Tag: ensure

  • How to Ensure You’ll Never Be a Chair Again (opinion/humor)

    How to Ensure You’ll Never Be a Chair Again (opinion/humor)

    “First rule of leadership: Everything is your fault.”

    –from A Bug’s Life

    Congratulations! You have been elected or appointed or duped into serving as department chair, the role that everyone says is the hardest job on campus. Maybe that’s what attracted you to the position—you enjoy working days, nights and weekends on thorny issues that rarely have anything to do with creativity, inspiration or intellectualism. Perhaps you dreamed of having a positive impact on mentoring young faculty or garnering more respect and resources for your department from the upper administration.

    If you’ve spent more than a month on the job, your grandiose vision of being admired and maybe even beloved by the faculty, staff and students will have crashed on the jagged shores of “What have you done for me today?” reality. It’s time for Plan B. We provide a list of proven techniques to ensure you will never be asked to serve as chair again.

    Tip #1: Spend the bulk of your time on strategic planning.

    Strategic plans are the most important work you will do as chair; we all know these documents are constantly referred to. I have mine on laminated cards that I hand out to prospective donors and students and frequently read during coffee breaks.

    When writing these documents, create “word salads”— the more pseudo-intellectual the better. Consistent sprinkling of terms like “revolutionary,” “intellectual” and “equity” will strengthen the document. Violate George Orwell’s writing rules by always using a long word where a short one will do and using jargon in place of everyday English equivalents (e.g., “With courageous attention to principles of equity and fairness, we will innovatively co-create a multi-trans-disciplinary minor that relentlessly centers student success while concurrently providing a revenue stream to be utilized for upgrading the office furniture.”)

    Form subcommittees to do this work and make sure they meet over the summer—particularly if your faculty are on nine-month appointments. Task subcommittee members with creating these documents from scratch. Don’t spend time locating prior versions or drafting a potential plan as a starting point.

    Tell the subcommittees you are happy to meet with them when they need your input. Then decline every invitation to do so. Having them guess what you want as a final product will create lively conversation and allow them to bond over your obtuse directions.

    Tip #2: Run faculty meetings from hell.

    Use faculty meetings as an opportunity to read out newsy updates that could easily have been emailed. Or, even better, email each of these items individually AND read them out loud in faculty meetings. Remember that your faculty are not busy with their own research, teaching and service.

    When sensitive issues are on the agenda, make your position crystal clear and stress its superiority to any other strategy before calling for a vote. Then respond to questions from faculty according to how hard they’ve worked to curry favor with you. The faculty will soon learn that the meetings go much more smoothly without the distraction of other viewpoints or lively debate.

    Lastly, have faculty vote publicly on these decisions by simply raising their hands. Pre-tenure faculty will feel just as comfortable as full professors in sharing their votes. Similar comfort levels will be felt by those of differing races/ethnicities, cultural backgrounds and genders. If you as chair feel that a decision is straightforward, so will they.

    Tip #3: Avoid meeting with faculty to review their research trajectory.

    An annual report from each faculty member will provide more than enough information, saving you time from meeting with each of your faculty members in person. Pre-tenure faculty who are heading off in multiple, diverse directions to obtain funding, or who are giving up on grants after a first rejection, should face the consequences they deserve. We’ve all suffered through that time period, and so should they.

    In that spirit, avoid arranging for and supporting mentoring teams for new faculty. Or, if you have already assigned a new faculty member their mentor, assume that the pair is meeting regularly. New faculty will always feel comfortable reaching out to their busy, senior mentors whenever they have questions.

    Tip #4: Be an expert in everything.

    Departments are complex organizations and chairing them involves overseeing a swarm of areas including finances/budget, human resources, curriculum, teaching assignments, graduate student issues, computing support, etc. Wear as many hats as possible and be the expert on all of these topics. Do not delegate to staff, graduate program directors or associate chairs who may have expertise in these areas.

