…'Let the jury consider their verdict,' the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first - verdict afterwards.'
'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!'
'Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.
'I won't!' said Alice.
'Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
--Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapt. 12
Below is a slightly abridged version of a rebuttal letter to a number of administrators by the former chair of the English Department, Dr Brenda Aghahowa, for an “evaluation” she recently received. Department chairs especially should take note.
REBUTTAL FOR RETALIATORY CHAIRPERSON’S “EVALUATION”By Dr. Brenda Eatman Aghahowa
Associate Professor of English
Department of English, Communications, Media Arts and Theatre (ECMAT)
Chicago State University
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
The transparency of the retaliatory nature of the Chairperson’s “Evaluation” I received last Wednesday, September 1, 2010, from College of Arts and Sciences Dean Rachel W. Lindsey, is almost laughable. The evaluation was handled on an “emergency” basis and under false pretext, two months after I was forced to step down as Chairperson, and perhaps three months after the Contract Administrator’s annual deadline for such evaluations. Thus, while a meeting was held last week to discuss my performance, I do not acknowledge that any valid Chairperson’s Evaluation was conducted or occurred, nor will I sign any paperwork related to any such “evaluation.” For these reasons quotation marks have been placed around the term “evaluation” here initially. From this point forward, readers should consider any use of the term “evaluation” to refer to a so-called evaluation of September 1, 2010.
While the Dean had all spring and summer to evaluate me, she did not. During the summer, due diligence was not exercised to meet with me, even though I taught a ten-week summer course that was scheduled to meet on campus twice weekly, and even though she has my home telephone number and email address. The fact that the contents of this suspect annual evaluation amount to retaliation will become clear as one considers the information that follows.
False Pretext of the Evaluation
When the Dean called me at home at 8:17 p.m. the evening before the evaluation to ask me to meet with her, I asked the agenda for the meeting. I was told that a flurry of calls had come in from the Chicago Tribune and quote, “I need to clarify some things about your letter,” unquote. She was referring to the now controversial memo that I wrote to faculty of the Department of English, Communications, Media Arts and Theatre on my last day as Department Chairperson, June 30, 2010. The memo, posted by a CSU Faculty Senator on the CSU Faculty Voice blog, has been seen by the media there, and (according to Provost Sandra Westbrooks during the September 1, 2010 meeting) also has been seen by everyone at the University.
FYI, I had picked up a voice mail from a Tribune reporter some days prior. She wanted to speak with me and others because she was writing a story about Prof. Haki Madhubuti. The reporter said she wanted feedback from those who had worked closely with him about his creative and scholarly work, and also feedback about his exit from CSU and his start at DePaul University. Prof. Madhubuti, and possibly others as well, referred her to the CSU Faculty Voice blog, to get my take on his exit, since I had declined to discuss that matter.
In any case, I was lured to the meeting on a false pretext. Be very clear that if I had known the real reason the Dean wanted to meet with me on September 1st, I never would have attended any such meeting, particularly since the evaluation was being conduced two to three months late and amidst controversy… It is standard protocol for Chairs (in fact, for all employees) to be consulted about the scheduling of annual evaluations so that they can be fully prepared, and I would not have agreed to schedule a meeting at that late date at all. Do not miss the fact that I was called on a Tuesday night for a meeting that just had to be held the following day (i.e., less than 24 hours later). It could not wait until I returned to campus on Thursday, even though the Dean had had all summer (and all spring) to conduct an evaluation.
I invited the campus Union 4100 attorney, Prof. Janet Grange, to sit in on the September 1st meeting, just in case any disciplinary action was planned. I informed the Dean via email that Prof. Grange would be there. The Union leader, Dr. Laurie Walter, also had been invited, but she was unable to attend due to the short notice given…. I am now in the faculty bargaining unit, however, and am entitled to representation at such meetings, even though this particular one related to my duties as Chair. Chairs are faculty anyway, per the Union Contract. Prof. Grange did graciously attend, and a document was to be developed later for her signature in which she would agree to not speak with anyone about the conversation held during the meeting. I agreed to no such silence, however, and do fully retain my First Amendment right of freedom of speech. To remain silent …would amount to being complicit in it and a party to my own victimization. Perhaps others will be helped by my speaking out.
The meeting was held in Harold Washington Hall, Room 300A and, as mentioned earlier, the Dean was accompanied by Provost Westbrooks. (Of course, there was no mention the night before the meeting that the Provost or anyone else would be in attendance.) During the meeting, the Dean spent under five minutes voicing a couple of …objections to my June 30th memo. After that, it soon became apparent that the real purpose of the meeting, however, was to conduct the Annual Chairperson’s Evaluation that had not been conducted on a timely basis (i.e., it had not been conducted some months earlier)…
During my thirteen years on campus, I have received many accolades and recognitions from superiors, colleagues, students, and staff because of my diligence, my dedication, the quality of my work, and my love for our students and our institution. I am very clear about who I am, about Whose I am, and about the added value I bring to any setting in which God places me to work. Thus, I stand by my work and my performance. If I did not understand the retaliation involved here, I would have to say I am puzzled that roughly eight weeks after I am no longer Chair, the same Dean who recommended me to serve as Chair for three terms now alleges that I am an incompetent Chair. The actions are contradictory, to say the least.
Asked to Manage an Additional Department Just Months Prior
What is especially curious about the retaliatory evaluation I received from the Dean is that it is common public knowledge (at the very least within the College), and it also is officially documented in a variety of places, that during Spring Semester of 2010, this very same Dean invited me to consider adding management of a third unit to management of English and CMAT, effective July 1, 2010… She approached relevant parties in ECMAT and FLL and alerted them about the possible changes, and various discussions were held in and between faculty of those two departments. Up until the very end of the Spring Semester and beyond, relevant parties continued to have meetings and discussions about what such a re-merger of ECMAT and FLL would mean…
When the Dean asked me to consider adding this third area to my responsibilities, I stated (with others as a witness) that this would be a lot of work, but that I would be willing to take on the new responsibility under certain conditions. At no time, either during the spring or summer, did the Dean come back to say to me or to anyone else in ECMAT or FLL that my “poor” performance in the two areas (English and CMAT) had made her change her mind about my assuming the new role...
…You get the picture. The Chairperson who was doing well enough in her performance to be approached just a few months ago about taking on a third area is now written up as being incompetent. Clearly, the Dean’s intent seems to be to put a negative evaluation in my personnel file when there was not one there before. This is so that if the media continue to ask about my June 30th memo and why the customary process for selecting a Chair was set aside, those speaking for the University will be able to pretend that I was a “bad” Chair, and that that is why I was not allowed to have a third term.
During the September 1st meeting {the Dean}even went so as far as to refer to an invalid evaluation from academic year 2008-09, one that cited some minor concerns that have been addressed. She said that it is her practice to give lower marks the next year if the concerns of the previous year have not been addressed. The 2008-09 evaluation (which was written up late also) was invalid because I was on sabbatical during Fall 2008. Per the Union Contract, someone who is on sabbatical is not to have an annual evaluation during that year. I also received in writing correspondence retracting that 2008-09 evaluation for this very reason. If there is any evaluation for 2008-09 in my permanent personnel file, it should be removed.
Possible Aftermath or Consequences for the Dean and Others for “Workplace Bullying”
The Dean should be warned that {her actions}can have a way of bouncing back on her. We do reap what we have sown. In other words, after certain higher administrators are done using her to do their personnel dirty work, they can simply rid themselves of her, for any reason, by simply referring to this and any other unfair evaluations and rebuttals. …{The Dean might be considered} incompetent because she knew she had a “bad” Chair in her estimation, and yet she recommended the person to serve as Chair three times instead of asking that Chair to step down.
The Provost mentioned in our September 1st evaluation meeting that sometimes Chairs who perform poorly are asked to step down after year one or year two of the three-year term. If I performed as badly as the Dean is pretending now, why was I not asked to step down sooner? Obviously, the late, derogatory evaluation holds no merit…considering the recent recommendation that I serve a third term. It is poor show…to try to pretend now that I was bad Chair.
Anyone else responsible for the orchestration of that sham of an Annual Chairperson’s Evaluation I endured last week (which amounts to workplace bullying) should be aware of the laws that govern employment retaliation. Those who engage in such bullying at CSU are just as vulnerable as those of us who are victimized by it.
In light of the information in this rebuttal, I ask relevant staff in the Chicago State University Human Resources Office to do the following:
1) Remove from my permanent personnel file any evaluation from the 2008-09 academic year (during which I was on sabbatical), if there is one;
2) Remove from my permanent personnel file, if it has been inserted, the so-called evaluation paperwork from the meeting of September 1, 2010 because I did not sign it and I will not sign it, due to its retaliatory nature.
As far as I am concerned, no valid Annual Chairperson’s Evaluation was conducted for the 2009-10 academic year on September 1, 2010 or at any other time.
_Brenda Aghahowa__________________________
Former ECMAT Chairperson’s Signature and Date
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Faculty Senate Responds
In case some people didn't know, the Faculty Senate formally responded to the Washington Monthly article from August regarding the misinformation about CSU's graduation rates. Below is the Senate's letter.
Washington Monthly Editors,
This is a formal response of the Faculty Senate at Chicago State University to the article "College Dropout Factories" of August 22nd 2010. While replete with "evidence" and "facts," much of this article is little more than an intellectually lazy hit-piece parading as a well-researched journalistic endeavor.
There are many important caveats to the information presented in the article: First, the graduation rate cited is biased in favor of traditional, residential universities. It works like this: a student enrolls in a university her/his first semester in college then remains at that university until graduation. For most residential universities, the full-time students constitute better than 95 percent of the student population. At Chicago State University (CSU), most students are commuters and better than one-third of the undergraduates attend part-time. There is only one dormitory on campus. As a result, the full-time first-time freshmen measured in the graduation rate constituted roughly eight percent of the school's undergraduates from 2004 through 2007.
Thus, CSU's graduation rate is based on fewer than one-twelfth of its undergraduate population. This school, unlike the other public universities you offered for comparison, serves mainly transfer students. Unfortunately, the graduation rate gives no university credit for transfer students completing their courses of study. A student who enrolls for one semester or quarter at another college, then transfers and graduates from Chicago State is simply not counted. Chicago State receives no credit for that student's graduation. In actuality, Chicago state granted more than 640 undergraduate degrees per year from 2004-2007, a graduation rate versus the full-time student population of 19.5 percent. In comparison, during a similar time period, the University of Michigan graduated its full-time students at a rate of 24.3 percent. Less than five percentage points separates CSU from the University of Michigan yet nowhere is such an analysis provided in the article.
Second, the student you profiled to demonstrate the problems with CSU was identified as a pre-engineering student and that he transferred to another institution. As CSU only houses a pre-engineering program, all pre-engineering students must transfer to other institutions in order to receive bachelor degrees in engineering. That student and any other student in the pre-engineering program would not have been counted in CSU's graduation rate! This was omitted from the article. Interestingly, the article highlights that faculty members were those who were responsible for providing the support to the student to ensure his future success. There was no mention that CSU admitted a student that did not gain entrance into a "selective" university due to attending a high school that, "didn’t provide much in the way of college guidance," yet prepared him sufficiently to successfully transfer to a "selective" environment. Certainly, this betrays the notion of a dropout factory.
Third, the article failed to incorporate any mention of initiatives undertaken in the 2009-2010 academic year at CSU to address retention and graduation of first-year full-time freshman. For example, the Office of the Freshman Year Experience was created to be a student-centered support mechanism that provides advising, mentoring, and study support. For the 2010-2011 academic year a cohort model of course scheduling has been incorporated. This model is derived from research that suggests that retention increases when students gain a sense of greater collegiality that develops through shared scholarly and social experiences. The Dean of the Office of the Freshman Year Experience maintains regular contact with all of the first-time first-year Freshman. Clearly, this shows an interest in improving student outcomes. While other universities were profiled that showed efforts to improve outcomes, CSU's efforts were not detailed.
Noting these caveats is not to deny that CSU has problems. The graduation of first-year full-time students must improve. There are problems at CSU. However, this intellectually dishonest article provides a false picture of how the school performs. At the least the writers should have defined how graduation rates are calculated. Had they bothered to look beyond their own biases, they might have found a school that, although deserving of criticism in a variety of areas, hardly qualifies as a "dropout factory." Had the writers interviewed more than one student, you likely would have found accolades moreso than disparagement.
In service,
Yan Dominic Searcy, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
CSU Faculty Senate President
Washington Monthly Editors,
This is a formal response of the Faculty Senate at Chicago State University to the article "College Dropout Factories" of August 22nd 2010. While replete with "evidence" and "facts," much of this article is little more than an intellectually lazy hit-piece parading as a well-researched journalistic endeavor.
There are many important caveats to the information presented in the article: First, the graduation rate cited is biased in favor of traditional, residential universities. It works like this: a student enrolls in a university her/his first semester in college then remains at that university until graduation. For most residential universities, the full-time students constitute better than 95 percent of the student population. At Chicago State University (CSU), most students are commuters and better than one-third of the undergraduates attend part-time. There is only one dormitory on campus. As a result, the full-time first-time freshmen measured in the graduation rate constituted roughly eight percent of the school's undergraduates from 2004 through 2007.
Thus, CSU's graduation rate is based on fewer than one-twelfth of its undergraduate population. This school, unlike the other public universities you offered for comparison, serves mainly transfer students. Unfortunately, the graduation rate gives no university credit for transfer students completing their courses of study. A student who enrolls for one semester or quarter at another college, then transfers and graduates from Chicago State is simply not counted. Chicago State receives no credit for that student's graduation. In actuality, Chicago state granted more than 640 undergraduate degrees per year from 2004-2007, a graduation rate versus the full-time student population of 19.5 percent. In comparison, during a similar time period, the University of Michigan graduated its full-time students at a rate of 24.3 percent. Less than five percentage points separates CSU from the University of Michigan yet nowhere is such an analysis provided in the article.
