Kay Cunningham's List: Academia

• While he did not foresee the complete obliteration of tenured faculty, Hermanowicz said the trend of tenured and tenure-track faculty lines being replaced by adjuncts will likely continue, which will affect the nature of the university and higher education.
• Attacks on tenure and on the role of the faculty tend to happen not just during times of economic insecurity, but also during periods of political flux -- both of which apply at present, noted several scholars. Added to the mix is a strain of anti-intellectualism and a suspicion of elites. Technology, too, has diminished many traditional avenues of intellectual authority, allowing the uninformed to appear, to the layperson, as well-versed as the expert.
• But many agreed that perhaps the largest factor leading to the changed make-up of the faculty has been both slower moving and more consequential: the replacement of tenured faculty with adjuncts.

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• It is he, for instance, who decides, over the objections of some faculty members and parents, that the school should remain open even after four students are petrified by a basilisk (which I take to be something like a provost).
• At the very least, they can learn to resist their more Umbridge-like urges, and thus save a herd of angry Centaurs (which I take to be something like the members of a faculty senate) the trouble of carrying them off into the Forbidden Forest.

• There is a yawning gap between what we've been doing and what many of our graduate students believe we can and should do. That gap points to a failure of understanding. How many of us sit down with our graduate students and ask them what they want from us? The default assumption is that they want to be like us—but some do not, and most will not. One of the fundamental problems in graduate teaching right now is a failure of communication, and the results are hot to the touch.

• Beyond self-interest, becoming a valued colleague is integral to becoming a  mature and happy professional. If you haven’t already seen him or her, you  surely will: the academic “star” who’s a poor — and therefore alienated —  colleague.
• A word of caution: resist the understandable temptation to rely on committee or  department meetings to build relationships with your new colleagues. Unless  you’re very lucky, you’ll quickly discover that faculty meetings are more likely  to reveal the strains in existing relationships than afford opportunities to  forge new ones.

• The same advice holds true for new faculty who work  with graduate students. Because you’re likely to be close in age to your  graduate students, it may feel very natural to you to behave like the graduate  student or postdoc you were only a short time ago. Trust me, though: having your  picture posted on Facebook, Jello shot in hand, hot tubbing with your students  will not be a career builder. And that’s not the worst that can happen if you  fail to respect the boundaries that come with being a professor.

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• Administrative time is yet another casualty of the budget cuts in higher  education. With reduced staffs and reduced hours for administrative assistants,  deans and chairs live in an everyday environment of too much to do, too little  time to do it in, and too little money to spread around. Despite that, most  deans and chairs are interested in advancing the mission of the institution and  the profession, and they will use what money they have to do so. And in fact,  even in tight budget times, they do have small pots of money that can pay for  space, a speaker or two, or snacks that one needs to pull off an event. But the  proposals they choose to fund must catch their eye.
• In a profession where C.V.s are often six pages long and cover letters at least  two pages, brevity has long ceased to be the soul of wit. Still, that most basic  rule of writing still applies: the writer must know the audience.
• The ambitious young assistant professor should make a habit of leaving her  office and getting to know the campus community. She should actually attend all  of those potentially boring meetings wherein the president or the provost or the  dean or even the chair discusses the future and the mission of the university or  the college or the department. Only in understanding that future can the young  professor discover the junctures between her training and expertise and the  mission of the university. These junctures can become the source for on-campus  speakers or conferences.

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• The emergence of an accountability regime generates a list of questions: Will nothing halt the corporate university's insistence on subordinating knowledge to money? Will changes in higher education resemble accounting processes now characteristic of health care and legal practice? What do such alterations in key institutions, like colleges and universities, that help establish the underpinnings of our culture, tell us about how contemporary society is changing?

• When service doesn't "count" for tenure, promotion, and merit raises, but this  amorphous categories nonetheless absorbs a major portion of a faculty member's  60+ hour work week, something is very awry. We see service as a silent economy  that maintains institutions but that often isn't part of the public reckoning.
• I would like to see service counting for more and service labor being equally  distributed.
• The "good old days" (good at least for those being served) when women with  college educations answered phones, typed manuscripts, and made reservations for  professors in tweed jackets are long gone. There are also fewer and fewer staff  as retrenchment hits many schools. What this means is that we've all had to find  our inner IT specialists, travel agents, and secretaries, as surely as we're  learning to bag our own groceries.
• It's also often true that chair and deans continue to ask the same people  because those people are very, very good at what they do. A gentle reminder --"I  would love to do this after tenure (or promotion to full or receiving a  three-year contract), but I'm afraid that I won't make it to the next step if I  take this on" -- is usually enough to make any decent administrator bethink  herself.

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• What it now takes to secure a tenure-track job and move up the ranks at a large  university is substantially greater than what it used to be.
• On the other hand, you guys really did breed your own problem, pumping up your  PhD output like that, and pushing up overhead the way you have. Must look  productive! What did you think was going to happen? Your econ TAs could've told  you, and some of them probably did.

• What the article really attempts to do, is to frame the way today’s junior  faculty feel in comparison to those who went through the tenure process a decade  or more ago.
• The consensus of those interviewed appears to be that faculty are under much  more pressure now to produce – and are being held to a much higher standard than  colleagues who have already achieved tenure.

• According to Mr. Nelson, though, the biggest loss isn't what professors can't say in the classroom. It's what they don't say to the president or the trustees—or to politicians.
• A couple of dozen studies over the last decade have shown that as the proportion of professors off the tenure track rises, the proportion of students who return to college the following year and eventually graduate declines.