The dean rejected the department’s request for a replacement line. He acknowledged that nearly sixty percent of the classes for our majors and one hundred percent of our “general-education” courses are taught by adjuncts.He acknowledged the additional work the reliance on adjuncts means for each “permanent” faculty member (for advising, committee work, service, etc).
He acknowledged the strains on our ability to address the needs of our nearly 500 undergraduate majors.
He then asked if we could start an MA program.
I know that too many CM readers have similar examples of what I call “administrative vision:” we have no money to help you, but would you please start something that will make it worse?
Q: So, what bullshit is your ambitious dean giving you to do as s/he wants something “new” to pad a cv?
My college - like many - uses and abuses and overabundance of adjuncts. They get shitty pay, lousy schedules, have no guarantee from semester to semester. They crowd a big shared office in my department, and many of us don't even know their names.
ReplyDeleteLast semester our Dean-in-waiting told the assembled faculty that we had do more for the adjuncts. I'm thinking office space, health benefits, FREE parking.
Instead, he assigned departmental liaisons to counsel each adjunct on how to better represent themselves in the full time job market.
Once a year or so, a Dean comes around our department and says, "You know, if we had a bigger building, you all wouldn't be so crowded. Why don't you do a headcount and let me know exactly how many office you have, how many are shared, and all that. I'll get into it."
ReplyDeleteI did this for him twice already, and now the guy across the hall does it once a year.
Our Dean wanted each member of the department to videotape approximately 25% of each course's lectures, and put them in an on-demand online queue on our intranet for use by any and all interested parties.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I know, not a one of us has done even the first step of finding clean clothes and setting up a tripod.
Our Dean removed our chair from his position halfway through the semester; our chair was informed about this as he was walking in from his car. The Dean then sent us all an email telling us the department would be run by his office.
ReplyDeleteThen, at the meeting discussing why such drastic measures needed to be taken, we were informed that, simultaneously, our passing rates were too low and the people passing our classes did not know enough content.
Develop a new major based solely on only classes we already teach... with no new faculty being added (adjunct or otherwise). Porque???
ReplyDelete@Terry P.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me of the old Solzhenitsyn short story "For the Good of the Cause", but at least you were not screwed out of a new building, just given the barest hint of "hey, mebbe we should stop building gyms and start building offices. For who? The teachers. Fuck them, we need another NCAA trophy."
You got a real Bill Lumbergh there, Terry P.
@BuffDan - Did they manage a straight face while they said it? That's gotta take practice.
ReplyDeleteCynic - I hear you. I've pointed out more than once to our admins that we have something like 200 course numbers for only about 40 courses. This is a mix of two things - "initiatives" that never attracted enough students and leave dead courses on our books, and giving multiple course numbers to the same course in two programs which gins up the numbers.
The response from the admins was (say it with me...) Crickets...
"Your teaching is generally innovative and high quality, the content covered appropriate to the levels of study, the assessments used by the department are appropriate and varied, and the marking schemes used are exemplary. However, your proportion of A and B grades is too low. Fix this without spending any more time on teaching or engaging in grade inflation. Giving more As and Bs is not grade inflation."
ReplyDeleteSigh.
This post is so depressing that it's funny.
ReplyDelete@Will -- that little scenario pretty much epitomizes many tenure-track administrators' attitudes toward adjunct/contingent faculty. What I haven't figured out is that they think they'd do for teaching labor if all of us did somehow magically find full-time TT jobs. I guess they imagine an endless supply of new Ph.D.s moving through what they still envision as temporary, entry-level jobs. Never mind that they aren't creating the TT lines for those Ph.D.s to fill, or hiring anybody else's longtime contingents, let alone their own, to the jobs they do create. And never mind what a hassle it would be to supervise a faculty over 50% of whose members were in their first five years or so in the classroom (or to field snowflake/parent complaints about such a faculty, especially when it was teaching mostly intro/gen ed classes). We established contingent faculty are pretty low-maintenance (i.e. good at keeping our heads down) as well as being cheap.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of that, as far as I can tell, the Dean who most directly affects my professional life seems mostly to want the teaching function of the university to be as invisible as possible, the better to make way for Research, so, most of the time, I am entirely invisible to hir. But (s)he wants to be able to claim excellence in teaching with as little fuss as possible -- which means, you guessed it, that everyone should score above the departmental and university averages in teaching evaluations. Or something like that; I'm not clear on the details, but the numbers on the teaching evaluation spreadsheet seem to matter a lot.
One for the ages - Administrative Vision: "We have no money to help you, but would you please start something that will make it worse?"
ReplyDelete