Second, the student you profiled to demonstrate the problems with CSU was identified as a pre-engineering student and that he transferred to another institution. As CSU only houses a pre-engineering program, all pre-engineering students must transfer to other institutions in order to receive bachelor degrees in engineering. That student and any other student in the pre-engineering program would not have been counted in CSU's graduation rate! This was omitted from the article. Interestingly, the article highlights that faculty members were those who were responsible for providing the support to the student to ensure his future success. There was no mention that CSU admitted a student that did not gain entrance into a "selective" university due to attending a high school that, "didn’t provide much in the way of college guidance," yet prepared him sufficiently to successfully transfer to a "selective" environment. Certainly, this betrays the notion of a dropout factory.
Third, the article failed to incorporate any mention of initiatives undertaken in the 2009-2010 academic year at CSU to address retention and graduation of first-year full-time freshman. For example, the Office of the Freshman Year Experience was created to be a student-centered support mechanism that provides advising, mentoring, and study support. For the 2010-2011 academic year a cohort model of course scheduling has been incorporated. This model is derived from research that suggests that retention increases when students gain a sense of greater collegiality that develops through shared scholarly and social experiences. The Dean of the Office of the Freshman Year Experience maintains regular contact with all of the first-time first-year Freshman. Clearly, this shows an interest in improving student outcomes. While other universities were profiled that showed efforts to improve outcomes, CSU's efforts were not detailed.
Noting these caveats is not to deny that CSU has problems. The graduation of first-year full-time students must improve. There are problems at CSU. However, this intellectually dishonest article provides a false picture of how the school performs. At the least the writers should have defined how graduation rates are calculated. Had they bothered to look beyond their own biases, they might have found a school that, although deserving of criticism in a variety of areas, hardly qualifies as a "dropout factory." Had the writers interviewed more than one student, you likely would have found accolades moreso than disparagement.
In service,
Yan Dominic Searcy, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
CSU Faculty Senate President
Sunday, September 5, 2010
And we're back...for now?
"Patronage is so rooted in Chicago..." That's what I caught on an NPR report last week about how Mayor Daley has done a lot for the city, but the one thing he cannot surmount is political patronage. The other half of the sentence concluded, "...but we can't afford it any more."
I've been thinking about this as I was reading the Provost Council minutes of August 11th which were sent to the faculty. I appreciate that we are included in this aspect of shared information. Apparently Illinois politicians are interested in our graduation rates and at an IBHE meeting presidents were told that appropriations to universities will not be sent out until January 2011 at the earliest, so we may face a budget cut of 50%. Reference was made to the possibility of the state closing two universities, possibly selling one to a for-profit university and/or consolidating one. So CSU is on guard to raise graduation rates by May.
Should we be demoralized by all this? Are we just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as we scurry about keeping tabs on first time full-time freshmen, gather statistics, watch as our colleagues' programs or our own go up before the "program elimination board?" Or, should we just sit back and let the "race card" save us this time as people think it has in the past? It seems a point of view on campus is that "they" will never close us down because we are the only African American university in the state.
Can Illinois afford the patronage pits anymore?
Certainly nothing much will happen at the state level until after the November election. I'm cynical enough to recognize that, chastened as I am after seeing how little the political authorities cared to listen to faculty voices at their doors during that farce we played out called the CSU presidential search process in 2009. Governor Quinn and Senator Malony bear a lot of responsibility for the current failures at CSU, other politicians and many of our politically-appointed trustees current and past, who have no business running an educational institution, bear responsibility as well. Will Senator Malony, whose face is now broadcast on our website like some latterday Emil Jones patron saint, step in and save us? He was in bed with the trustees two years ago and probably longer than that when he ignored faculty pleas for intervention. The machine kicked into high gear once a few internal voices began questioning authority on campus.
And how true is that old canard that the victors write the history. Read the whitewash the CSU Trustees have made of our microhistory on the Presidential Search. The minutes to the Trustees' meetings for 2009 have been posted to their webpage on our website. You will not find one single mention of the Search Advisory Committee, made up of faculty, staff, and students who were excluded from the selection process, resigning from the committee. Not a single mention of the petition and resignation of that committee from that flawed and tainted search process.
The provost's minutes say that "we need to get CSU where we are not dependent upon state dollars." Like the NPR report on Mayor Daly's situation, how will we surmount the political patronage that our leadership has relied on so much in the past? Are Phuong Ly and Ben Miller in their Washington Monthly article that castigated CSU last week correct when they describe CSU's leadership as a "familiar pattern: temporary reform followed by familiar fecklessness. No improvements ever seemed to stick."
As I was reading the comments to that Washington Monthly article, I was getting angrier and angrier at the politicians and university trustees, not just here, but all over the state.
Steve White, whoever he is, commented on the article, but he is not the first to have said all this. Many of us faculty did two years ago. I'll quote him as yet another voice out there with us in the Illinois wilderness.
Steve White on Wed 25 Aug 2010 09:26 PM
As a Chicago area resident and a professor at a big university on the south
side (not Chicago State), what Mr. Miller and Ms. Ly allude to but don't
quite state is that, as usual, a failed institution (be it a university or
any other endeavor) many times is attached to or is a consequence of failed
politics.
That's Chicago.
CSU has been a dumping ground for decades for Chicago politics. It's run, by
and large, by political hacks and fools. It's no wonder that relatively few
students, faculty and staff with any choice at all would be there. Chicago
machine politics dictates that CSU, the County Hospital, the Chicago Housing
Authority, and so on, are cesspools of corruption. That the president of the
institution was pillaging the budget isn't surprising in the least once you
understand that Chicago State is a machine school. Failure for the 'little
people' like Nestor in such institutions doesn't register with either the
pols or the public.
Another school on the dropout list, Northeastern Illinois University, has a
similar history to Chicago State and similar problems with the Machine. It
too has a horrific drop-out rate, and Mr. Miller and Ms. Ly could have
easily found a Nestor there for their story.
In contrast, University of Illinois at Chicago is run not by the city but by
the state, and the Board of Trustees traditionally have been able to keep
the city at arms' length. It has greater visibility with the public, and
those two facts keep UIC from failing.
If Mr. Miller and Ms. Ly were to examine the failed colleges on their list
with the local politics, they very likely would discover (I hypothesize) a
correlation.
Whether one is progressive or conservative, correcting the problem of
dropout colleges requires one to understand the connection between failed
public institutions and corrupt politics. Be those politicians Democrats or
Republicans, the problem won't be fixed until the public demands and attains
accountability.
Accountability? Chicago? Be serious.
I've been thinking about this as I was reading the Provost Council minutes of August 11th which were sent to the faculty. I appreciate that we are included in this aspect of shared information. Apparently Illinois politicians are interested in our graduation rates and at an IBHE meeting presidents were told that appropriations to universities will not be sent out until January 2011 at the earliest, so we may face a budget cut of 50%. Reference was made to the possibility of the state closing two universities, possibly selling one to a for-profit university and/or consolidating one. So CSU is on guard to raise graduation rates by May.
Should we be demoralized by all this? Are we just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as we scurry about keeping tabs on first time full-time freshmen, gather statistics, watch as our colleagues' programs or our own go up before the "program elimination board?" Or, should we just sit back and let the "race card" save us this time as people think it has in the past? It seems a point of view on campus is that "they" will never close us down because we are the only African American university in the state.
Can Illinois afford the patronage pits anymore?
Certainly nothing much will happen at the state level until after the November election. I'm cynical enough to recognize that, chastened as I am after seeing how little the political authorities cared to listen to faculty voices at their doors during that farce we played out called the CSU presidential search process in 2009. Governor Quinn and Senator Malony bear a lot of responsibility for the current failures at CSU, other politicians and many of our politically-appointed trustees current and past, who have no business running an educational institution, bear responsibility as well. Will Senator Malony, whose face is now broadcast on our website like some latterday Emil Jones patron saint, step in and save us? He was in bed with the trustees two years ago and probably longer than that when he ignored faculty pleas for intervention. The machine kicked into high gear once a few internal voices began questioning authority on campus.
And how true is that old canard that the victors write the history. Read the whitewash the CSU Trustees have made of our microhistory on the Presidential Search. The minutes to the Trustees' meetings for 2009 have been posted to their webpage on our website. You will not find one single mention of the Search Advisory Committee, made up of faculty, staff, and students who were excluded from the selection process, resigning from the committee. Not a single mention of the petition and resignation of that committee from that flawed and tainted search process.
The provost's minutes say that "we need to get CSU where we are not dependent upon state dollars." Like the NPR report on Mayor Daly's situation, how will we surmount the political patronage that our leadership has relied on so much in the past? Are Phuong Ly and Ben Miller in their Washington Monthly article that castigated CSU last week correct when they describe CSU's leadership as a "familiar pattern: temporary reform followed by familiar fecklessness. No improvements ever seemed to stick."
As I was reading the comments to that Washington Monthly article, I was getting angrier and angrier at the politicians and university trustees, not just here, but all over the state.
Steve White, whoever he is, commented on the article, but he is not the first to have said all this. Many of us faculty did two years ago. I'll quote him as yet another voice out there with us in the Illinois wilderness.
Steve White on Wed 25 Aug 2010 09:26 PM
As a Chicago area resident and a professor at a big university on the south
side (not Chicago State), what Mr. Miller and Ms. Ly allude to but don't
quite state is that, as usual, a failed institution (be it a university or
any other endeavor) many times is attached to or is a consequence of failed
politics.
That's Chicago.
CSU has been a dumping ground for decades for Chicago politics. It's run, by
and large, by political hacks and fools. It's no wonder that relatively few
students, faculty and staff with any choice at all would be there. Chicago
machine politics dictates that CSU, the County Hospital, the Chicago Housing
Authority, and so on, are cesspools of corruption. That the president of the
institution was pillaging the budget isn't surprising in the least once you
understand that Chicago State is a machine school. Failure for the 'little
people' like Nestor in such institutions doesn't register with either the
pols or the public.
Another school on the dropout list, Northeastern Illinois University, has a
similar history to Chicago State and similar problems with the Machine. It
too has a horrific drop-out rate, and Mr. Miller and Ms. Ly could have
easily found a Nestor there for their story.
In contrast, University of Illinois at Chicago is run not by the city but by
the state, and the Board of Trustees traditionally have been able to keep
the city at arms' length. It has greater visibility with the public, and
those two facts keep UIC from failing.
If Mr. Miller and Ms. Ly were to examine the failed colleges on their list
with the local politics, they very likely would discover (I hypothesize) a
correlation.
Whether one is progressive or conservative, correcting the problem of
dropout colleges requires one to understand the connection between failed
public institutions and corrupt politics. Be those politicians Democrats or
Republicans, the problem won't be fixed until the public demands and attains
accountability.
Accountability? Chicago? Be serious.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
CSU featured again
From "diploma mill" to "dropout factory"?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_dropout_factories.php?page=all&print=true
Washington Monthly -Sept. 1, 2010
College Guide
Feature
College Dropout Factories
by Ben Miller and Phuong Ly
It was money—or the lack of it—that determined where Nestor Curiel chose to go to college. The third of six children in an immigrant Mexican family, Nestor grew up in Blue Island, a gritty working-class suburb near Chicago’s South Side. His father worked, and still works, two jobs—machine operator and restaurant dishwasher—and his mother makes and sells crocheted gifts. Nestor, a polite twenty-one-year-old with black-rimmed glasses, graduated from Eisenhower High School with a 3.6 GPA and dreams of becoming an engineer. (As a child he was inspired by Discovery Channel documentaries about engineering marvels, and he also enjoyed helping his dad repair automobiles on weekends.) He particularly wanted to help his parents pay off the mortgage on their weathered gray house, which is two doors down from a corner store with a large “WE ACCEPT WIC” sign in the window.
Nestor was an above-average high school student who generally made the honors list, and he was diligent in his non-school hours as well, holding down a part-time job as a busboy and line cook at the restaurant where his father worked. His ACT score was 18, equivalent to about 870 on the SAT, which wasn’t high enough to gain him admission to a selective college. (This was typical for his school—41 percent Hispanic, 38 percent black—where only 31 percent of kids meet or exceed standards on state tests, versus 76 percent for the state.) And, apart from a career fair, Eisenhower High School didn’t provide much in the way of college guidance. One time, a guest speaker had urged students to expand their horizons and apply to schools out of state, but Nestor worried about going somewhere unfamiliar. Also, if he could live at home, he would save money.
Ultimately, Nestor wound up narrowing his choices down to two nearby schools: Purdue University Calumet and Chicago State University. Each seemed to have advantages and disadvantages, but Chicago State offered one extra perk: $1,000 in scholarship money if Nestor enrolled in its pre-engineering program. That sealed the deal. The stipend, combined with federal and state grants and a private scholarship from Chicago’s George M. Pullman Educational Foundation, meant that Nestor could get a college education with most of his expenses paid.
With its tree-lined campus and gleaming new steel and glass convocation center, Chicago State certainly looked impressive. But within his first month there, Nestor wanted to leave. Advisers in the engineering department seemed clueless about guiding him to the right courses, insisting that if he wanted to take programming he first needed to enroll in a computer class that showed students how to turn on a monitor and operate a mouse. (Nestor required no such training.) The library boasted a robot that retrieved books, but Nestor would have preferred that it simply stay open past eight p.m., since class sometimes ended at nine p.m. or later, leaving him without a useful place to study or do research before going home. Trash littered the classrooms and grounds, and during class many of the students would simply carry on conversations among themselves and ignore the instructors—or even talk back to them. Nestor was appalled. “It was like high school, but I was paying for it,” he says.
