Category: EMU

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On the Gen Ed Revisions Proposal, or Why Composition Courses Matter

Here is another very EMU-centric and very long post, though not unlike the post I had in September about the EMU-AAUP 2027-29 contract, maybe there are those beyond EMU who might be interested in my efforts to explain my field and the course that is most associated with it, first year writing. Let me also make clear that I am speaking only for myself and not for my program or colleagues or whatever. So, with that disclaimer out of the way:

In August, Interim Provost David Schecter announced that General Education was going to be revised. The new requirements are going to be “launched” in the 2027-28 school year, and then fully implemented in 28-29. Every course in Gen Ed will apparently have to be re-evaluated to meet the new outcomes, though these outcomes have not yet been developed.  Schecter and the faculty committee he set up for this released an outline of what the new Gen Ed will (likely) look like for faculty to review before the upcoming campus-wide town hall discussions. This is a link to the PDF that was widely circulated via email.

The main goal seems to be to reduce the number of Gen Ed requirements from 41 credits to around 31 by cutting the number of courses in each category and eliminating the Learning Beyond the Classroom requirement. I don’t disagree with either of these goals, actually. Reducing the number of required courses would put EMU’s Gen Ed is in line with the Michigan Transfer Agreement, which is 30 credits. And while Learning Beyond the Classroom was (and probably still is) a good idea, the logistics of running that program have always been challenging.

What concerns me is the language about potential changes to the Effective Communication Gen Ed requirements. Currently, students fulfill this area with a writing course (aka “WRTG 121: Composition II: Researching the Public Experience”; aka “freshman comp;” aka “English Composition”) and a speech course (aka “COMM 124: Foundations of Speech Communication”). My area of expertise is composition and rhetoric, so I’m focusing here on that.

The Gen Ed proposal still requires two courses in this category, but it doesn’t seem to specify a particular course. Here is how this category is described on page 3 and 4:

Inquiry, Expression, and Critical Thinking (6 credit hours total) – students will take two required foundational classes in which they will develop their writing, communication, and critical thinking skills in preparation for subsequent college course work and their careers. In these foundational courses (e.g., first-year writing, argumentative writing, speech, visual communication), students will develop their abilities to evaluate and build arguments, to evaluate and incorporate information and evidence from appropriate and diverse sources, and to communicate effectively to an audience to achieve their purpose(s).

Confusingly, there is a table on page 7 of the Gen Ed proposal that still calls this area “Effective Communication,” and the notation on the table reads “This category may contain more than two courses moving forward; however, the total number of courses will remain small.”

I don’t know what this means. I am willing to take the provost and members of Gen Ed committee at their words when they say this proposal is a work in progress, no decisions have been made yet, and the committee and provost really want to hear what others have to say during the upcoming town hall events. But the rumors I have heard and the wording in this proposal suggest that there are faculty from other programs and departments on this committee who think that there ought to be other courses in this category as well. I can only speculate on the reasoning behind this, but my guess is the reasoning is that everyone writes and everyone assigns writing, so why should this requirement be restricted to a specific course or a specific discipline?

I strongly disagree, but before I get to that, let me briefly describe my discipline, composition and rhetoric, and my experiences in it.

Freshman Composition emerged as a course in the late 19th century, and today, somewhere around 90% of all colleges and universities in the U.S. require students to take a composition course. But composition and rhetoric (aka writing studies, composition studies, rhetoric and writing, etc.) is a relatively new academic specialization, with the first PhD programs emerging in the 1970s. Broadly speaking, composition and rhetoric also includes specialists in technical writing, business writing, and rhetoric. Some of the PhD programs around the country also include/are aligned with English as a Second Language or Communications. During my PhD studies in the 1990s (at BGSU and in an English department), I took courses about rhetorical theory, writing pedagogy, writing program administration, and qualitative research methodologies.

Most of my scholarship focuses on the connections between technology and writing pedagogy. My teaching includes everything from WRTG 121 to the courses graduate students need to take in order to teach WRTG 121 as a graduate assistant, not to mention many different 300 and 400-level classes. I have done quasi-administrative/service work over my 28 years at EMU as the coordinator of the undergrad program and MA program in writing, and as the interim director and associate director of the first-year writing program as well.  I also wrote and a textbook for teaching research writing, an online/open source textbook that is used by writing teachers all over the world.

In short, I think I know what I’m talking about.

My main objection to this (proposed, still hypothetical) move away from requiring WRTG 121 is that it assumes any course where writing is assigned can substitute. That is inaccurate because WRTG 121 is a composition course, one in which the subject of the course is the process of writing.

WRTG 121 is an introduction to writing with research in order to persuade an audience and argue a thesis. It’s called freshman composition because it is supposed to precede the more advanced writingiintensive course taken in a major. This is exactly the kind of course the Gen Ed proposal is calling for, and I would argue that it is a course that should be taken before students take a course in “argumentative writing,” “visual communication,” or any course in a subject area where writing is assigned. Unfortunately, a lot of students at EMU don’t take WRTG 121 until their junior or even senior year.

Students always need to have some topic to research and write about, and in 121, those topics vary quite a bit. But unlike a writing course in (for example) business or biology or philosophy, the subject of research is secondary to the focus on studying the process of writing.

Composition is a “how-to” type of course: how to get started with an idea by practicing invention strategies, how to develop a thesis, how to conduct research, and how to evaluate those sources.  The course introduces students to rhetoric in terms of studying appeals to persuade audiences, how to develop an argument, and how to arrange an essay. This is all accomplished through a series of scaffolded writing assignments: that is, rather than assigning students one large “research paper,” composition courses typically ask students to complete a series of shorter essays that build to a larger essay. Finally, composition courses are “student-centered” in that the pedagogy focuses on discussion, small group interactions, and peer review where students discuss each others’ essays with the goal of helping each other improve their final drafts.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

My second and closely related objection is that the Michigan Transfer Agreement specifically requires a composition course. Eliminating that requirement will likely create unanticipated transfer problems. Here’s a long quote from the MTA website:

To fulfill the Michigan Transfer Agreement, students must successfully complete at least 30 credits, with at least a 2.0 in each course and at least one credit completed at the institution awarding the MTA. These credits should be met according to the following distribution:

  • One course in English Composition

  • A second course in English Composition or 1 course in Communications

  • One course in Mathematics from one of three pathways: College Algebra, Statistics or Quantitative Reasoning

  • Two courses in Social Sciences (from two disciplines)

  • Two courses in Humanities and Fine Arts (from two disciplines excluding studio and performance classes)

  • Two courses in Natural Sciences including one with laboratory experience (from two disciplines)

Again, the MTA specifically requires an English Composition course, not merely a course where writing is assigned.  And based on my previous experience helping to administer the first-year writing program, that distinction between a composition course and a course that assigns writing matters.

One of the goals for revising the Gen Ed is to streamline the transfer process, in part by automating it. For the most part, this already happens with WRTG 121: when students transfer from the Michigan community colleges, public universities, and independent colleges and universities listed on the MTA website, the transfer is automated based on a specific composition course.  For example, Central Michigan’s ENG 103, Oakland’s WRT 1060, and U of M Dearborn’s COMP 106 all automatically transfer to EMU as 121– and vice versa.

But remember how I mentioned earlier that it was “almost” every university/college in the U.S.? It is “almost” because a lot of the most elite universities in the U.S. (the Ivy league and similarly prestigious places) don’t have a specific freshman composition course. One such university is the University of Michigan– though that is not because they don’t have composition courses. Rather, those courses are distributed across the curriculum at UM-Ann Arbor. It is also worth mentioning that both UM-Dearborn and UM-Flint have a specifically required composition courses, and those are institutions more similar to EMU than UM-Ann Arbor.