    Tip #5: Assign faculty as much service as possible.

    Faculty members are always trying to get away with less work—therefore, make a one-size-fits-all rule for assigning service and stick with it. In this spirit, confuse “equity” with “equality” and cut off any reference to diversity, equity and inclusion as social justice with the phrase, “you know, DEIJ, yadda yadda yadda.”

    Don’t count mentoring other faculty as service. In fact, don’t count any useful, impactful or innovative service if it happened outside one of your official committees. If it really was a clever idea, you would have already thought of it.

    When faculty ask for a break from a busy committee to focus on a major grant proposal or to develop a new course, remind them that when you were a faculty member, you were able to do both tasks while also serving as the business officer, graduate program director and teaching daily yoga classes for emeritus faculty.

    Tip #6: Be the dean’s messenger.

    You, as chair, are essentially the mouthpiece of the dean and the upper administration. Therefore, focus the bulk of your time on top-down initiatives. Do not canvass your faculty to see what they need for their own growth and success. And, if you instead take the rash step of creating a department-driven plan, be sure to enlist the dean’s advice on every step you take. Take care to assign the bulk of planning work to unproductive faculty who have taught the same course in the same way for 15 years and last received a major research grant before the year 2000.

    Lastly, encourage faculty to get to know the dean and other members of the upper administration. Then savagely punish them for any communication that does not go directly through you.

    Tip #7: Be an intrepid decision maker.

    When a decision from the chair is called for, don’t solicit thoughts from your faculty first. It looks stronger if you make your decision in isolation. Similarly, when faculty members ask you for things, say “no” to every request to show that you are strong and decisive. Or, say “yes” to the random “hallway ask” instead of considering that, if one faculty member has a need, so may another.

    Frequently remind your faculty that you are “data-driven” and demand that any request, no matter how minuscule, come with several pages of rationale that delineates costs to the penny, identifies exact sources of each dollar, and includes a comprehensive, multi-method analysis of return on investment. Then make a decision based on whether you are in a good or bad mood and whether the faculty request comes from one of your “favorites.”

    Tip #8: Respond immediately to student complaints about faculty.

    When you receive a complaint about a faculty member from a student, take action against that faculty member immediately. Remember that students are totally objective; there cannot be another side to the story. Let the associate dean handle things with the faculty member directly—or even better, the dean. Disregard the department bylaws that the faculty worked so hard to develop. Decisive action is better than adhering to agreed-upon guidelines. Don’t fulfill your role as the faculty member’s primary supervisor, certainly not one who has their best interests at heart.

    Tip #9: Let everyone know how busy and important you are.

    Say things like, “I remember when I was just a faculty member; it was so much easier than being chair.” Or, even better, “The previous chair did it wrong; back at my old school, we did it better.”

    Always refer to the dean, provost and the president by their first names. Then, if the faculty do the same, tell them they are being disrespectful.

    Tip #10: Have no life and put your research on hold.

    It’s crazy to think that you can keep your own lab going. Instead, spend the bulk of your time responding to emails. You’ll feel proud of your alacrity in immediately responding to the latest requests from the upper administration. Don’t carve out dedicated “meet with the chair coffee hours,” nor dedicated time to progress in your own work. You’ll easily pick up where you left off with your own research after your chair-hood!

    Finally, and most importantly, although you will never again be asked to serve as chair, you will be eminently qualified to be a dean. Prepare yourself now to be aggressively headhunted for open positions!

    Disclaimer: Any resemblance to specific chairs, present or past, is purely coincidental. No chairs were harmed in the making of this product.

    Lisa Chasan-Taber, Sc.D., is a professor and former chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

    Barry Braun, Ph.D., is a professor and head of the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University.

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  • ensure college grads gain higher incomes

    ensure college grads gain higher incomes

    Seventeen years ago, the Lumina Foundation set out to try to raise the percentage of working-age U.S. adults with a college credential from 38 percent to 60 percent by 2025.