Several students he knew dropped out, but Nestor stayed. “I wasn’t going to give them my money and let them kick me out,” he says. For the next two years, Nestor encountered a ceaseless array of impediments to getting through school. When he wanted to get a tutor, his advisers couldn’t offer any advice about who might be available. When he visited the financial aid office to clear up what seemed like a simple clerical error depriving him of a state grant, the office told him—untruthfully, as it turned out—that getting such grant money would disqualify him from getting any scholarship money from the Pullman Foundation. (By the time the situation was straightened out, the first semester of his sophomore year was nearly over, and the financial office gave Nestor only $780 of what was supposed to be a $1,200 grant, telling him that it couldn’t give him money for a semester that was ending. “It kind of felt like they were stealing from me,” he says.) Only with the help of two dedicated instructors—Shuming Zheng, an engineering professor, and Thomas Kuhn, a physics lecturer—was Nestor able to finish his pre-engineering credits as planned. Fortunately, this allowed him to transfer to a superior school, the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a $5,000 scholarship.
UIC, adjacent to the city’s downtown, is just fifteen miles north of Chicago State, but felt like a world away. Nestor marveled over the smoothness of the operation. At Chicago State, he had been forced to work hard to find help. At UIC, on the first day of each of his classes, professors provided lists of tutors. Chicago State had offered no meaningful job assistance. At UIC, the engineering department was sending out regular e-mails about internships and other opportunities.
Nestor is certain that the two years at Chicago State put him behind. In his first semester at UIC, he failed a math class, finding it difficult to match the faster pace and heavier workload. (He retook the class, however, and passed.) It’ll take him five years, rather than four, to get his degree. But he says he feels invigorated by the challenges. “It’s hard, but it feels like everybody’s trying to help you,” he says. “You didn’t get that sense at Chicago State.”
As it happens, Nestor’s impressions are supported by hard numbers. Chicago State has the worst graduation rate of any public four-year university in Illinois and one of the worst in the nation, with just 13 percent of students finishing in six years. For stronger students like Nestor, the statistics are only somewhat better than that. According to a study from the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR), which looked at twenty different colleges in the Chicago area, kids who graduate from a Chicago public high school with a grade point average of 3.5 have a 37 percent chance of graduating from Chicago State. Those with the same grades who attend UIC have a much better chance of graduating—56 percent. And for those with a 3.5 GPA who attend Northwestern, just north in Evanston, the completion rate is 89 percent. Even schools all around the country with student profiles as challenging as that of Chicago State—that is, schools with mostly African American and Latino students from low-income backgrounds—have overall graduation rates that are many times higher.
Nestor’s experience of educational incompetence at the college level isn’t just a Chicago phenomenon. Nationwide, low-income minority students are disproportionately steered toward colleges not where they’re most likely to succeed, but where they’re most likely to fail.
School reformers, including President Obama, often talk about high school “dropout factories.” These are the roughly 2,000 public high schools, about 15 percent of the total, with the nation’s highest dropout rates. The average student at these schools has about a fifty-fifty chance of graduating, according to the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. But the term “dropout factory” is also applicable to colleges. The Washington Monthly and Education Sector, an independent think tank, looked at the 15 percent of colleges and universities with the worst graduation records—about 200 schools in all—and found that the graduation rate at these schools is 26 percent. (See the table at left for a listing of the fifty colleges and universities with the worst graduation rates.) America’s “college dropout factories,” in other words, are twice as bad at graduating their students as the worst high schools are at graduating theirs.
Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny. This indifference is inexcusable now that a postsecondary credential has become virtually indispensable to anyone hoping to lead a middle-class life. If we want better outcomes in higher education, we need to hold dropout factories like Chicago State accountable in the same way the Obama administration proposes to hold underperforming high schools accountable: transform them—or shut them down.
When one examines the schools on the list of college dropout factories—the worst being Southern University at New Orleans, with a 5 percent graduation rate—one thing that stands out is their diversity. Geographically, they are all over the map. From New York to Florida to Alaska—few regions of the United States are spared a local dropout factory. Some, like Chicago State, the University of the District of Columbia, and Houston’s Texas Southern University, are located in big cities; others, like Sul Ross State University and Heritage University, are in small towns and rural areas. Nor is there a bias toward public or private institutions: it’s split fairly evenly, although the public colleges, which are generally bigger, tend to account for greater numbers of dropouts. Some are heavily weighted toward certain minority groups—historically black colleges, for instance, and tribal colleges. Others, like Idaho State, are 80 percent white and do just as poorly. Some of the schools are religious—like Jarvis Christian College, with a 90 percent attrition rate. Most are just seemingly ordinary schools that mostly fly beneath the radar of the national press.
But there are also similarities. As a percentage of their student bodies, these college dropout factories enroll twice as many part-time students, nearly twice as many from low-income families, and around 50 percent more blacks and Hispanics than the average American college or university. They mainly serve local communities, admit most of their applicants, and have much less money than colleges that are higher in prestige. Most upper-middle-class parents would never send their kids to these schools—nor have they generally even heard of them. Not surprisingly, the worst of the dropout factories are allowed to roll along in dysfunction, year after year.
The school that would later become Chicago State was founded in September 1867 and called the Cook County Normal School—“Normal” referring to schools that prepare teachers for the classroom. For a century or so, it fulfilled this teacher-training role reasonably well. But in 1965 the school was acquired by the state of Illinois, soon renamed Chicago State, and converted into a standard four-year institution. In 1972, Chicago State moved to a newly built $95 million campus that could accommodate an additional 10,000 students. Most of them would be drawn from the city’s poor and working-class South Side and nearby suburbs. It was an admirable attempt to open new doors to a demographic that had been largely shut out of higher education. But it wasn’t long before signs of neglect and mismanagement were obvious. Passage rates on an elementary education teacher licensure exam, for instance, plummeted from 82 percent in 1968 to 42 percent in 1973, and the school almost lost its teacher accreditation.
One year later, in 1974, a devastating series on Chicago State appeared in the Chicago Defender, the city’s premier black newspaper. Under the heading “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Read,” the articles blasted the school, calling it a “diploma mill, with little quality control or concern about the product,” and noted “oppressively low” morale among students. Chicago State is a “ripoff institution,” it said, “a place where a comfortable white administration and faculty is providing a second-rate education for black students.”
Benjamin Alexander, the university’s first black president, arrived as a reformer in the 1970s. He made some significant improvements, but the progress largely evaporated after he left in the 1980s. Another reformer came in the 1990s and then was likewise gone. This would become a familiar pattern: temporary reform followed by familiar fecklessness. No improvements ever seemed to stick. In 2008, Chicago State’s President Elnora Daniel resigned under pressure after the school suffered yet another severe bout of mismanagement. A state audit found that even as the university suffered budget cuts, Daniel and other employees had spent lavishly on meals, alcohol, and first-class airfare. Daniel had brought five relatives and a university administrator with her on a nine-day Caribbean cruise for a “leadership conference.” Lax financial oversight allegedly resulted in the university paying more than a quarter of a million dollars for two photocopiers purchased from a company owned by a university employee.
Meanwhile, students contended with broken elevators, dirty classrooms, and ill-equipped labs. As enrollment declined, so did graduation rates. Of the first-time, full-time freshmen who started in 1996, about 18 percent graduated within six years. The graduation rate dropped to 13 percent in 2008.
Last year, the school’s board of trustees picked a new president, Wayne Watson, who has vowed to boost the school’s graduation rate through such reforms as a new electronic “early alert” system to track student attendance and class performance. But he cautions against expecting too much from Chicago State, given the kind of students that go there. “I serve a lower economic quartile,” he says. “So they’re going to drop out because their baby’s sick, because they don’t have money, because they’re trying to survive.”
Certainly, Chicago State enrolls a large share of academically underprepared students compared to more selective schools such as UIC or Northwestern, so its graduation rate might be expected to be lower. But the idea that Chicago State is doing the best it can with the kind of students it serves is belied by ample countervailing evidence. As the chart below shows, there are more than half a dozen schools in the United States with student bodies that are remarkably similar to that of Chicago State in every important respect—from race to test scores to family income—but whose graduation rates are at least double, and in some cases more than triple, the graduation rate of Chicago State.
Take North Carolina Central University, which enrolls 8,500 students. About 85 percent of students at both schools are black. NCCU’s median SAT score is 840, the approximate equivalent of about 17 on the ACT, even lower than Chicago State’s average ACT of 18. The difference, however, is that NCCU tries to work with the students it has. The result: while Chicago State graduates about 13 percent of its students, NCCU graduates about 50 percent. “We have the philosophy that if we admit the students into this institution we have a great responsibility in ensuring their success,” says Bernice Duffy Johnson, dean of the school’s University College, which focuses on supporting students during their first two years.
Students entering NCCU are told from the start that they are expected to have a goal of graduating in four years. The University College keeps students together in groups and assigns them advisers who must approve all major academic decisions and meet with students frequently. NCCU students even sign a contract upon arriving, a document that lays out the goals of what they are going to accomplish. If they start to struggle, they sign an additional contract that commits them to even closer monitoring. Above all, what drives places like NCCU is a culture of experimentation and data collection. The administrators track students, and they track results. If something works, they keep doing it. If it doesn’t, they try something else.
Other schools similar to Chicago State in their profiles are likewise similar in their pursuit of improved student outcomes. Jackson State University in Mississippi—95 percent black, 65 percent Pell Grant, 43 percent graduation rate—divides incoming students into small groups based on their expected majors and has a required first-year course to help ease the college transition. Faculty can immediately identify struggling students through an online tracking system. The university contracts for extra tutoring in addition to what’s already available on campus. It also gathers as much data about students as it can find, using surveys of student engagement and an exam developed by the University of Missouri that tests students before and after their general education courses. “If you don’t put in place strategies and interventions to retain the students throughout the four, five, six years of matriculation then you are not meeting the mandate that has been set, and that is to graduate a larger number of students,” says Evelyn J. Leggette, Jackson State’s dean of undergraduate studies.
Such examples suggest that the stratospheric rates of failure in college dropout factories are hardly inevitable and that blaming the students has become the last refuge of the bungler. As Melissa Roderick, lead author of the Consortium on Chicago School Research report, asks, “How could a child who gets a 4.0 in an urban school system and has high performance in an urban school system and has managed our environment and overcome their poverty, overcome their race, suddenly become a different person in three months who can no longer perform?”
It’s important to note that most students who drop out of college don’t fail out of college. They leave because they don’t perceive that the educational benefit of college exceeds the substantial expense of time and money—especially not when it’s coupled with indifferent bureaucracies that pride themselves more on inane complexities than actually helping students. But when students are given high expectations and good teaching to match, they succeed academically. And when they succeed they’re more likely to keep succeeding and eventually earn a degree.
The worst colleges also tend to plead ignorance as to how to get better. But the strategies employed by colleges that successfully graduate at-risk students aren’t particularly groundbreaking. Researchers have been documenting effective methods of preventing dropouts for decades. Most are commonsensical: pay attention to students, and give them the support they need. When Chicago State couldn’t give Nestor advice about tutors, it wasn’t failing to use “best practices.” It was failing to be minimally competent. Nor do college presidents need research to tell them it’s a bad idea to squander student tuition dollars on cruises and booze.
Why, then, has the nation tolerated this kind of catastrophic failure, one that has destroyed the college dreams of millions of disadvantaged students, for so long? The answer begins with the fact that most of us don’t know there’s a problem. The world is run by college graduates, most of whom are products of the middle class. They didn’t attend dropout factories, nor are they likely to know anyone who did. People naturally generalize from their own experience, and most public leaders simply have no idea that so many college students fail where they succeeded.
Another reason why we have accepted extremely high dropout rates at some colleges—and, frankly, unimpressive graduation rates throughout much of higher education—is that we lack a broadly shared sense of what an acceptable graduation rate would be. Pretty much everyone agrees that all children need a high school diploma. That’s why high school dropout factories are condemned without question. College, by contrast, isn’t for everyone. So it’s easy to see college dropouts as people who didn’t get what they probably didn’t deserve.
But while some people don’t, in fact, need college, most do. Forty years ago, the majority of high school graduates went no further with their education. Today, three-quarters of high school graduates go after a college degree, because they know that a career with a middle-class wage almost always requires one.
Similarly, just as some people shouldn’t go to college, some people who go shouldn’t graduate. Colleges have an obligation to maintain academic standards, and the slothful are rightly denied degrees. But there is a huge difference between “not everyone graduates” and “hardly anyone graduates”—the latter being the norm at schools like Chicago State. Of the millions of new students who stream into colleges as freshmen every year, barely half will graduate on time. Many won’t graduate at all. According to the census, nearly 34 million Americans over the age of twenty-five list their highest level of education as “some college, no degree.” And there is little or no evidence that they fell short because colleges are rigidly enforcing standards. Quite the opposite: the colleges that successfully graduate low-income and minority students don’t ask less of them. They ask more. Researchers have found that more challenging coursework makes success rates go up, not down.
The public’s blindness to mass failure in higher education is bolstered by chronological happenstance: students move from high school to college at the same time that they reach the legal age of majority. As a result, without much thought, we’ve applied a binary mindset to education: elementary and secondary students are children; if they fail, it’s the fault of the schools. College students are adults; if they fail, it’s the fault of the students.
