A couple of articles came across my feeds in the last day or two that highlight the truly important cultural divide in academia. Not the gap between sciences and “humanities,” but the much greater divide between faculty and administration. This morning, we have an Inside Higher Ed essay from Kellie Bean on the experience of moving into administration:
When I moved into administration after being a professor, a colleague who had made the same move years before told me to brace for the loss of my faculty friends.
Impossible, I argued — we attended regular Friday cocktail hours, had fought and won battles across campus, supported each other across the thorny paths leading to tenure and promotion. We’d been through it all, and those are precisely the kinds of experiences that make for lasting relationships.
I was wrong. My colleague was right.
About this time in my career, I began noticing for the first time the term “incivility” in higher ed news. Perhaps I noticed it because for the first time, it rang true. Where once I had been respected as a caring teacher and a hardworking colleague, I was now viewed with suspicion.
Now perceived as someone out for personal glory and set on bungling things for everyone else, I began finding it difficult to interact with my department (where I still taught one course a semester). After my move to the administration building, returning to my home department was like returning to the house of ex-in-laws after a bad divorce — everyone froze, smiled stiffly and waited for me to leave. This office had been my home for over 15 years.
This collided with a much-rehared piece on the evils of “flipped classrooms” from Jonathan Rees, which compares faculty adopting “flipped” methods to the self-slaughtering cartoon pigs of old meat ads. “Flipping” is “professional suicide,” playing into the hands of rapacious administrators looking to cut costs by cutting corners.
As you can probably guess, I’m way more sympathetic to Bean than Rees. There are reasons to be skeptical about the merits of “flipped” classes, but Rees’s article doesn’t indicate much knowledge of the strength and weaknesses of the method beyond what you might get from a couple of Chronicle of Higher Ed op-eds on the subject. None of the pedagogical issues he raises are new, nor is the claim that flipping is just “outsourcing your class to the Internet.” All of this has been raised and addressed by the community of faculty who actually work on this stuff, as opposed to writing hyperbolic op-eds about it.
Instead, Rees goes for the fall-back position that it’s just another way for evil administrators to screw faculty. Which is pretty much the go-to argument against any change suggested in academia– if we do anything other than exactly what we’re doing right now, it will enable administrators to screw the faculty over.
But the number of administrators who are actively trying to screw people is very small. Most of them, like Bean, are former faculty who are still trying to do what they think is best for their institutions, just on a bigger scale. They’re working at the level where they have to wrestle with the constraints affecting the entire institution, not just a single class or department, and that frequently means they have to be the Mean Person who makes tough decisions that some faculty don’t like. But they’re doing the best they can for the institution, in the same way that individual faculty do the best they can for their classes, even when that means handing out grades that some students won’t like.
Academia would be a lot healthier if faculty could, as Bean says, try to “remember that many of us in administration are just as competent as we were as faculty, and no matter where we are seated on a plane, still as human.”
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1U4aJrF
A couple of articles came across my feeds in the last day or two that highlight the truly important cultural divide in academia. Not the gap between sciences and “humanities,” but the much greater divide between faculty and administration. This morning, we have an Inside Higher Ed essay from Kellie Bean on the experience of moving into administration:
When I moved into administration after being a professor, a colleague who had made the same move years before told me to brace for the loss of my faculty friends.
Impossible, I argued — we attended regular Friday cocktail hours, had fought and won battles across campus, supported each other across the thorny paths leading to tenure and promotion. We’d been through it all, and those are precisely the kinds of experiences that make for lasting relationships.
I was wrong. My colleague was right.
About this time in my career, I began noticing for the first time the term “incivility” in higher ed news. Perhaps I noticed it because for the first time, it rang true. Where once I had been respected as a caring teacher and a hardworking colleague, I was now viewed with suspicion.
Now perceived as someone out for personal glory and set on bungling things for everyone else, I began finding it difficult to interact with my department (where I still taught one course a semester). After my move to the administration building, returning to my home department was like returning to the house of ex-in-laws after a bad divorce — everyone froze, smiled stiffly and waited for me to leave. This office had been my home for over 15 years.
This collided with a much-rehared piece on the evils of “flipped classrooms” from Jonathan Rees, which compares faculty adopting “flipped” methods to the self-slaughtering cartoon pigs of old meat ads. “Flipping” is “professional suicide,” playing into the hands of rapacious administrators looking to cut costs by cutting corners.
As you can probably guess, I’m way more sympathetic to Bean than Rees. There are reasons to be skeptical about the merits of “flipped” classes, but Rees’s article doesn’t indicate much knowledge of the strength and weaknesses of the method beyond what you might get from a couple of Chronicle of Higher Ed op-eds on the subject. None of the pedagogical issues he raises are new, nor is the claim that flipping is just “outsourcing your class to the Internet.” All of this has been raised and addressed by the community of faculty who actually work on this stuff, as opposed to writing hyperbolic op-eds about it.
Instead, Rees goes for the fall-back position that it’s just another way for evil administrators to screw faculty. Which is pretty much the go-to argument against any change suggested in academia– if we do anything other than exactly what we’re doing right now, it will enable administrators to screw the faculty over.
But the number of administrators who are actively trying to screw people is very small. Most of them, like Bean, are former faculty who are still trying to do what they think is best for their institutions, just on a bigger scale. They’re working at the level where they have to wrestle with the constraints affecting the entire institution, not just a single class or department, and that frequently means they have to be the Mean Person who makes tough decisions that some faculty don’t like. But they’re doing the best they can for the institution, in the same way that individual faculty do the best they can for their classes, even when that means handing out grades that some students won’t like.
Academia would be a lot healthier if faculty could, as Bean says, try to “remember that many of us in administration are just as competent as we were as faculty, and no matter where we are seated on a plane, still as human.”
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1U4aJrF
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