Can't you just do something to fuck over the people who don't do service while you're doing service?
I guess we could form a committee to look at the fucking-over of people who won't join the committee to look at the fucking-over of people who...
Make them teach 8:00 classes or something.
I wonder how Heebie and I compare. I think of myself as a clearly above average service contributor, but also way below what a lot of the women I know do. (And more importantly I do think I get credit for the work I do within my department in a way that women don't always do.) With only 12% women in the department, men still do most of the service even if the women are somewhat over-represented (or rather, one has switched careers to admin instead of research, one does way too much, and the other two do kinda normal responsible amounts).
Anyway, the solution to this is for service duty to be explicitly part of the job rather than on a yearly cycling semi-volunteer basis. If you need a director of undergraduate studies make that the job from the beginning and hire someone who is good at it, there's plenty of good people on the market who would happily take that job.
And of course if you hire someone for a job that has service as a major component and they avoid that service then you don't give them tenure!
Reading the descriptions of the techniques of avoidance, one feels, as the young people say, seen.
Be careful not to draw overly broad conclusions from this data. In many other areas, women are more intelligent than men.
A few years ago, at my diverse and progressive place of work, before we'd turned on auto-transcription for our Zoom meetings, we took notes manually. One day at the all-hands meeting, one of the women said, "So I've collected some stats...." Women were way disproportionately doing the note-taking. It was a very well-executed kick in the teeth to any self-congratulations we might have been inclined to, and to the company's credit, when we set up a list of volunteer note-takers after that, it was almost all men*.
* Please note that I'm slumming here by using "women" and "men" as the categories, which I wouldn't do at work.
Everyone post your name, detailed gender identity, and how much work you routinely avoid. E.g.: um, I dunno, a lot.
This sort of thing cracks me up, because it used to come up in court: an order or something would need to be handwritten for the judge to sign. And my writing is genuinely incomprehensible as well as being painfully slow -- I am objectively the wrong person to be the scribe, as compared to the vast majority of the literate population. But boy is the assumption that the woman is going to do the writing powerful; I always had to actively refuse, at least once to the point of letting a pen that some dude was pressing into my hand drop from my limply relaxed fingers.
This wasn't even a feminist point of resistance, I was genuinely uncomfortable having anything binding set forth in handwriting as unclear as mine is.
The authors of the study never consider the possibility that the men are shirking responsibility on the job because they need to get home to vacuum and clean the bathrooms.
letting a pen that some dude was pressing into my hand drop from my limply relaxed fingers
xoxoxox
12: Please explain this procedural point a bit more. Certain court orders are not valid unless handwritten? Typing deprives certain words of the force of law?
I've been in corporate life for ever a decade and am still learning how to guiltlessly decline to do things that I will not be rewarded for.
My company recently introduced a process in which we write down expectations for the year with the understanding that our progress against these will be the major input to our annual performance review, and this has greatly attenuated my desire to do anything not on that list.
E.g., this week I got an interview request. I said "Why no, fair recruiter with whom I will never interact again, I will not spend an hour assessing and documenting this stranger's technical skill", and hit "No". This felt briefly transgressive as in the past I felt like I had to accept such requests in order to be a good person. In light of the new expectations model, however, it just feels responsible to avoid work that won't feed into the letter grade at the end of the year that is the primary input to my compensation and job retention prospects.
I wonder how Heebie and I compare. I think of myself as a clearly above average service contributor, but also way below what a lot of the women I know do.
I don't know if there's any way to compare, either. Aren't you in some massive admin role right now?
We usually get stuck on ~3 committies per year, I'd estimate, but they vary wildly in how time-consuming they are. Some of the admin things come with a course release, but mine don't. The main thing I'm doing above and beyond the math department is the math club. I tried to hand it off, but it keeps rolling back onto me, for gender reasons I assume. This year math club was an insane amount of work, due to some ambitious students, but usually it's not this bad.
12: I would have paid good money to see this!!!
12: I would have paid good money to see this!!!
18: The trick is to offload as much work as possible to the ambitious mathletes under the guise of "leadership opportunities".
17: You all are hiring, is what I'm hearing... This hasn't been an issue for me at all in the past two years.
Back in the boom times, there was a point when I was getting 2-3 interview requests a week and many teammates were getting 0. I actually had fair success insisting that more interviewers get trained and the load be more evenly spread. (There is a dynamic where recruiters get to know and like "well-calibrated" interviewers and over-use them.)
The note-taking thing hits hard because I am a man and I generally refuse to do it, but, like LB's case, I am genuinely bad at it and it makes it near-impossible for me to actively participate in a meeting.
I am stretched too thin. I am tired of the equivalent of picking up everyone's socks. Meanwhile a colleague gets research money and awards despite publishing really not at all, and far less than I do. It's a bit much and I'm trying to figure out how to negotiate it.
22: I neglected to mention that this was the first interview in about the same number of years, and it was for a worksite on the other side of the world. It's a global village, yo.
When I've casually browsed the job boards lately within my desired geography most or many of the applicable open positions have been at your firm, suggesting it may still be viewed as an area of relative promise.
On my current team note taking generally is quietly picked up by the meeting organizer, which seems fair and practical, as they are usually the one who cares most about why we are all there.
, I am genuinely bad at it and it makes it near-impossible for me to actively participate in a meeting.
I also hate it because it means I can't participate in the meeting, which makes me suspect that part is universal. Which is probably why, traditionally, all-men committees had a lady-secretary to sit in and take notes.
After much trying, last year I successfully turned the bulk of my invisible advising service into a position as advising coordinator with a course release. It feels really good-- about 10% more advising work than I was doing anyway, but much more visible and compensated. And I helpfully hooked the "incompetent" men up to the IT training people.
And after the first department meeting with a new female chair, she created a note-taking rotation. Progress!
Counterpoint: dealing with tasks in order of priority is normal, good, and absolutely standard for anyone competent. Nobody should answer literally all their e-mail, are you insane? Only academics could possibly think it was some sort of secret trick handed down by the Boys' Club at their conspiracy meetings.
26: definitely agree that everyone in every academic department should be physically forced to take the patronising basic IT skills courses they try to push on the undergraduates, preferably on pain of death. Thank you for your service, you are doing the Lord's work.
28: I am a firm believer that people who don't procrastinate don't understand how often the problem just goes away.
And not because someone else does it. For example, I got a tiny stipend last year, so now I'm supposed to give a talk about it during faculty workshops, which sounds annoying. I didn't submit an abstract for awhile. The organizer apologized today, but they've run out of space. So sad!