Of course, this makes little sense. College students don’t become entirely different people in the three months that pass between walking off the high school graduation stage and moving into the freshman dorm. To be sure, the proper balance of responsibility between student and school moves toward students over time. But the burden shouldn’t lurch suddenly and completely onto students between the twelfth and thirteenth grades. Good colleges understand this and take it into account. That’s why the data on colleges show such a correlation between extensive student support, especially during the freshman and sophomore years, and high graduation rates. Yet the blame-the-student mindset persists all the same.
This sort of indifference sets the stage for dismal institutions like Chicago State to prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing. When a prestigious school such as the flagship University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign turns out to be making politically influenced admissions decisions, it’s national news. (When such reports surfaced, Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn immediately stepped in and forced seven of the school’s nine trustees to resign.) When a dropout factory like Chicago State turns in a 13 percent graduation rate, it’s business as usual.
It’s not just the public that’s uninvolved. While public universities are in theory overseen by a combination of state officials and voluntary accrediting bodies, none of them use their power in a manner that’s genuinely ameliorative. Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation. The fifty dropout factories listed on page 22—some of which have graduation rates in the single digits—are all accredited and advertise that fact prominently on their Web sites. Even when accreditors do pay attention to problems at a school, they tend to be slow and secretive in revealing their findings. Chicago State’s accreditor expressed “serious concern” about the school as far back as 2003, but this was never publicized. Not even the Illinois Board of Higher Education, which monitors Chicago State, knew about it. Only in 2009, when the Chicago Tribune published damning excerpts from a leaked confidential letter from the accreditor to the university, did more than a few parties know that Chicago State might be in trouble.
As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”
That’s not the only problem with how funding for higher education is designed. It’s not uncommon for flagship research universities that enroll a disproportionate number of smart, well-off students to receive double the per-student funding allotted to regional universities and former normal schools like Chicago State. In K-12 education, that kind of misallocation often results in multibillion-dollar legal judgments against the state. In higher education, it’s called “meritocracy.”
In such a climate, there’s very little profit in mending one’s ways. After all, you can’t get credit for solving a problem people don’t think exists. Nearly everyone has heard of Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools, and her battle with the education bureaucracy of Washington, D.C. Who has heard of Charlie Nelms, chancellor of North Carolina Central University? Similarly, many people have heard of the last two Chicago school superintendents: Paul Vallas, who went on to run for governor, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Who has heard of the president of Jackson State, Leslie McLemore? College presidents don’t become rich and famous by turning around Chicago State. They make their careers by never working for Chicago State in the first place.
While big-city mayors like Richard Daley and Michael Bloomberg like to focus on fixing K-12 education, few bother to go after any of the moribund public universities that students who survive the K-12 system often attend. Fortunately, some public figures are starting to see things differently. When Secretary Duncan was asked about the college graduation problem at a public event recently, he proposed that high school guidance counselors actively discourage students from enrolling in colleges that persistently fail. Melissa Roderick, the lead author of the CSSR report about Chicago public school students’ college graduation rates, notes that some high schools are banning certain universities from their college fairs because it’s understood that the colleges will not serve their students well.
But it’s not enough just to tell high school students, “Buyer beware.” In other areas of the economy, consumers rightly expect government to protect them from grossly defective products. Governors and state legislatures should do the same, in part by tying a significant portion of state funding to graduation rate goals. Accreditors, for their part, could make their evaluations public and link graduation rates to accreditation. That could go hand in hand with intensified scrutiny of academic standards, to ensure that colleges don’t react to graduation rate pressure by turning into diploma mills.
But we won’t make real headway on the college graduation problem until two even more fundamental steps are taken. The first is acknowledging that colleges share responsibility for graduation with their students. Without that, governors, mayors, accreditors, and secretaries of education won’t be willing to expend scarce political capital on behalf of students like Nestor. The second is a willingness to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.
On the surface, a peaceful university campus can seem like a vital asset to the community. But a university with an 87 percent dropout rate is a service to no one. And chronically dysfunctional organizations can be very difficult to change. There is no reason that states can’t quickly build newer, better, more cost-effective public universities to educate people who are currently stuck in college dropout factories. No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair. The sooner we acknowledge that, the better off those students—and the rest of us—will be.
Ben Miller and Phuong Ly collaborated on this article. Miller is a policy analyst at Education Sector. Ly is a journalist who writes frequently on education and immigration issues. She is currently a John S. Knight Fellow in journalism at Stanford University.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_dropout_factories.php?page=all&print=true
Washington Monthly -Sept. 1, 2010
College Guide
Feature
College Dropout Factories
by Ben Miller and Phuong Ly
It was money—or the lack of it—that determined where Nestor Curiel chose to go to college. The third of six children in an immigrant Mexican family, Nestor grew up in Blue Island, a gritty working-class suburb near Chicago’s South Side. His father worked, and still works, two jobs—machine operator and restaurant dishwasher—and his mother makes and sells crocheted gifts. Nestor, a polite twenty-one-year-old with black-rimmed glasses, graduated from Eisenhower High School with a 3.6 GPA and dreams of becoming an engineer. (As a child he was inspired by Discovery Channel documentaries about engineering marvels, and he also enjoyed helping his dad repair automobiles on weekends.) He particularly wanted to help his parents pay off the mortgage on their weathered gray house, which is two doors down from a corner store with a large “WE ACCEPT WIC” sign in the window.
Nestor was an above-average high school student who generally made the honors list, and he was diligent in his non-school hours as well, holding down a part-time job as a busboy and line cook at the restaurant where his father worked. His ACT score was 18, equivalent to about 870 on the SAT, which wasn’t high enough to gain him admission to a selective college. (This was typical for his school—41 percent Hispanic, 38 percent black—where only 31 percent of kids meet or exceed standards on state tests, versus 76 percent for the state.) And, apart from a career fair, Eisenhower High School didn’t provide much in the way of college guidance. One time, a guest speaker had urged students to expand their horizons and apply to schools out of state, but Nestor worried about going somewhere unfamiliar. Also, if he could live at home, he would save money.
Ultimately, Nestor wound up narrowing his choices down to two nearby schools: Purdue University Calumet and Chicago State University. Each seemed to have advantages and disadvantages, but Chicago State offered one extra perk: $1,000 in scholarship money if Nestor enrolled in its pre-engineering program. That sealed the deal. The stipend, combined with federal and state grants and a private scholarship from Chicago’s George M. Pullman Educational Foundation, meant that Nestor could get a college education with most of his expenses paid.
With its tree-lined campus and gleaming new steel and glass convocation center, Chicago State certainly looked impressive. But within his first month there, Nestor wanted to leave. Advisers in the engineering department seemed clueless about guiding him to the right courses, insisting that if he wanted to take programming he first needed to enroll in a computer class that showed students how to turn on a monitor and operate a mouse. (Nestor required no such training.) The library boasted a robot that retrieved books, but Nestor would have preferred that it simply stay open past eight p.m., since class sometimes ended at nine p.m. or later, leaving him without a useful place to study or do research before going home. Trash littered the classrooms and grounds, and during class many of the students would simply carry on conversations among themselves and ignore the instructors—or even talk back to them. Nestor was appalled. “It was like high school, but I was paying for it,” he says.
Several students he knew dropped out, but Nestor stayed. “I wasn’t going to give them my money and let them kick me out,” he says. For the next two years, Nestor encountered a ceaseless array of impediments to getting through school. When he wanted to get a tutor, his advisers couldn’t offer any advice about who might be available. When he visited the financial aid office to clear up what seemed like a simple clerical error depriving him of a state grant, the office told him—untruthfully, as it turned out—that getting such grant money would disqualify him from getting any scholarship money from the Pullman Foundation. (By the time the situation was straightened out, the first semester of his sophomore year was nearly over, and the financial office gave Nestor only $780 of what was supposed to be a $1,200 grant, telling him that it couldn’t give him money for a semester that was ending. “It kind of felt like they were stealing from me,” he says.) Only with the help of two dedicated instructors—Shuming Zheng, an engineering professor, and Thomas Kuhn, a physics lecturer—was Nestor able to finish his pre-engineering credits as planned. Fortunately, this allowed him to transfer to a superior school, the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a $5,000 scholarship.
UIC, adjacent to the city’s downtown, is just fifteen miles north of Chicago State, but felt like a world away. Nestor marveled over the smoothness of the operation. At Chicago State, he had been forced to work hard to find help. At UIC, on the first day of each of his classes, professors provided lists of tutors. Chicago State had offered no meaningful job assistance. At UIC, the engineering department was sending out regular e-mails about internships and other opportunities.
Nestor is certain that the two years at Chicago State put him behind. In his first semester at UIC, he failed a math class, finding it difficult to match the faster pace and heavier workload. (He retook the class, however, and passed.) It’ll take him five years, rather than four, to get his degree. But he says he feels invigorated by the challenges. “It’s hard, but it feels like everybody’s trying to help you,” he says. “You didn’t get that sense at Chicago State.”
As it happens, Nestor’s impressions are supported by hard numbers. Chicago State has the worst graduation rate of any public four-year university in Illinois and one of the worst in the nation, with just 13 percent of students finishing in six years. For stronger students like Nestor, the statistics are only somewhat better than that. According to a study from the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR), which looked at twenty different colleges in the Chicago area, kids who graduate from a Chicago public high school with a grade point average of 3.5 have a 37 percent chance of graduating from Chicago State. Those with the same grades who attend UIC have a much better chance of graduating—56 percent. And for those with a 3.5 GPA who attend Northwestern, just north in Evanston, the completion rate is 89 percent. Even schools all around the country with student profiles as challenging as that of Chicago State—that is, schools with mostly African American and Latino students from low-income backgrounds—have overall graduation rates that are many times higher.
Nestor’s experience of educational incompetence at the college level isn’t just a Chicago phenomenon. Nationwide, low-income minority students are disproportionately steered toward colleges not where they’re most likely to succeed, but where they’re most likely to fail.
School reformers, including President Obama, often talk about high school “dropout factories.” These are the roughly 2,000 public high schools, about 15 percent of the total, with the nation’s highest dropout rates. The average student at these schools has about a fifty-fifty chance of graduating, according to the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. But the term “dropout factory” is also applicable to colleges. The Washington Monthly and Education Sector, an independent think tank, looked at the 15 percent of colleges and universities with the worst graduation records—about 200 schools in all—and found that the graduation rate at these schools is 26 percent. (See the table at left for a listing of the fifty colleges and universities with the worst graduation rates.) America’s “college dropout factories,” in other words, are twice as bad at graduating their students as the worst high schools are at graduating theirs.
Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny. This indifference is inexcusable now that a postsecondary credential has become virtually indispensable to anyone hoping to lead a middle-class life. If we want better outcomes in higher education, we need to hold dropout factories like Chicago State accountable in the same way the Obama administration proposes to hold underperforming high schools accountable: transform them—or shut them down.
When one examines the schools on the list of college dropout factories—the worst being Southern University at New Orleans, with a 5 percent graduation rate—one thing that stands out is their diversity. Geographically, they are all over the map. From New York to Florida to Alaska—few regions of the United States are spared a local dropout factory. Some, like Chicago State, the University of the District of Columbia, and Houston’s Texas Southern University, are located in big cities; others, like Sul Ross State University and Heritage University, are in small towns and rural areas. Nor is there a bias toward public or private institutions: it’s split fairly evenly, although the public colleges, which are generally bigger, tend to account for greater numbers of dropouts. Some are heavily weighted toward certain minority groups—historically black colleges, for instance, and tribal colleges. Others, like Idaho State, are 80 percent white and do just as poorly. Some of the schools are religious—like Jarvis Christian College, with a 90 percent attrition rate. Most are just seemingly ordinary schools that mostly fly beneath the radar of the national press.
But there are also similarities. As a percentage of their student bodies, these college dropout factories enroll twice as many part-time students, nearly twice as many from low-income families, and around 50 percent more blacks and Hispanics than the average American college or university. They mainly serve local communities, admit most of their applicants, and have much less money than colleges that are higher in prestige. Most upper-middle-class parents would never send their kids to these schools—nor have they generally even heard of them. Not surprisingly, the worst of the dropout factories are allowed to roll along in dysfunction, year after year.
The school that would later become Chicago State was founded in September 1867 and called the Cook County Normal School—“Normal” referring to schools that prepare teachers for the classroom. For a century or so, it fulfilled this teacher-training role reasonably well. But in 1965 the school was acquired by the state of Illinois, soon renamed Chicago State, and converted into a standard four-year institution. In 1972, Chicago State moved to a newly built $95 million campus that could accommodate an additional 10,000 students. Most of them would be drawn from the city’s poor and working-class South Side and nearby suburbs. It was an admirable attempt to open new doors to a demographic that had been largely shut out of higher education. But it wasn’t long before signs of neglect and mismanagement were obvious. Passage rates on an elementary education teacher licensure exam, for instance, plummeted from 82 percent in 1968 to 42 percent in 1973, and the school almost lost its teacher accreditation.
One year later, in 1974, a devastating series on Chicago State appeared in the Chicago Defender, the city’s premier black newspaper. Under the heading “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Read,” the articles blasted the school, calling it a “diploma mill, with little quality control or concern about the product,” and noted “oppressively low” morale among students. Chicago State is a “ripoff institution,” it said, “a place where a comfortable white administration and faculty is providing a second-rate education for black students.”
Benjamin Alexander, the university’s first black president, arrived as a reformer in the 1970s. He made some significant improvements, but the progress largely evaporated after he left in the 1980s. Another reformer came in the 1990s and then was likewise gone. This would become a familiar pattern: temporary reform followed by familiar fecklessness. No improvements ever seemed to stick. In 2008, Chicago State’s President Elnora Daniel resigned under pressure after the school suffered yet another severe bout of mismanagement. A state audit found that even as the university suffered budget cuts, Daniel and other employees had spent lavishly on meals, alcohol, and first-class airfare. Daniel had brought five relatives and a university administrator with her on a nine-day Caribbean cruise for a “leadership conference.” Lax financial oversight allegedly resulted in the university paying more than a quarter of a million dollars for two photocopiers purchased from a company owned by a university employee.
