Tag higher education

Professor Decider

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Faced with budget cuts and a rapidly changing landscape in higher education, I have made the painful decision to lay off, to outsource and to redeploy, my entire imaginary staff. As the leader of myself, I have to show a good example. A college professor, I am aligning key resources with a refurbished messaging strategy. Understanding that my most valuable resources–my three-pound brain–needs to be positioned to take maximal advantage of emerging opportunities in the sector, I aim to make those tough decisions to guarantee that my inflection point doesimages not drain anticipated resources in the final quarter of the reporting period. Relying on the guidance and management principles that served many well, I can point to the scholar who wrote, “I just stopped in to see what condition my condition was in” as my dashboard measure here.

In an effort to enhance transparency, I am announcing the following realignment of my pretend staff and faux advisors. There has been plenty of carping and snarky comments about my assistants and advisors so let it be known today that these staff members are being realigned, maybe more consistent with their horoscopes.

Complaints and criticisms about grading, my mood, my haircut, my expectations, and administrative responses to my response to unreasonable demands will no longer be fielded by my Special Assistant for Grievances. Instead, these will be outsourced to our regional office in a far away land taking advantage of the fact that well educated people will work for pennies if they have to.

Appointments, conferences, meetings, Skyping, Instant Messaging, Instragramming, Tweeting and all the rest will be managed by the Roomba robot, which will be assigned in a dual appointment to vacuum my office floor as well. This eliminates my Special Assistant for Filling Time.

The Special Projects Office will also be eliminated. This, as you may remember, was the unit assigned to keep our division on a clear path to strategic distinctiveness. These duties—formulating mission statements, zeroing in on strategic directions, creating actionable acts, fashioning wordy words— are being reassigned to the Ministry of Future where promises are made and deadlines forgotten.

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The impact of so much administrative change in a non-existent staff will be harder for some to adjust than others. Jettisoning levels of mid-level managers means that underlings can make many bad decisions on their own without the interference from above. This will allow me, Professor Decider, to manage my own time and resources in a more efficient effective way.

My door is always open to you, of course, but I most likely will not be in my office. No need.

Why Martin Luther King, Jr. never gave his I Have a Business Plan Speech

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Unless you put yourself on news diet in higher education or have tossed out all the emails from your university, you’ve been deluged with news about the new kids on campus, innovation and his big brother, disruption.  The innovation movement influences the naming of buildings, the funding of new initiatives, the design of curricular offerings and the branding of programs for our students. What I want to address here is not technological innovation, machine intelligence nor the rise of the robots; I want to address social innovation.  As a twenty-year student of civic engagement on campuses, I’ve been tracking the introduction of programs in social innovation and social entrepreneurship across the country. As chronicled by Ashoka U, more courses are being taught, more faculty are on board, more programs of study are being created and more campuses are signing up to be Changemaker campuses, forty-five universities here and abroad. All to the good. That is how programs are created and make their way into the academic mainstream. Like any new program or discipline that aims to make a place in higher education, problems are framed, claims are advanced, journals are founded, organizations are created, and work begins to establish a presence on campuses.

What is so new about innovation? In some flavors of social entrepreneurship, there is a claim that social entrepreneurship is the panacea we have all been waiting for, that it is new, that it is distinctive and that is far superior to other approaches to social change. In 2015, McBride and Mlyn offered their critique of social innovation’s embrace in higher education, privileging new ideas that will be birthed by our students, instead of carefully teaching them the skills that it really takes to put sound ideas in place—those civic skills and community organizing strategies. As they note, “Engaged citizens know the roles of public, private, and nonprofit sectors and the tools that leverage their work together”.

A recent article in the New York Times takes the recent batch of entrepreneurs to task for solving all wrong problems, those that address the lives of the privileged and connected, paying lip service to social improvement in a cynical use of the term “changing the world”. In Design: The Invention of Desire, Jessica Helfand berates the impulse to destroy, creatively or not. Is “nothing worth saving…is it necessary to start from scratch every time?” According to Helfand, the principles that should guide innovation are not clever branding schemes or the launch of programs that affect people’s lives with the idea that we should fail fast and fail often. As she argues, the values most important for innovation include “empathy, humility, compassion and conscience.” I just looked it up in Google; there is no app for that.

When we think about educating our students for lives and work in the 21st century, we must not neglect their lives as active members of their communities, whether they become volunteers, board members, teachers, social workers, philanthropists, artists, activists, opinion leaders, public officials or other roles.  In a recent issue of Humanities, Danielle Allen reminds us that we ignore our job to nurture “participatory readiness” in our students, preparing them for lives of civic and political participation. The role of arts, humanities and social sciences is particularly important here, although as scholar and teachers, it is also our job to create new tools that fit new social, economic and political challenges.