"I got a stipend. It turns out that money is great. Thank you for coming to my talk. "
I wonder how they are quantifying service work, because what happens a lot in my department is not that people refuse to serve on committees but that they agree to serve on them and then simply do nothing. The last time I served on the graduate admissions committee, I and one other person read about 30% more applications than anyone else on the committee (around 130, IIRC). Last year I refused to serve on the committee, and they asked someone else from my subfield to serve instead. That person read zero applications (literally zero) and just advocated for admitting a couple of people who they heard about from friends.
This year I chaired a very time-intensive committee and there were people who agreed to serve but then simply refused to do anything I asked them to do.
I guess I lost track of the point I was going for with my first sentence, which is that surely everyone reports all of the committees they served on when they fill out their annual faculty activity report, which influences salary bumps for the next year. There is no mechanism to distinguish between someone who served on a committee and spent twenty minutes total on it and someone who spent a hundred hours on it. So the smart move is not to refuse to serve, but to agree to serve and then be dead weight.
My grandfather's advice to my mother, on leaving for university: "Don't learn to type. They'll make you take minutes."
My mother went on to work-- eventually in very senior management-- at a federal government department dominated by (male) engineers. She retired proud of never once having taken the minutes.
My grandfather was not the most progressive man in the world (he was apparently an admirer of Franco!) but that advice was life changing for multiple generations.
My mom refused to learn to type for the same reason. Even when computers started becoming a routine part of life my dad would do all the typing for her.
I do an exercise every time I teach intro. In the 2nd week of class I divide them into groups for a structured discussion and I ask each group to pick someone to take notes on the activity. At the end of the class, I just tell them the gender breakdown of the note-takers compared to the breakdown in the class as a whole. The women nod knowingly and the men look sheepish, and then the next time we do a group activity the men take notes without me having to say anything. It's the most effective teaching exercises I've ever developed. Inspired entirely by my grandfather.
16: It's not that handwriting is special (unless it's a will, but I don't actually know the rules around that), it's that you're all standing in a courtroom without access to a printer, and the judge wants an order to sign now, so you handwrite it on one of the triplicate forms there are stacks of on the part clerk's desk.
That probably happens much less post pandemic when so many court appearances are virtual -- I stopped going to court myself much when I got promoted in 2020.
I have just learned thanks to the Miller Center oral histories that when Brent Scowcroft left the Ford White House, there were two entire file drawers of documents marked URGENT ACTION in his personal safe, some of which had been there for two years. Bob Gates would drop into his office, during the Bush Sr administration, perch on his desk, and pull papers out of his box to make him read them; it was called the Strasbourg Goose Process.
So yes, perhaps more of a point than my slightly trolly intervention concedes. Twist: Scowcroft was also notorious for falling asleep in meetings, which was less surprising when you realise he was a carer for his seriously ill wife (like Sir John Dill in 1940, for British general staff fans; that was why he was sent to Washington and Alan Brooke given the top job instead)
They made my entire class learn to type as freshmen. On IBM Selectrics because there were only like 8 computers in the school.
29 is of course me being tired of uncompensated IT user support to universities as an academic's other half. I have occasionally been asked to support entirely different universities at one or two removes, which seems excessive.
Could you steal stuff as compensation?
The feral media showed no interest in the stolen internal e-mail
In most places I've worked, the minutes-taker has tremendous power to shape the historical record and almost always gets explicitly thanked. But I keep reading people talking about it like it's menial labor.
Yeah, for us the note taker for is the one who is saying things like "Otto, are you going to take that action item?" After my reluctant assent they then tag me in a comment that produces an email that can be ignored for awhile. But in that moment, they seem like a Leader, which is the highest good around here.
If the women in senior positions in my institution (ie, pretty much all the senior management, because we are an 80% female organisation) would get clear in their heads the distinction between "holding regular meetings regarding issue X" and "actually achieving any progress at all on issue X" I would be absolutely delighted.
And yes to 44. I learned very quickly that if you take the notes, you run the meeting, regardless of rank, and can ensure that decisions are made and tasks assigned, rather than it just degenerating into a sort of aimless chat session.
The worst form of this, and it happens so often that I am starting to think it is deliberate, is a three step process.
1. This is a very important issue and I the manager therefore refuse to delegate authority. All decisions must be approved by me.
2. I am arranging regular hour-long meetings to discuss this issue...
3. ...to which I will rarely if ever turn up.
Counterpoint: dealing with tasks in order of priority is normal, good, and absolutely standard for anyone competent.
Yes. Look, outsider here, so feel free to tell me I'm wrong, but my impression is that academic work is largely fixed-term-contract-based and highly competitive. That being so, there are three categories of activity:
1. This is explicitly part of my current job, and by that I mean that my manager will take disciplinary action if I don't do it. For example, I would imagine: teaching classes, marking exam papers. By the very nature of institutions, if something is truly important to the institution, it will be in somebody's category 1.
2. This is not explicitly part of my current job but it will help me get my next job. eg: doing research, presenting at conferences, organising conferences, publishing papers.
3. EVERYTHING ELSE.
Now, all this service work that the authors are passively-aggressively complaining about having to do in their own department* must fall into one of those three categories.
If it's in 1, then they have no standing to complain because they should have thought of that before they took the job.
If it's in 2, then they have no standing to complain because it's helping their careers along.
If it's in 3... why are they doing it? Why not focus exclusively on 1 and 2? if a bit of service work is truly important to the institution, and it doesn't get done, then sooner or later it will end up in somebody's category 1.
* "Look, I think that in a good relationship, you have to have ways for working out any issues that might come up." Randy says reasonably.
"And you don't consider ramming your car a good way, I'll bet."
"I can think of some problems with it."
"And you had ways of working out your problems with Charlene that were very sophisticated. No voices were ever raised. No angry words exchanged."
"No cars rammed."
"Yeah. And that worked, right?"
Randy sighs.
"How about that thing that Charlene wrote about beards?" Amy asks.
"How did you know about that?"
"Looked it up on the Internet. Was that an example of how you guys worked out your problems? By publishing totally oblique academic papers blasting the other person?"
"I got a stipend. It turns out that money is great. Thank you for coming to my talk. "
Sounds like you've been to a business school research seminar.
It is amazing that the expression "learned helplessness," which was common enough to have a deep groove in my brain, was not recognized as "performative helplessness" right from the start. No one taught them that shit, they figured it out all on their own.
re: 47
Yeah. I tend to take the meeting notes at work. I'm the director of the department, so unless our MD is in the meeting, I'm always the senior person.* I take them partly so I can ensure that I have a record of who has been delegated what, but also because after years in the academic world before I left, note-taking is essentially a memory-fixation tool for me. If I've taken notes on something, I'll probably always remember it, or at least for as long as it's useful. I may never refer back to the notes again but the fact that I've taken them is important.
It's a constant surprise to me in my professional life, just how little people remember. I suspect not because they are cognitively challenged, but because they just cruise through paying about 30% attention to everything.** Explicitly calling them out in meetings--I am assigning X to you--helps, a bit.