Sometimes, students will transfer to EMU from UM or another university where we don’t have a transfer agreement (from another state, for example), and that student will want EMU to count a particular course as the same as WRTG 121. When that happens, the director of first-year writing asks the student to share the syllabus for the course. If it looks like a composition course, it counts as 121. If it was a course that just assigned writing, it doesn’t.

Now, I suppose that if EMU moves away from a specific composition course, it doesn’t make a lot of difference to the students transferring from someplace else to here. After all, if we’re not going to have a specific composition course and we’re going to open it up to multiple courses, I’m sure we’ll still accept a real composition course as well. But besides the fact that eliminating a specifically required composition course would make us an outlier in terms of both the MTA and 90+% of other universities around the country like us, it would likely make it harder for EMU students to transfer someplace else.

So no, we should not eliminate a specific composition course from the General Education, and we should not open up that category to just any class where there happens to be writing assignments. That’s a bad idea.

This is more than long enough, but let me end with two more general observations:

First, none of this is to say that WRTG 121 is a perfect course and shouldn’t be changed in any way. There are lots of different ways the outcomes and design of the course could be changed and improved. For example, maybe there is an opportunity for making WRTG 121 and COMM 124 into a more closely coordinated two course sequence. But EMU also might want to require FTIACs to take freshman composition in their freshman year and before any writing intensive course within a major, and maybe we should require transfer students to take the course when they first enroll at EMU.

Second,  what is the motivation for this change in the proposal? Every other area of the current and proposed Gen ed presumes disciplinarity, and I don’t think that a writing course about the rhetoric of the sciences would be considered as a Gen Ed option for either the Social Sciences or Natural Sciences. What is different about my discipline?

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The EMU-AAUP 2027-2029 Contract: as good as it gets

This post is very EMU-centric– not to say that anyone at EMU will be interested either!– and about my thoughts on the EMU-AAUP’s negotiated “collective bargaining agreement” or CBA or “contract” for 2027 to 2029. I don’t know how much of the details are public because faculty got this information from a website that required a password. I’m voting for this contract because I think that this is the best deal we’re going to get under the circumstances, and because the most contentious issue the union agreed to, which is replacing the faculty senate with a TBA “university senate,” is not something I’m willing to go on strike over.

So, here’s my take, based on conversations, the documents the union shared with faculty, and the contentious Zoom session where the negotiating team tried to explain things:

I think it’s fair to say that the main thing  driving the administration’s position is that the EMU is broke.  EMU’s revenues are almost entirely based on tuition, so falling enrollment has continued to hit the institution hard. The union estimated that the decline in enrollment represented about a $2.8 million decline in revenue in the 2024-25 fiscal year, and the current estimated decline in enrollments will probably add up to another $5.89 million decline. The state appropriations fell in 2024-25 from $188.4 million to $100.7 million. Operating expenses have gone up (we all have experienced the costs of everything going up), the university is paying more in interest to cover it’s debts, and EMU ended the 2025 fiscal year with $6.1 million few dollars in cash holdings. So yeah, the finances ain’t good.

Most of the basic provisions of the contract– the things that define things like faculty work, tenure, and various policies about rules of work stuff– seem about the same. There’s a sliding scale for modest salary increases where everyone gets some money and a percentage based on income. So added altogether, my base pay will go up around 7.6% over the next three years, while someone at the lower end of the starting salary scale will go up 9.4%. That’s definitely a better deal than in a number of past contracts where the union negotiated an across the board percentage increase, which always meant that faculty making more money got a better deal. Not coincidentally, a lot of the past leadership in those days who helped negotiate those contracts were amongst the highest paid faculty at EMU. So I think the sliding scale to help people on the lower end of the pay spectrum has been a good thing, and the union has negotiated like this for the last couple of contracts.

Health care is going to cost more, but of course that’s true everywhere and beyond EMU’s control in so many different ways. But as far as I can tell, I can get the same insurance I get now for a bit more money. Hopefully, this insurance will continue to cover Zepbound, but time will tell.

There are some other things that were negotiated that streamline the grievance process and that reform the layoff and recall process so that the administration can’t get rid of faculty even if they eliminate the programs those faculty teach in. There’s a new appendix about AI that empowers faculty to make all of the decisions on using it or not. Among other things, the contract language specifically says that the administration can’t force faculty to use AI in ways they don’t want to, the administration can’t use AI (at least alone) to make hiring/firing decisions, they can’t replace faculty with AI, stuff like that. It also says faculty can’t use AI alone to assess/grade student work.

The number of sabbaticals and faculty research leaves were reduced, but modestly and in ways that probably don’t make much difference. For example, while the union did agree to reduce the number of faculty research fellowships from 55 to 35, the committee that decides FRFs (which is mostly faculty) typically only gives out around 35 of these awards anyway.

There’s also a faculty buyout, the ending of phased retirement, and a 10 year moratorium on future faculty buyouts. I’ve gone deep enough into the weeds as it is, but basically, I think the buyout is a pretty good deal for anyone who is old enough/can afford to retire, or anyone who is in their 30s or 40s contemplating leaving academia. I think it’s a shame they are getting rid of the phased retirement (at least for now), but the whole “no buyouts for 10 years” thing doesn’t mean anything. If the administration decides that another buyout is necessary to reduce costs, they’ll do it and they will do it within the next ten years.

So, on the whole, not any real gains and kind of modest loses, which, given the conditions on the ground right now at EMU, is probably about as good as it gets. If our current shiny and new president is able to turn things around and increase enrollments, I am sure the union will return to the bargaining table in 2029 and ask for more, but we’ll see.

Where things get most contentious is around shared governance and the replacement of faculty senate.

One of the things I heard first-hand from people on the negotiating team and that was also explained during this Zoom meeting the other night was that when negotiations got underway and both sides were listing their priorities, President Kelly and his interim provost, David Schecter, put reforming faculty input and the faculty senate as a high priority. I think it’s fair to say that the negotiating team was surprised by this– I would be too– and apparently, it was one of the last things that got settled as the deadline approached.

It sounds like the administration’s opening proposal was to get rid of faculty senate and replace it with faculty appointed by the administration, and to also eliminate college advisory committees, which I’ll get to in a moment. What the EMU-AAUP settled on was the continuation of CACs, but now there will be a “University Senate.” The details are TBA, but it will have 20 members, 12 of which will be faculty, and it will include representation from other “stakeholders” (I hate that word, but it’s the best I got). Staff are named in what I’m seeing from the union, but I think this might also include non-tenure-track faculty as well.

Now, my initial (knee-jerk) reaction was “what, wait: we can’t get rid of faculty senate, can we?” But then I thought about it a bit more, and, well, we can, and maybe we should.

Let me take a step back for the 30,000 foot view on how faculty governance and input works at EMU, at least in my experience. We have/had faculty senate and CACs and other bodies designed to be part of the governance process forever. I have been on both CAC and faculty senate. I was on faculty senate twenty years ago (I believe it was called “faculty council” back then), I was on CAC for the first time in (and briefly) in 2004, and I am currently on CAC for my department (so College of Arts and Sciences).

I realize that I have many colleagues who have devoted significant chunks of their careers to these bodies, and sure, I think both of these committees have had some accomplishments. But for me, these two bodies both exhibit two very common problems with input bodies like this in academia: “input theater” and “mission creep.”

The main purpose of CAC (IMO) is to review and approve curricular decisions: that is, when a department/program proposes a new course or a new major (or changes to existing courses and majors), CAC reviews it before it moves on to the last stages of approval in the Provost’s office. When I was on CAC the first time way way back when, that was literally all we did. Sometimes the twice a month meetings would be cancelled or would only last 20 minutes because once we were done reviewing these proposals, we were done.

