EMU in the CHE for all the wrong reasons

From the January 5 Chronicle of Higher Education comes this article, “Cashing In on Virtual Courses: At Eastern Michigan U., professors can double their pay by teaching online, but some of their leaders find that unfair.” For the most part, it’s a recap of the problems with the grading stipend loophole for online teaching at EMU that I’ve discussed here in the past and also on EMUtalk.org. But there are a few differences.

First off, this has now become national news, and (I assume, at least) that one of the reasons why this is in the Chronicle at all is because this deal of paying teachers $150 extra per head for classes of more than 25 students is so out of whack with the normal practices at other institutions. I mean, this is a pretty sizable article, and there isn’t one other school mentioned in it. Shouldn’t this give the people in the leadership at EMU pause?

Second, my department and my department head are both specifically mentioned in it. Go figure! Here’s a lengthy quote with a few editorial comments along the way:

Mr. Eiss [note– This is Harry Eiss, the “poster boy” for this practice of enormous overrides and a guy who has an office just down the hall from me] used to teach more courses online, but his department has capped the number a professor may teach online each semester at two courses. [note– This happened a couple years ago, before the rise of online classes, when Eiss was scheduled to teach five or more overload CE classes, some of which appeared to be meeting at the same time.] And it has decided to cancel the online version of his advanced course on critical approaches to children’s literature, which he taught in the fall. [note– This was because Eiss was letting in so many students into his advanced online writing class that the other versions of the class that other faculty were teaching were canceled because they didn’t fill.]

According to Laura J. George, head of the English department, the children’s literature committee decided it was important to have face-to-face interaction in every writing class that is offered, which includes Mr. Eiss’s advanced course. She says the department introduced the cap because it became clear a few years ago that Mr. Eiss was teaching an “exorbitant” number of classes online.

“There were some concerns about quality and service to students,” she says.

[note– Not surprising, all this is more complicated than is suggested here. I think it’s fair to say that the department (and this is a discussion at the department level now, not just at the Children’s Literature committee) is okay with online classes, but it believes that these classes shouldn’t be overloaded.]

Mr. Eiss says his fellow professors are wrong about the quality’s being lower. He thinks they are simply jealous.

According to the grading-stipend policies at Eastern, for every student Mr. Eiss takes over an established limit of 25 he earns $150. So for this winter’s course, in which he may enroll up to 100 students, or more than 70 extra, he could make as much as $10,000. A salary report released recently by the university reported that Mr. Eiss was the second-highest wage earner among the university’s 680 faculty members last year. His nine-month base salary was about $68,000, and he made an extra $95,000 by teaching overload courses.

I wouldn’t want to speak directly about Eiss, but let me just say something in general terms here about the charge of faculty being “jealous,” about the “hard work” of these faculty teaching these huge overloads in online classes. If one decided that they wanted to completely divorce themselves from the workings of the department– that is, hypothetically, if faculty member decided they no longer were going to come to department meetings or volunteer to serve on the various committees that do the work of the department, then one could probably teach extra classes. Also, if one decided and/or convinced themselves that it was okay to lower the standards of what counts as teaching in these overloaded online classes in order to “cash in,” then it seems to me that a faculty member could indeed manage to teach online classes like this.

But for me, this isn’t something to be jealous about. It is a practice of a fellow faculty member that I for one find unethical.

Two more “behind the scenes” aspect of this story I thought I’d mention: first off, this is a “discussion” that is still going on in the department in terms of policies that we will be adopting to govern online teaching. That’s all I’ll say about that for now.

Second, the writing faculty started talking about this a while ago, and I think it’s fair to say that we’re all on the same page when it comes to these class caps. Simply put, online writing classes don’t have any more students than face to face classes. My online version of English 328 has 20 students in it and my online version of English 516 has 15 students in it, the same caps as I would have in a normal classroom.

Besides the obvious pedagogical benefits of these lower numbers, we decided as a committee that we didn’t want to undercut or cannibalize each others’ teaching. I mean, if I let in 80 people into my online section of English 328 just because I want to make more money oh, excuse me, work harder, then I would end up causing some of my colleagues’ versions of English 328 to not make. Thus the term cannibalize.

And third, this is (as you can imagine) a topic of discussion on EMUtalk.org right here.

Inside Higher Ed's "Meet the Bloggers" (and a few other tidbits)

I had a day of unintended “blog silence” yesterday because the service I use to host this (and other) blog(s), ICDsoft, crashed for the day, and crashed hard. From the sounds of it, something blew a fuse or a cable was cut or something. Anyway, they’re still a reliable service and I’d still recommend them.

This didn’t give me a chance to blog about an article that showed up on Inside Higher Ed yesterday, “Radical Shift for MLA– on Meeting Date.” To quote at length:

The endorsement of a date change by the Delegate Assembly at the MLA annual convention in Philadelphia Friday was perhaps the biggest news for the thousands of MLA members who voiced overwhelmingly on a recent survey that holding the convention during the peak of the holiday season no longer makes sense. In a survey of 20,000 members, which yielded 5,806 responses, 75 percent indicated that shifting the date so that the convention always begins the first Thursday following January 2 would positively affect their decision to attend. Just 9 percent said it would negatively affect their decision (9 and 7 percent respectively said it would not affect their decision or they weren’t sure).

This will certainly help the situation, but as long as MLA keeps up its primary role as a “job market,” I think that people will still be pretty grumpy at it. Oh, and as long as it continues to equate “English studies” with “literature,” I’m not that interested.

Anyway, the other Inside Higher Ed piece was a report on the “Meet the Bloggers” MLA panel by Scott McLemee called “Against Phalloblogocentrism.” Interesting piece for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it includes links to several of the presenter’s papers, things I’ll have to go back and read when I’m not distracted by getting ready for this pesky school semester coming up next week.