* it's a small company, so that's not some massive brag.
** this, unfortunately, includes the people explicitly paid to pay attention as delivery managers.
It's a constant surprise to me in my professional life, just how little people remember. I suspect not because they are cognitively challenged, but because they just cruise through paying about 30% attention to everything.
Because managers in my organisation have a reflex of calling large meetings to deal with any issue or decision, most of one's calendar is taken up with being in meetings, almost all remote, to which one generally has little to contribute and from which one generally has little to learn. This means that the only way to get any work done is to work during meetings which in turn means that you don't pay much attention to what's going on, because generally it's irrelevant.
I should clarify that this - " calling large meetings to deal with any issue" - does not mean that the meeting decides how the issue is to be dealt with. Calling the meeting, in their heads, is dealing with the issue.
54 was endemic at my previous place of employment and nothing ever got done except by those of us in the trenches doing our regular day to day duties but some really cool projects that I considered no-brainers and would have gotten us a lot of attention and acclaim fell by the wayside because of upper and middle management incompetence. They sure went to a lot of meetings though.
re: 53/54
Yeah, when I worked in a university, that was exactly the pattern so I'm very familiar with it. In that job, and to a certain extent but much less so in my current job, you could divide the senior managers into those who just had meetings, and those who delivered actual work. It wasn't a pointy-haired boss versus put-upon engineer divide. Some of the hardest working and most productive people were in management. But there was about 60-70% of senior management where: "calling the meeting, in their heads, is dealing with the issue" was exactly the dynamic.*
My team, however, would usually be in around 3 hours of meetings a week in total, so they have no excuse. One planning meeting (maybe 60-90 minutes) a week plus a 15 minute daily standup. If we have to schedule any additional meetings, especially with clients, we schedule them on the same day as the planning meeting, so that the other 4 days a week are completely meeting free.
* I left when they promoted one of the "all talk" people in a competitive interview where I was the other candidate, then they realised that that person couldn't do the job, so they created a new senior management position for me which was, almost literally, "Head of Actually Doing the Shit" and transferred all of the implementation and delivery responsibilities over to that job, then created a new strategic role to define the overall strategy of the department, which they also assigned to me. The net result was that I got promoted and more money, but it was very clear to me that the management structure was broken as X had been promoted up into a role in which they had literally nothing to do but drink coffee in meetings and go to conferences. 7 years later, they are still in that role.
My team, however, would usually be in around 3 hours of meetings a week in total, so they have no excuse. One planning meeting (maybe 60-90 minutes) a week plus a 15 minute daily standup. If we have to schedule any additional meetings, especially with clients, we schedule them on the same day as the planning meeting, so that the other 4 days a week are completely meeting free.
My god, this is like some impossible vision of utopia.
The core of the linked article is this bit right here:
For example, organising seminars, sitting on committees and making expert assessments is essential work for an academic institution, Alsos believes.
The research project shows that male associate professors in particular use relational strategies to dodge internal service work and thus ended up only doing 25 per cent of such work.
It is just unquestionably and obviously true to her that every committee is essential and every internal meeting is essential. It's like "if this committee weren't vital, why would it exist? Ha! Answer me that!"
She doesn't even bother to question that assumption and therefore inevitably becomes incredibly frustrated that
a) none of the managers seem willing to force people to go to internal meetings
b) it isn't explicitly part of anyone's job to attend internal meetings
c) going to lots of internal meetings never actually seems to do your career any good, and dodging them doesn't seem to do your career any harm
At some point in the future the kroner will no doubt drop for her.
re: 57
Lesson learned the hard way and occasionally we deviate. But, on the whole, for the bulk of the people delivering billable work, they can expect to have at least 3 and more often 4 days a week without meetings. Unfortunately, for me, that's not the case, as I'm working across multiple projects, and doing other client facing things but even for me, I'll generally have a couple of days a week without meetings.
It is just unquestionably and obviously true to her that every committee is essential and every internal meeting is essential. It's like "if this committee weren't vital, why would it exist? Ha! Answer me that!"
She doesn't even bother to question that assumption
Should have added "...which is of course incredibly funny because she is literally a professional sociologist!"
49: It might be true that in many places the majority of academic workers are on fixed term contracts, though there is a lot of variation between institutions and countries. But the kind of academic work being discussed here is, in lots of places, almost entirely assigned to permanent and typically tenured faculty. At my institution and at our peer institutions, folks on fixed term contracts are rarely assigned significant administrative tasks.
At my institution the standard division of work for a professor (whether pre-tenure or tenured) is 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% administration/service. The exact weightings can be negotiated with the Dean, but the 'service' component can't get negotiated below 20%. Doing admin is in your category (1), not your category (3), except of course that it's almost impossible to discipline people for shirking their responsibilities.
"But the kind of academic work being discussed here is, in lots of places, almost entirely assigned to permanent and typically tenured faculty"
My mistake - I assumed that the references to "associate professors" implied they were relatively junior non-tenured staff. I know little about academia and less about Scandinavian academia!
"Doing admin is in your category (1), not your category (3), except of course that it's almost impossible to discipline people for shirking their responsibilities."
Which puts it in category 3. If there are no negative consequences of any kins for not doing something, it isn't category 1.
I am taking a "purpose of an organisation is what it does" view here. If an institution says "you must do X" but gives me no incentive of any kind to do X and no disincentive not to do X, then the institution does not actually want me to do X. It just says it does.
That said it's definitely true that universities have more meetings, and more unnecessary admin roles, than strictly necessary. But a lot of that is down to the nature of universities as collegially governed institutions. As Chair I'm not anyone's boss, except for the Department admin manager. In university policy there are a whole host of decisions that need to be made by committees, often elected committees, even though it would be faster and easier for me to just make the decisions myself. And this contributes to a culture where faculty members expect that they get extensively consulted on every decision. After all, I'm not their boss! You can see how this dynamic could lead to too many meetings and lots of unnecessary committees.
63: I'm sympathetic this this view! But I have learned that if "it's almost impossible to discipline people for not doing something" puts the work in category, 3, then pretty much nothing is in category 1. Tenured professors have a lot of autonomy, at least in many North American institutions. Some of them abuse this autonomy.
"Discipline" is probably too narrow a term, and I should have talked about incentives and disincentives more broadly. Why should the department pay for someone to go to a conference if they haven't done any internal work at all this term?
How can you have your pudding if you haven't eaten your meat?
The typical promotion pattern for tenure track faculty is Assistant Professor to Associate Professor to Professor (colloquially "full professor") with Tenure coming at the move from assistant to associate. Assistant professors are typically not asked to do much service, which is why they're focused on associates. (Though in my experience the bulk of service is done by Full Professors on the young side.)