When I was on faculty council way-back when, the meetings were fairly formal, frequent, quite a bit longer, and they often felt ceremonial. We did some real work back then– I recall a lot of time going over general education reforms, for example– but most of those meetings were presentations by administrators, and faculty were allowed to voice their approval or dissent, but the faculty senate’s actions rarely had any real consequences. That’s what I mean by “input theater:” it’s designed to give some folks the impression of having input and influence, but it’s not real.

Twenty-some-odd years after my first experience, the CAC has now leaned heavily into its advisory role. I think this has happened partly because of some deans wanting more advice/input from faculty, and also because of some of the faculty on CAC insisting on offering more advice and input on lots of things. So while most of CAC still revolves around curriculum, these meetings (never less than 90 minutes) now are addressing topics like the reorganization of the college, gen ed reform, graduate student appointments, release time, etc. Mind you, this is all advisory: the dean doesn’t have to (and frequently does not) follow the CAC’s advice. So here, CAC is a bit of input theater (though I think the curriculum part is still very real), but also a lot of mission creep.

It’s been more than a minute since I’ve been involved with faculty senate, but I must say I have a difficult time identifying a specific action that body has taken in the last 20 years that has had tangible results for me. As one of my colleagues pointed out, the faculty senate had a no-confidence vote against the former and now retired president, Jim Smith, a few years ago. While a majority of faculy senate voted no-confidence, it was not a decisive majority, and what was the result? The EMU Board of Regents extended Smith’s contract and gave him a raise.

The bottom line is that at EMU, shared governance and faculty input take place through the union. It’s the faculty union that negotiates the key rules for faculty work and grievances, and because of that, it has much more power than these other bodies. The administration ignores the input from the faculty senate and the CACs all the time; if they try to ignore the union, they risk being taken to court or pushing the faculty into a strike.

Anyway, to return from 30,000 feet and the matter at hand: my first reaction to a proposal to eliminate faculty senate was “absolutely not.” But as I started thinking about it, I came around to the idea that maybe a university-wide senate that includes staff, NTT, etc. might not be such a bad idea. For one thing, it’s perhaps best to think of this not as faculty senate being replaced; rather, this body is being expanded to include folks who are not faculty. And it is still going to be a body where faculty still retain a clear majority.

The other thing is a university-wide committee made up of more than faculty might have a stronger influence on input to the administration and to the Board of Regents. Let’s take the example of a no-confidence vote in the president (which definitely could happen if things don’t improve around here). A faculty exclusive group is a lot easier for the administration, the BoR, and the general public to dismiss because, you know, faculty tend to  see themselves as “special”. But if a university-wide body had a decisive vote of no-confidence, I think that might be harder for the administration and the BoR to ignore.

I would prefer it if EMU kept the faculty senate in place, though with some basic and common-sense reforms. Term limits immediately come to mind. But I also do not think that changing the faculty senate into a university senate is a reason to reject the contract and to potentially go on strike. At that Zoom meeting, Matt Kirkpatrick (who is president of the union right now) explained that if we turn this contract down, negotiations start all over.

Do you think there’s any chance that this will result in a better deal? I don’t.

So again, I’m voting for this contract. It’s not everything we might have wanted, but as I posted in the Zoom chat of that meeting the other day, there’s no way I’m going to go on strike or risk an even worse renegotiated contract for keeping the faculty senate as it is.

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Declines/Changes/Endings and New School Year Resolutions for 2026-27

It’s far from done, but 2026 has already been a notable year of declines, changes, and endings for me, and I’m not just talking about the demise of the CCCCs. I’m thinking here mostly about EMU.

Like a lot of regional and opportunity-granting universities around the US, EMU’s enrollments have been falling for a while. In fall 2016, we had around 23,000 students– about 18,500 undergrads, and not quite 5,000 grad students. The writing program (which I’m in, of course) had seven or eight tenure-track faculty, and all of us taught a mix of undergrad and grad writing classes. It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns back then of course, but my program, the department, and the institution was pretty stable.

By fall 2025, EMU was down to about 10,000 undergraduates and 2,100 graduate students, and for this fall, we will be lucky if total enrollment passes 12,000. That has resulted in staff layoffs and buyouts, almost no part-timers, and faculty not being replaced when they leave or retire. The writing program faculty is about to be down to three, and just about everyone in the department, including the literature faculty, are taking on sections of first-year writing in order to make load. The main upside for me from all of this has been that it is now super-duper easy to find parking on campus.

EMU’s now former president (James Smith), Provost (Rhonda Longworth), and pretty much everyone in the upper administration at EMU (most of whom are also gone) blamed this decline solely on demographics: the state of Michigan, where almost all of our students are from, has been losing population for decades, plus the number of 18-25 year olds has been declining since the “great recession” days. This is true, but it is not the whole story.

First off, enrollments have actually been falling slowly but surely as long as I’ve been here. When I started in 1998, EMU was around 25,000 students. Through the 2000s, enrollments declined slightly so that by 2008, we were down to around 22,000 students. The great recession did help enrollments for a couple of years because a lot of folks who could not find a job went to school instead. But by 2011, we started to decline again– but again slowly, and like the proverbial frog in the slowly heating water, no one really seemed to notice or think much about the drift downward to about 21,000 students by 2016. In other words, the warning signs about enrollments were there for well over a decade before any of the people running the place realized there was a problem.

Second, the worst is yet to come– probably. As The Wall Street Journal put it in a headline just a couple of days ago, “America’s Colleges Are Hurtling Toward an Enrollment Cliff.” (I accessed this article via this link, fwiw). According to this article:

The largest number of Americans born in a single year arrived on campus in the autumn of 2025, and now a falloff is looming. College enrollments are forecast to drop 13% by 2041, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. In some parts of the country—especially the Midwest and the Northeast—the declines have already begun.

The dates of this enrollment cliff depends on who you ask, but there is little doubt this is a huge problem for all of higher education that is going to play out over the next decade or two. What makes matters even worse for places like EMU is that a lot of our would-be students are being drawn to what the WSJ describes a “flight to quality,” “where the most sought-after schools are attracting an ever-growing number of applicants.” This is why the University of Michigan is receiving record numbers of applications, which in turn makes it even more competitive. And if that wasn’t bad enough: Michigan State University, in an effort to keep its enrollments up, has made it easier to get in. So a lot of the students who came to EMU five or 10 or 15 years ago because they couldn’t get into MSU are going there instead. And why not? It’s not like EMU costs much less, and arguably MSU is a better school.

Smith, who was a pretty “do nothing” president over the last 10 years, has retired and been replaced by Brendan Kelly. He’s an EMU alum (he has an undergraduate degree in Public Relations), I think he is about 50, and he’s been in a number of upper-level administrative jobs for years. Kelly and his interim provost, David Schechter, both have a lot of urgent energy and they have been quick to make changes in leadership, along with putting the reorganization of the College of Arts and Sciences on the fast-track. So among many other changes/endings already underway, that means that at some point this fall, I will no longer be in the “Department of English Language and Literature;” rather, I will be a professor in the “School of Language, Media, and Communications.” Basically, part of what were in the foreign languages and communication departments are being merged into what was English.

Oh yeah, also in current events: the 78+ year old flagship organization for my field was suddenly killed off by NCTE about a month ago, and the Trump administration continues its authoritarian efforts to punish higher education. The state of affairs in academia in general has never been worse in my career. It’s not all bad because while Kelly’s and Schechter’s quick pace of changes has been a little unsettling, there’s a lot of stuff around here that needed to be changed. But like a milestone birthday (and I had one of those in March), all of this does concentrate my mind.

