flynn056

I don’t even want to speculate as to the total combined years of education represented at the meeting at which all of these questions, none of which I am making up, were asked. “Do the giant scissors actually cut?” “Where’s the mascot?  Is it in Marketing? Athletics?” “What if the mascots met?” “Can the statue actually support a person?” The challenge of academic administration is balancing large questions about mission and academic integrity, basic economic sense, political savvy, and personnel management, with remembering where somebody left the mascot’s head. As we like to say in administrative circles, “other duties as assigned…”

I just finished listening to Annie Lowrey’s new book “Give People Money,” which is about the policy idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), and it got me thinking.  What if many of the jobs for which we prepare people now are going away in a few years, to be replaced with AI-driven automation? The question could go in several directions, of course.  Some supporters of UBI, especially some of the tech evangelists, see it as a sort of life support for the many who will have been rendered economically valueless by the robots.  If we have self-driving trucks, the argument goes, who needs truck drivers? That’s a lot of jobs eliminated in a short time. The economic danger is that if machines generate most value, then most money will accrue to the owners of the machines.  (For present purposes, “machines” could be defined to include something as ethereal as an algorithm.) Staving off mass starvation, or revolution, would require throwing the masses some bones. UBI coul...

Back during the first Clinton administration, I spent more time than I should have playing Sim City.  It was a very early version, chock-full of 16 bit goodness; it was nowhere near as sophisticated as later versions were, but the outlines were there.  Sometimes as a city matured, the game would start to fall into a rut. When that happened, every so often a Godzilla-like monster would appear, stomping through the city and wreaking general havoc.  It was a sort of “reset” button that immediately mooted any plans you were making, and that forced some rapid adjustments on the fly. I haven’t played the game probably since Clinton was reelected, but the mental image of the random Godzilla attack stayed with me.  A prehistoric fire-breathing lizard has a way of abruptly forcing a rethink of whatever was happening before. Substitute “the state legislature” for “a prehistoric fire-breathing lizard,” as one does, and you get a sense of what’s happening now. The New Jersey le...

Robert Kelchen posted a nice visual response to the argument that “administrative bloat” is driving tuition increases.  I was particularly taken with the graph showing the change in administrators per 1000 FTE students. The green line -- the one sloping downward hard, lower than all the others -- represents community colleges. We have plenty of challenges, but bloat is not one of them.  It’s nice to have a rebuttal in handy visual form, though. -- We’re going through the annual ritual of looking at low-enrolled sections and trying to decide what to keep and what to cut.   Although I’ve been doing that in various places since 2001 (!), I realized this week that the task has changed fundamentally in the last couple of years. It has always involved looking at the marginal cost of instruction of another section, and a general sense of the fungibility of student schedules. (Non-financial considerations also include the number of alternative sections, whether a given course i...

In response to yesterday’s post about the hidden rules of administration, one commenter asked about hidden rules that might apply to faculty who take on partial administrative loads through course releases.  What should they expect? That was actually how I got started in administration.  I took on a self-study for an accreditation visit, and the rest is history.  Admittedly, that was some time ago… Context matters, of course, as do motives.  I’ll write from a combination of memory of my own time straddling the two roles, and what I’ve observed since then from here.  Wise and worldly readers are invited to fill out the picture in the comments. I remember being surprised at the different senses of time in the two worlds.  The best analogy I’ve seen to it is that teaching is like sprinting, while administration is like distance running.  I don’t know if it makes any sense to declare one easier than the other; they’re just different. But moving between t...

Jessica Calarco got a good discussion going on Twitter recently about the hidden rules of graduate school.  She pointed out that many graduate students start out not really knowing how it’s done, and nobody tells them.  Unsurprisingly, the folks least likely to know the rules are first-generation, and that tends to break out demographically along predictable lines.   It got me thinking about some of the hidden rules of administration, the stuff that everybody expects you to know but nobody bothers to spell out.  What do new administrators confront? Herewith, a non-exhaustive list. First, and most basically, you will quickly find yourself treated as a synecdoche for every decision that the institution ever made, even if it’s long before you arrived and in another unit of the college.  Although most people understand that there’s an element of silliness to that, you can’t really evade it. From the inside, the administration is a bunch of moving parts, each with s...

Back in 2009, when enrollments were booming, I wrote a piece in which I explained why I hate parking as an issue.  There’s never enough of it, and everybody is opposed to adding more. It’s a no-win. From the vantage point of 2018, I can see that I didn’t forecast sustained enrollment decline as a solution to a parking squeeze.  Until recently, the relaxation of the parking squeeze on many campuses was a minor, but real, silver lining against the dark cloud of enrollment decline.   Now, even that silver lining is in jeopardy. Apparently , the federal tax bill passed late last year includes a provision requiring colleges that provide free parking to pay taxes on it.   The provenance of the rule was silly, but if one were so inclined, there’s a far less stupid argument for it.  By making driving artificially cheap, the argument goes, we get more of it. If we want drivers to take other options more seriously, such as taking the bus, then we need to ensure that th...