I think ajay's threefold distinction still holds, but category 2 is not solely about future jobs but also salary and just general "prestige."
We're nominally 1/2 research, 1/3 teaching, 1/6 service.
66: My grant pays for my travel, and doing research will get me a grant and doing service mostly won't (small caveat that the CAREER grant has a serious service-like component).
I do think in my department the chairs could be more active about punishing the low-service faculty, mostly by giving them teaching assignments that they don't want, but they don't have that many levers. We do have $400/yr of travel funding for faculty without grants and you could pull that, but it's not enough of a lever to make someone do more work.
In my new department there is someone whose entire job seems to be meeting minutes and training. She's hopelessly corporate. I've noticed that they record a lot of meetings which makes me uncomfortable, so I try to turn off my camera and only participate, if at all, by chat. My own large team's meetings are not recorded.
Speaking of jerks, OJ Simpson died.
71 is an issue! Maybe tie it to office assignments? "Oh, no, sorry, Dr Name, this isn't you're office any more. You're down in the basement this semester in the cement-walled cupboard next to the MRI machine. We're moving Professor Thing into your old office with the wood panelling, because they did all their internal service requirements and you just ignored them. Enjoy!"
re: 72
We never record internal meetings, but often record meeting with clients, and I much prefer it that way. More than once I've had clients insist that we agreed X--usually something that involves us doing a load of free un-billed work on their behalf, or accepting some massive change of scope--and it's very handy to point them to the relevant point in the call where I say, "I'm sorry, we'd be very happy to do that, but it'd be additional billable hours, and would be around 6 days out of your current budget." and they say, "Yes, that sounds fair."
73: NMM to the search for the real killer.
77: Do you post them internally so that people can watch them. And what about when you want to say something off the record?
If my experience of academic departments is any guide, the outcome of 75 would not be that Dr Name would do more service work, but rather that Dr Name would immediately begin an extended, impassioned and (depending on Dr Name's prestige) possibly successful project to deny Professor Thing grant money, blacklist them from publications, and ideally deny them tenure and get them canned.
re: 79
These are professional meetings with clients. We'd never do anything off the record. We do sometimes start the recording after we've done all the informal chat at the start, introductions, catch ups, etc and then we make sure everyone knows we are recording.
Purely internal meetings would never be recorded.
75: Or tie it to who gets left out when the ratio of people to cake is too big.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/d3f543e5-4c80-4b2d-a018-4f8786a00940
71 gets it right: there aren't always many levers. Chairs don't control faculty research grants. I do control teaching assignments, but within limits. 'Punishing people who piss me off' is only one of many variables in assigning teaching. I also control performance review scores (with a committee, of course...) which ultimately can affect pay, but the process is complex and isn't much of a lever. If 'admin' is 20% of the score and 'research' is 40%, then it's rational to accept a lower score on admin if the trade-off is a higher score on research.
It's a classic free-rider problem without many of the mechanisms that are useful for dissuading free-riders.
80: well, then Professor Thing could do the same thing back to Dr Name, and let the best man win.
But you're describing a situation in which universities are, from an employment point of view, inherently ungovernable - there is no way for a university to exert any control whatsoever over the actions of any of its faculty, unless they actually start committing crimes.
Right, the main consequence is 20% smaller raises (on the unusual years when there are raises). I think also the worst offenders do get a little lower teaching scores too (partly because the committee is annoyed, partly because not doing service can also correlate with not really pulling your weight as an advisor) so maybe get a little less in raises than that. But there's so few raises anyway, so like we're talking about the consequences of like 20 years of not pulling your weight being that you make $107k instead of $115k.
>But you're describing a situation in which universities are, from an employment point of view, inherently ungovernable - there is no way for a university to exert any control whatsoever over the actions of any of its faculty, unless they actually start committing crimes.
If you don't do any research there's clear consequences (you teach an extra course every year, and you make $70k instead of $110k since you don't get raises and don't get promoted to full professor which comes with a 15% raise). If you don't do excellent research there's a clear consequence (an NSF grant is a 25% pay raise in addition to travel funds). If you actually don't do the teaching part of your job you will get fired. But doing a mediocre job teaching or a terrible job at service has no consequences and yes is ungovernable.
But those penalties could be applied to service work too, if the university chose to do so. If you don't do the teaching part of your job you get fired. So you can fire people! Why not fire people for not doing the service part of the job?
And anyway the paper makes clear that there actually are incentives here. They talk about men doing service work as "barter" - in exchange for another favour - or as "investment" - in order to gain benefits later. Both of which sound entirely sensible and rational.
The problem they describe is that women are much more likely than men to voluntarily do unpleasant undesirable work which benefits their institutions in exchange for no reward or recognition, and, bizarrely, this is framed as a sign that men are doing something wrong when the solution is entirely within women's grasp, viz. "stop doing that".
ajay, if I'm not mistaken you were previously a senior military officer? From the perspective of military governance, yes, universities are pretty much entirely ungovernable. Or rather, tenured university faculty are-- contract academic staff and all admin staff are managed like employees anywhere else.
University collegial governance relies on a fair amount of good will and the willingness of people to voluntarily do things that no one can force them to do. That's true in all workplaces of course but it's structurally true in universities. Which is why disparities in willingness to do these tasks arw of particular interest to academics.
It's genuinely hard to fire people with tenure, they have to do something egregious, and simply not doing much service (or doing a bad job teaching) isn't enough. You have to do something egregious like stop showing up to class. Yes you could change the policies to make it easier to fire people, but the upshot would be more firing of people for reserving a room for the Palestinian student organization or doing research on race and not firing people for not pulling their weight on service.
I do sort of wonder why it's not easier to specify what's protected under tenure.
- Anything related to research
- Anything political.
Things that shouldn't be protected:
- taking up space like a bump on a log and being an incredibly shitty instructor on top of that.
It seems like wiser people than me could write a tenure description that catches a few of the most egregious latter cases without endangering the former sympathetic cases.
There's a recent notorious case of someone getting fired (or rather, forced to go on leave) for being useless and a bad a teacher, and boy is it super controversial!
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202302/rnoti-p196.pdf?adat=February%202023
But you don't even have to fire them. You can link service work to pay - and from upthread some universities do exactly that. You can exchange it for recognition or favours- and the authors' universities do that too.
91: CHE article. Looks like he got a ton of warning/notice to improve. Don't know what's happened in the year since.
I'm pretty sure most universities can't cut your salary, only not give you raises. Though there are exceptions:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/03/04/mizzou-defends-presidents-right-cut-faculty-pay-25
93: Yeah, as far as I can tell it's fine, but lots of people are big mad about it!
