you must remember that this amount, 125% of my salary, is approximately the same amount of money that a 5 year veteran of the LAPD makes with a language bonus. It is much less than an entry level consultant in D.C., but significantly more than a k-12 teacher in Utah (#47 of 50 states for average educator salary). Oh, and I live in Southern California, which is renown for its low cost of living.
Normally, I don't think that I would sign up for these winter or summer school classes. Those times are reserved for thinking, writing, working on tenure, and spending time with my family. The main problem is that my salary isn't enough to support a family of 5 without help, and the furlough hasn't made that any easier. I have become a hustler - constantly looking for some new scheme to make a couple more bucks. I don't have any fancy clothes, or look like Snoop Dogg, but I feel like a slimy character nonetheless. This academic hustling is what I call prostituting your brain.
You see the sad part of the entire story is that Academics don't have much else going for them besides their brain. I for instance have lobbied every semester to have someone place a chili beside my name on ratemyprofessor.com. Each semester, the students shoot me this look that says "I pity you for asking, but I still can't sink that low." We are all geeks with poor physiques, stupid jokes, overly analytical worldviews, and no self-censoring mechanism - the perfect blind date nightmare. We can't sell anything else of worth except our brains. I imagine that prostitutes think the same thing as most academics - "I'll stop doing it when I can just save enough to stop." The honest truth is that we are addicted to the little bit more money that we can bring in as we get better at performing our tricks. We work hard to make ourselves look better for our clients, hoping that the next step will bring a little more of a payoff. Yet we have to admit in the end, we have traded ourselves for something of less worth. Maybe I'll stop selling my brain for 10% of my salary per trick. Probably not.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The lessons learned about bargaining in an open Saudi market, while never leaving the USA
I supervised my first 2 Master's theses. One was unbelievably good, the other not so much.
The first student only needed 4 or 5 office visits and two drafts of the thesis before he was done. His public presentation was better than anything I could do. Needless to say, he was immediately snatched up into a great company.
The other student started her work over a year earlier, burned through two other advisors, and needed an inordinate amount of my effort to get the thing written. She made no changes to the first or second draft, even when I had asked her to do so. I revised her thesis twice within 24 hours, both times suggesting significant changes. The day of the deadline, she came into my office begging for my approval. My children were there. She begged and I said no, she pleaded, I said no. Finally she told me that she was going to be deported and essentially tortured because she had not finished her thesis in the time allotted her by her scholarship. I signed the approval form on the condition that she would revise the thesis according to my standards within the week. She needed two more signatures, but was unable to get them. In the end, we found an exit strategy for her that had a later deadline.
It was an embarassment to me. The most hurtful was to see the confusion in son E.'s eyes when he looked up at me after hearing her pleading, understanding my argument to uphold my standards, and watching me cave to a bastardized solution with my signature. He simply said "You signed it? Why? She was wrong." I felt less than the dust of the earth. I made a committment that day that I would never relax my standards, agree to an insufficient compromise, or in any other way reduce the amount of respect that my children would have for me. I learned a lot about negotiating and defending standards through the eyes of my son.
I later learned that she was in no danger, and only needed to graduate because she would have had to return home rather than be allowed to stay on a different type of visa. If I could repeat that day, I would. I learned a lot. I made significant changes to my advising strategy, but if I disclosed them, you would probably accuse me of being xenophobic. Maybe most importantly, I never want to bargain with a Saudi ever again.
The first student only needed 4 or 5 office visits and two drafts of the thesis before he was done. His public presentation was better than anything I could do. Needless to say, he was immediately snatched up into a great company.
The other student started her work over a year earlier, burned through two other advisors, and needed an inordinate amount of my effort to get the thing written. She made no changes to the first or second draft, even when I had asked her to do so. I revised her thesis twice within 24 hours, both times suggesting significant changes. The day of the deadline, she came into my office begging for my approval. My children were there. She begged and I said no, she pleaded, I said no. Finally she told me that she was going to be deported and essentially tortured because she had not finished her thesis in the time allotted her by her scholarship. I signed the approval form on the condition that she would revise the thesis according to my standards within the week. She needed two more signatures, but was unable to get them. In the end, we found an exit strategy for her that had a later deadline.
It was an embarassment to me. The most hurtful was to see the confusion in son E.'s eyes when he looked up at me after hearing her pleading, understanding my argument to uphold my standards, and watching me cave to a bastardized solution with my signature. He simply said "You signed it? Why? She was wrong." I felt less than the dust of the earth. I made a committment that day that I would never relax my standards, agree to an insufficient compromise, or in any other way reduce the amount of respect that my children would have for me. I learned a lot about negotiating and defending standards through the eyes of my son.
I later learned that she was in no danger, and only needed to graduate because she would have had to return home rather than be allowed to stay on a different type of visa. If I could repeat that day, I would. I learned a lot. I made significant changes to my advising strategy, but if I disclosed them, you would probably accuse me of being xenophobic. Maybe most importantly, I never want to bargain with a Saudi ever again.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Management by Rationale
For over thirty years, everyone in the Political Science department had just submitted the days and times that they wanted to teach which classes. Maybe the Chair of the department would suggest someone teach a different class, but on the whole, we just hired part time faculty if we needed something different than what was proposed. This lead to some classes being offered much more than they needed to be and others never offered. When the Dean started messing with our class load - moving us from 3 classes per semester to 4, and adding many more students to each class - I proposed that someone look comprehensively at student demand and see if we could move back to a 3/3 workload. I spent much of last semester gathering data that no one had ever looked at in our department. I thought through all of the possibilities and what we would have to do (students, schedules, classes, etc.). Finally, in the last part of the semester, people caught the vision and a flurry of meetings took place. Each department thought through their curriculum and student needs. We started planning years of course offerings rather than a semester by semester plan. The 5 and 6 hours planning meetings were largely without problem, which is unheard of here. People caught the vision of a reduced load, and they have worked for it. It has even left some of us dreaming (or having nightmares) about the different possible combinations of class offerings, schedules, and faculty assignments.
We still have a few minor details to work through, but my (now everyone's) scheduling project looks like it is a tentative go. We submitted the plan to the Dean and she said that it looked good. Now we are waiting on approval from the 'much higher ups.' It is odd that no one had looked at our department in a comprehensive manner or made a comprehensive plan in 30 years. While I seriously dislike the budget crisis, it has forced us to rethink our existence as a department. I just hope these positives aren't balanced out by something worse, the largely rumored pay cut. More to come on that later.
We still have a few minor details to work through, but my (now everyone's) scheduling project looks like it is a tentative go. We submitted the plan to the Dean and she said that it looked good. Now we are waiting on approval from the 'much higher ups.' It is odd that no one had looked at our department in a comprehensive manner or made a comprehensive plan in 30 years. While I seriously dislike the budget crisis, it has forced us to rethink our existence as a department. I just hope these positives aren't balanced out by something worse, the largely rumored pay cut. More to come on that later.
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