Meanwhile, students contended with broken elevators, dirty classrooms, and ill-equipped labs. As enrollment declined, so did graduation rates. Of the first-time, full-time freshmen who started in 1996, about 18 percent graduated within six years. The graduation rate dropped to 13 percent in 2008.
Last year, the school’s board of trustees picked a new president, Wayne Watson, who has vowed to boost the school’s graduation rate through such reforms as a new electronic “early alert” system to track student attendance and class performance. But he cautions against expecting too much from Chicago State, given the kind of students that go there. “I serve a lower economic quartile,” he says. “So they’re going to drop out because their baby’s sick, because they don’t have money, because they’re trying to survive.”
Certainly, Chicago State enrolls a large share of academically underprepared students compared to more selective schools such as UIC or Northwestern, so its graduation rate might be expected to be lower. But the idea that Chicago State is doing the best it can with the kind of students it serves is belied by ample countervailing evidence. As the chart below shows, there are more than half a dozen schools in the United States with student bodies that are remarkably similar to that of Chicago State in every important respect—from race to test scores to family income—but whose graduation rates are at least double, and in some cases more than triple, the graduation rate of Chicago State.
Take North Carolina Central University, which enrolls 8,500 students. About 85 percent of students at both schools are black. NCCU’s median SAT score is 840, the approximate equivalent of about 17 on the ACT, even lower than Chicago State’s average ACT of 18. The difference, however, is that NCCU tries to work with the students it has. The result: while Chicago State graduates about 13 percent of its students, NCCU graduates about 50 percent. “We have the philosophy that if we admit the students into this institution we have a great responsibility in ensuring their success,” says Bernice Duffy Johnson, dean of the school’s University College, which focuses on supporting students during their first two years.
Students entering NCCU are told from the start that they are expected to have a goal of graduating in four years. The University College keeps students together in groups and assigns them advisers who must approve all major academic decisions and meet with students frequently. NCCU students even sign a contract upon arriving, a document that lays out the goals of what they are going to accomplish. If they start to struggle, they sign an additional contract that commits them to even closer monitoring. Above all, what drives places like NCCU is a culture of experimentation and data collection. The administrators track students, and they track results. If something works, they keep doing it. If it doesn’t, they try something else.
Other schools similar to Chicago State in their profiles are likewise similar in their pursuit of improved student outcomes. Jackson State University in Mississippi—95 percent black, 65 percent Pell Grant, 43 percent graduation rate—divides incoming students into small groups based on their expected majors and has a required first-year course to help ease the college transition. Faculty can immediately identify struggling students through an online tracking system. The university contracts for extra tutoring in addition to what’s already available on campus. It also gathers as much data about students as it can find, using surveys of student engagement and an exam developed by the University of Missouri that tests students before and after their general education courses. “If you don’t put in place strategies and interventions to retain the students throughout the four, five, six years of matriculation then you are not meeting the mandate that has been set, and that is to graduate a larger number of students,” says Evelyn J. Leggette, Jackson State’s dean of undergraduate studies.
Such examples suggest that the stratospheric rates of failure in college dropout factories are hardly inevitable and that blaming the students has become the last refuge of the bungler. As Melissa Roderick, lead author of the Consortium on Chicago School Research report, asks, “How could a child who gets a 4.0 in an urban school system and has high performance in an urban school system and has managed our environment and overcome their poverty, overcome their race, suddenly become a different person in three months who can no longer perform?”
It’s important to note that most students who drop out of college don’t fail out of college. They leave because they don’t perceive that the educational benefit of college exceeds the substantial expense of time and money—especially not when it’s coupled with indifferent bureaucracies that pride themselves more on inane complexities than actually helping students. But when students are given high expectations and good teaching to match, they succeed academically. And when they succeed they’re more likely to keep succeeding and eventually earn a degree.
The worst colleges also tend to plead ignorance as to how to get better. But the strategies employed by colleges that successfully graduate at-risk students aren’t particularly groundbreaking. Researchers have been documenting effective methods of preventing dropouts for decades. Most are commonsensical: pay attention to students, and give them the support they need. When Chicago State couldn’t give Nestor advice about tutors, it wasn’t failing to use “best practices.” It was failing to be minimally competent. Nor do college presidents need research to tell them it’s a bad idea to squander student tuition dollars on cruises and booze.
Why, then, has the nation tolerated this kind of catastrophic failure, one that has destroyed the college dreams of millions of disadvantaged students, for so long? The answer begins with the fact that most of us don’t know there’s a problem. The world is run by college graduates, most of whom are products of the middle class. They didn’t attend dropout factories, nor are they likely to know anyone who did. People naturally generalize from their own experience, and most public leaders simply have no idea that so many college students fail where they succeeded.
Another reason why we have accepted extremely high dropout rates at some colleges—and, frankly, unimpressive graduation rates throughout much of higher education—is that we lack a broadly shared sense of what an acceptable graduation rate would be. Pretty much everyone agrees that all children need a high school diploma. That’s why high school dropout factories are condemned without question. College, by contrast, isn’t for everyone. So it’s easy to see college dropouts as people who didn’t get what they probably didn’t deserve.
But while some people don’t, in fact, need college, most do. Forty years ago, the majority of high school graduates went no further with their education. Today, three-quarters of high school graduates go after a college degree, because they know that a career with a middle-class wage almost always requires one.
Similarly, just as some people shouldn’t go to college, some people who go shouldn’t graduate. Colleges have an obligation to maintain academic standards, and the slothful are rightly denied degrees. But there is a huge difference between “not everyone graduates” and “hardly anyone graduates”—the latter being the norm at schools like Chicago State. Of the millions of new students who stream into colleges as freshmen every year, barely half will graduate on time. Many won’t graduate at all. According to the census, nearly 34 million Americans over the age of twenty-five list their highest level of education as “some college, no degree.” And there is little or no evidence that they fell short because colleges are rigidly enforcing standards. Quite the opposite: the colleges that successfully graduate low-income and minority students don’t ask less of them. They ask more. Researchers have found that more challenging coursework makes success rates go up, not down.
The public’s blindness to mass failure in higher education is bolstered by chronological happenstance: students move from high school to college at the same time that they reach the legal age of majority. As a result, without much thought, we’ve applied a binary mindset to education: elementary and secondary students are children; if they fail, it’s the fault of the schools. College students are adults; if they fail, it’s the fault of the students.
Of course, this makes little sense. College students don’t become entirely different people in the three months that pass between walking off the high school graduation stage and moving into the freshman dorm. To be sure, the proper balance of responsibility between student and school moves toward students over time. But the burden shouldn’t lurch suddenly and completely onto students between the twelfth and thirteenth grades. Good colleges understand this and take it into account. That’s why the data on colleges show such a correlation between extensive student support, especially during the freshman and sophomore years, and high graduation rates. Yet the blame-the-student mindset persists all the same.
This sort of indifference sets the stage for dismal institutions like Chicago State to prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing. When a prestigious school such as the flagship University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign turns out to be making politically influenced admissions decisions, it’s national news. (When such reports surfaced, Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn immediately stepped in and forced seven of the school’s nine trustees to resign.) When a dropout factory like Chicago State turns in a 13 percent graduation rate, it’s business as usual.
It’s not just the public that’s uninvolved. While public universities are in theory overseen by a combination of state officials and voluntary accrediting bodies, none of them use their power in a manner that’s genuinely ameliorative. Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation. The fifty dropout factories listed on page 22—some of which have graduation rates in the single digits—are all accredited and advertise that fact prominently on their Web sites. Even when accreditors do pay attention to problems at a school, they tend to be slow and secretive in revealing their findings. Chicago State’s accreditor expressed “serious concern” about the school as far back as 2003, but this was never publicized. Not even the Illinois Board of Higher Education, which monitors Chicago State, knew about it. Only in 2009, when the Chicago Tribune published damning excerpts from a leaked confidential letter from the accreditor to the university, did more than a few parties know that Chicago State might be in trouble.
As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”
That’s not the only problem with how funding for higher education is designed. It’s not uncommon for flagship research universities that enroll a disproportionate number of smart, well-off students to receive double the per-student funding allotted to regional universities and former normal schools like Chicago State. In K-12 education, that kind of misallocation often results in multibillion-dollar legal judgments against the state. In higher education, it’s called “meritocracy.”
In such a climate, there’s very little profit in mending one’s ways. After all, you can’t get credit for solving a problem people don’t think exists. Nearly everyone has heard of Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools, and her battle with the education bureaucracy of Washington, D.C. Who has heard of Charlie Nelms, chancellor of North Carolina Central University? Similarly, many people have heard of the last two Chicago school superintendents: Paul Vallas, who went on to run for governor, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Who has heard of the president of Jackson State, Leslie McLemore? College presidents don’t become rich and famous by turning around Chicago State. They make their careers by never working for Chicago State in the first place.
While big-city mayors like Richard Daley and Michael Bloomberg like to focus on fixing K-12 education, few bother to go after any of the moribund public universities that students who survive the K-12 system often attend. Fortunately, some public figures are starting to see things differently. When Secretary Duncan was asked about the college graduation problem at a public event recently, he proposed that high school guidance counselors actively discourage students from enrolling in colleges that persistently fail. Melissa Roderick, the lead author of the CSSR report about Chicago public school students’ college graduation rates, notes that some high schools are banning certain universities from their college fairs because it’s understood that the colleges will not serve their students well.
But it’s not enough just to tell high school students, “Buyer beware.” In other areas of the economy, consumers rightly expect government to protect them from grossly defective products. Governors and state legislatures should do the same, in part by tying a significant portion of state funding to graduation rate goals. Accreditors, for their part, could make their evaluations public and link graduation rates to accreditation. That could go hand in hand with intensified scrutiny of academic standards, to ensure that colleges don’t react to graduation rate pressure by turning into diploma mills.
But we won’t make real headway on the college graduation problem until two even more fundamental steps are taken. The first is acknowledging that colleges share responsibility for graduation with their students. Without that, governors, mayors, accreditors, and secretaries of education won’t be willing to expend scarce political capital on behalf of students like Nestor. The second is a willingness to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.
On the surface, a peaceful university campus can seem like a vital asset to the community. But a university with an 87 percent dropout rate is a service to no one. And chronically dysfunctional organizations can be very difficult to change. There is no reason that states can’t quickly build newer, better, more cost-effective public universities to educate people who are currently stuck in college dropout factories. No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair. The sooner we acknowledge that, the better off those students—and the rest of us—will be.
Ben Miller and Phuong Ly collaborated on this article. Miller is a policy analyst at Education Sector. Ly is a journalist who writes frequently on education and immigration issues. She is currently a John S. Knight Fellow in journalism at Stanford University.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
What the heck happened to the English Department?
Dr. Brenda Aghahowa has allowed me to post her letter to the faculty of the English, Communications,Media&Theatre Department on CEO Watson's disregard of unanimous faculty support for her election as department chair. She outlines and contextualizes in strong language the reasons for this namely: retaliation compounded by weak and "powerless" administrators.
Before we permit the furtherance of an imperial (and imperious), not to mention corporatized, presidency at CSU, I hope our faculty contract negotiators will take notice of the need to have real, not sham, shared governance embedded into the contract they are negotiating this summer. If a faculty's voice is not even "granted" consideration on the department level, then university governance is broken. The current view that on every university decision "faculty are advisory only" must come to an end. This is imperative especially if senior administrators, deans and higher, are going to be mere bobbleheads to the executive authority on campus.
Dr. Aghahowa's letter follows.
MEMORANDUM
To: All Faculty in English, Communications, Media Arts and Theatre
From: Dr. Brenda Eatman Aghahowa
Department Chairperson
Re: New Direction for the Department
Date: Wednesday, June 30, 2010
It is with mixed emotions that I share momentous news for our department. As I expected (and predicted during recent department meetings), the University President, Dr. Wayne D. Watson, has asked me to step down as Department Chairperson. As a tenured faculty member, I am entitled to return to the classroom, and that is what I will do after August 16th. I pledge to perform my duties with the same characteristic diligence and warmth.
As background, I received what appeared to be a cold, form letter in the U.S. mail at home in early June. The letter acknowledged the recommendations of our department faculty and of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences that I continue serving for another three-year term. Nevertheless, he stated, he has decided to set aside those recommendations so that he can go in a “new direction,” with the leadership of the department, as he put it. For the record, during the Department Chairperson’s Election held in April, the vote by eligible, tenured and tenure-track (Unit A) English and Communications faculty was ten yes, zero nay, and one abstention – a strong mandate from voting faculty that I continue. No one ran against me. As someone I know would say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it.”
Both the Dean’s recommendation and the department’s vote indicating that I should serve another three years are in writing and easily documented by both CAS Dean Dr. Rachel W. Lindsey and Dr. Forrest Hazard (our most senior English faculty member and the one prescribed by our by-laws as the person who should supervise the Department Chair election process). There would have been an eleventh “yes” vote, but Prof. Haki Madhubuti (who was unjustly forced into early retirement by the President and now has landed a plum position at Depaul University) was unable to vote. This is because our by-laws state that only continuing faculty members may vote for the Chair. Baba Haki, as many of us affectionately call him, was present during the meeting, however, and spoke kind and compelling words to support my bid to serve another term.