One of this professor's defenders has posted a bunch of material on the saga. At a first skim, it does not seem very exculpatory - major issues with his teaching pre-pandemic, and according to a Reddit commentator two department chairs in a row were continuing this work, making a personal grudge less likely.
That said it does seem plausible that from the perspective of how tenure is supposed to work, administratively cutting salary of $0 is arguably a runaround, however justified by the facts.
87: I'm not sure that's so. I can't speak to universities, but I think often women get labeled as "not being team players" when they do that. A lot of recommendations for negotiating a la Cheryl Sandberg's Lean In can backfire for women. Women often write e-mails that come across as apologetic. It turns out that in some organizations they get punished or described as shrill if they do otherwise.
We do have $400/yr of travel funding for faculty without grants and you could pull that, but it's not enough of a lever to make someone do more work.
There's an old comedy sketch where a flight attendant tries to get someone to stop smoking by telling the passenger there's a fine and his response is, "I'll pay it." And then the rest of sketch, which I don't remember, is about trying to find another way to get him to stop.
Because of full-spectrum avoidance of my entire life, I'm now deep-diving into this Donnelly case. I really don't know what to think, but it does seem like a great example of how thoroughly academic departments are governed by norms. (Which is not the same as "ungovernable," strictly speaking, but conflicts over norms are always going to be rough to adjudicate.)
I also found it hilarious that two of the Reddit hits were this (lengthy discussion from January 2023) and this (2019).
Have you tried playing Civ V to avoid things?
Apparently, if you buy an iPhone, you get an extra minute warning of a flash flood in your area than if you have an Android.
The problem they describe is that women are much more likely than men to voluntarily do unpleasant undesirable work which benefits their institutions in exchange for no reward or recognition, and, bizarrely, this is framed as a sign that men are doing something wrong when the solution is entirely within women's grasp, viz. "stop doing that".
The question here is what would happen if everyone stopped doing the uncompensated work. It's not all useless or unnecessary, at least some of it does benefit the institutions. So presumably, in the face of a total strike, the institution would react with carrots or would find some sticks.
It's possible that women academics are generally pathetic martyrs with no sense of their own best interests. It's also possible that they have a reasonable fear that they would be the first in line for negative consequences if the negative consequences started getting handed out.
101: I wonder how many of the things the Reddit commenters suggest as a better alternative had already been attempted? I haven't read that whole thread, but it seems likely the department tried "gently" suggesting emeritus/retirement.
Maybe the real problem is that academia isn't funded enough to be able to support the occasional non-contributor while others cover the actual work of teaching, research, and service. People love to talk about cutting waste in universities but I'd bet there are more people hanging out while doing little in large, profitable corporate organizations than in most universities.
Another possibility is that the work is necessary, but the powers that be will let the academic institution fall apart rather than provide incentives for getting it done. Men, under that theory, are more likely to be indifferent to damage to the larger institution, regardless of their formal commitment to help maintain it, and be motivated only by their own direct interest in additional leisure or time to spend on their chosen pursuits. Women, on the other hand, seem to be more strongly motivated by considerations of honesty, even where they won't be punished for being dishonest, and a sense of professional responsibility to the imperfect institutions of which they are members.
You could perceive this as women being hapless chumps who deserve to be taken advantage of by craftier, more sensible men. If that's how you think about things.
I also successfully avoid video games.
It looks like after a period of forced unpaid leave, the guy managed to retire with Emeritus status fairly recently, so after those articles were published? Archive of department site from March 2023 (still active faculty); not yet on emeritus list in Sep 2023. Okay FINE I will write a damn email now. (My kid is sick for the sixth day running with a mysterious GI ailment that has kept her from eating enough food to get through a busy schoolday. Everyone is very tired of it, but it just is not getting resolved. I took her to the doctor already, and they didn't have an obvious fix.)
I had a job at a not-academic organization where there were a group of people who'd do interviews as part of their job and also were responsible for making sure those interviews got edited for publication. Except many of them would take forever or just would never do the editorial part, and it was clear that it was considered part of the job enough that failing to edit would be a problem. While failing to interview would have been a problem for them.
My feeling was that you could make the editing an explicit part of someone's job and, you know, pay them to do it or stop paying them if they didn't do it. But the leadership (including the interviewers) felt that only the interviewers were "qualified" to make and sign off on edits, and that was that. Someone did manage the communication among interview participants, plus all the scheduling and everything else, and it didn't make sense for them to edit on top of all their other duties. But you could have, again, created an editor job and hired someone with enough prestige or caché or mental whateverness to be qualified to sign off on edits. It was better if the interviewers edited, but not better if no one edited. By the time I left, there was a huge backlog of interviews that were considered both essential enough to be among the highest valued "assets" of the organization and simultaneously not important enough to publish on any particular timeline.
Oh, and if you're wondering, why not make the interviewers edit by making it an essential part of their job? Good question! But that was clearly not going to happen, plus if you had a good editor and people who were good at interviewing but not editing you could play to everyone's strengths.
78. NMM to the search for the real killer
Apparently Michael Tracy will be taking up the cudgel.
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1778556562203611432?s=46&t=qd8I3ZXUD2bzNhzE_AtTxA
One of the most reliably wrong people ever. Way back in the day (2016) Maggie Haberman revealed in a tweet that she was generally a fan.
I remember the OJ verdict because a friend asked me after class where I was going to go to watch the verdict and I said "verdict?" and then he looked at me like I was crazy. So maybe I don't remember where I was when the verdict was announced, maybe at the library.
111. Is there a font that supports writing his name upside down? Bring back the claymation death matches, him and Shaun King can go. Or better still the two of them can try competitive agricultural work or logging or something. Parasites.
84 universities are, from an employment point of view, inherently ungovernable - there is no way for a university to exert any control whatsoever over the actions of any of its faculty, unless they actually start committing crimes
Exactly right, but I'm not really sure about the committing crimes part, to be honest.
They medical school professor here who murdered his wife with cyanide purchased through the university is in prison.
Here's the thing. The academy relies on a lot of uncompensated work, cf. "other duties as assigned", and there are no carrots or sticks. And lots of meetings could be emails, but there are also things that are important, and "well someone would magically move it to category one" isn't a thing.
Anyhow, I'm chair, the differences in workload between men and women was noticeable enough at reviews this year, but also guys would count reviewing one journal article as "making an impact" and their hobby as "community engagement" and women would put ten reviews in "other service.". So now I'm quietly telling the women not to volunteer for things and putting the men in committees.
The other problem here is that I'm very good, efficient, and extremely well-respected, so I get asked to do a lot of stuff that would surely fill someone else's waking hours but is Tuesday morning for me. But I looked at my c.v. and realized I'm getting nothing for most of it, and I'm pulling back unless I start getting compensated for it.
90: our legislature just gutted tenure and the end result will be that I have to write reviews of all the dead weight and the president will probably have to fire someone in gender studies and we'll still have the dead weight.
