Dean's Letter

By now most of you have been able to read the Provost's effusive letter praising our present interim (sorry) permanent dean. While the letter explains she probably won't stay past next year there are no promises to that effect. There is likewise no promise of an actual search for a dean. Given the tone of the letter, I would not hold my breath waiting for a search. Also given the tone of the letter, one might think that on the eigth day Dr. McClelland created the college of Arts and Sciences as well as a global economy. This is difficult for us mere mortals to actually determine because we never really get to evaluate the gods. Dr. White has provided an excellent critique of the letter and I would ask all to thoroughly read it. Just one last point before I depart. What exactly got put on hold because her title was interim? What has not taken place (besides a real search) that would have taken place with a dean? If her leadership has been that effective, why does the title matter? (Perhaps an intended slap at A & S Council?)Inquiring minds wish to know.

Let me be clear

Just in case there was any ambiguity as to where Dr. Tinkle stands on the idea of personal interviews, I am deadset against them. We have spent the last thirty plus years attempting to take the "personal" out of the tenure process. We have tried to get all levels to approach the process on as unbiased a level as possible. That's why the dossier is the only document anyone gets to base their decision on. To assume that the president of this university is somehow endowed with super human powers to ignore any personal information in a one-on-one interview is nonsense. Just look at the deans' reactions to the idea. Everyone is scared to death to disagree with him. This emperor has no clothes and it is high time someone with more authority than Dr. Tinkle tells him so.

Confused

Please undertand it is easy to confuse me, but this time the administration has done a bangup job. Under section9.2.3.2 it says in discussing the dossier for tenure and promotion, "Thereafter , the file shall be considered sealed and all subsequent evaluators shall make their judgments based on the file as presented. All evaluating units have the right to request in writing to the member a clarification of dossier contents, but "clarification" shall not require additional documentation or materials to be submitted by the member."

There is nothing there to imply a meeting with the President. If the Pres. really wants to get to know the nontenured faculty, this is not the way to do it. This is also not the time to do it. To imply that the Pres. is somehow perfect and would never let any personal issues come between him and a decision begs the question, "Why then have the meeting at all?"

I don't really care what the administration's intentions are; we have a collective bargaining agreement that specifically lays out the process. They want to change the process. Then negotiate the change. I really enjoyed all the Collegian quotes from the deans saying what a great idea this is. Does anyone really believe a dean in this environment will disagree with the Pres.?

A & S Meeting

Well it took several hundred phone calls but Dr. Tinkle has gathered a view of yesterday's public sighting of the dean. Her performance by most accounts was pretty so so. Here are the gathered details. First she was asked about the Confucius Institute. It seems the Chinese government wants to place "institutes" on various college campus around the U.S. Colleges. We were evidently required to apply for the pleasure of having this group on campus. Our Asian Studies faculty did most of the leg work on this. However once the Chinese said yes our faculty were pretty much cut out of any decision-making process and are now more than a touch aggravated. The Dean's response was the make-up of the governing board was three of them and four of us. They had appointed "high ranking officials" as their three members and therefore we appointed three deans and a provost as our representatives. The Dean was unable to explain exactly what "high ranking" meant here. It strikes some that it might have been a good idea to have at least one Asian Studies faculty member on the board. First, they had evidently done most of the work and two it would explain to Chinese administrators that faculty matter here. O, I'm sorry, what a silly statement to make. Also, the Institute was originally supposed to be housed in the Foreign Language Department. However, when Foreign Language asked for resources to make this happen they were told none were available. So we have an institute that the Dean thinks is very important, but an administration that wishes to do this on the cheap and without any questions from the faculty. The Dean made it very apparant that the complaining had to stop or the whole institute deal would go somewhere else. The next A & S meeting will have a panel discussion on the institute. It should be enlightening.

The Dean made a big deal out of making the chairs real managers. She pointed out that the chairs would be given real power when they showed they could handle it. She then used an unidentified department as an example saying that half the faculty had been allowed to submit sabbatical requests. That was evidently not her idea of a chair making the decisions a chair is supposed to make. Now, the problem with this example is that's all the information that was given. Therefore it is difficult to judge if the Dean has given A & S enough information or there are other circumstances. It is entirely possible that the chair abdicated his/her responsibility for this. There may also be real reasons this was done in this fashion by the department. We will wait for "the rest of the story" before passing judgment.