Anyway, and in an effort to continue my tradition of new school year resolution posts– like this one from last year, and the one the year before that— I am thinking this week before the week before classes begin about my goals for next school year. They are modest.

First, more AI stuff– but not as much. Unlike last year when I taught two sections of a “topics in” class called Rhetoric, Writing, and AI, this fall I am teaching an oldie I’ve been teaching off and on for almost 30 years, “Writing for the Web.” There will be some AI components of course, and the theme for my two sections of first-year writing will once again be about “future careers” and AI. I’m also hoping to lead the development of a few new AI and writing-focused courses.

Second, EMU paperwork and service– one more time. I’m also going to be putting together the paperwork this school year for my second “salary adjustment promotion,” which is designed to address salary compression and to keep full professors like me engaged. The pay raise will kick in next fall, and at that point, I will have been a full professor at EMU for 20 years. I’m also going to be serving my last year on the College Advisory Committee, which is likely to have a busy and contentious school year with stuff like college reorganization and gen ed reform and who else knows what comes up.

Third, teaching and (some) scholarship. The main thing that keeps me going– along with the fact I think I’ve got five and up to ten years before I want to or can afford to retire– is teaching. I’ve always liked it a lot, but as my interests in both service work and scholarly work have declined, I’ve found focusing on teaching even more rewarding. I feel like I have taught more sections of first-year writing in the last 10 years than I did in my first (almost) 20 at EMU, and my relationship with that class has really evolved. I am now old enough to be (almost) all of my students’ father or even grandfather, so I take a much more parental approach to the class than I used to. Plus I’ve done it so much for so long now I’ve got a good schtick down, and I think it’s working.

In terms of scholarship, I have a faculty research fellowship coming up in winter 2027. These are competitive awards that basically allows me to take a semester off from teaching but not service, so like a sabbatical but not quite. My proposal was to research and write about the connections between computer-aided instruction software from the 1980s or so and the use of AI tools for “tutoring” and aiding students.

Originally, my plan was quite modest: put together enough of something to present at the CCCCs in Milwaukee and to maybe write an article or a chapter for a collection. But now that the CCCCs is at best in limbo (and there is no way I’m participating if it means I need to renew my NCTE membership) and the CWCON is for me up in the air (the timing of the conference in early June in Tucson might or might not work), I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do. I’m not even sure I’m going to stick with the same project, which is something that happens with these research fellowships all the time.

Fourth, continue the path to a slow exit. Like I said, I feel like I’m on the five-to-ten year plan. Besides the money/health insurance issues, I’m not sure I’ll be “ready” before I turn 65. At the same time, I don’t think I’ll still be working past the age of 70 (and of course that assumes I’m still anywhere in 10 years!), which was not always my original plan. Back in the days when EMU had robust enrollments and was a comparatively stable institution, I had plenty of colleagues who worked into their mid-70s, and that seemed like a good deal to me. Well, when I was in my 40s and retirement was still an abstract concept, it seemed like a good deal. Now that my work is getting in the way of me doing other things I want to do before I end, not so much.

Anyway, hang on tight– the 2026-2027 school year promises to be an interesting but bumpy ride.

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Bomb Threat

It is “that time” of the semester, which is made all the much worse by it also being “that time” of the school year, mid-April. Everyone on campus– students of course, but also faculty and staff and administrators and everyone else– is peak stressed out because this is the time where everything is due. We’re all late. My students are late finishing stuff they were supposed to finish a couple weeks ago, and for me that means I’m late on finishing reading/commenting on/grading all of those things they haven’t quite finished. We are mutually late. And just to make the vibe around it all that much more spooky, there’s the remaining mojo of Monday’s eclipse.

So sure, let’s through a stupid bomb threat into the mix.

This entry from “EMU Today” (EMU’s public relations site) provides a timeline, and this story from The Detroit News is a good summary of the event.  I was in my office during all this, slowly climbing Grading Mountain (the summit is visible, the end is near, and yet the distance to that summit is further away than I had hoped) and responding to earlier student emails about missing class because of “stress” and such. Then I started getting messages from EMU’s emergency alert system. “Emergency reported in Wise, Buell, Putnam (these are dorms). Please evacuate the building immediately.” This was followed a few minutes later by a similar message about clearing several other dorms and an update that said it was a bomb threat.

EMU set up an emergency alert system a few years ago as part of a response to the rise in school and college campus shootings and violence happening around the country. They rolled this out at about the same time the campus security folks started holding workshops about how to properly shelter in place. I believe yesterday’s bomb threat was the first time this system was used for a threat like this. Previously, the only alerts I think I have received from this system (besides regular system tests) had to do with the weather, messages about campus being closed because of a snowstorm. It is also worth mentioning that this time, the alert system didn’t just send everyone a text. It also sent emails and robocalls, which means all the devices were all lit up in a few different ways.

Our son Will (who lives in Connecticut) texted me and Annette because, for whatever reason, he’s signed up to get these EMU emergency messages and he was concerned. Annette, who wasn’t on campus, wasn’t sure what was going on. When EMU alerted a few minutes after the evacuation posts that it was a bomb threat, I knew it had to be a hoax. I knew (well, I assumed) this in part because I have a good view of several of these dorms from my office, and it wasn’t like I was seeing cops and firefighters rushing into those buildings. Mostly what I saw were students hanging around outside the dorm looking at their phones.

I also thought immediately it was a hoax because 99.9999% of the time, bomb threats are hoaxes. One of the few colleagues of mine who was around the offices at the same time as me poked his head in my door and asked if I was going to still have class. “Well, yeah,” I said, “no one has said classes are cancelled.”

Rather than spending another hour or so prepping for my two afternoon classes and at least making a tiny bit more of a dent on all the grading as I had planned, I instead spent the time responding to student emails and then sending out group emails to my afternoon classes that yes indeed, we were meeting because EMU had not cancelled classes. Some were genuinely confused, wondering if we were still having class because the alerts did not make that clear. Some emailed me about the logistics of it all, basically “I don’t know if I can make it because I need to get back into my dorm room to get my stuff first,” or whatever. Some were freaked out about the whole thing, that they didn’t feel safe on campus, there was no way they were coming to class, etc. “Well, EMU has not cancelled classes, so we will be meeting,” I wrote back. And a couple of student seemed to sense this might be the excuse to skip they were hoping for.

About an hour after it all started and before my 2 pm class, we got another alert (or rather, three more alerts simultaneously) that the three dorms that had been named in the initial bomb threat had been inspected and declared clear. The other dorms had been evacuated as a precaution. At about 2:15, I got an email from the dean (forwarded to faculty by the department head) that no, classes were not cancelled.

Before my 2 pm class was over, EMU alerts sent a final message (again, three ways) to announce all was clear. But of course a lot of students were still freaked out– and for good reason, I guess. I talked with one student after my last class and after it was over who said he was nervous about spending the night in his dorm room, and I kind of understand that. But at the same time, maybe there was never anything to be afraid of?

I’m not saying that EMU overreacted because, obviously, all it takes is that 0.0001% chance where bombs go off simultaneously in the dorms like in the end of Fight Club. Not unlike a fire alarm going off in the dorms in the middle of the night (a regular occurance, I’m told), everyone knows (or at least assumes) is because of some jackass. But you still have to evacuate, you still have to call the fire department, etc.

The whole thing pisses me off. At least it was a hoax and it wasn’t a shooter, something that is always always somewhere on everyone’s minds nowadays. At least no one was hurt beyond being freaked out for a while. And at least there are only about two weeks before the end of the semester.

