Steven D. Krause

This is the season in which folks start posting potential job searches to mailing lists, where folks start polishing up their CVs and making hotel reservations for MLA. Not me– not this year, and probably not ever again.

Never say never, of course. But since my wife has started on the tenure-track here at EMU, we’re probably here for the duration, for better or worse (and it is mostly for better).

I have to say that it is a somewhat odd feeling, though. My wife and I had been “on the market” pretty much since 1996; some years, we were somewhat casual about our searches, and in other years, like last year, we were very close to taking different jobs. But now that we’re settled, I’m merely a spectator and it is a weird sort of feeling. Good, but still weird.

Anyway, I started thinking about this in part because of the CHE article “The Sixth Time is the Charm,” by Esther “not her real name” Davis. Basically, Davis offers advice to current job seekers based on her own six years “on the market” in the social sciences. My and my wife’s experiences are pretty similar to Davis’.

Also in ths issue of the CHE is an article with the inviting title of “Crossing Over to the Dark Side” by Jean and George “real names” Dowdall. I think it’s a worthwhile piece for faculty like me to consider. Like many faculty who have been granted tenure, I have thought (albeit very briefly) about pursuing an administrative position. But this article simple re-confirms my reasons for not doing this. Among other things, the Dowdalls warn potential deans and other full-time adminstrators that moving from a faculty position to an administrative one means:

• an “academic calendar change” (meaning that they expect administrators to show up every day during business hours, including the summer);
• being required to work within a pretty strict system of supervisors and supervising;
• having to work with people you don’t want to work with (though faculty have to do this, too); and
• inevitably making some decisions that will piss some people off (my paraphrase there).

Oh yeah, one thing not mentioned in this article: the dress code changes– I mean, they don’t call them “the suits” for nothing.

There are some quasi-administrative positions within the English department– director of graduate studies or coordinator of the writing program, for example– that I wouldn’t mind doing. But being a full-time administrator? No, thanks.

I’ve come across three kinda short-ish, unrelated, and still somehow connected articles about the “state of the university” and what that might mean in terms of where where we’re going in the short, medium, and long(ish) terms.

First, there’s this CNN article about Princeton trying to control the percentage of “As” it gives out to students. Predictably, the administration wants to give out fewer “excellent” grades.

Second, there’s this interesting discussion in Inside Higher Ed: “What Should the U.S. Commission Do?” As the first paragraph of the article says:

On Monday, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the creation of a national Commission on the Future of Higher Education. She said the panel would help develop a “comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education,� exploring such issues as access, affordability, and higher education’s role in reversing America’s declining competitiveness in the world economy.

The rest of this article is different folks view on the whole thing, which basically seems to be “it’s too early to tell/we don’t want any more regulations/it’s never a bad idea to study our practices.”

And third, also on the Inside Higher Ed web site, comes this Q&A with the writers of a new book called Remaking the American University. Among other things, the authors are worried about universities becoming all about “the bottom line” (as in “What worries us most is that universities and colleges have become so preoccupied with succeeding in a world of markets that they too often forget the need to be places of public purpose as well.”), the problems with rankings by outfits like U.S. News and World Report, the problems with doing institutional assessment (“people don’t like assessment if it is done to them”), problems with academic publishing, and about technology in the classroom (“Not until faculty members, for their own reasons and purposes, decide that Web-based instruction offers both important and sustainable advantages will major changes in collegiate teaching actually happen — regardless of how attractive distance education becomes”).

I have a lot of different thoughts about this, but because I have a lot of other things to do right now, I’ll just list them and let you fill in the blanks at your leisure:

• Few things are less interesting to me than grades.
• One of these things includes institutional assessment.
• I am sure that the ancient Greeks also complained about grade inflation at Plato’s Academy. They might have complained about institutional assessment, too.
• I suspect that this commission to study American universities will not go far because a) “No Child Left Behind” has been a bad policy that is unlikely to be repeated easily, b) American universities pretty much have their act together in terms of assessment and competiting on an international level, and c) if this commission turns into a “political witch hunt,” then I suspect they won’t get as far as they want to get.
• Of course, I agree that it’s a bad thing for universities to remake themselves in the model of for-profit corporations. On the other hand, if the funding for public universities is going to steadily decrease, then the money to pay the bills has to come from somewhere. And tuition increases alone ain’t going to make up the difference.
• The only thing that is reassuring about all this is history because academia has more or less been down these paths many times before.

Update:
My colleague Bill Hart-Davidson sent me a link to this article on Economist.com, “The brain business.” It’s an excellent piece that shows the view from “across the pond” and how similar it is to here. Oh, and there is a list of the “top 20 universities in the world,” based on some dubious measures by a university in Japan. Of the 20 schools, one was Japanese, two were British, and 13 were in the U.S.