The Dean dropped a little bomb on the A & S crowd near the end of her presentation. Evidently the President wants to meet with the faculty who are up for promotion and tenure. She thought this was a dandy idea. She's wrong. First, it is a probable violation of the contract. There is no "meeting with the Pres." in the process. Second, if they had asked, Henry Moon tried this and stopped it because several lawsuits were threatened. I suggest that anyone wishing tenure or promotion should show up in a lab coat with a stethascope (sp?) around his/her neck.

Finally, the Dean noted there were no resources for hiring but we should look ahead and plan. It has been Dr. Tinkle's experience that there are always resources, just none for what you wish to accomplish. They are available, in this case, for the medical campus. The rest of us get to take a hike.

It was a tragic day around the department. The coffee pot died. Probably all the cigar smoke.

Truer words...

Dear A&S blog person: I’m not a blogger, and before this have never posted anything to the A&S Blog, so I’m not QUITE sure how this will work.  I originally sent a version of this to Jim Nemeth, in response to his request for feedback.  He suggested that this might be posted to the blog, and I’m very comfortable with this.  I do not wish to be anonymous.

 

 

In a recent A&S blog posting, Jim Nemeth asked for input regarding the actions of the “Arts and Sciences Roundtable Initiative” implementation committee.  Like Jim, I have deep concerns regarding the Roundtable Initiative itself and how the College responds to it.  I was a member of the original A&S Roundtable that met a year ago.  It had many good and sincere faculty members, and a few people like Tom Brady who knew nothing of undergraduate education and had no business being there.  There ARE some good things in the Zemsky Report, but it was HIS report, not OUR report, and I fear that the implementation of any portion of the report is being driven by a VERY small group of people, most of them administrators or faculty members with administrative ambitions.

 

From what I have heard, the Extended Roundtable Retreat in early May (in the middle of final-exam week!) was a joke.  A close friend and colleague attended the “Teaching Modalities” session.  There was only ONE session, attended by only 6-8 people, and lasting for a couple of hours, tops.  My colleague described the session as a somewhat interesting and wide-ranging discussion, but not one that really reached any definite conclusions.

 

Here’s my basic question: how can any group of roughly half a dozen people, meeting for only a couple of hours, come up with a plan to address teaching needs in the College??  (Side question: why isn’t the discussion about LEARNING needs, which is really what everything we do is supposed to be about?).

 

Our teaching efforts, most especially at the 1000/2000 level, are failing our students.  UT’s year 1 à year 2 retention rate is now at 68%, a five-year low, meaning that a third of our first-year students do not return for a second year.  (VP Kaye Patten-Wallace quoted a 70% retention rate at Senate a couple of weeks ago.  Apparently she was rounding up – or massaging – her figures…).  Eight years ago our retention number was 75%, third-best for public universities in the state of Ohio.  UT’s advertising proudly trumpets big gains in freshman enrollment, but our support for first-year instruction has been cut back like everything else (except administrative salaries and alternative energy research).  We should be ashamed.  Instead, we’re not even talking about this.

 

I realize that I speak with some bitterness here.  Since resigning from the directorship of the CTL I have become an unperson in the eyes of the administration.  It’s certainly clear that the era of faculty-driven faculty development, which I always espoused during the years of the CTE/CTL, are over.  The new vice-provost position that will replace the CTL clearly has its primary responsibility as a technology shop, aiming to increase the use of DL courses and save some money for the University.  Perhaps that is even the administrative vision for the future of first-year instruction: don’t worry about learning, just make it all an on-line experience. 

 

I want no part of this.

 

Bernard W. Bopp

Professor of Astronomy

Dept. of Physics and Astronomy

McMaster Hall 4002

University of Toledo, MS 111

Toledo, OH 43606

(419) 530-5335 (ofc.)

(419) 530-2723 (fax)

Thank you, Dr. Bopp

See "University, Inc." (and read the book with the same title!)

The following on-campus event is significant for concerned A&S students, faculty and staff:

Filmmaker Kyle Henry will be on campus Friday, November 6, 7:30, for the screening of his film University, Inc., to be shown in the Law School Auditorium along with The Subtext of a Yale Education from filmmaker Laura Dunn. Admission is free (with donations welcome). Both films explore the corporate takeover of academia. Following the screenings, Mr. Henry will lead a panel discussion of the phenomenon’s impact at UT. The UT panel members will represent its faculty, its students and (perhaps) its administration. This event, also known as “THE McCOLLEGE TOUR” is presented by the UT Department of Theatre & Film.