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New Department Chairperson; What the President’s Decision RepresentsNevertheless, the President has decided to totally disregard the informed input of relevant parties, as well as the customary University process for Chair elections (this appears to be his usual M.O. with regard to many decisions he makes here at the University), and to appoint our television production faculty member, Dr. Christine List, as the new Chairperson. While Chris and I have had a warm working relationship over many years, and I expect that that will continue, there are no words that adequately describe the sheer idiocy, poor administrative judgment, vindictiveness, and retaliation that this decision represents.
Here’s why I say that. With the resignation of Prof. Artisia Green of Theatre and the Fall Semester maternity leave of Prof. Kamesha Khan in Theatre, there now remains in the CMAT division of our department only one tenured faculty member (Prof. Songodina Ifatunji), one full-time Unit B Lecturer (Prof. Marilyn Olson), and several part-time adjuncts and a few studio production staff, this during what is a critical time of transition. I do not know who the new Coordinator of CMAT will be and the last I heard, new hiring had been frozen here at the University. During the Spring Semester, persons were interviewed and selected by our department’s Search Committee to fill two CMAT vacancies. Those persons are desperately needed. Of note, the President has instituted a new initiative that will bring Kennedy-King College (KKC) students to CSU’s campus to use our teaching TV studio while our CMAT TV specialists will use the KKC state-of-the-art television studio for classes. On the surface, that is a great idea, but not so if there are inadequate numbers of faculty to cope with all the new KKC students we anticipate. This influx of KKC students obviously will place additional demands on CMAT faculty and facilities, and on the department in general. Unless those who have been interviewed and recommended to the CAS Dean ultimately are hired, there will be complete chaos in CMAT.
Clearly, though, English is the leading division within ECMAT. Even after personnel changes I anticipate this fall (related to possible terminations I am not at liberty to discuss, the departure of Prof. Sterling Plumpp, who will no longer be compensated for his contribution to the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, and the retirement of Dr. Jacqueline Imani Bryant, who is moving to Texas to be closer to her parents and to accept a Visiting Professorship), there will remain at least seven full-time English tenured and tenure-track faculty and roughly twenty full-time Unit B lecturers and part-time adjuncts. Prof. Quraysh Ali Lansana, a tenured faculty member who directs CSU’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, also serves as faculty support for our MFA Program in Creative Writing.
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Further, English is the department that supports the entire campus by providing basic composi-tion and writing courses for all students in all majors. Our department (ECMAT), which also serves the entire campus with its basic public speaking courses, possibly has the highest credit-hour production of any department on campus. Only Math and Psychology might be higher in credit-hour production.
Yet, the person selected to lead the department is a television and communications specialist. This is not to bash Chris, who is caught in the middle here and is well respected in her own field. Leadership of what is essentially an English department, however, requires a Chair with serious scholarly background in at least one of the following areas: rhetoric, composition theory, American Literature, British Literature, European Literature/World Masterpieces, Third World Literature, African American Literature, Literary Criticism, English Education, Linguistics, Print Journalism or any other specialties taught within English. While Chris’ leadership of the CMAT division has been commendable, it does not in my view provide her the administrative background that would lend itself to efficient and effective supervision of the day-to-day operations of a department of this size. The tasks of crisis troubleshooting and course scheduling for CSU students in every major are challenging even for a seasoned English Chair, let alone someone from outside the department’s primary discipline.
The President does not seem to have the department’s (or CSU students’) best interests at heart. If he really had pure motives for going in a new direction and for failing to honor the recommendations of the department’s faculty and of the CAS Dean, he would have taken one of the following options: 1) selected another CSU tenured English faculty member with the requisite administrative and people skills for the job or 2) selected someone from the outside with the relevant scholarly and administrative background. While I seriously doubt that any CSU tenured English faculty members would have taken the position if it had been offered to them, given the questionable circumstances of vindictiveness involved, I must state (with no offense intended to Chris) that many of these tenured English faculty members would have made a far better choice for Chair, given program need of what is largely an English department. Given the following considerations (i.e., that I have made it crystal clear to both Dean Lindsey and to Chris that I will not participate in my own victimization by training my former subordinate, and also that they are on their own to develop their own “new direction,” since my direction of the department was not appreciated), the President’s decision is a recipe for disaster.
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As was the President’s decision to force out Prof. Madhubuti (because this eminent faculty member had written an open letter to the Chicago community justifiably decrying the bogus selection process by which Watson was forced upon this campus), this latest decision was made out of vindictiveness and retaliation. It was designed to hurt and humiliate the Chairperson who has supported Prof. Madhubuti unfailingly and unflinchingly, and who has given gracious but strong push-back, as it were, during these initial months of the President’s tenure on a variety of issues and proposed initiatives that would adversely impact our department and the University’s students at large. As best as I can tell, Watson has no real experience running a four-year university, and it shows. At least CSU’s former President, Dr. Elnora D. Daniel, whom I dearly love and respect, had been second in command at the prestigious four-year school from which she came, Hampton University. In my judgment, she had far more administrative skill and a far more personable approach with people. Without question, she made many stellar accomplish-ments while leading Chicago State University. Consider, for example, the opening of the Jones Convocation Center and of the New Academic Library, both of which were constructed on her watch.
For the past 13 years, I have represented the university well in a variety of venues, including the Oxford Round Table in England, as I have pursued diligent and significant scholarly work, scholarship related primarily to the oratory of the late Texas Congresswoman Barbara Charline Jordan. (As all of you may recall, the related book, Grace Under Fire: Barbara Jordan’s Rhetoric of Watergate, Patriotism, and Equality, was just pre-released by Chicago’s Third World Press in April of this year during CSU’s 20th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Black Writers’ Conference. A splashy, full release will be made in the fall.) For the past six years, by various objective measures, I have served capably and caringly as a Department Chairperson. To the best of my ability, I have tried to carry out my multi-faceted responsibilities in a manner that respects the dignity of each student, faculty member, staffer, parent, and campus visitor with whom I have interacted. Yet, the letter I received in the mail seemed to send this message: “Step down, shut up, and train your former subordinate while you’re at it.”
As one CSU colleague aptly noted, no one had the “testicular fortitude or the ovarian fortitude” to meet with me face to face about the decision – not the President, not the Provost (Dr. Sandra Westbrooks), not the Contract Administrator (Dr. Debrah Jefferson), and not our CAS Dean, who may or may not have even known about the decision, given how things have gone since the new President began his work here last October.
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Unfortunately, Deans on this campus (as well as other key administrators who generally are quite close to retirement age) seem to have been reduced to powerless pawns in this whole pitiful mess that we have on campus right now. They just simply cannot afford to make any real waves lest they lose their jobs and their livelihoods at this late stage in their careers. Their gentle suggestions, for instance, that there are too many new initiatives being established on campus all at once, have fallen on the President’s deaf ears and gone unheeded. It seems that, at the end of his five-year contract, the President wants to be able to point to an inordinate number of new initiatives he established and directed, regardless of the cost in stress and burn-out to those in the trenches who actually have to make those initiatives work while he is attempting so self-actualize.
I am no psychologist, but I do have some certification in pastoral care and counseling, and I know that there is only so much change that the human spirit can absorb all at once. In many cases, CSU faculty and staff have simply shut down emotionally and professionally, refusing to engage in any substantive or lasting productivity. Let many tell it, they are doing the least that they can get away with while biding their time either until retirement or until they can find something better. This is no way to run a university – creating a climate in which people are not inspired to do their best, but rather are intimidated and burned out into doing their least.
Everyone agrees that since Watson came, our campus is now permeated with an atmosphere that is charged by fear and intimidation. He came in creating fear by denying approval of sabbaticals and research compensation CUEs (cost-cutting measures, he said), and by denying some faculty members tenure and retention, for frivolous reasons in some cases. Obviously, some of us do not scare easily (or at all) because we are spiritually clear about who ultimately is in charge of our lives and of our futures, and (news flash!) it is not Wayne Watson or any other human person. Whatever happens, my Christian life experience has taught me that I will land on my feet firmly and successfully, and that whatever comes after a transition of this type will be infinitely better than what preceded it.
The low morale on campus, troubles me, though. The poisonous and unhealthy atmosphere here at CSU has led one CSU colleague, who shall remain nameless, to dub our school, “Coon State University,” meaning that CSU has become a professional plantation (one, in this case, with a Black slave master who behaves in a manner that is dictatorial and tyrannical). The person expresses the feeling of countless administrators, faculty, and staff on campus who feel CSU has become a plantation where “slaves” can only survive if they act like step-and-fetch-its, continually saying, “Yassuh, massuh,” to everything Watson says or proposes. God help Chris if
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she ever has to disagree strongly with the President on any issue of importance to English or CMAT faculty.
The Future (The Department’s and Mine)
As I say, I am not certain what the future holds for our department since the new Chair has no real background that prepares her to serve as lead administrator for what is undeniably the most important department on campus, and as the lead person of what is essentially an English Department with a communications and theatre division. Given the personnel changes that likely will occur in English this fall, everyone needs to expect many schedule changes as the fall approaches.
At present, there are many uncovered sections of classes for many reasons. After learning from higher administration who is allowed to return, I normally would spend all of mid July through mid August, carefully handling the intricate, painstaking, detailed work involved with ensuring that each and every English class will be covered by a faculty member on the first day of class. Prof. Mary Ann Ryan, the department’s former(?) scheduling assistant (who is ABD in British Literature and expecting to finish her dissertation this coming academic year) then would ably collaborate with me in finalizing the schedule during Registration Week in August. None of this will occur, this summer, of course. It is likely that neither of us will be involved with course scheduling going forward.
Mary Ann likely will not be involved first of all because it is summer and she is not required to be on campus again until the week of August 16th, but more importantly because the University’s Contract Administrator, citing the University’s financial trouble, has removed CUEs (compensation) for various coordinator positions from all departments. It is unclear at this moment whether or not Mary Ann will return as sour cheduling assistant. If the CUEs we have requested for her to serve in this capacity ultimately are not approved, this will mean that Mary Ann, who is especially skilled and knowledgeable with respect to the handling of course scheduling (scheduling related to the more than 130 sections of classes our English department offers each long semester), effectively and unfairly will have been fired from that job. As the Dean and Chris work to finalize the schedule in early August (doing so, in all likelihood, without the benefit of input from those of us who really know English scheduling), I sincerely hope that the result will be that each section will be covered with an instructor on the first day of class so that students will not be sitting in classrooms without teachers.
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My second, three-year-term ends today (June 30th), and Dr. List does not begin as the new Chair until August 1st. Dr. List will handle emergency ECMAT business only, while completing a book she is writing at home. (Congrats on the book, Chris!) While the Chair’s duties will not be totally uncovered, this means there will be no Chair in place in the office on a day-to-day basis for the entire month of July, a questionable customer service move on the University’s part. It seems to me that for whatever length of time relevant parties have known that I was going to be asked to step down as Chair, that is the same length of time they should have been training someone to handle the ECMAT Chair’s responsibilities on a day-to-day basis during July and beyond.
While I am unhappy about the possible fate of the department, I am happy for myself. Do not cry or feel sorry for me. While I would not have made the decision myself to step down as Chair at this critical juncture in the department’s life (especially not with NCATE/NCA accreditation visits so close upon us), and while I would have preferred to have continued to serve as a strong voice of advocacy for our individual and collective interests, now that the decision has been made for me, I am at peace. I know I must expose the injustice I have suffered, this in order to help ensure that the same thing does not happen in quite this way to anyone else at CSU in the future, but the decision to have me return to the classroom is answered prayer.
If I may put on my other hat of ordained minister and pastor for a moment, I must confess that I have been praying for some time about the overall quality of my life. Due to CSU’s poor leadership at the top, administrative jobs like that of Chairperson (i.e., middle management positions that involve a great deal of responsibility but that afford no real authority to get anything done) force one to live one’s life out of balance, force one to have to squeeze out limited amounts of time for the things that are truly important in life because of the enormous of amount of time that is required by the position. It has been my experience that the working conditions of CSU administrators often are inhumane. For instance, the person who wants to use his or her accrued vacation time is frowned on and receives flak if that well-deserved and much-needed time off is taken during a period that makes sense personally but represents bad timing for the institution’s needs. Some in CSU’s higher administration act as if it is supposed to be “normal” or routine to forfeit and/or forego vacation time.
Ask me sometime about what happened and what was said this past February when I used well-earned and much-needed vacation time to take a combination personal business/pleasure trip to the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area during Super Bowl Week. (Lord, have mercy!) CSU admini-
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strators constantly are bothered with telephone calls from the University and must take their laptops to handle projects while on what is ostensibly vacation. In my view, outside of a job as the U.S. President or as a physician, there is no job that should require one to be on call or available 24/7. Balance and undisturbed rest are absolutely necessary for any individual’s (including a U.S. President’s or medical doctor’s) physical and emotional well-being, and for the leading of a happy and fulfilled life. The person who is on vacation should really be on vacation and have total rest of mind and spirit from anything work related. This is a pastor speaking, of course, but I suspect that credentialed psychologists and many other relevant professionals would agree. I suspect that many of you who are reading this would agree.
For about two years now (and especially since Dr. Watson was brought to the campus last fall as its lead executive by a Board of Trustees’ process that was corrupt), I have been asking God to help me re-design my life so that I might daily honor these priorities, in this order: God first, family second, then work, church, and everything and everybody else after that. Well, as I often jokingly say to friends and church members, “Be careful what you pray for because you just might get it!”