Apparently the flash floods were about twenty miles away.
I guess there's some closer. Maybe I should not ignore the phone when it does a weather alert.
"The question here is what would happen if everyone stopped doing the uncompensated work. It's not all useless or unnecessary, at least some of it does benefit the institutions. So presumably, in the face of a total strike, the institution would react with carrots or would find some sticks."
Yes, that is what normally happens in response to successful industrial action.
"It's possible that women academics are generally pathetic martyrs with no sense of their own best interests. It's also possible that they have a reasonable fear that they would be the first in line for negative consequences if the negative consequences started getting handed out."
Walk me through the logic here. At present there are no punishments for not doing this work. Women do most of it. And you think that, if there started to be punishments for not doing the work, these would be inflicted mostly on the women? How would that happen? Would they all stop doing this work as soon as there was an incentive to keep doing it? That isn't just being a pathetic martyr, that's actual masochism.
"Another possibility is that the work is necessary, but the powers that be will let the academic institution fall apart rather than provide incentives for getting it done."
That is a possibility, yes. I don't think it's a very likely one, because it is virtually never true of any institution that the people who run it and benefit from it will let it collapse rather than make minor management changes.
And if I were the annoyed female academic fed up with doing 20 hours of unpaid admin work per week, I would not be feeling very much loyalty to said institution, and would be very tempted to give it a go and see what happened.
At present there are no punishments for not doing this work. Women do most of it. And you think that, if there started to be punishments for not doing the work, these would be inflicted mostly on the women? How would that happen?
Women would be held to a higher standard, as usual.
"Women, on the other hand, seem to be more strongly motivated by considerations of honesty, even where they won't be punished for being dishonest, "
See, this point of view is very odd. "Dishonest"?? It is not immoral to refuse to volunteer for huge amounts of unpaid, unrecognised work!
Or is Cala being dishonest?
"The other problem here is that I'm very good, efficient, and extremely well-respected, so I get asked to do a lot of stuff that would surely fill someone else's waking hours but is Tuesday morning for me. But I looked at my c.v. and realized I'm getting nothing for most of it, and I'm pulling back unless I start getting compensated for it."
The thing is that this is all a bit of a sidetrack.
The article itself admits that there are incentives available and in use to get people to do service work which they don't want to do. You can offer to do some of their work in exchange - this is called "barter" by the authors. You can promise them help with their careers further down the line - this is called "investment". And both these tools are used! By both men and women! It simply isn't the case that this work is only being done by women, or that there is no way to incentivise people to do it.
The issue is that most of the work is being done by women who for some reason feel like doing it without getting anything in return at all. My suggestion is that they should stop doing that, and should instead do what they are already doing in some cases, and what their male colleagues are doing almost all the time - saying "I will do this service work but in exchange I need you to teach one of my classes or something". This would not be dishonest. It might even benefit both men and women because at present, as described, there is a market in which you swap service work for, essentially, favours, and it is possible that men trying to trade in this market are being undercut by women who are doing service work for free.
Framing the act of doing massive amounts of unpaid, unrewarded work as a question of "loyalty to the institution" and even, incredibly, of "honesty", is an extremely toxic approach. You know who I work for. You think doctors and nurses (and health care workers generally) don't feel immense loyalty to the NHS and to their patients? You think they don't have extremely strongly reinforced professional expectations of service? Of course they do. Doesn't stop them going on strike for better conditions, or bringing complaints when they feel they're being unfairly treated.
Here's the thing, ajay. Every ambitious academic woman I know looked at this article and said, "yup." It's the dynamic where dad mowing the lawn and "I'd help if she asked" is his satisfactory contribution, and mom is doing literally everything else, such to the point that I can talk to the (female) chair of the business program and describe a deadweight coworker situation as "I'm done with picking up their socks" and that's perfectly sufficient to describe the dynamic. It's really not just that the girls are dumb and the boys are so smart, poor dears with their labor being fucking undercut by women (good lord, man.) The standards aren't the same. The same was true of publication standards, by the way, prior to more transparent guidelines (MIT study on this, iirc.)
A little more detail:
Some of the service stuff is compensated -- my position as chair, for example. Some of it is framed as an "investment"; chair this committee, do a good job, and you get help with your career later. Then there's a bunch of stuff that is important, but doesn't come with a title or compensation or anything but is vital and well, it might help your career? Wouldn't it be nice if someone picked up the socks? That last category is by far the majority of my service work. I'm good at writing policy, usually as someone who is specifically asked to do so, but who isn't chair of the committee, or maybe there's not even a committee, just a task (how do we distinguish the different delivery methods of our classes during COVID?) It's turning into a real problem for me personally, because I'm winding up with lots of valuable experience that is going to matter only if I move into administration.
(Men who do this kind of thing on our campus? They exist! Oh, they're Distinguished Professors. Look at all the service they do! What leaders! They get awards and money and titles. I get asked to write more policy.)
So, cool, hey, Cala, the associate provost is stepping down. Would you.... be on the search committee, since you work so closely with that office? Message: not yet, sweetie. You've only been chair two years. That's... actually probably fair. The current associate provost had been chair for nine years when he moved up. And obviously if the provost is asking me to be on the committee, I'm not someone who is ready. Maybe I need a little bit more work.
Who we hire: a nice external boy full of platitudes who has less experience than I do at everything, but got a couple of titles. He's very nice. I actually don't really have strong objections to him. He'll probably be pretty good. I am sure I will help him do a great job. You know, since I've worked so closely with the office, and I know the institutional dynamics really well.
And this is why I told the dean and the current associate provost that I'm done with this. But we value you! No, you don't. Go ask one of your distinguished professors to do it.
Here's the thing, ajay. Every ambitious academic woman I know looked at this article and said, "yup." It's the dynamic where dad mowing the lawn and "I'd help if she asked" is his satisfactory contribution, and mom is doing literally everything else
YOUR WORKPLACE IS NOT YOUR FAMILY HOME ffs. Your workplace is a place where you go and perform contractually specified duties, in exchange for money. You should absolutely not be acting there as you do at home, simply because they are both buildings in which there are human beings! You live in your family home, with people whom you love and whose welfare you value very highly.
I'm not endorsing the dynamic. But there is a gendered difference in how one understands contractually assigned duties, and in how that's rewarded internally. Me not picking up socks is read as me not doing the work. Not a team player. Men picking up socks? WHAT AN AMAZING LEADER. Men failing to pick up socks? Maybe we need to encourage him with an extended contract and $10,000 per annum.
Or, as you said, some of this is supposed to be "investment", right? It's just one with a bad ROI for a lot of women.