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On the Eve of a (Possible) Strike, Thinking Back on the Strike of 2006

We started classes here at EMU on Monday, August 29, and we might be halting them– at least all the ones taught by faculty– on Thursday, September 1, because that’s when the EMU-AAUP faculty union contract expires. Here’s a link to a story about all this on the Detroit NBC affiliate’s web site which kind of gets it right, but not quite.

I think the main sticking point right now is trying to figure out a way to give everyone a modest raise but that also covers a steep increase in health insurance. That is not an easy problem to solve at all because there are so many variables in play. For example, our only son is turning 25 and thus just about done with being eligible for our insurance anyway, and both my wife and I are in the “senior faculty” category and thus a lot more secure and settled in our positions. So for me, a contract that pays 3-4% a year plus some money to offset the increase in insurance premiums is fine. But for someone without that level of seniority (and the pay raises that accompany that) or who has many more dependents, especially if some of those children, spouses, other insured family members have some kind of condition that requires more elaborate (and expensive) insurance, the deal that EMU administration is proposing– even as they characterize it as an “up to 8% raise for most faculty”– really could be a pay cut for a lot of folks.

Anyway, I was thinking about some of that on my first day of teaching Tuesday and as I explained to my students that I might be on strike on Thursday, and I realized that the last time the EMU faculty went on strike was way back in the fall of 2006. This was before things like Facebook or Twitter were much of a thing, and I spent most of the energy I now spend on social media just on blogging here. And back during the strike, I blogged about it A LOT.

I don’t even know how many posts I wrote about all this and labeled The Strike of 2006— maybe 40? Maybe more? The chronology is a bit wonky here, so the “beginning” (back in August 2006) starts on the bottom of page 5 of this archive. It’s not worth rehashing all of it, but there are some interesting things. Once again, healthcare costs were the sticking point, which also once again reminds me that if we had a version of the kind of universal/government run health care program that’s available in most of the other countries in the world, or if we could just extend Medicare to everyone and not just people over 65, we probably would not have gone on strike back then, and we certainly wouldn’t go on strike now. But I digress.

More problematically perhaps, the other similarity between then and now seems to be the approach to negotiations taken by the administration. They have once again hired Dykema’s James P. Greene, who was even before the 2006 strike known around EMU as a “union busting” lawyer. I think he was the administration’s main negotiator before 2006 (and I recall being on strike a couple times before 2006 when I believe Greene was in charge), and that ended up being the ugliest strike in my time here. Back in 2006, there were complaints from both sides at the table similar to what we have now: a lack of willingness to actually negotiate, a lot of sketchy numbers being presented (mostly by the administration), a lot of “we almost have a deal” until we don’t, mediators, etc.

Hopefully, things will not turn as ugly as they did in 2006. For example, after being out on strike for four days, EMU (from then president Jim Fallon and BoR chair Karen Valvo) issued an ultimatum demanding (basically) that the faculty give up their childish strike and accept the administration’s terms by 10 PM on September 6 “or else.” Here’s my blog post about that, and (thanks to the Wayback Machine) here’s the administration’s original press release on all this. Well, that move (IMO) backfired on the administration badly. Before that, a lot of faculty– including me– were starting to say to each other that maybe it’d be best to settle and get on with the school year. But that threat really pissed people off, and (a long story made much shorter) we ended up staying out on strike for about two weeks, we “suspended” the strike and went back to work while the university and the union went through a “fact finding” and arbitration process that didn’t get resolved until the following spring. We actually ended up with a deal that was closer to what the faculty was originally asking for, but like I said, I’d just as soon avoid that.

One other difference I’m noticing this time around, at least in myself: I think the union/faculty is even more right this time around. As I wrote here way back when, I thought both sides of the table were playing pretty “fast and loose” with some of the facts in the name of a pissing contest that they both hoped to win. There’s still some of that going on, no question. But I think the administration is the one that’s prolonging this thing this time.

I guess we’ll see what the next 24 or so hours brings. Hopefully we’ll have a deal because a strike is not a “win” for anyone, not for our students of course, but not for the administration or the faculty either. Hopefully, the administration does recall that the last time they tried these tough guy bullshit tactics.

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Is it August Again?

It’s another August, which means a shift into thinking about the new school year and shifting back into “working.” After some of the events of this summer, after some of the challenges of the 2020-21 school year, after EMU offered faculty a buyout deal I briefly considered, and after the faculty agreed to terms of a very mediocre contract extension, I think I’m getting close to ready for fall and my research fellowship in winter 2022.

There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph.

I haven’t taught in the summer for five years now, mainly because my wife and I have gotten to a point where we can afford it. I used to be quite a bit more defensive about having so much free-time in the summer, but I have gotten to an age and to a point in my career where I feel like I’ve earned the break. So yeah, I’ve done a bit of work this summer, but mostly not. We went to Vegas and up north, we’ve had some fun slowly emerging into a post vaccinated world (restaurants! movies! shopping!), we’ve had some life challenges I’m certainly not going to write about here, and we’ve had a lot of chances to admire our lovely gardens and yard. So sure, it hasn’t been all great and I grow increasingly annoyed about Covid and dumb-assed unvaccinated people, but overall not too bad. Better than last year, that’s for sure.

The 2020-21 school year was obviously a challenge for everyone everywhere (oh yeah, COVID!), but what I’m thinking about here are the local circumstances and departmental politics and how it impacted me. I had a conflict with an asshole of a colleague, and when I tried to find a satisfactory resolution to this dispute by working through my department head, the university’s director of academic human resources, and with the administrator of the faculty union, nothing happened. All of these people said that when it comes to conflicts between individual faculty members, there are no rules. That was pretty much a last straw moment for me. I’m not sure how this is going to play out over the next year or two, but I believe it’s fair to say that I’ve officially entered the “do not give any fucks”/dead wood stage of my career.

So when EMU announced a buyout plan and I was eligible for it, I did some pondering. The deal is two years of salary (paid out over those two years) plus 18 months or health care coverage. Alas, it isn’t right for me. If I was 10 or so years younger and the circumstances were like they are right now, I might have considered it, especially if I had a better sense about what I would want to do for a job/career outside of academia. If I were 10 years older and thus fully eligible for retirement, I would have taken this deal in a heartbeat. But at 55? Too old to start something new, too young to retire.

In a Facebook discussion recently, another faculty member at EMU said he “pitied me” for “having to work at a place I hate,” for not having “the courage to leave with even a generous buyout offer,” and that I had “plenty of career options” and if I hated it here so much, then I should just go get a new job at a better university. I think the person who said these things is clueless. Besides, I don’t hate EMU. The university has disappointed, angered, confused, and frustrated me over the years in many different ways, but so what? All employers– certainly all universities!– disappoint and frustrate employees at some point, and that is even more true for old-timers like me. But I’ve never hated the place.

And who else is going to pay me as much money as I make to only work about 8 months out of the year and mostly while at home? I still like to teach, so given that I have to do something to pay the bills, teaching is a pretty good option. Obviously, I still like to write a lot, and if I could do nothing but write whatever and whenever I want, that’s what I would do– and it’s what I plan to do in retirement, too. So sure, I would retire now if I could afford it, but that doesn’t mean I hate my job.

What puzzles me is the number of colleagues I have who are at retirement age– that is in their mid-60s or in many cases quite a bit older– and who have plenty of money but who are not taking this buyout offer. To each their own of course, but I think a lot of these folks don’t want to retire quite yet because they aren’t sure what they would do with themselves. I have no such worries. Besides not teaching in the summer for a while, I’ve also been lucky over the last seven years or so to have had a sabbatical and a couple of semesters off of teaching (“Faculty Research Fellowship”), and that’s made it possible for me to publish Invasion of the MOOCs, More Than a Moment, and a variety of other things. It’s also given me the chance to essentially have a series of “practice” retirements. So personally, I’m ready for the real thing.