    It didn’t reach that goal, though it was only short a few percentage points; today, 55 percent of individuals between the ages of 25 and 64 have a college degree or short-term credential, an increase that Lumina CEO Jamie Merisotis called “one of the most significant but least recognized success stories of the past decade and a half.” 

    But times have changed since 2008, Lumina’s leaders said during a news briefing Monday, and in developing a new goal for the coming 15 years, they chose to focus not only on college attainment, but also on making sure that people’s college degrees help them find success and prosperity in their careers.

    That’s why the foundation’s new goal aims to increase the number of adults in the labor force who have a “credential of value”—meaning they have earned a college credential and now make an income at least 15 percent more than the national average for high school graduates—to 75 percent by 2040. That number lines up with various labor projections, such as a Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce report, released earlier this year, that anticipated that 72 percent of jobs will require postsecondary education or training by the year 2031.

    Lumina’s leaders decided to focus on earnings in large part because of Americans’ lack of confidence in the value of higher education. Polls by Gallup and Lumina have shown that a major reason people don’t think a degree is worth the high cost of attending college is because they don’t believe higher education sets people up well to be successful in the workforce.

    “Our view is that we’ve got to do more to transform higher education workforce systems in order to meet human talent needs, in order to expand economic prosperity for individuals and for families and for communities,” said Merisotis. “Today, we have to make sure higher education literally serves more people better.”

    Currently, only 44.1 percent of the U.S. labor force—which includes members of the military and those who are looking for work—has a college degree or certificate and earns at least 15 percent more than those with just a high school diploma, according to the foundation’s analysis of Census data. Those rates are significantly lower for Native American, Hispanic and Black people, and higher for white and Asian people.

    The foundation laid out four pillars it plans to prioritize to reach that 75 percent goal: continuing to expand access to college, promoting student success and retention, redesigning college and workforce readiness to better support today’s students, and ensuring the credentials students receive do, in fact, pay off.

    Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the education equity nonprofit EdTrust, lauded the foundation for turning its focus to college value—and for providing a definition of what a valuable credential actually is.

    “The return-on-investment piece is under serious scrutiny nationally,” he said. “Including a metric that measures outcome—that measures income as an outcome—pushes folks to think about the return on investment of higher education that I think is a much-needed data point”—though he noted that earning 15 percent more than high school graduates, who made an average of about $38,000 in 2023, seems like “a low bar.”

    (Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice president of impact and planning, said at the media briefing that the 15 percent figure was determined in consultation with multiple labor economists.)

    Lumina’s quest to increase credentials of value will be a boon not only to graduates, but also to employers seeking to recruit talent they can trust will have the job skills to succeed in their role, according to Shawn VanDerziel, president and CEO of the National Association of Colleges and Employers. In an email to Inside Higher Ed, he called the project a “worthy goal” and a “win-win” for graduates and employers.

    “The education landscape is changing and how adults are consuming education is changing,” he wrote in an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed. “With Lumina’s assistance, I hope we can expand the speed at which our educational institutions can evolve to meet the changing needs of employers and their focus on skills-based hiring.”

    Charles Ansell, vice president for research, policy and advocacy at Complete College America, noted that while he appreciated the foundation’s focus on the value of credentials, he was also happy Lumina hadn’t shifted its focus away from attainment entirely.

    “College attainment is still the best predictor of the higher wage outcomes,” he said. “If you have full-time-student graduation rates hovering in the 20s at best in the community college space … it’s hard to get economic mobility. It’s still extremely important to put that attainment goal itself first and not to lose sight of quantifying that college completion.”

    As for whether the 75 percent goal seems achievable? That’s irrelevant, Ansel argued, because it’s simply what needs to happen to keep the country’s economy and democracy healthy.

    “We should never lie to ourselves about what we need to do,” he said. “I don’t find it unrealistic—it’s what we need to do.”

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