Co-sign everything Cala said. Plus if no one steps up to do the work, not only do women get disproportionately blamed as shirkers, but the defaults exacerbate the existing inequalities. So if no one reads the applications, they admit the students who have patrons who make phone calls. And in the absence of a policy things get assigned to "the people who seem to have time and are good at them" who coincidentally are mostly women.
It's not coincidental that I found it easier to create a compensated position for myself as advising coordinator than to stop students from asking me to help, stop colleagues from referring students to me, or let students take an extra term because of bad advising.
I agree that women get the short end of this stick either way, but on the other hand ajay is right that the goal state here can't be everyone doing uncompensated work out of guilt. You need structural solutions, hence my 5.
Which is to say, 132 is great, and we need more of that.
Another big one here is graduate advising, and Illinois has a half-course reduction for every student you graduate, which is good system!
Increasing everyone's base teaching load and giving more reductions is one easy way to improve things (though you still can run into the wrong people being rewarded if course).
127 is forcefully put, but it is actual evidence, from someone in a very good position to know, that my suggestion ("if academic women are fed up with voluntarily doing huge amounts of unrewarded, unrecognised service work, they should emulate academic men and start refusing to do so much of it") is entirely practicable and effective.
Maybe? It's not getting me money yet. I think I have enough clout to swing it? But a structural solution would be preferable, except that I know who would have to write the policy and I'm not gonna.
Systems that rely on women having 10 years of youthful enthusiastic exploitation, followed by 10 years of growing jadedness, before retreating in exasperated quiet quitting are always going to have a fresh generation of women to exploit.
Not if you don't hire anyone!
My department is quickly hitting the "everyone is jaded" point. We have 1 Assistant Professor, and 4 Associates (not counting the terminal associates) out of 37.
137 describes my personal attitudes to working pretty well, but more initial enthusiasm that wasn't exploited. I'll have a look for gendered discussion, but I found the book "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" pretty useful for thinking through the dynamics.
In a faculty meeting preparing for a departmental review we were supposed to write a vision statement and the chair was having trouble getting the faculty to engage with the process, and someone said in the meeting: "The vision of this department is doom."
137: I think at my institution COVID hastened the jaded-to-useless transition of the cohort about five years ahead of me.
"A place to go in the morning."
Of course there's an element of honesty in doing the job you've explicitly agreed to do, even if your employer is bad at punishing you for failures. Essear in 33 describes people who are nominally on committees, do no work on them, and take credit for 'service' as a result. That's not clever, that's dishonest.
I could get away with not doing my job for years -- my employer is really bad at getting rid of dead weight. The fact that I wouldn't be punished doesn't mean I haven't agreed to do it in exchange for my salary and that it wouldn't be dishonest of me to refuse to carry out any of the component tasks without punishment.
It's kinda weird to me how bad the ongoing effects of COVID are for my general sense of purpose and well-being. It's been nearly two years since I stopped taking any covid precautions and I'm still just full of sadness.
Closely related question as we are on the subject. Almost every academic of my age that I know is hanging on in at least some capacity. This is in stark contrast to folks in private industry who have generally been out for years*. ( For instance when I got paid handsomely to get out of Dodge at age 63 I was the 2nd or 3rd oldest in my several hundred person department.)
Is this your experience? And is it considered a big problem? When I mildly hint that it might be time to go and make room for younger folk I am met with hostility and protestations of the ample opportunities for youngsters in their field (Ha!). The one argument they make that I think potentially carries weight is that they are valued for their ability to get grants--which is of course another kind of structural problem.
*It is true that not insignificant percentage continue with consulting gigs, so there is certainly some reduction of work demand for younger folks.
On the one hand, yes it's a huge problem. On the other hand, it doesn't actually make room for younger people, since the retirements just don't get replaced. That is, if *everyone* over 65 retired that would probably result in some kind of significant change across the industry, but on the margins it does nothing (or rather less than nothing, since there are plenty of 65+ faculty who are good at their job).
144: Right.
Shorter ajay:
"The only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax," Clinton said.
Trump: "That makes me smart."
Odds are decent that my program gets terminated in the next five years. I will probably be fine, but if it does, I'm staying till 80 out of spite.
The thing is the 63 yo dead weight has a sweet gig, and they're probably going to replace him with an adjunct. So, might as well golf all day.
I occasionally muse about going on the job market, but really all I can say is that I'm kinda bored at my job. But it generally allows me enough time for my more-time-consuming local blogging hobby and there's a tuition exchange program for the kids' college, and I basically like teaching here, so really I should just stay put.
So one takeaway I am getting from this thread, and many threads over the last year, is that ajay badly needs a different and better job. This one contains the clearest evidence to support my months-old hypothesis.
I've been seriously considering applying for jobs, but I really like my town, and I really really like having a $1100/mth mortgage. And it's not obvious to me how much better other places are.
There was a period in the early 90s when I was so bored at my (non-academic) job that I began to seriously fear it would lead to significantly bad consequences; I just really could not bring myself to do the basic stuff of the job. (Plus there was Usenet, and tetris, and Crystal Quest, and Jewelbox.) Then I was serendipitously and fortuitously volunteered for a job at the epicenter of massive internal politics and strife which was endlessly aggravating but not boring in the minute-to-minute sense
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The kids are alright? Maybe? Or at least decently bizarre.
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Speaking of lazy jerks, folks may be wondering what the US Supreme Court is up to. Three opinions today, first since the two on March 19. (1) Unanimously settled a dispute about the scope of the transportation workers exemption to the federal arbitration act. Yes, delivery drivers for bakeries are exempt. (2) Unanimously resolved a question of securities law, whether failing to report a change of law that ended up having a serious impact on stock price was actionable under section 10(b)(5): No. (3) What is the proper format for deciding whether a legislatively mandated county impact fee for real estate development constitutes a Taking. Unanimous on the position that it doesn't matter whether the fee was imposed administratively or legislatively -- this was enough to reverse the California courts, and send the case back. Three separate sets of justices wrote separately, each emphasizing what wasn't being decided.
(1) by Roberts, (2) by Sotomayor, (3) by Barrett with concurrences (a) Sotomayor (joined by Jackson), (b) Gorsuch, (c) Kav (joined by Kagan and Jackson).
Thomas and Alito could have stayed home. More likely, though, they're busy crafting some kind of evil bullshit in the other cases argued this term.
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"Of course there's an element of honesty in doing the job you've explicitly agreed to do, even if your employer is bad at punishing you for failures"
Yeah, sure, but I thought we were talking here about voluntarily doing additional service work that wasn't part of your job, because no one else was doing it and you felt you ought to.
The whole question is what is or isn't part of your job. This is all stuff that in some sense is "part of your job" but in some sense isn't, and that's the problem. It's a spectrum that you seem to want to treat as a binary.