By allowing this transition from administration back to the classroom, God has freed me up to shape my life in the way that I believe will best honor God and in a way that I desire. In my holy imagination, I hear the voice of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. intoning, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, [I am] free at last!” Hallelujah! The transition has freed me to create a life of balance – one that will involve far fewer hours related to work, far fewer headaches connected with work, and also the time, energy, and flexibility of scheduling to pursue interests and activities that are far more lucrative and far more fulfilling than all the three-hour administrative meetings and the endless report writing that go with the job of Department Chairperson. While on the surface, the return to the classroom represents a 25 percent cut in my salary (because I will be paid for nine months and not twelve), in actuality it represents the potential for a major increase in pay as I use my valuable skill set as an editorial consultant and grant writer during my expanded spare time. From a spiritual, biblical perspective, Joseph of the Old Testament said it best: What Satan meant for harm, God has used for good in my life as a spiritually mature believer. In short, the whole situation is, again, actually a blessing in disguise.
Thanks for All of the Great Years; Let’s Stay Connected
I apologize for the length of this communication, but it is my last magnum opus, as it were, to my beloved faculty after many terrific years of pursuing the department’s interests and goals together as a team. I know that I am well within my American, First Amendment rights of free
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speech to say whatever I want to say to my faculty members and colleagues as I exit the Chair’s position, and to take my time and be thorough in doing so. Please forgive any type-os or other glitches that may appear here. I have re-read this memo several times, and we who are English educators and experienced proofreaders and editors know what that means (i.e., after awhile it is difficult to see the errors, if any).
As I pen these last words, memories of countless wonderful moments flood my mind. There are mental images of morale-building events and parties I spearheaded over the years related to retirements, the Christmas holidays, and the end of the academic year, for instance. (Even show my Director of Composition, clerical assistants, and student aides appreciation and, as I later learned, they had been “plotting” to surprise me and show me appreciation as well. I have been blessed with a fantastic team of faculty, staff, and student workers these past six years. What a group! You’re the best! I thank each and every one of you profusely, and I also thank God! At first when I mentioned the idea of a party, those in the office said that they did not feel much like celebrating under the circumstances, and I certainly understand that. In the end, however, we had one heck of a blow-out celebration yesterday, one that also included many persons who work in the Science Building but not in our specific department.
As I look back over the years, in my mind’s eye I see myself at the church funerals and home repasts of faculty members who have lost parents or other loved ones since July 2004. Mentally, I see myself in the department’s outer office and corridors, bending over strollers, cooing into the faces of many precious and cute-as-a-button infants (some of them twins!) – little ones who are the children and grandchildren of faculty members and students. I see myself, in spite of the crush of paperwork and meetings, taking the time to helpfully counsel and encourage students who have wanted to give up on the University (because of all the red tape and all the run-around they have experienced). Certainly, I see myself taking the time to tap on staff and faculty members’ doors and pop my head into their offices to ask with genuine interest how that conference presentation in California was received or how the dissertation work is coming along or how the family reunion in Georgia went or how that exotic vacation in the Caribbean (or wherever) was enjoyed.
I know that as God considers not only the administrative effort and skill I have invested in my work as Chair, but also the love I have invested (and sometimes it had to be tough love), God stands in heaven saying, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in a few things. I will make you ruler over much.” God also stands ready to execute whatever judgment and justice are required by the injustice I have suffered. As I pray the whole thing
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through, I am clear that God’s direction to me to refusel to participate in my own victimization is part of that justice, and that such refusal constitutes God-directed civil disobedience, with which the Bible is filled, of course. Obviously, the Christian’s role model for life practice, Jesus Christ Himself, was the number one rabble rouser in the Bible.
I have no idea what God fully intends as consequences for the adverse and unfair actions that have been taken against me. God’s Spirit has directed me to simply speak out to help others, to step back and do nothing other than that to vindicate myself, and then to watch God’s justice and vengeance unfold. I can do that. I am spiritually strong enough to follow the Spirit’s lead in this regard, and I will do that. I get the sense that the persons who are responsible for this action have been running roughshod over people for many years with impunity, but they picked on the wrong one this time. God has allowed the rope with which they will hang themselves to become very long.
While I no longer will be leading the department’s parties (if any) or signing off on Travel Authorizations and Vacation Requests, all of you who are part of my CSU family still can expect me as your colleague to share in your life struggles and celebrations to the greatest extent possible. It has been my distinct privilege and pleasure to serve as your Department Chairperson and “adopted” family member these past six years. Let’s stay connected! See you around the campus and around the classroom buildings. Blessings!
Before we permit the furtherance of an imperial (and imperious), not to mention corporatized, presidency at CSU, I hope our faculty contract negotiators will take notice of the need to have real, not sham, shared governance embedded into the contract they are negotiating this summer. If a faculty's voice is not even "granted" consideration on the department level, then university governance is broken. The current view that on every university decision "faculty are advisory only" must come to an end. This is imperative especially if senior administrators, deans and higher, are going to be mere bobbleheads to the executive authority on campus.
Dr. Aghahowa's letter follows.
MEMORANDUM
To: All Faculty in English, Communications, Media Arts and Theatre
From: Dr. Brenda Eatman Aghahowa
Department Chairperson
Re: New Direction for the Department
Date: Wednesday, June 30, 2010
It is with mixed emotions that I share momentous news for our department. As I expected (and predicted during recent department meetings), the University President, Dr. Wayne D. Watson, has asked me to step down as Department Chairperson. As a tenured faculty member, I am entitled to return to the classroom, and that is what I will do after August 16th. I pledge to perform my duties with the same characteristic diligence and warmth.
As background, I received what appeared to be a cold, form letter in the U.S. mail at home in early June. The letter acknowledged the recommendations of our department faculty and of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences that I continue serving for another three-year term. Nevertheless, he stated, he has decided to set aside those recommendations so that he can go in a “new direction,” with the leadership of the department, as he put it. For the record, during the Department Chairperson’s Election held in April, the vote by eligible, tenured and tenure-track (Unit A) English and Communications faculty was ten yes, zero nay, and one abstention – a strong mandate from voting faculty that I continue. No one ran against me. As someone I know would say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it.”
Both the Dean’s recommendation and the department’s vote indicating that I should serve another three years are in writing and easily documented by both CAS Dean Dr. Rachel W. Lindsey and Dr. Forrest Hazard (our most senior English faculty member and the one prescribed by our by-laws as the person who should supervise the Department Chair election process). There would have been an eleventh “yes” vote, but Prof. Haki Madhubuti (who was unjustly forced into early retirement by the President and now has landed a plum position at Depaul University) was unable to vote. This is because our by-laws state that only continuing faculty members may vote for the Chair. Baba Haki, as many of us affectionately call him, was present during the meeting, however, and spoke kind and compelling words to support my bid to serve another term.
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New Department Chairperson; What the President’s Decision RepresentsNevertheless, the President has decided to totally disregard the informed input of relevant parties, as well as the customary University process for Chair elections (this appears to be his usual M.O. with regard to many decisions he makes here at the University), and to appoint our television production faculty member, Dr. Christine List, as the new Chairperson. While Chris and I have had a warm working relationship over many years, and I expect that that will continue, there are no words that adequately describe the sheer idiocy, poor administrative judgment, vindictiveness, and retaliation that this decision represents.
Here’s why I say that. With the resignation of Prof. Artisia Green of Theatre and the Fall Semester maternity leave of Prof. Kamesha Khan in Theatre, there now remains in the CMAT division of our department only one tenured faculty member (Prof. Songodina Ifatunji), one full-time Unit B Lecturer (Prof. Marilyn Olson), and several part-time adjuncts and a few studio production staff, this during what is a critical time of transition. I do not know who the new Coordinator of CMAT will be and the last I heard, new hiring had been frozen here at the University. During the Spring Semester, persons were interviewed and selected by our department’s Search Committee to fill two CMAT vacancies. Those persons are desperately needed. Of note, the President has instituted a new initiative that will bring Kennedy-King College (KKC) students to CSU’s campus to use our teaching TV studio while our CMAT TV specialists will use the KKC state-of-the-art television studio for classes. On the surface, that is a great idea, but not so if there are inadequate numbers of faculty to cope with all the new KKC students we anticipate. This influx of KKC students obviously will place additional demands on CMAT faculty and facilities, and on the department in general. Unless those who have been interviewed and recommended to the CAS Dean ultimately are hired, there will be complete chaos in CMAT.
Clearly, though, English is the leading division within ECMAT. Even after personnel changes I anticipate this fall (related to possible terminations I am not at liberty to discuss, the departure of Prof. Sterling Plumpp, who will no longer be compensated for his contribution to the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, and the retirement of Dr. Jacqueline Imani Bryant, who is moving to Texas to be closer to her parents and to accept a Visiting Professorship), there will remain at least seven full-time English tenured and tenure-track faculty and roughly twenty full-time Unit B lecturers and part-time adjuncts. Prof. Quraysh Ali Lansana, a tenured faculty member who directs CSU’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, also serves as faculty support for our MFA Program in Creative Writing.
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Further, English is the department that supports the entire campus by providing basic composi-tion and writing courses for all students in all majors. Our department (ECMAT), which also serves the entire campus with its basic public speaking courses, possibly has the highest credit-hour production of any department on campus. Only Math and Psychology might be higher in credit-hour production.
Yet, the person selected to lead the department is a television and communications specialist. This is not to bash Chris, who is caught in the middle here and is well respected in her own field. Leadership of what is essentially an English department, however, requires a Chair with serious scholarly background in at least one of the following areas: rhetoric, composition theory, American Literature, British Literature, European Literature/World Masterpieces, Third World Literature, African American Literature, Literary Criticism, English Education, Linguistics, Print Journalism or any other specialties taught within English. While Chris’ leadership of the CMAT division has been commendable, it does not in my view provide her the administrative background that would lend itself to efficient and effective supervision of the day-to-day operations of a department of this size. The tasks of crisis troubleshooting and course scheduling for CSU students in every major are challenging even for a seasoned English Chair, let alone someone from outside the department’s primary discipline.
The President does not seem to have the department’s (or CSU students’) best interests at heart. If he really had pure motives for going in a new direction and for failing to honor the recommendations of the department’s faculty and of the CAS Dean, he would have taken one of the following options: 1) selected another CSU tenured English faculty member with the requisite administrative and people skills for the job or 2) selected someone from the outside with the relevant scholarly and administrative background. While I seriously doubt that any CSU tenured English faculty members would have taken the position if it had been offered to them, given the questionable circumstances of vindictiveness involved, I must state (with no offense intended to Chris) that many of these tenured English faculty members would have made a far better choice for Chair, given program need of what is largely an English department. Given the following considerations (i.e., that I have made it crystal clear to both Dean Lindsey and to Chris that I will not participate in my own victimization by training my former subordinate, and also that they are on their own to develop their own “new direction,” since my direction of the department was not appreciated), the President’s decision is a recipe for disaster.
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As was the President’s decision to force out Prof. Madhubuti (because this eminent faculty member had written an open letter to the Chicago community justifiably decrying the bogus selection process by which Watson was forced upon this campus), this latest decision was made out of vindictiveness and retaliation. It was designed to hurt and humiliate the Chairperson who has supported Prof. Madhubuti unfailingly and unflinchingly, and who has given gracious but strong push-back, as it were, during these initial months of the President’s tenure on a variety of issues and proposed initiatives that would adversely impact our department and the University’s students at large. As best as I can tell, Watson has no real experience running a four-year university, and it shows. At least CSU’s former President, Dr. Elnora D. Daniel, whom I dearly love and respect, had been second in command at the prestigious four-year school from which she came, Hampton University. In my judgment, she had far more administrative skill and a far more personable approach with people. Without question, she made many stellar accomplish-ments while leading Chicago State University. Consider, for example, the opening of the Jones Convocation Center and of the New Academic Library, both of which were constructed on her watch.
For the past 13 years, I have represented the university well in a variety of venues, including the Oxford Round Table in England, as I have pursued diligent and significant scholarly work, scholarship related primarily to the oratory of the late Texas Congresswoman Barbara Charline Jordan. (As all of you may recall, the related book, Grace Under Fire: Barbara Jordan’s Rhetoric of Watergate, Patriotism, and Equality, was just pre-released by Chicago’s Third World Press in April of this year during CSU’s 20th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Black Writers’ Conference. A splashy, full release will be made in the fall.) For the past six years, by various objective measures, I have served capably and caringly as a Department Chairperson. To the best of my ability, I have tried to carry out my multi-faceted responsibilities in a manner that respects the dignity of each student, faculty member, staffer, parent, and campus visitor with whom I have interacted. Yet, the letter I received in the mail seemed to send this message: “Step down, shut up, and train your former subordinate while you’re at it.”
As one CSU colleague aptly noted, no one had the “testicular fortitude or the ovarian fortitude” to meet with me face to face about the decision – not the President, not the Provost (Dr. Sandra Westbrooks), not the Contract Administrator (Dr. Debrah Jefferson), and not our CAS Dean, who may or may not have even known about the decision, given how things have gone since the new President began his work here last October.
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Unfortunately, Deans on this campus (as well as other key administrators who generally are quite close to retirement age) seem to have been reduced to powerless pawns in this whole pitiful mess that we have on campus right now. They just simply cannot afford to make any real waves lest they lose their jobs and their livelihoods at this late stage in their careers. Their gentle suggestions, for instance, that there are too many new initiatives being established on campus all at once, have fallen on the President’s deaf ears and gone unheeded. It seems that, at the end of his five-year contract, the President wants to be able to point to an inordinate number of new initiatives he established and directed, regardless of the cost in stress and burn-out to those in the trenches who actually have to make those initiatives work while he is attempting so self-actualize.
I am no psychologist, but I do have some certification in pastoral care and counseling, and I know that there is only so much change that the human spirit can absorb all at once. In many cases, CSU faculty and staff have simply shut down emotionally and professionally, refusing to engage in any substantive or lasting productivity. Let many tell it, they are doing the least that they can get away with while biding their time either until retirement or until they can find something better. This is no way to run a university – creating a climate in which people are not inspired to do their best, but rather are intimidated and burned out into doing their least.