From what I can tell from this article, it was a pretty good panel, and the apparent “star” of it was Bitch, PhD. Interestingly enough, this panel (and also this article) “outted” the pseudoanonymous blogger as Tedra Osell, an assistant professor of English at the University of Guelph. From there, it’s but a hop and a skip to a brief version of her CV, and then even a site with a picture of her (but I’ll let you do your own searches for those).

Frankly, I have mixed feelings about the so-called phallocentric nature of the “blogosphere” that McLemee discusses and that Osell’s presentation (as of yet not online) eluded to. To quote from the Inside Higher Ed piece:

There was one moment in Osell’s presentation that must have hit close to home, given the panel’s Y-chromosomal preponderance: her reference to the “old-boy network� in the blogosphere. This is no joke — and no exaggeration, either. Just before heading off to Philadelphia, I had photocopied an article from the summer 2006 issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly called “The Gendered Blogosphere: Examining Inequality Using Network and Feminist Theory.� Looking it over now, it’s striking how exact her formulation really is.

The authors, Dustin Harp and Mark Tremayne, are both assistant professors of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. “Sampling over one year from blog rankings,� they note, “we found that 10% of the top [political] bloggers were women.� They consider various explanations of why this might be, but conclude that “the linked nature of blogs� has had a skewing effect given certain tendencies familiar to network theorists.

Well, okay. But what’s the gender sample for blogs who are writing about cooking? About childcare/family life? About composition studies? What I’m getting at is it perhaps makes some sense that most political blogs are gendered male since politics in general has been gendered male for a long time.

One more thing about Osell’s/BitchPhD’s appearance at this: I have never been much of a fan of the pseudo-anonymous blog thing, and there are lots of reasons why I don’t read BitchPhD that much. I like the things that she (and others) have to say there about academia and politics (occasionally, at least); I’m not as wild about the posts on her boyfriend and semi-open marriage (that falls into the category of “too much information” for me, but call me a squimish small-town boy from Iowa on that if you like).

So I’m not a fan/regular reader. But I have to think that at least part of the fascination people have with reading that blog is trying to figure out who she is. Well, now that we know, is it as interesting?

Slight addition:

From Sivacracy.net comes another summary of this panel.

Who says nothing ever happens in Detroit?

Via boing-boing and in the Washington Post, “Mannequin Fetishist Could Get Life.” To quote:

A man who has a history of smashing windows to indulge his fetish for female mannequins could draw a long prison term for his latest arrest. Ronald A. Dotson, 39, of Detroit faces up to life in prison if convicted of a charge of attempted breaking and entering at a cleaning-supply company in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale.

Later in the article, it says this guy was arrested a few years ago with three “lingerie-clad mannequins” in an alley a few years before.

Home– NOT from MLA

My wife and son and I all returned home yesterday afternoon from the south Florida office (e.g., the in-laws) where we had a long, restful, warm and productive (I did much planning for winter term classes poolside, for example) holiday, and this morning, we’re all recovering from a “disco” New Year’s Eve party that was small but darn fun.

Lounging about, I am NOT coming back from MLA. But it sure seems like many on the blogosphere are reflecting on their MLA adventures.

It sounds like a lot of folks had fun, but my favorite post about MLA so far comes from my friend Mary. I’ll quote it in its entirety here:

At the MLA

Please, kill me now.

Zen-like, isn’t it?

Anyway, as I wrote about this time last year, I ain’t going anymore, even in the unlikely event I end up “on the market” again. There are so many problems with MLA I don’t even know where to begin, but for now, I will attempt to make four observations about the main function of MLA (points I made on the WPA mailing list a couple weeks ago), which is not actually the conference but interviewing.

  • It seems to me rather unfair to defacto charge PhD candidates $1000 or more so that they can get an interview. This is especially a problem in literature of course, where someone finishing up their dissertation on some dead white guy has to invest in a suit (and I don’t care if you are a man or a woman, it’s the same damn black suit!), get airfare, get a hotel room, eat, etc., all of this for one or two or maybe three interviews. That’s a condition that strikes me as one very much rooted in the good ol’ days (like 35 or more years ago) when there were both plenty of jobs and where everyone in PhD studies was of a “certain class” where they could afford all of these expenses.
  • Because at least two-thirds of the people at MLA are really there as part of the arcane interviewing process still practiced by many English departments, the majority of people there are in a bad mood. This has at least been my experience. Interviewees (e.g., job seekers) are obviously stressed out (“the rest of my life hinges on the next 20 minutes– I hope my black suit looks okay…”), but interviewers are mad too (“oh God, I’m interviewing another one of these kids in a new black suit when I could be home with the family watching football games…”). Just a bad bad vibe all around, and, having been on both sides of that table, I personally think that being the interviewer is actually the worst end of the bargain.
  • There is of course a pretty easy technological solution to this whole interview problem, a new-fangled talking device called “the telephone.” Say, did you know they even make them with speakers now so multiple people can talk and listen? Amazing! I have some colleagues (all in literature, btw) who are convinced that the 20 minutes of “real life” contact you have with someone at MLA most certainly tells you so much more about a candidate than 20 or so minutes on the phone. Having been on both sides of the phone a couple of times, I think that’s rubbish.
  • Here’s my first prediction of the year: it won’t be too long before it will become normal to conduct interviews via a live audio chat with a video enhancement. Every Mac on the market right now has a built-in camera, and that means it won’t be too long before every windoze computer has one too. So at that point, what will be the point of interviewing at MLA? The hand-shake?

Enough of that. Time for me to slowly move on with the day and cook up some black-eyed peas….