Fifteen years ago, at the behest of the leadership of the Campus Compact, I co-taught a year long course titled American Traditions of Philanthropy with Brown University Professor Ann Dill. We enrolled students from elite schools, from the public university, four-year college and community college, as well as a private college whose focus was business education and another private Catholic college. After a year’s worth of lectures and an end-of-the-semester community project, we asked students to article their philosophies of doing good. The students from the public four-year and community colleges stipulated that their obligation was to give back to the communities that had nurtured them by becoming teachers, social workers, and health professionals. The students from the business college believed that their role was to apply their management skills to direct nonprofits, which they believed were poorly managed. They contended that doing so would go a long way to changing the world. The students from the private Catholic university saw themselves empowering community members as citizens. Their role was as community organizers. Finally, the students from the elite universities characterized their role as thought leaders and organizational founders. They saw the current landscape of nonprofit organizations and government agencies as inadequate to serve and change communities; new organizations needed to take their place. These differences in how these students saw their roles in the world were striking—some as direct service workers, others as community organizers, still others as managers and finally others as founders and innovators. We need to be sensitive to the ways in which we empower our students and help them understand their agency in the world.

As we consider which students and campuses are in the community engagement and social innovation fields, we can ask which of our students are truly empowered to be social entrepreneurs? Which are delegated to do more direct service without much access to take up leadership or management roles? We should be clearer about these differences and understand to role of campus culture in citizen making.

Great examples of programs on some campuses aim to marry skills in developing and organizing resources, in working with teams, and with critical analysis. Students don’t create new enterprises until they have worked in the problem space. Students and recent graduates whose goals are social entrepreneurship need time “apprenticing with a problem” as Papi-Thornton characterizes it, understanding how organizations already in place define the problem and their theories of change. Working with others and against the current model of the entrepreneur as a single heroic individual develops the skills and orientations citizens need to truly make a difference.

Paul Light’s Driving Social Change reminds us that transformational change never employs such one tool. Advocacy without the passage of laws gets us nowhere. Volunteerism without a larger conceptualization of the roots of the social problems may be short sighted and misplaced. Without those who are preserving the social safety while others are creating new organizations, many would suffer. No question, we do need new blood and new thinking that addresses problems with which we have become too comfortable. I would argue that we should help our students understand that an array of tools is required for social engagement that improves the lives and communities. Students should understand the role of important books, films and other media that have brought issues to the fore, the role of the civil and the public sectors, the history and life cycles of social movements, and when and why a new organization should be created. Importantly, they can appreciate that a business plan is not a social movement. The anchoring of social entrepreneurship in some business schools has tied them to the business plan as the way to organize for social change. Business thinking that points to ramping up and scaling projects may not the best fit given the complicated nature of social problems. Context matters. Echoing many calls for increased civic education, students need to better understand the tools of citizenship and advocacy. We need to expand the tools students master for involvement in the community, not shoehorn them into narrow views of how change happens.

The good old days when grandmothers were dying

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I have been teaching for nearly twenty years. I started a career as a newborn Ph.D. in a tenure track position when I was fifty years old. So, although I haven’t made my whole living by teaching, I do have the experience of teaching young people across a few generations and as an adjunct, an even longer trace of time.  In the past two years, I have noticed that my collection of student excuses for missing classes has moved from the very solid,

My grandmother died. I won’t be in class tomorrow but I can visit your office hours so that I don’t fall too far behind.

to the extended and complicated,

The grandmother of my roommate has died. I need to go to the week-long wake, the days- long funeral and need to live with her parents because they cannot get through this without me.

Or, when the holidays used to occur,

Professor, I will miss class on Wednesday to celebrate Passover. I wish our university recognized this holiday. Can we meet to go over the lecture that I missed next week?

Now, the run up to the holidays is something more like, 

My parents bought me cheap tickets for a flight home, so I won’t be in class Monday, Wednesday, Friday and the next Monday and Wednesday. We got an unbelievable deal. I know that with the high cost of tuition, you understand this. That’s OK. Right?

As a professor, many of us are understanding when illnesses, contagious or serious, befall our students. We are happy to accommodate them. A professor can tell when the sneezy feverish student with the pink eye presents a danger to the rest of the class. I urge students to get better before they return to class, to attend to these illnesses because the college classroom is really an incubator for disease. After two decades in a classroom, I am pretty certain that my immune response is better than my peers who have only been exposed to older people who are already suffering from something not contagious.