Like it's definitely part of the job that I'm supposed spend 1/6th of my time on unspecified "service." The problem is that there's not really much of a mechanism to check that I'm doing so, or to make sure I'm doing a *good* job at it instead of a bad one. But it's undoubtedly true that service is 1/6th of my job!
The underlying problem is that the weird medieval heritage of faculty self-governance in universities means that a lot of work that in any other institution would be done by a separate administrative staff is considered part of the job of a professor, but it's obviously not the most important part of the job and there's a lot of ambiguity surrounding it that people take advantage of. (Universities do also have a separate administrative staff but it does other things that mostly don't overlap with this stuff. It's all very weird from the outside.)
Because I was in the medical schools, I only ever saw senior professors with plenty of staff. Mostly because grants administration is the most intellectually demanding task that a university engages in.
155.3 is prompting a storm in my feeds. These fees are IMO pretty misguided in general, pushed by a coalition of people who genuinely want the more revenue to spend on stuff (since Prop 13 constrains revenue) and people who want the fees to be as high as possible to block development. They've gotten so high in so much of California it's plausible to need to figure out if it's a taking in practice, but as Charley notes the decision is pretty narrow so no one's sure how far it's going to lead yet.
Of course the majority would like to expand the concept of takings beyond all recognition, to perhaps even environmental regs, so it's not harmless. But limited to this issue it's correct in a stopped-clock way, even if the courts are ill equipped to decide the underlying policy questions. (The 3 may have joined with the 6 partly to make the decision narrower, but they may have been genuinely outraged by the underlying conduct too.)
157: exactly. With shared governance (not the hospital model ajay has in mind where apparently everyone works to rule at all times?), faculty count as something of management. Is writing the university's COVID delivery model my job? I mean, maybe? It's not clearly not my job in the way that handling student registration isn't my job.
159: so the legislature effectively ended shared governance this session, restricting faculty only to curriculum and academics. This is not financially feasible. I'm on the committee that normally sets the agenda for the coming year for policy work. Most of our work is de jure not allowed now. I don't think we can send them anything and I'm not inclined to if we can't vote on it, so I hope they have fun hiring eleventy assistant vice presidents to do the work.
My associate dean just asked us to help students with advising and I'm being a pest and citing state law.
157 is exactly right. As mentioned above, grad supervision is a good example here. Definitely, explicitly part of the job, even more so than amorphous 'admin/service'. If you're a prof in a department with a grad program, you've been hired in part to teach grad students and you draw significant benefits from that: lower teaching loads, higher pay, more prestige...
As Chair I assign classes. It's the rare place where I just get to tell people what to do. But the thing about supervision is that typically it isn't assigned; it's negotiated between faculty and the student.
Now in some disciplines, this isn't really a problem because supervising grad students contributes directly to a faculty member's research. They run labs, gather and crunch data, etc... In those disciplines, high power/prestige faculty members do their share-- and more!-- of supervision.
In other disciplines, like mine, supervision does not contribute to research in the same way. In those disciplines, high power/prestige people often do much less supervision. And there is no lever beyond slightly lower annual review scores to encourage people to supervise.
In my department, there might be 20 -30 graduate projects at any one time that require individual supervision. At any given time three of us are probably supervising 15 of those between us. Another three of us never supervise any. Those people publish more than the over-burdened supervisors do!
For us fortunately many of the high prestige people are also the over-advising people, so the situation is less perverse, but mostly it's just luck that we have top people who are responsible citizens and/or really enjoy advising students.
But that's just luck, and it'd be better to give everyone a slightly higher load and reductions for advising. (But I'm not sure it'd be smart politically to make that deal, eventually the administration would take away the reductions.)
My hospital,was run in an academic way, and we have gotten the message that that is too inefficient, and it needs to be more corporate, top-down and stream-lined.
Does that mean the managers are supposed to use cocaine or meth? I always get confused.
149 I'm staying till 80 out of spite
Why would you retire so young, then? I have a colleague who only retired recently at, I think, 91. I have multiple colleagues in the later half of their 80s who haven't retired and show no inclination to do so soon.
It's kinda strange, I would like some day to retire and not be tied down to a class schedule. I guess maybe their teaching load is so comically low that it's ok?
171: Michael Dukakis* was honored the other day. He's 91, and he has a cane now do he's dliwed fown a bit. He taught at Northeastern fir 30 years after retiring from politics, so he was doing that until age 87, maybe.
I saw him at a Deval Patrick rally in 2006, and he was just standing in the Common instead of up on stage. Also saw him walk away from a T station and pick up litter.
I have no idea how effective he would have been as a president in DC but a stand-up guy.
The Ones Who Walk Away From the T Station
My dad was forced out at 79.
My colleague is retiring this year. I'm not sure how old he is, but this is his 49th year here. His vibe is more "is he safe walking without a walker?" and less "oh was he hired at age 20?"
Oh look, he has a wikipedia page. He was born in 1932.
171: The guy who retired at over 90 had his primary appointment in astronomy, and they only teach 1/0. The people in their late 80s in my department still teach the standard 1/1, although one of them often teaches the "topics in research" class where a different professor from the department gives a talk about their work every week, and the course instructor doesn't do anything except scheduling who talks when and maybe asking some questions.
A whole lot of my colleagues who are over 60 or so teach a freshman seminar every year, which meets just one day a week and is often about some oddball subject like solving puzzles or chatting about the popular books the instructor has written or just telling stories about the glory days of their career. They also tend to teach advanced graduate classes where either they make students research topics and present in every class, or they bring in their friends to give guest lectures.
We have the most extreme lopsidedness in graduate advising I've ever heard of: we have something like 200 grad students in the department, and something like 40 of them are advised by one person. I am not so confident they are advised well, but that's a different story.
I have no idea how effective he would have been as a president in DC but a stand-up guy.
I think he would have been totally unprepared for the Republican onslaught that would have followed the end of the Berlin Wall, and all the things that followed it. I never voted for him, and will never forgive him for Clarence Thomas, but I think GHWB was the right guy -- with Baker and Scowcroft -- for that moment. Republicans in opposition would have pulled out all the stops to make sure nothing about the end of the Cold War either (a) took place or (b) could be understood as a vindication of the post-war Western consensus.
180: Yeah, I kind of figured. Also, Kitty Dukakis was severely depressed and got ECT. She's been a huge advocate for mental health, but I'm sure the Republicans in DC would have been merciless.
We went to the 9/11 museum and then we're making our way to Chinatown for lunch and ran into what I thought was a movie filming location. Production trucks, crew meal trucks, giant lighting boards and backdrops on lifts all around a building, people in costumes which appeared to be a combination of military, police, and professional outfits. Everyone mugging for camera stands and having a good time before the shooting started. Then I realized it was the courthouse and it was the production setup for Trump's trial starting tomorrow.