Should a strategic plan more closely resemble a phone book, or a to-do list? I’ve come to realize that not only to people disagree on the answer, but they often don’t even realize that there’s a question.  They think there’s only one way. The goal of the phone book model is to ensure that everyone is in it.  In this model, a good plan is one in which everyone is named, and everything is connected to everything else.  Ideally, each area (department, program, or center) writes its own section, so everyone can do what they want. Typically, when it comes time to act, there isn’t anywhere near enough money or time to do everything.  The plan then moves to a shelf, where it sits, undisturbed, until it’s time for the next plan. Meanwhile, actual decisions are made reactively, compelled by circumstances. The goal of a to-do list is to set out a manageable number of things to get done, and then to get them done.  Effective to-do lists are short, by design. They leave ...

The Boy is flying to Honduras on Saturday.  We’re quietly freaking out, though for different reasons. He’s with a group called Students Helping Honduras.  As I understand it, they build schools in rural parts of Honduras so children there don’t have to walk long distances through gang territory to go to school.  TB’s girlfriend went last year and is going again this year, but this will be his first trip. He (and the group) will be there for a week. The larger organization brings various groups in over the course of the summer. In the manner of young men everywhere, he’s motivated by a combination of idealism, restlessness, a sense of adventure, and a desire to impress his girlfriend.  That’s pretty much as it should be. He’s a great kid, he really wants to go, the organization seems legit, and his girlfriend, whom we like, speaks highly of her experience there last year.  We couldn’t come up with a reason to say no. The Wife is concerned about his safety. ...

File this one under “how to” for my counterparts out there... Jennifer Zinth and Elisabeth Barnett have a good piece at the League for Innovation website on expanding dual enrollment programs beyond the highest achieving students.  It’s worth a look. We’ve been doing that here for a few years now, so I’ll share a few lessons from the trenches. First, and most basically, it’s true that students who might not be on the Honors track can succeed in college-level courses.  We just had our first cohort of “Poseidon” students graduate, for instance. They were donor-supported first-generation students at Neptune High School, mostly with average grades in junior high, who completed an Associate’s degree while in high school.  The challenges were real, and a few students had to peel away from the cohort, but about ⅔ of those who started, graduated with college degrees. For a low-income group of first-generation students, that’s excellent. Even better, they came to think of the...

“In the last five years, 15 institutions [of higher learning] have closed or merged in Massachusetts.” That line was buried somewhere in the long middle of this story .  For full effect, imagine the record-scratch sound upon reading it. (For younger readers, substitute the “dramatic chipmunk” video .)  It’s an alarming number. It came in the context of a story about a proposed law in Massachusetts that would require colleges to give advance notice to the state if they think they’re on the brink of economic collapse.  Some private colleges -- most likely, the ones who think it might affect them -- are pushing back. It’s probably a sign that I’ve been in these roles a while that I actually get their argument. When the City College of San Francisco had its near-death experience with its accreditor several years ago, the short-term effect was a double-digit percentage drop in enrollments.  Prospective students made the individually rational calculation that they’d rather...

Did you know that credits awarded by prior learning assessment may not transfer? Okay, as scandals go, that’s weak tea.  But as an operational matter for community colleges, it’s no small thing. Prior Learning Assessment is the catchall term for credits awarded for documented mastery of material or skills acquired outside of regular classes.  The usual methods are either exams -- AP, CLEP, and DSST are the most common national ones, though departments sometimes offer their own -- or portfolios of work.   It’s reasonable to see PLA as a sort of embryonic form of competency-based education.  In both cases, seat time is made irrelevant, and students are judged on their demonstrated knowledge or performance.  And in both, it doesn’t really matter where the student picked up the knowledge or skill. This can reward the returning veteran who picked up certain skills in the military, or the office manager for a small business who could probably teach the introductory s...

A tip of the cap to longtime Brookdale chemistry professor Shahin Pirzad, who passed away unexpectedly this month.   Shahin came to the US from Iran and made his presence felt here.  He was a beloved chemistry instructor -- students asked for him by name.  Last year, he won the Barringer award, voted on by his peers as deserving of recognition for years of outstanding work.   He had been a co-advisor for the Brookdale chapter of Phi Theta Kappa for years, which is how I had the most contact with him.  Over the years, I saw him happy, busy, and occasionally flustered, but I never saw him sad. He was always excited to be here. He brought his energy with him wherever he went.  It went without saying that there would be a scholarship established in his name. This weekend his family hosted a celebration of his life at his home.  The street was jammed with cars, and the yard filled with people laughing and hugging and remembering. He would have enjoyed it...