Recently I learned about a new course being offered in Underwater Hamster Wheel Repair. I was very excited as this is exactly what I studied, what I have degrees in, what I love teaching.I immediately applied to teach Underwater Hamster Wheel Repair. In doing so, I had to drop another class, but that was ok because I wanted so very much to break up the monotony of teaching Gerbil Dancing 101, which I’ve been teaching over and over and over again.
It was in August when I applied. In October I learned that there was a problem with me teaching UHWR – that all of my experience had taken place in the wrong kind of water. Apparently if I got some letters together from advisors and peers, I’d be able to teach UHWR. I sent in the letters immediately. I asked every few weeks if the HR people had yet deemed me qualified (yes, it’s up to HR and not the department head).
Finally, I learned today that I am not qualified to teach a subject that I have degrees in and have taught at other schools. It is too late to recover the hours that I dropped. I feel like my head is going to explode.
WTF! The real kicker is going to be that they hire someone without a degree related to UHWR to teach the thing. I'm beginning to understand why people hate HR so much. And in what way is HR qualified to make that determination anyway?
ReplyDeleteThat's completely insane, to have HR and not the department decide who can teach certain classes. I could teach a ton of classes that my "degrees" don't qualify me for, and if I was told I couldn't because of that, I'd be kicking some people.
ReplyDeleteThe best part is that the class will probably now be cancelled because it was taught with another prof who will be over his max hours if he teaches it alone. So, all the students that signed up can now re-arrange their schedules, after the classes are of course full. This is a NO WIN situation for everyone, and I'm sad to say it's par for the course at my "institution."
ReplyDeleteAt one of the schools I teach for, degrees appear to only matter based on their level and general field ("English" or "History" for example). You are a PhD or an MA. In what ("Modern Europe" or "19th Century British" or "Weimer Germany" or "Ante bellum South" or whatever) appears to play no role at all. If you are a PhD you can teach graduate classes. If you are MA you teach only undergrad. So we have people with specialized knowledge late baroque hamster cults teaching Gerbils of the 1960s while people with published books with titles like Rodents Before and After Woodstock don't get to teach that class because they weren't standing around the right water cooler at the right time. They get to teach, oh, I don't know, Medieval Hamsterism or Utopian Water Bottle Use in the Victorian Guinea Pig Short Story.
ReplyDeleteI know we are all indulgent of the need to be circumspect, but AdSlave ... Medieval Hamsterism just made my day!
ReplyDeleteI need a new degree!
Thank goodness HR doesn't have quite that much power here. Like Adjunct Slave's university, here we just need to fit the general category. Having a degree in a field that is interdisciplinary means I can scoot around quite a bit which keeps things interesting for me, my research, and my students.
ReplyDeleteI find it more than a bit (irritating? condescending? short-sighted?) that trained scholars with related experiences would be denied access to a course because there isn't an exact one-to-one correlation between the degree achieved and the class being taught. If I only taught classes on the specialized gunk that appeared in my M.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation, the department would hardly be able to meet their enrollment numbers. I'm the only one who was foolish enough to get caught in that riptide. To make it palatable to the masses, I have to seriously tweak and broaden my topic to something that, to the untrained eye, might appear unrelated. But isn't.
And since I've got several degrees, I think I know what I'm capable of doing or not doing. Why would I volunteer to take on a class that I've no qualifications for whatsoever? That sounds like more time/work than I've got to spare!
Bah Humbug.
@Aware - I'm glad I could add some sunshine to our otherwise dreary lives!
ReplyDeleteBTW, if you are sincerely interested in medieval hamsterism, there is a new book out about the self-flagellating plague rats of Cordoba that you might find interesting. A fascinating footnote on page 422 argues that hamsterism didn't arise in Latin Europe until the Renaissance, brought there by exiled Polish and Ruthenian sewer rodents when hordes of snakes from the east overran Cracow in 1454. If that finding is confirmed, some hamsterists will have to re-write their books or find themselves on the wrong side of the feeder when tenure time comes around...
@ Liz - I agree. I would hate only teaching within my specialty and I don't think such a narrow focus is good for scholarship or teaching. But sometimes people are passed over despite a perfect fit - we're talking about adjuncts fighting among each other at the trough - or courses aren't shared or alternated, but "locked" by someone who does not have a core interest in the sub-field. Seems weird.
Their loss. I had the same happen to me. Towards the end of a VAP at an R1, I applied (out of desperation) for adjunct work at a state college. Around this time, I had a conversation with my grad-school advisor, who mentioned being consulted by a tenure committee there, where the candidate being considered was a total joke. He told me that if I were on the faculty there with my moderately better-than-average CV, I'd be a professor above scale.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the next week I got an e-mail from said school saying I didn't meet the "minimum qualifications" for employment!
It varied at the place where I used to teach.
ReplyDeleteSome department heads would look at my qualifications and then dump the course outlines on my desk, figuring that with my education and experience, I could sort out how to teach the material myself.
Others decided that even though I had degrees in a certain field, I wasn't allowed to teach a course in it until I audited it myself, the logic being that I would then see how it "should" be taught. Nobody, however, told me what I was supposed to do if the instructor was lousy at teaching that course or if the manner of presentation was lousy or ridiculous. Often, I found that the material was at such a level that even a trained monkey could teach it, so the auditing was a complete waste of time.
Sometimes, though, I thought that the latter scenario was politically motivated and used to put me in my "place" because I was often better-educated than most of the staff I dealt with. ("You got a Ph. D. in that field? Gee, now we're gonna hafta show you how it should be taught...")
Prof. T, I agree this is absurd. But I may have an inkling about the cause.
ReplyDeleteMy department has to update the "minimum quals" for teaching particular courses every few years, and the process is fraught with peril. We try to cover every permutation of degree combinations and disciplines that might equip a candidate to teach a class -- to cast a wide net. The problem is the lack of standardization; different colleges and universities classify and name disciplines in slightly different ways. If we've left one out, and later get a great applicant with a degree we didn't consider, HR tells us that we're stuck with the "minimum quals" list we compiled two years ago. We can amend it, but it can't be retroactive, or that could be seen as discriminatory, as if we were biased towards hiring a particular individual.
Of course, if we get a great candidate who could blow us out of the water teaching that class, we WOULD be biased towards hiring him or her. But our hands would be tied. The process is set in our Byzantine state educational code.
Oh, HR thinks they know it all. Who cares about teaching skills and knowledge of subject area, the paper trail is the most important thing.
ReplyDeleteI've just had an adjunct suffer a stroke. I need someone real fast to finish out the term. But we have Rules on what papers the person must have and Rules on how many hours an adjunct can teach.
It really hurts to see great people I cannot hire. Must make the HR people feel real good.
I'll have whatever AdjunctSlave is having.
ReplyDelete@ Ovreductd - Riga's Black Balsams followed by a Gammeldansk.
ReplyDelete