Speaking of which: I’m very much looking forward to having been awarded another FRF for winter 2022, which means that after this fall semester, I’ll be mostly free to do what I want from mid-December 2021 to mid-August 2022.

Oh yeah, two last things to unpack from that first paragraph: once again, the faculty union and administration agreed to kick the contract down the road again for another year, though there are some changes that might (maybe? sort of?) completely undo the equivalency nonsense and restore some order to teaching loads.  But this is only a one year deal, so who knows how this will ultimately work out.

And teaching: I have a selection of “the usual” this fall. My most challenging prep is a class I haven’t taught since 2018, “Writing for the Web,” and my version of the class three years ago was getting a little out of date back then. I’m making some changes to the other two/gen ed writing classes I’m teaching, but these are more ready to go.

I’m also once again going to be teaching entirely online. Way back in January or February of 2021, faculty in my department were asked if we had a preference for the fall 2021 term, to teach on campus or online. I basically said I’ll do either, though I also pointed out that it’d be a whole lot easier to schedule classes for f2f and then convert them to online if necessary than it would be to do the other way around. But given the fact that I’d just as soon stay away from both the assholes and Covid, another semester of all online isn’t such a bad idea….

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Higher Ed’s Reopening Plans Have Gone From “Wishful Thinking” to “Bait and Switch”

The tl;dr version: universities are running a “bait and switch” marketing strategy for fall 2020. Plan for online courses because it’s the only option that makes any sense, and it’s time that university administrators admit that.

Back in late April/early May, about a month after all of higher education got into the online lifeboats to salvage the term and at around the same time when, predictably, faculty and students with zero prior experience with online learning declared that the last month proved online courses were just “the worst,” we started seeing major universities announcing their plans to be open for f2f classes in fall 2020. I blogged a bit about it here. Purdue’s Mitch Daniels had a series of eyebrow raising ideas about how things could work in the fall, and while I disagreed then (and I do now) with Brown’s Christina Paxson’s reasons for reopening, at least she was honest: universities need the money.

Other universities soon followed, and, with the notable exception of California State University’s announcement that they were planning on primarily online courses for fall 2020, the pattern has been the same: universities are planning to be back in the fall with f2f classes and students in the dorms. EMU released its own statement along these lines both as ads on regional television and with this extended YouTube video.

All of these plans were short on details and long on emotions (not to mention carefully worded hedges), and they reminded me of what people say after a hurricane or a tornado. It’s a weather news cliché at this point. There’s the video footage of the storm hitting, the stock photo/video of the beautiful home or popular seaside restaurant as it was before, and then the after the storm ruins with a tearful family or owner proclaiming “We will rebuild!”

Hey, I get it. The first response to the hurricane destroying your business or a pandemic destroying your school year is to fight back, to at least pretend to have a little hope and optimism. The first thing you say to someone laying on the pavement and clinging to life after a car accident or a heart attack is “It’s going to be okay, you’re going to make it!” even when (especially when) you know that’s not true.

As we got into May, university presidents and officials began describing their plans for reopening, and it became clear these “plans” were not much more than “wishful thinking.” For me (and pretty much everyone else I know who actually teaches college classes), the plans just raised more questions. How are you going to have f2f classes that are physically distanced? As it is right now, my university is reluctant to run any class that is less than 3/4ths enrolled because (or so we are told) we can’t afford that; so how is a class purposefully kept at half capacity possibly going to work? Where are you going to put these classes, anyway? Where is the money going to come from to pay for mandatory testing, for everyone or randomly? What about these antibody tests– are they going to get more accurate? Or are we just giving up on testing entirely? What is the plan when (not if, when) students, faculty, and/or staff get sick and need to be quarantined? Is EMU going to just send those people home, and thus endanger the sick folks’ relatives and friends? How are we going to require everyone to wear masks while on campus? Given that the classroom buildings are barely cleaned now, how is the university possibly going to clean them even once a day (never mind between classes)? Who thinks teaching behind a plexiglass shield is a good idea? What if I as an employee am not willing to sign a document that says I won’t consider the university liable if I get sick, am hospitalized, or even die from Covid-19? And so forth.

Now and just within the last week or so, it feels like we’re entering into new phase. We have gone from “hope and optimism” and “wishful thinking” to a situation where it is clear these plans for a robust number of f2f offerings this fall just aren’t going to work. Here are a few simple examples of things I’ve seen recently, articles and commentaries that are getting a lot more pointed in questioning university administrator’s plans and motivations:

  • To help pay for its (always strange and unrealistic) plans for reopening, Purdue is asking for donations specifically to pay for things like face masks, hand sanitizer, virus tests, and plexiglass shields, and they’re doing this with a campaign (here’s a link to the web site for it) that has the feel of one of those “feed the children” or “save the stray dogs” ads– “just one dollar a day can make such a difference,” etc.
  • IHE published an opinion piece by Lia Paradis (a history professor at Slippery Rock) called “A Day in the Life This Fall (Faculty Edition),” which describes the many ways the administration’s plans for reopening can and will go wrong.
  • From sociology professor Deborah J. Cohan in Psychology Today comes “Pandemic U,” where (among other smart things) she says it’s “profoundly revealing” that after years of universities encouraging students and faculty into online classes they are now insisting on face-to-face classes in the midst of a pandemic. “In and of itself, this rich irony should cause us to question motives. It is nothing short of institutional gaslighting.”
  • In a New York Times Op-ed with one of the clearest headlines I’ve seen in a while, “Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy,” psychology professor Laurence Steinberg draws from his expertise to explain something every person who actually teaches college has known forever: 18-24 year olds engage in a lot of risky behaviors and do not follow rules like staying six feet apart, wear masks in public places, etc.
  • And from Forbes, where economist Andrew Zimbalist and Donna A. Lopiano ask the rhetorical question “Has Higher Education Lost Its Mind?”  Specifically, has college sports lost its mind as we are already seeing the craziness of preparing for the all important football season while players increasingly become infected with Covid-19.

In short, the message “we will be open this fall” is now just a “bait and switch” marketing strategy, and it’s been that way for a while. Would-be and returning students said back in May that they would be less likely to start or return to college in the fall if they had to take classes online. Universities in turn said “oh, don’t worry, we’re going to have f2f classes,” albeit with a ton of hedges and qualifiers that I am guessing most students and their families ignored. That’s the bait. Once students are “locked in” for the fall term and it is too late for them to change their plans, universities will start announcing that despite their best efforts, they just aren’t going to be able to offer many (any?) f2f classes after all– darn it!– and if students want to go to college in fall 2020, they’re going to have to take their classes online. That’s the switch.

Bait and switch is usually described as a scam, though it’s such a common marketing strategy nowadays I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization. What else would you call these “Black Friday” deep discount sales on giant flat screen TVs? Adding the phrase “while they last” doesn’t make it less of a bait. Regardless, it certainly isn’t an ethical practice.

I have no way of knowing for sure if this was the plan my university’s administration had all along or if it has just kind of evolved into this. And to be completely fair, maybe there will be some kind of Covid-19 miracle before the start of fall, or maybe in the next two months, these crazy, fantasy, delusional plans for successfully holding f2f classes really will come together and it’ll all be great. But I’ve also seen administrators at EMU (and elsewhere) do some pretty shady and dubious shit in the past, so it wouldn’t surprise me much if this bait and switch was part of the plan all along.