Two items worth noting about this event is that 1) this documentary first appeared in 1999 (concomitantly with THE McCOLLEGE TOUR); and 2) there is coincidently a book worth reading by investigative journalist Jennifer Washburn titled University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (2005). This book is an “investigative and critical analysis on the rise of the corporate university” which grew out of Washburn’s earlier investigations focusing on “the secretive connections between public education and private industry.” Excerpts from a review of Washburn’s University, Inc. by Sharon Hudson include these observations:

“When the profit motive entered university research, universities began to behave like for-profit corporations. Chasing money—and the prestige that attracts it—has created distortions in education. Do undergraduates subsidize research? Some universities now pay “star” professors up to a half million dollars per year, while undergraduate education is “farmed out to the growing army of part-time instructors who receive no benefits and meager pay.” In 1969, 97% of professors were on tenure track; now it is 40%; America now has an army of Ph.D.s scrounging for steady jobs. Tuition has increased at three times the rate of inflation, while students have become “customers” to be gratified with lifestyle luxuries and high grades rather than outstanding education. Funding is diverted from the humanities and social sciences into the science departments that can bring in industrial dollars.
In the lucrative sciences, academic collegiality is giving way to squabbles over patent rights, and the “knowledge commons” is increasingly privatized and hoarded. When professors object, universities assuage them by making them stakeholders in university business enterprises. Ironically, most universities make no profit on their patenting operations, so opening the Pandora’s Box of academic damage yields them no benefits. And in the final twist, American universities have gotten so greedy that now their private partners are complaining—and starting to take their research subsidies overseas!As Washburn points out, the profit-motivated behavior of universities is a gross violation of the public trust that universities have earned over a hundred years. Universities receive public funding and tax exemptions because they serve the public good, providing well-rounded education, unbiased research, and accessible knowledge. But if universities behave like businesses, shouldn’t they be treated like them—legally and fiscally? And, Washburn asks: “Would alumni continue to give so generously to their alma maters if they perceived them as increasingly motivated by profit rather than serving the public good? Would politicians and taxpayers continue to issue tens of billions of dollars annually to colleges and universities in the form of grants, tax exemptions, and student financial aid?”

Question: Does any of this sound familiar?

The round table (continued)

Jim Nemeth's report is available below and I suggest you all read it and contact him. However, Dr. Tinkle has discerned by interviewing several hundred of the participants that Jim has left two very important elements go without comment. First, was the dean's Yoda like pronouncement that, "Number one can we be my children." When it was pointed out that no open-enrollment institutions are a part of the top tier, she merely brushed it off with one of her, "don't get in my way I'm on a roll" glances. The second point is that somehow because the Pres spent "$80,000 dollars on Zemsky we should all be jumping through hoops to express our graciousness. Hey folks, 80 grand is chump change. He knows it and so does the dean.

However, for today's commentary, Dr. Tinkle would like to return to the dean's comment about Newsweek's rankings. I don't know about you but Dr. Tinkle is getting more than a little irritated that somehow I'm second rate because we don't meet some ridiculous measures. To whom do we owe our efforts, Newsweek or our students? I was unaware that anyone from Newsweek was on the BOT or had students attending here. The fact is we are open-enrollment. That means we do get a lot of unprepared students. We are now going to be blamed for their being unable to do university level work. The dean acts as if there is a magic bullit to fix twelve years of collective issues and problems. Dr. Tinkle received an essay the other day. It had no complete sentences and the words it did have did not go together in any coherent fashion. We also know that the whole retention issue will fall on a specific number of departments. It is highly unlikely that a student who cannot write in complete sentences will major in Biology or Chemistry. Now what really bothers Dr. Tinkle about Newsweek and other absurd measurements is that it is more than possible to get an excellent education in all majors at the University of Toledo. We do a good job. We have excellent faculty and by giving credence to such things as Newsweek the dean does us no favors. Frankly Dr. Tinkle doesn't give two hoots in hell about the rankings. I care about the students in my class.