Recently a student told me he would be missing class because of a scheduled medical procedure. When I expressed my concern for his health, he comforted me by saying,

Oh no, professor. It’s not for me. It’s for my cat; she needs a rabies shot.

I am too well socialized to reply sarcastically to such a statement because I know to the student, this seems like a perfectly reasonable excuse.

Another student met me at the end of class,

Professor, on the first day of class, I told you I won’t be here next week because I have to go a wedding. I hope you remembered and that is still fine.

I was thinking, “Gosh, she has to take all that time to go to a wedding. I should probably send a gift or at least a card. How thoughtless of me.”

While I was scheduling class presentations at semester’s end, a student reported he and his study partner couldn’t make their report on Monday because the basketball formal ball was the night before. Hmm, I thought. There must be a Cinderella thing going on here. Why would an event the night before interfere with a presentation at 11:00 the following morning? I think I was supposed to understand that any formal dress occasion or any party involving college students meant excessive drinking and that a hangover wouldn’t allow them to do their best work. I should understand that this is way college life is.

I have also heard in an email from a good student that he would be missing class that afternoon.

Dear Professor, I just learned that my uncle has dementia. I won’t be able to make it to class today.

I would put that email in the category of non-sequitur unless maybe the uncle was the person who reminded the student to come to class and he wouldn’t be available to do that because he just got dementia. Or maybe, it was just hard for the student to accept the diagnosis, which says a lot about how sensitive and caring the student is.

Another wrote that a person close to his family has passed away and that he didn’t think he’d feel up to giving a presentation in class. I can sympathize, of course. I feel awful each day that I have to confront these excuses. But my worries about the fall of Western civilization and how students will navigate their way through the world when chances are grandmothers and uncles and cats and celebrities will routinely demand our attention and empathy. But how did coming to class fall to such a low priority, making it like a drop-in center instead of a commitment to learning in a community? How did we as adults allow this to happen?

Hmmm. I grow nostalgic. Wasn’t it nice when students tried to gin up an excuse that reflected their concern for the judgement of the teachers? Not to disrespect cats, of course. But, really. I should have a list in my syllabus of acceptable excuses so students wouldn’t have to spend anytime at all spinning a palatable way to ditch class (in their minds anyway).

And, of course, the second half of these appeals always include a request for a dispensation. Many ask, “Are we doing anything important in class that day?” or “Will I miss anything?” They search for your approval. This happens frequently enough that we should create some standard responses to this question, as well. Here is one that I have been working on.

Dear Child,

Openeth your ears and hear me well lest these words fall on hard ground, lest the dominions be called into battle and great torrents of fury shall flow. On said day of your absence, all the wisdom contained in Chapter three shall be poured forward and shared with grace and sentiment with your brethren. Those brethren shall not, with severe penalty, pass on to you, the secrets they shall learn that day. Blessed be me. And, even if those brethren could   pass such wisdom, verily it may fall on sterile soil. 

There, that seems clear enough.

It should be stated that the vast number of students seem engaged in their learning. But it should also be stipulated that, in my experience, there has been a change in the college classroom and in university culture. This is true in elite universities, as well as other less prestigious institutions.  There is more negotiation by the students over content, grading, assignments and other matters. It is as if they were coached by someone before they left on a trip to a foreign land, “Never pay retail. You can always bargain them down.” And, they took this lesson to their universities. Recently a student tried to convince me that his B minus grade wasn’t that far from an A minus and that he knew and I knew that he  knew the  course material dead cold. He was convinced that I could be argued into believing this was the case. This lasted about thirty minutes. I felt like I was being deposed in a criminal trial.

Finally, he asked,

Well, actually, what is it to you, if I get a B- or A-?

I explained that I would have loved to have given him an A, if he had earned it. But raising his grade wasn’t fair to other students who had done better than he had and got the grades they earned.  This was very hard for him to understand. I think he was about to argue that if students wanted better grades, they should simply put effort into arguing for them. I reminded him that I had accepted late work from him and allowed him to re-submit a poorly written essay. He may not have even earned the B-, actually.

That drew things to a close. Well, actually, I used the legitimate excuse of having to attend a meeting to end the conversation.

Imagine.Engage. Reflect. Repeat: Forty years of civic work

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An anniversary is always a good time to take measure of where we have been, where we are and where we might go. So, when I look ahead, Compact’s thirtieth anniversary next year provokes me to consider the arc of the work we do and to consider my own path within this larger story. Next year, I also mark a personal anniversary. In 1971, I joined VISTA, finding my way to southeastern Alabama for a year of service–a short 45 years ago. This year turned out to be the most determinative event of my life. From that year, I can trace an unsteady path from my sojourn in the south to my early career in child welfare and corrections to my later time at the Compact’s national office twenty years later to my current position as a faculty member. Throughout all of this work, one question has haunted me–whether working in the state prison or behalf of foster children or building houses in Alabama or teaching sociology at a private university: how do I understand what I am doing when I aim to be of service? And after decades of being in the company of some people who I think are the finest I will ever meet, I think this question haunts many of them, as well.

