Friday, November 9, 2012

Works well with Others



You have never heard a Princeton professor lecture, until you have seen him on the big screen.

Micheal BerubĂ© organized this stimulating summit on the future on graduate education in the humanities, where Anthony Grafton, known to all participants as “Tony”, the comma splice slayer, held the opening keynote address—by Skype no less, ostensibly because he was under the weather, but from where I sat in the audience, the the big screen at the front of the auditorium with its freakish lighting made Grafton look the spitting image of the Great OZ.

Grafton spoke eloquently about the troubles encircling the humanities, troubles we are all know well and good, but which he laid out so movingly.  In the last third of his lecture, he got down to some possible solutions to the fact that graduate students  in the humanities often learn skills that do not translate well to the marketplace.  Among other woes, they do not learn to work collaboratively, not does the institution have the administrative wherewithal to evaluate and reward collaborative research projects and publications. 

Many times have I heard colleagues say they prefer to work collaboratively.  In my department, these people are invariably linguists and women of all fields.  It is all too often the male literary critics, like myself, who prefer to work alone.  We write our own books, edit own articles; we do not want to be disturbed by other people interfering with our narcissistic writing projects. [Writing is the only intoxicant for which I receive institutional encouragement and reward]

However, there are collaborations in language departments that have long received institutional encouragement.  Foreign language teaching programs are almost always collaborative.  A whole bunch of instructors work together using the same syllabus, the same textbook.  They compare notes, develop joint exercises, compose and grade exams as a group.  Perhaps the only time I worked in a team during my graduate studies was while teaching German.  We all learned to play good cop to the professor’s bad cop.  We divided up our roles, we each had a different function in the language instruction sequence.  It was a blast and we were grateful that as young teachers we were not left to our own clueless devices, but instead we could work out lesson plans while huddled together.  Irony aside, TAing in German language instruction was a huge collaborative success and a great model for other forms of research

Linguists have been collaborating at every level of the academic heirarchy.  They work together not just as TAs, but as scholars and professors.  No one holds it against linguists coming up for tenure that they co-wrote an essay, because we all understand, “That’s how linguists work.”   Try saying that about a collaborative essay on Goethe’s Faust.  You don’t often get the same understanding—and then who are the Goethe scholars who work together, often across disciplines: quite frequently women who know how to share, not isolated guys trying to show off how clever they are.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could all get together as a group and read Faust?  Stay tuned we have just such an essay in the next Goethe Yearbook.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Heads versus Chairs


What is the difference between department heads and chairs?  Most people are unfamiliar with the distinction and it is only if you have lived under both systems that you even recognize the difference, to say nothing of understanding it.  For the past 12 years I have tried to explain it to myself and friends; I would not want to pretend that I understand all its mysteries even now.  The short answer is that department heads have a great deal more administrative power because they are actually serving the dean, not the faculty.  A department head can, for example, veto the faculty’s decisions about tenure; the head can make appointments without consulting members of the department; the head has sole responsibility for the budget—seems like a great deal more than what department chairs have, but really the system is more complicated. 

Department heads rarely use these powers because they serve at the behest of the dean; they are very rarely people with an independent agenda.  Department heads rarely revamp the department according to their own vision.  The few heads who have tried this around here were summarily fired by the dean—it really was shocking to see.

Chairs work with the assumption that their tenure will last only three years, so they generally do not undertake radical changes because they know that one of their colleague’s will rotate in to replace them.  That is how the argument in favor of the chair system runs, but the reality is also often different.  Department chairs are quite capable of forcing their agenda or resentments onto colleagues.  Reason does not rule in all corners of the university and we have all seen departments with rotating chairs who bash each other. 

When this bashing occurs, in either system, it rarely directly impacts the senior colleagues; usually it is the grad students or junior faculty who become the surrogate targets in a dysfunctional department.

Department heads because they serve under the dean and because they have so much control tend to be mild-mannered administrators, more interested in balance and procedure than in pushing a big vision for their departments. –this is the point in my essay where I start sounding like an eighteenth-century German intellectual discussing monarchy as a form of government—I hereby swear that my department head is an eminently reasonable fellow, and that I am only discussing the system.

The trickiest problems arise when department heads use their bureaucratic power to slowly and subtly favor or disfavor someone.  We have seen here at Penn State how very important the small administrative decisions can become in pushing or covering up behavior.  So the most dangerous department heads are those who use procedures to consistently undermine someone, say an assistant professor working on a book.  By a string of little decisions that only occasionally rise to the level of injustice, a department head can eliminate a colleague without ever having to use the veto power at his disposal.

Within a system of department heads, the only absolute power is the dean and the wise head acknowledges this reality.  With a department chair, decision making power is distributed more diffusely among the faculty.  An effective chair needs to build consensus among colleagues, in order to develop a broadly agreed-upon policy.  This requires great skills as a democratic politician, and admittedly most professors are not Bill Clinton, and so department chairs usually do not undertake sweeping programs. They advance the general consensus which sometimes can look a lot like stasis;  a really successful chair has get everyone motivated on the basis of an intellectual agenda that appeals to the scholarly interests of the faculty.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

All Stick, No Carrot--How to Judge Scholarship


All stick and no carrot characterizes a common administrative approach to improving the quality of academic programs at state universities. 

There are several problems with the punitive approach to fostering quality scholarship and teaching: the first involves the long term effectiveness of bullying people to work harder—as soon as the pressure is off, they start to relax.  Threats work only as long as they are applied.  Far more effective motivations are ambition, desire and a competitive urge.  Punitive measures dull these forms of inspiration by discouraging independent thinking.

A second problem with the unwavering and strict application of narrow standards is that all shades of nuance are lost in the process of pressing all scholars into the same mold.  For example, the demand that assistant professors publish in flagship journals ignores the often complex relations within academic disciplines.  Cutting edge research is often not published in the mainstream journals.  If you have an assistant professor engaged in truly innovative research, requiring them to publish in flagship journals functions as a brake on their thinking. 

Mainstream journals tend to be quite conservative; they are often the last journals to adopt new ideas, rather than the first.  Institutions are certainly capable of recognizing this tendency.  At the elite coastal universities, it is often taken as a sign of mediocrity, if a scholar publishes in a “flagship” journal. 

Before coming to my current position at a state university, I was taught that you wanted to avoid these journals at all costs because by publishing in them, you showed everyone that you could not do better and that you really had nothing new to say. 

State universities in the middle of the US often look resentfully at Ivy League expectations as just so much snobbery, while the coastal elite see state universities’ mainstream tendencies as sign of plodding backwardness.  What both sides overlook, of course, are the insecurities behind both standards. 

State universities tend to overemphasize bureaucratic standards and procedures because they fundamentally do not have the confidence required decide what constitutes “quality” scholarship.  Is an article really innovative?  State university administrators fundamentally do not trust their faculty to judge; instead they want indicators, such as the ranking of the journal in which an article appears. 

Ivy League universities on the other hand live for the marginal difference between institutions.  They want to always demonstrate that they are better than other institutions, not just their peers, but more importantly they want to keep a long distance between themselves and all other universities in the world.  Thus, they will emphasize innovation over mainstream consensus and conformity. 

The trouble with this approach is that often an argument that seems radically new has only a short lifespan and once a trendy line of reasoning has passed, little remains of the argument and the scholar who made it.  Thus the double insecurity of the Ivy League department: is this young scholar truly innovative and will he/she continue to innovate in the long run. 

Ivy League academics want to know fundamentally whether someone is really and truly brilliant, the indicators that state universities require ultimately matter little in elite departments, in fact, those indicators tend to operate negatively—the more you publish in mainstream journals, the less clever you are.