Either way, it does appear to be a marketing strategy that has worked– at least so far. According to this article in Inside Higher Ed, enrollments in public research and regional universities for the fall are not much different than they were last year. EMU was specifically mentioned in this article. “Eastern Michigan University, like many regional publics, does not use the May 1 (or this year June 1) deadline day to reply to an admissions offer. Currently, the university is down 8.4 percent on new students for the fall, but it has two more registration dates in June to close that. The university is also offering students who want them a single room.” And frankly, that drop in enrollments isn’t necessarily tied to Covid-19 at all since our enrollments have been falling for a while, mostly because of the demographics of the state and the upper midwest.

At this point, I don’t really care if this was the administration’s intention all along or if this was just a strategy they stumbled into; I just want them to tell everyone the truth about what is becoming patently obvious with classes this fall term. If it’s a class that can be online, it will be online. If it’s a class that can’t be online (say some kind of chemistry or biology lab, a ceramics class that requires a kiln, a class about welding, etc.), it is either going be held under strict limitations to maximize safety, or it’s not going to be held at all. I want my university to tell this truth because it is the ethical thing to do, and because faculty who are going to teach these classes and students who are going to take these classes need to start making plans.

Be honest for a change of pace.

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Help! I have to suddenly teach online! What should I do?

As the number of universities (including my own) announce covid-19 plans that include requiring all classes finish out their terms online, I’m imagining an increasing number of college instructor and faculty-types doing a Google search along these lines of “how to teach a course online.”

Some of these administrators requiring this move or faculty who have avoided and/or complained about online courses might want to ask for advice from people like me who have a lot of experience teaching online, though frankly, that’s far from certain. After all, MOOC developers didn’t ask experts in online pedagogy when they launched. (Which reminds me, More Than A Moment: Contextualizing the Past, Present, and Future of MOOCs seems like it might all of a sudden be a little more relevant right now. Take a look at the free sample that includes the introduction and first chapter and if you want the book, use the promo code KRAU at checkout and then it’s only $13.77).

In case there is someone who has been asked to suddenly stop what they’ve been doing for decades (let alone all semester) in order to shift everything online, and that person did a Google search and then landed here, I thought I’d jot down a few bits of advice based on my experiences and research about online teaching.

Continue reading “Help! I have to suddenly teach online! What should I do?”

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Here’s why I will vote no on the EMU-AAUP’s new and not negotiated contract

(This is an extremely insider/in the weeds kind of post about the proposal in front of the EMU faculty union right now, so there’s a pretty good chance that if you are not a member of the faculty at EMU, this will only kinda/sorta make sense. My apologies for that in advance).

The EMU-AAUP sent around news that the leadership wants to agree to terms for a new contract (and this is not an extension— see below) right now, about five months before the contract ends without a single day of negotiations. The Executive Committee has approved this proposal as has the faculty Bargaining Council– the vote there was 53-1. The EMU-AAUP leadership is fast-tracking this, so there will basically be a discussion on March 25 (at a time where it would be difficult for me to go and besides, that’s my birthday) and then a rushed vote to (presumably) ratify this new contract on March 26.

So this looks like it’s a done deal.

I assume I am in the minority of faculty opposing it, but I still plan to vote “no.” Here’s why (and, IMO, more or less in this order):

This doesn’t come close to solving the problems of “equivalencies.” As I’ve blogged about and posted about on Facebook numerous times, the deal struck in the last contract regarding teaching loads (aka “equivalencies”) has been a complete clusterfuck and it has hit the English department hard. Which, by the way, was the intent: that is, former EMU-AAUP president Susan Moeller more or less admitted that a lot of the motivation behind these changes in teaching load was to “get” the English department. For me and many of my department colleagues, the main reason it was important to vote out the former leadership of the union was to have new leadership who would solve this particular problem.

As I understand it, there is disagreement among faculty about what to do with these equivalencies, and the (rumored) deal from the administration of a 3-3 load would actually increase the teaching load of a significant number of my colleagues in the sciences and the College of Business. So I get it’s a problem: it’s awfully hard at this point to negotiate a deal on workload with the administration when you can’t agree amongst yourselves what that workload should be. But look, the current EMU-AAUP leadership has had two years to do this and they haven’t made any progress.  So now what they’re proposing is a committee to study the problem– that is, the union leadership just wants to kick the can down the road.

In an email to the faculty, the EMU-AAUP Executive Committee said “Both the President and Provost have expressed a desire to find alternative models to the current workload and equivalencies. We are thus cautiously optimistic that progress can be made in this area.” Riiight… because the administration has been so willing to work with faculty on modifying the rules for equivalencies so far. It is as if members of the EC have never worked with these administrators on this before. This “cautious optimism” is naiveté.

If the language about this workload committee also said EMU would roll back the rules for teaching loads to where it was before the last contract and we’re going to form a committee to try to come up with something smarter and more fair this time, then I’d be all for that.  If there was language that the goal of this committee is to get to a 3-3 load or whatever is similar and fair to all departments, I’d agree to that. If the leadership of the EMU-AAUP and the folks in the administration specifically agreed to enact some of the many previously proposed and rejected or ignored solutions my department offered to solve our load problems, then sure, I’d take that deal. If the sentence “Both parties acknowledge that participation on this Committee does not constitute negotiation over workload” wasn’t there I might be more inclined too– and what then is this committee for if not to negotiate over workload? And, of course, if we hadn’t been repeatedly and systematically screwed over by the administration on these issues for the last two years, I might feel differently. But otherwise, no.

In a masochistic kind of way, I’d like to be on this committee both to advocate for my department and to see how the sausage ends up getting made. But if history is at all instructive, this committee is going to be another clusterfuck.

Which brings me to my next point: this isn’t a contract extension. This is a new contract. A two year contract extension would mean the exact same terms as the old contract for another two years, but this new deal includes different pay raises, it includes different costs for insurance, and it includes this new committee about workload. New rules/new language = new contract.

The only reason I can figure as to why the EMU-AAUP and the administration want to call this an extension is because they want to convince (trick?) the faculty that it’s totally cool to accept this extension with no negotiations.  Which brings me to my next point:

What’s the hurry? Why not see this as an opening for negotiations rather than a way to bypass them entirely? The contract doesn’t expire until September. Bargaining council isn’t even done yet, and as far as I know there is no actual bargaining team in place. What is the urgency here?

And is this even legal? I’m no lawyer, but isn’t it bad faith negotiating and a violation of collective bargaining rules/norms for the administration to put down a “take it or leave it” offer and for the union to say yes without any counter-offer?

This is the part of this I really don’t get at all. It seems to me that a better response from the union would be to take this as a starting point for talks rather than a way to end them. Why hasn’t the EMU-AAUP said something along the lines of “Great! This is a great place to start! Here are these other issues we want to see if we can work out– workload, for example– and let’s work amicably together toward those goals with the intent to wrap up negotiations and the next contract some time in July or August.”

I will say it is probably true that the deal being presented by the administration in terms of salary, insurance, and benefits is about as good as we’re going to get. We’re probably not going to get better raises and benefits than what’s being offered, especially as the combination of demographics and bad decisions drives our enrollments lower and lower. I get it.

At the same time, taking this deal with no discussion and so quickly makes me think that the union leadership is unwilling or too scared to negotiate. Why? What is the elephant in the room that the Executive Committee of the EMU-AAUP and the administration can see that the rest of us can’t?

Like I said, I expect this new contract (not an extension) to pass. It will be a relief to not have to have a contentious negotiation– I totally agree with that– and both the union and the administration will cheerfully pat themselves on each others’ backs. But it also sets the stage for an even more shitty contract negotiation in 2022.

