More painful...

The grievance procedure can be more painful than bullying...

Anonymous

Retribution for asserting (or trying to assert one's rights)

Graduate students are at the mercy of academic bul... Graduate students are at the mercy of academic bullies just as professors are. It appears to be a phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic, as well. In the US, a system of regional accrediting agencies is supposed to ensure students' rights, but in reality these agencies are run by the institutions and do little or nothing to ensure fair processes. In my case, the university administrator in charge of the doctoral program made substantive changes to the program and prohibited doctoral candidates from pursuing their dissertation research until long after advancement to candidacy. She claimed the delay (two full semesters) was for educational purposes, but she provided no rationale and the regional accrediting agency refused to intervene even though such a delay was a clear violation of the agency's standards (WASC, in this case). The university ombudsman offered no relief just as in the case of the post, above. It's a sad commentary on the state of higher education when educated individuals act in such a medieval manner. I'm not a fan of anonymous posts, but you will see that I have posted anonymously. Why? Retribution for asserting (or trying to assert one's rights).

Anonymous

The 'best' for 2008...

• News from Kingston University
• A favorite tactic of bullies...
  
• Not only in America...
• Staff give sector managers low marks
• Sticks, Stones and Semantics: The Ivory Tower Bully's Vocabulary of Motives
• A letter to Sally Hunt
• The canary down the mine: what whistleblowers' health tells us about their environment
  
• Warning: chronic bullying is hazardous to the academy's health
  
• Academic bullies
• Why does [academic] mobbing take place?
• The Fundamental Question: Do You Side With Bullied Targets or With Perpetrators?
  
• Avoiding Academe's Ax Murderers

Vote/nominate for the oppressive University of 2008:

The shortlist included: the University of Leicester, Leeds Metropolitan, Oest. Akademie der Wissenschaften (Austria), the University of Nottingham, the University of Wales College, and Kingston University.

And the winner is: Kingston University - the facts speak for themselves.

42% consider leaving!

When 42% consider leaving their job at a certain university, then you do know there is a problem - a managerial problem.

A senseless system graduates without honours

The 2008 university Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), whose results have been announced with a mixture of fear, loathing and exhaustion, is a classic example of the self-defeating performance-management drive that is overwhelming the public sector.

RAE results determine the research funding allocated to institutions by the Higher Education Funding Council, according to a formula that changes each time. The official line is that the assessment - 2008's is the sixth since 1986 - is a success. It is "important and valuable", to quote one vice-chancellor, in providing an accepted quality yardstick and a means of promoting UK universities abroad. Others argue that it helps to ensure accountability for £8bn of public funding, the largest single chunk of university income. That sounds plausible: but as usual it conveniently airbrushes out other costs and consequences.

The first and most obvious of these is colossal bureaucracy. Government blithely assumes that management is weightless; but the direct cost of writing detailed specifications and special software, and assembling 1,100 panellists to scrutinise submissions from 50,000 individuals in 2,500 submissions, high as it already is, is dwarfed by the indirect ones - in particular, the huge and ongoing management overheads in the universities themselves. As with any target exercise, the RAE has developed into a costly arms race between the participants, who quickly figure out how to work the rules to their advantage, and regulators trying to plug the loopholes by adjusting and elaborating them.

The result is an RAE rulebook of staggering complexity on one side and, on the other, the generation of an army of university managers, consultants and PR spinners whose de facto purpose is not to teach, nor make intellectual discoveries, but to manage RAE scores. As in previous assessments, a lively transfer market in prolific researchers developed before the submission cut-off date at the end of 2007, while, under the urging of their managers, many university departments have been drafting and redrafting their submissions for the past three years.

Meanwhile, the figures themselves can be interpreted in so many different ways that even insiders find them hard to comprehend. How many parents will know that, because the rules and ranking system has changed so much since 2001, it's difficult to identify performance trends? That departments nominally teaching the same subject may figure under different assessment panels, so here too direct comparison is difficult? That some numbers are bafflingly rounded, while from the figures given it is impossible to calculate how many of a department's staff have been submitted for the assessment exercise, and thus its "real" research strength?

Not surprisingly, as the monster has become increasingly unwieldy, the intervals between the ever more onerous audits has steadily lengthened. After a gap that has stretched to seven years this time, RAE 2008, the last of the present format, is expiring exhausted - although it will rise again in 2013 as a system based on 'metrics', or citations, that promises to be equally controversial.

In the meantime, though, many thoughtful academics believe that much damage has been done. On a systems view, you can't optimise one part of a system without affecting others. In the university context, what suffers from the research obsession ("publish or perish") is teaching, especially undergraduate teaching. It's not much use students choosing a university with internationally known researchers if the researchers are too busy to teach. A teaching assessment exercise turned out to be too nightmarishly bureaucratic even for this government and has been abandoned.

Within research, there is little doubt that target pressure has distorted priorities, forcing researchers to work within the tight guidelines of a few established publications, discouraging unconventional views and making unpredictable discovery all but impossible.

Somewhat ironically, the narrow horizons have a particularly perverse effect in economics and business studies, where, judging by today's melted-down financial sector, "paradigm shifts" are needed more than anywhere else. They are unlikely to emerge, however, from learned journals that effectively privilege research for research's sake over usable knowledge and are light years away from the concerns of inquiring managers.

Finally, the RAE is a potent symbol and vehicle for the bullying top-down managerial culture that has steadily eroded both the quality of working life and results in much of the public sector. This management style has given us Baby P and HM Revenue and Customs on the one hand, and General Motors and the financial collapse on the other. Universities should be part of the search for alternatives, not a reinforcement for today's bankrupt model.