We could consider this question as a standard reflective practice—a way to understand our experiences—but I think it is much more important than a learning exercise to tick off as end a particular project. I think of questions like these as our life’s work, creating and calibrating the compasses we use to steer our hearts, minds and souls. I think about how the purest of intentions have formed some of our local, national and international efforts to do good and I have to consider why and how these so often go awry. I think about how those of us who do this work appear to those whom we aim to help. In my own experience, I think about how a ragtag group of twelve long-haired young people from the north looked to the poor black folks in rural Alabama when we showed up to “help.” I reflect upon what their white neighbors may have made of us and our intentions. So many decades later, I can still hear the echoes of those conversations when my host family asked, “Didn’t your family need you at home?” or when the waitress at the restaurant said to us, “Things must be very bad down here for you to trouble yourself to come all this way.” All those misunderstood motives for our being there put me on a path to question my own reasons and purposes for service.

That year of service taught me many things, most of which were most likely not the part of any administrator’s strategic plan. Our planned projects—building houses, organizing the community improve the distribution of commodity foo, extending family planning—became so complicated and difficult that I finally understood that the art and science of helping and bettering the world was much more complex than simply planting that disposition in one’s heart. The challenge was to not allow those difficulties and complications to stop us from doing what we believe ought to be rightly done. This is as true on our campuses today as it was in rural Alabama forty years ago.

There are many benefits to being a member of service-learning and community engagement communities. I have never worked in a field where there are so many individuals to emulate. I find myself taking on mentors who have no idea I have chosen them to guide and enrich my work. One of my heroes, Ira Harkavy quoted Chilean sociologist Eugenio Tironi in a recent speech.

The answer to the question “What kind of education do we need?” is to be found in the answer to the question, “What kind of society do we want…If human beings hope to maintain and develop a particular type of society, they must develop and maintain the particular type of education system conducive to it.

This point is a critical one if we in higher education believe we have something to offer to the public, as a public good, well beyond career training and a narrow agenda. And, I would argue, well beyond mandatory community service projects and days of service. What I have learned after two decades in this field is that we need to be both ambitious in our aims and humble in our approaches. I will try to make these points as clearly as I can. First, I have been thinking deeply about what we need as citizens and members of our communities to be full-fledged members of our community. In teaching sociology at Bryant, I try to help students understand all the ways that their lives are implicated in the lives of others. So, we think about ways to be more conscientious in what and how we consume, to be more thoughtful about philanthropy, to be better informed about public events, to be careful researchers, to design new approaches to social problems, and to be accountable for our actions, especially those meant to do good. This is what I meant about ambition or maybe, more correctly, vision. It is just too easy to keep doing what we have been doing without considering how we might take on more. As Tompkins reminds us,

 The classroom is a microcosm of the world; it is the chance to practice whatever ideals we may cherish. They kind of classroom one creates is the acid test of what it is one really stands for.

Onto my second point. The lesson here may seem remote. A recent article in the New York Times traced the impact of the campaign to distribute millions of mosquito nets to eradicate malaria—an effort that has had multiple unanticipated negative consequences. Play Pump met with a similar fate. Great excitement over a cool idea. Millions of dollars to ramp up and spread this innovation. Six months later, most pumps were out of service and residents were left with less access to water than they had before the pumps were installed. We don’t have to go to far off regions to find other instances where our own intentions went away. As I wrote earlier, these issues are complicated. This is not to say that we are not obligated to do much better and bigger than we do at doing good; the second lesson suggests we be as careful with the lives and life-spaces of others that we seek to help as we would be of our own lives and communities.

New York Times columnist David Brooks offers two paths for living a worthwhile life. The first, the well-planned life, is the one we typically suggest to students–that they find their passions and follow these. We argue that it is only when we are deeply inspired by own dreams that we accomplish anything of significance. Brooks suggests an additional path, which he calls the summoned life. In contrast to the first model, individuals drawn to the summoned life believe that, as Brooks writes, that “life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored.” And because of this, we have to be open and engaged to pose the questions that Brooks suggests, “What are these circumstances summoning me to do? What is needed in this place? What is the most useful social role before me?” To these questions, I would add, “And what can we do as educators to help students develop those visions, skills, and values that get us closer to the society we want?”