My prediction is that by the time the next contract negotiations come around, this workload committee will have been declared a failure. Faculty will present offers for “alternative models” for teaching workloads to the administration, all of which the administration will reject for the same reasons they’ve rejected them before. Faculty within the bargaining unit will also still not be able to agree on what is a “fair” teaching load across all units. Faculty in my department– and I presume other departments– will continue to be in a crazy situation where it is not always clear how many courses I am going to be teaching from term to term.

Further, all of the problems that EMU has right now in terms of finances will be just as bad– probably worse since we’ll be out of things we can try to sell off or outsource. Enrollment will continue to fall, and the President and the Provost will continue to be unable to do anything about it. Healthcare will be more expensive, there will be more pressure to mess with TIAA contributions, and there will be even less money for a salary increase. The one thing that we will continue spending money on is the one thing that matters to the Board of Regents, which is football.

I hope I’m wrong about all this, but I also fully expect to link to this post in a similar “I told you so” post in two years.

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Academic Partnerships, “False EMU” in the news, and finding a concluding “hook” to my book project

EMU is in the news once again for the wrong reasons, and interestingly enough, the latest problems are helping me find a conclusion to the book I’m working on. But before I get to that, let me try to explain a bit what’s going on here.

One of the things that happened at the end of the Fall 2016 semester (thanks in part to the knuckleheads who were in charge of the EMU-AAUP back then) was the administration entered into a deal with an operation called Academic Partnerships (AP). AP agreed to market nationally an online Bachelor of Science in Nursing program (BSN) along with an online Bachelors of “General Studies” program. In exchange, AP would collect around 50% of the tuition collected from these online students. As I wrote back in February when I went to an informational meeting on all this, I saw a lot of problems with this arrangement with AP, and the new leadership of the EMU-AAUP had LOTS of problems with the deal. The new EMU-AAUP leadership said that the arrangement with AP goes well beyond marketing and that ultimately, AP would be doing a lot of the teaching and curriculum work of these courses under the name of EMU and without faculty control, The administration has argued this isn’t happening and isn’t going to happen, that AP is just marketing.

The administration didn’t want to negotiate this at all, so the EMU-AAUP essentially took them to court: that is, a labor arbitration process where a judge/arbitrator hears the case and makes a ruling. I know that was in process, which might explain the timing of the EMU-AAUP’s PR campaign right now. So far, that campaign has been pretty effective. The Chronicle of Higher Education picked up the story here, “Faculty Members at One More University Push Back at Online Programs.”  Here’s a longish quote from that article:

As an online program manager, or OPM, Academic Partnerships has contracted with Eastern Michigan to market and recruit students for its online programs. Typically, OPMs — which also include 2U and Pearson Education — build a college’s online enrollment and bring in more revenue than the college arguably could bring in on its own. But critics argue that such partnerships can result in a lower-quality education and fewer consumer protections.

According to a recent report on the industry from the Century Foundation, “the involvement of a third-party — particularly a profit-seeking entity — in providing services so intertwined with the actual teaching and learning … presents potential risks to quality and value in the education.”

That “recent report” from the Century Foundation is perhaps something more interesting to me and my work on MOOCs than most quasi-casual observers of this arrangement with EMU, but among other things, OPMs are a lot more common and far-reaching than I thought. It’s pretty damning of the deal EMU has made, but also of the deal that many many universities have made.

Also in the press today is this piece from Michigan Public Radio, “Faculty unions fight EMU online degree contract with ads.” EMU’s spokesperson/PR guy Geoff Larcom is quoted saying that EMU won’t be using any AP “coaches,” and he went on to say this:

Larcom says initiatives like this are necessary, because Michigan’s population of college-bound students is projected to shrink over the next decade.

“Regional universities like Eastern Michigan, like our peers, are needing to think of ways to further enhance revenue,” he says.

Just as a slight tangent here: first, whenever anyone associated with the EMU administration says anything about the institution’s finances and then they don’t say anything about how much money EMU wastes on athletics– particularly football– I stop listening. The bottom line is the upper-administration and the Board of Regents cannot have it both ways. Second, universities like EMU need to recall that we are a state-operated and non-profit university and our main purpose is to educate students. We’re not about generating “revenue” generally, and if Michigan’s population of college-bound students does indeed go down over the next decade or so, then maybe EMU should think more about graceful strategies for getting smaller rather than “growing revenue.”

The story also got picked up by this piece from EdSurge, “Professors Take Out Ads Protesting Their University’s Online Degree Programs.” I came across this piece because Larcom posted a link to it on the EMUTalk Facebook page– he offered it as an example of how this article demonstrates faculty input and control in the process. I don’t think that’s what it says at all, but let me quote from the end of this article because I think this is what Larcom is referring to here:

“They wanted to know, ‘Do you really need letters of recommendation for students?’”[Ronald Flowers, Department Head of Leadership and Counseling in the College of Education] recalled. But he said he always pushes back in such situations. “Our faculty make the decisions about who gets in, and that process hasn’t changed at all.”

“There’s been a perception that Academic Partnerships has dictated some things,” he added. “But I’ve been in the room when we’ve had conversations where I’ve said, ‘This would threaten our academic integrity and we won’t go there,’ and they’ve said, ‘Fine.’”

He said that the charges made in ads placed this week by faculty groups about the university’s arrangement with Academic Partnerships are “not accurate.”

“I appreciate the concern about the nature of privatization of public education—I get it,” he said. “We don’t dispute that it’s a good conversation to have. But it shouldn’t necessarily be a conversation stopper.”

For union leaders, though, the biggest concern seem to be what might happen as these for-profit entities move closer to the academic core.

I suppose you could read Flowers’ recounting this exchange with AP as an example of how faculty (though in this case, I’d say administrators since a Department Head at EMU is technically not a faculty member but an administrator) can “push back” against AP. But the fact that this relationship with AP requires any faculty to “push back” is a huge problem. And all it would take for AP to get their way on lowering the standards is a less forceful administrator– which is why I think the EMU-AAUP’s fears are valid. It’s also the conclusion of that report the CHE article links to, “The Private Side of Public Higher Education.” One quick quote from that report relevant to this quote:

If institutions—public and nonprofit alike—are not careful to monitor these contractors, students and taxpayers who thought they were working with a relatively safe public institution may find that they have been taken advantage of by a for-profit company. More so than other contracting arrangements, OPMs represent the outsourcing of the core educational mission of public institutions of higher education, threatening the consumer-minded focus that results from the public control of schools.

But what about your MOOC book? Oh yeah, that. If you’ve read this far, I guess I can go into that a bit…

My book project has the working title “MOOCs in Context” and it’s about the rapid rise and fall of Massive Online Open Courses viewed from the instructor experience (I interviewed a bunch of people who created and taught MOOCs), the student experience (I took a bunch of MOOCs and write about that), and also from the historic experience (I compare MOOCs to previous technical innovations in distance education.)  I guess I have two basic arguments: first, there has always been a disconnect between what MOOC providers hoped/thought MOOCs could be and what MOOC students and faculty hoped/thought MOOCs were. Second, MOOCs are not “completely new” (a claim made repeatedly by MOOC providers and pundits); rather, they are part of a long history of distance learning technologies that have happened in higher education in the U.S. over the last 150 or so years.

I’ll spare the details for now, but MOOCs “failed” in the sense that they will not be altering the way that higher education works in the foreseeable future. They will not, as some pundits predicted just a few years ago, close down universities. But a lot of what I’m trying to do in the last chapter of this book is to ponder the “fuzzy future” of what comes after MOOCs. It’s obviously tricky, but one of the things I think the “MOOC moment” should teach us about the future of higher education is to be weary of the “transformative” promises of for-profit entities like AP. So from my point of view, this EMU “current event” story will fit in well with the end of my book. We’ll wait for what the arbitration says, but I hope it’s a happy ending.