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/21/rae-university-funding

HOW our union fails us - not WHY...

About academic management...

I recently attending a bullying and harassment policy briefing session for academics in management roles at my university. The point of the session was to ensure that managers stayed just on the right side of the law, given that (in the words of the session leader) "there is a very thin line between bullying and management."

From: Poll points to distrust of 'petty' managers

Poll points to distrust of 'petty' managers...

"Wholly ineffective and probably incapable of running a whelk stall," was one of the less flattering opinions of managers expressed in a survey of higher education staff.

Other responses included a lecturer's description of university leaders as "top-down petty bureaucrats whose main interest is in making money", and a professor's complaint that "at senior level the quality of management and leadership is unacceptable - there is a serious lack of accountability".

The comments were made to researchers who investigated levels of trust in higher and further education institutions. They presented their results last week to the Society for Research into Higher Education.

Around 40 per cent of respondents identified problems with the management culture of their institution, with a majority of these feeling that their leaders had "high concern for the task, low concern for the people".

Of the 145 participants, 65 had significant concerns about poor leadership and a lack of values among managers, with one programme leader from a London university citing "countless examples of middle and senior managers who lack breadth of view and are defensive".

"They tend to miss out on opportunities, put down people with things to offer, demotivate people around them (and) foster ineffective practices," they said.

There were also a significant number of respondents who were positive, with a third of those surveyed saying their managers had "high concern for outcomes and high concern for people".

The paper, by Jill Jameson of the University of Greenwich, concludes that a significant number of academics feel they are living in an era of increasingly managerialist attitudes, while "values-based" leadership is lacking.

"Academic staff found it hard to trust coercive managers: they could, and did, by contrast, resist 'new managerialist' trends," says the report.

From: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

...

Why adjunct is a dirty word

If you didn’t know it was, you haven’t known any adjuncts personally. It is amazing what people will say about adjuncts, even to their faces.

But here’s why:

The average adjunct is not as qualified as the average new full-timer. (I’m not addressing the folks hired back in the 60’s, when the market was entirely different.) And I’m not just talking about them receiving less institutional support, though that’s certainly true. Full-timers are recruited nationally, and vetted by search committees, deans, and vice presidents. It’s not unusual to get hundreds of applications for a single position, even at the cc level. When we hire someone to the tenure track, we’ve chosen the best of hundreds. Adjuncts are hired locally, ensuring a far smaller pool. They’re often chosen based on their availability for a given time slot. Yes, some of them are excellent instructors. Yes, sometimes we luck out and find really good people whose life circumstances steer them to us. (That was me, back in the mid-90’s.) But the idea that, on average, the best of hundreds aren’t any better than the best who live within a thirty minute drive and are available on Tuesdays at 12:30 just doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Absolutely the chances are good that the best of hundreds will be better than the best who live within an hour and a half drive. (I’m in Houston, after all.) That does not mean, as Community College Dean makes clear, that some aren’t good. Some are good. Some are excellent.

But we are regularly treated as if we are “the one living within driving distance who agrees to go to X campus.”

Even when we are not. Even when we have a PhD and more teaching experience than the full-timers. Even when our evaluations are glowing and our classes fill up immediately upon opening.

It reminds me of how doctors often treat their patients. Many doctors routinely treat their patients as if they are idiots and do not recognize their own symptoms. This happens even when the patients are bright, well-educated, and self-aware. The doctors do it because they have the expectation that the patient won’t be intelligent.

Maybe the academy has that same expectation. They expect the adjuncts to be poor teachers, place holders, cogs in a giant wheel that are interchangeable… And they get those things, to the detriment of the students. Maybe the colleges should give more and expect more from their adjuncts.

If students perform well when confronted with high expectations, shouldn’t teachers work the same way? We’re just older folks (usually). If adjuncts are expected to be underqualified, high graders without significant content in their courses, then that’s who they will become.

I work at three colleges with very different community cultures.

At one college everyone is introduced as Dr. if they have received one and by their first name as not. This is even when you are giving your name to colleagues. At this college, my PhD counters my adjunct status, as does the fact that relatively few of the faculty are adjuncts.

At one college the twain do not meet. Adjuncts (60 or so) have a four computers/tables office in a building, while the full-timers have individual offices in other buildings. Both the adjuncts and the full-timers have a start-of-school meeting, but the adjuncts’ is at night and the full-timers’ is in the day. Even adjuncts who could attend the full-timers’ meetings don’t because it means coming back to campus without pay. And it just continues that way. They don’t interact. This is CC1, which has offered adjunct certification.

At my third college, the adjuncts are invited (as far as I can tell) to everything the full-timers are. The adjuncts have offices in the same area as the full-timers, though they share an office and the ft have their own. (That’s okay, though, since few of the adjuncts are in the office area at the same time.) People talk to the adjuncts, instead of ignoring them in the halls like at CC1 and CC2. It’s a much more comfortable school to be an adjunct at.

Why am I working at three colleges?

I have been away from teaching college for fifteen years, teaching my children. Now I am trying to get back into teaching. I’ve been working at the local college for a while, teaching a Saturday morning or a Thursday night class. But this year my youngest is attending the local college for dual credit, so I am teaching part-time at several places trying to beef up my experience and my skills. I know that colleges look more at presentations and publications and I have been working on those. I have eight presentations this school year and two publications.

So I am working at several places, getting my feet in doors, hopefully getting to know people, and, next time they hire, I want them to be looking at me first. But when people think of adjuncts as the sweatshop workers, as at one of the colleges I applied for a full-time position, where they never hire their own adjuncts for full-time positions, maybe more adjuncting was not a good choice.

From: http://www.teachingcollegeenglish.com