Everyone agrees that since Watson came, our campus is now permeated with an atmosphere that is charged by fear and intimidation. He came in creating fear by denying approval of sabbaticals and research compensation CUEs (cost-cutting measures, he said), and by denying some faculty members tenure and retention, for frivolous reasons in some cases. Obviously, some of us do not scare easily (or at all) because we are spiritually clear about who ultimately is in charge of our lives and of our futures, and (news flash!) it is not Wayne Watson or any other human person. Whatever happens, my Christian life experience has taught me that I will land on my feet firmly and successfully, and that whatever comes after a transition of this type will be infinitely better than what preceded it.
The low morale on campus, troubles me, though. The poisonous and unhealthy atmosphere here at CSU has led one CSU colleague, who shall remain nameless, to dub our school, “Coon State University,” meaning that CSU has become a professional plantation (one, in this case, with a Black slave master who behaves in a manner that is dictatorial and tyrannical). The person expresses the feeling of countless administrators, faculty, and staff on campus who feel CSU has become a plantation where “slaves” can only survive if they act like step-and-fetch-its, continually saying, “Yassuh, massuh,” to everything Watson says or proposes. God help Chris if
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she ever has to disagree strongly with the President on any issue of importance to English or CMAT faculty.
The Future (The Department’s and Mine)
As I say, I am not certain what the future holds for our department since the new Chair has no real background that prepares her to serve as lead administrator for what is undeniably the most important department on campus, and as the lead person of what is essentially an English Department with a communications and theatre division. Given the personnel changes that likely will occur in English this fall, everyone needs to expect many schedule changes as the fall approaches.
At present, there are many uncovered sections of classes for many reasons. After learning from higher administration who is allowed to return, I normally would spend all of mid July through mid August, carefully handling the intricate, painstaking, detailed work involved with ensuring that each and every English class will be covered by a faculty member on the first day of class. Prof. Mary Ann Ryan, the department’s former(?) scheduling assistant (who is ABD in British Literature and expecting to finish her dissertation this coming academic year) then would ably collaborate with me in finalizing the schedule during Registration Week in August. None of this will occur, this summer, of course. It is likely that neither of us will be involved with course scheduling going forward.
Mary Ann likely will not be involved first of all because it is summer and she is not required to be on campus again until the week of August 16th, but more importantly because the University’s Contract Administrator, citing the University’s financial trouble, has removed CUEs (compensation) for various coordinator positions from all departments. It is unclear at this moment whether or not Mary Ann will return as sour cheduling assistant. If the CUEs we have requested for her to serve in this capacity ultimately are not approved, this will mean that Mary Ann, who is especially skilled and knowledgeable with respect to the handling of course scheduling (scheduling related to the more than 130 sections of classes our English department offers each long semester), effectively and unfairly will have been fired from that job. As the Dean and Chris work to finalize the schedule in early August (doing so, in all likelihood, without the benefit of input from those of us who really know English scheduling), I sincerely hope that the result will be that each section will be covered with an instructor on the first day of class so that students will not be sitting in classrooms without teachers.
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My second, three-year-term ends today (June 30th), and Dr. List does not begin as the new Chair until August 1st. Dr. List will handle emergency ECMAT business only, while completing a book she is writing at home. (Congrats on the book, Chris!) While the Chair’s duties will not be totally uncovered, this means there will be no Chair in place in the office on a day-to-day basis for the entire month of July, a questionable customer service move on the University’s part. It seems to me that for whatever length of time relevant parties have known that I was going to be asked to step down as Chair, that is the same length of time they should have been training someone to handle the ECMAT Chair’s responsibilities on a day-to-day basis during July and beyond.
While I am unhappy about the possible fate of the department, I am happy for myself. Do not cry or feel sorry for me. While I would not have made the decision myself to step down as Chair at this critical juncture in the department’s life (especially not with NCATE/NCA accreditation visits so close upon us), and while I would have preferred to have continued to serve as a strong voice of advocacy for our individual and collective interests, now that the decision has been made for me, I am at peace. I know I must expose the injustice I have suffered, this in order to help ensure that the same thing does not happen in quite this way to anyone else at CSU in the future, but the decision to have me return to the classroom is answered prayer.
If I may put on my other hat of ordained minister and pastor for a moment, I must confess that I have been praying for some time about the overall quality of my life. Due to CSU’s poor leadership at the top, administrative jobs like that of Chairperson (i.e., middle management positions that involve a great deal of responsibility but that afford no real authority to get anything done) force one to live one’s life out of balance, force one to have to squeeze out limited amounts of time for the things that are truly important in life because of the enormous of amount of time that is required by the position. It has been my experience that the working conditions of CSU administrators often are inhumane. For instance, the person who wants to use his or her accrued vacation time is frowned on and receives flak if that well-deserved and much-needed time off is taken during a period that makes sense personally but represents bad timing for the institution’s needs. Some in CSU’s higher administration act as if it is supposed to be “normal” or routine to forfeit and/or forego vacation time.
Ask me sometime about what happened and what was said this past February when I used well-earned and much-needed vacation time to take a combination personal business/pleasure trip to the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area during Super Bowl Week. (Lord, have mercy!) CSU admini-
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strators constantly are bothered with telephone calls from the University and must take their laptops to handle projects while on what is ostensibly vacation. In my view, outside of a job as the U.S. President or as a physician, there is no job that should require one to be on call or available 24/7. Balance and undisturbed rest are absolutely necessary for any individual’s (including a U.S. President’s or medical doctor’s) physical and emotional well-being, and for the leading of a happy and fulfilled life. The person who is on vacation should really be on vacation and have total rest of mind and spirit from anything work related. This is a pastor speaking, of course, but I suspect that credentialed psychologists and many other relevant professionals would agree. I suspect that many of you who are reading this would agree.
For about two years now (and especially since Dr. Watson was brought to the campus last fall as its lead executive by a Board of Trustees’ process that was corrupt), I have been asking God to help me re-design my life so that I might daily honor these priorities, in this order: God first, family second, then work, church, and everything and everybody else after that. Well, as I often jokingly say to friends and church members, “Be careful what you pray for because you just might get it!”
By allowing this transition from administration back to the classroom, God has freed me up to shape my life in the way that I believe will best honor God and in a way that I desire. In my holy imagination, I hear the voice of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. intoning, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, [I am] free at last!” Hallelujah! The transition has freed me to create a life of balance – one that will involve far fewer hours related to work, far fewer headaches connected with work, and also the time, energy, and flexibility of scheduling to pursue interests and activities that are far more lucrative and far more fulfilling than all the three-hour administrative meetings and the endless report writing that go with the job of Department Chairperson. While on the surface, the return to the classroom represents a 25 percent cut in my salary (because I will be paid for nine months and not twelve), in actuality it represents the potential for a major increase in pay as I use my valuable skill set as an editorial consultant and grant writer during my expanded spare time. From a spiritual, biblical perspective, Joseph of the Old Testament said it best: What Satan meant for harm, God has used for good in my life as a spiritually mature believer. In short, the whole situation is, again, actually a blessing in disguise.
Thanks for All of the Great Years; Let’s Stay Connected
I apologize for the length of this communication, but it is my last magnum opus, as it were, to my beloved faculty after many terrific years of pursuing the department’s interests and goals together as a team. I know that I am well within my American, First Amendment rights of free
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speech to say whatever I want to say to my faculty members and colleagues as I exit the Chair’s position, and to take my time and be thorough in doing so. Please forgive any type-os or other glitches that may appear here. I have re-read this memo several times, and we who are English educators and experienced proofreaders and editors know what that means (i.e., after awhile it is difficult to see the errors, if any).
As I pen these last words, memories of countless wonderful moments flood my mind. There are mental images of morale-building events and parties I spearheaded over the years related to retirements, the Christmas holidays, and the end of the academic year, for instance. (Even show my Director of Composition, clerical assistants, and student aides appreciation and, as I later learned, they had been “plotting” to surprise me and show me appreciation as well. I have been blessed with a fantastic team of faculty, staff, and student workers these past six years. What a group! You’re the best! I thank each and every one of you profusely, and I also thank God! At first when I mentioned the idea of a party, those in the office said that they did not feel much like celebrating under the circumstances, and I certainly understand that. In the end, however, we had one heck of a blow-out celebration yesterday, one that also included many persons who work in the Science Building but not in our specific department.
As I look back over the years, in my mind’s eye I see myself at the church funerals and home repasts of faculty members who have lost parents or other loved ones since July 2004. Mentally, I see myself in the department’s outer office and corridors, bending over strollers, cooing into the faces of many precious and cute-as-a-button infants (some of them twins!) – little ones who are the children and grandchildren of faculty members and students. I see myself, in spite of the crush of paperwork and meetings, taking the time to helpfully counsel and encourage students who have wanted to give up on the University (because of all the red tape and all the run-around they have experienced). Certainly, I see myself taking the time to tap on staff and faculty members’ doors and pop my head into their offices to ask with genuine interest how that conference presentation in California was received or how the dissertation work is coming along or how the family reunion in Georgia went or how that exotic vacation in the Caribbean (or wherever) was enjoyed.
I know that as God considers not only the administrative effort and skill I have invested in my work as Chair, but also the love I have invested (and sometimes it had to be tough love), God stands in heaven saying, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in a few things. I will make you ruler over much.” God also stands ready to execute whatever judgment and justice are required by the injustice I have suffered. As I pray the whole thing
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through, I am clear that God’s direction to me to refusel to participate in my own victimization is part of that justice, and that such refusal constitutes God-directed civil disobedience, with which the Bible is filled, of course. Obviously, the Christian’s role model for life practice, Jesus Christ Himself, was the number one rabble rouser in the Bible.
I have no idea what God fully intends as consequences for the adverse and unfair actions that have been taken against me. God’s Spirit has directed me to simply speak out to help others, to step back and do nothing other than that to vindicate myself, and then to watch God’s justice and vengeance unfold. I can do that. I am spiritually strong enough to follow the Spirit’s lead in this regard, and I will do that. I get the sense that the persons who are responsible for this action have been running roughshod over people for many years with impunity, but they picked on the wrong one this time. God has allowed the rope with which they will hang themselves to become very long.
While I no longer will be leading the department’s parties (if any) or signing off on Travel Authorizations and Vacation Requests, all of you who are part of my CSU family still can expect me as your colleague to share in your life struggles and celebrations to the greatest extent possible. It has been my distinct privilege and pleasure to serve as your Department Chairperson and “adopted” family member these past six years. Let’s stay connected! See you around the campus and around the classroom buildings. Blessings!
Friday, July 2, 2010
Another take on shared governance
So let me own my bias up front about how organizations function. When I was in the military, the core function of each service is its combat arms units. In the Air Force, there were airplanes, missiles and space operators. They made up a small portion of the service. The larger portion was the support functions; administration, personnel, supply, transportation, etc. I bring that experience into my understanding of all organizations. There is a core activity and a group or people responsible for that core activity. The rest of the people in the organization are there to support that activity and those people.
In academe, the core activity is the academic function. Everything else is support. This doesn’t make one more important than the others. I realize in our modern world of ‘don’t hurt anyone’s self esteem’ everyone is important. Importance and spatial relationships are separate issues. Conflation of those two issues misrepresents my point. If those in support are not supportive, it is likely that either they don’t understand the concept of the core activity or are so arrogant they believe they are the core activity. From an outsider’s perspective it seems as if the perpetual meetings and reports and committees are used as justification for the importance of the support function. Instead of asking those being supported how best to support them, educational administrators plod along often without regard to the core activity or the impact of their behavior on that core function. There is a process in the Academy whereby those at the center and those on the periphery work together to support the mission of the institution. That process is called shared governance. It isn’t about who makes decisions. Quite frankly, I don’t want to make administrative decisions and I will if it is too difficult for those administrators to collaborate with faculty to reach a sound outcome. Many administrators I have had conversations with seem to believe there is an inability of faculty to perform administrative functions. This may be the result of the professionalization of higher education administration. It is actually reversed. Unless an administrator has some disciplinary expertise and the credentials of a terminal degree, they can’t do my job. I most certainly can learn in a short period of time to do their job. Instead of focusing on who is better positioned to do someone else’s job, shared governance is about there being full disclosure and participation by the core with the periphery; with those who execute the mission and those who support them.
Rather than viewing the core as obstructionists or cats in need of herding, they (we) could be viewed as vital to the healthy functioning of the university. That would include having conversations at the front end of an idea, not 8 months later e.g. Senior Thesis. That would include putting requests in writing and creating a paper trail to prevent misunderstandings. Most academics I have worked with have very orderly minds and work better when things are thought through. They work less effectively with ill-conceived or unprepared ideas. Ideas that do not pass muster of the intellectual rigor of academics are likely to be unsound ideas and should be dismissed out of hand.
Formal communication could alleviate those challenges and allow fuller participation in the life of the institution. I find it strange that our university would still be pursuing a West Side campus when the faculty have not weighed in, been heard and been responded to about their concerns. It appears to be administrative hubris once again, believing that administration is the core function that is to be supported by everyone else.
As an intellectual construction, shared governance is an excellent and meaningful tool and process. In practice it is like a relationship. It takes work, commitment and communication to be successful. We haven’t quite mastered it here at CSU and until we do, we will never accomplish what we otherwise could.
In academe, the core activity is the academic function. Everything else is support. This doesn’t make one more important than the others. I realize in our modern world of ‘don’t hurt anyone’s self esteem’ everyone is important. Importance and spatial relationships are separate issues. Conflation of those two issues misrepresents my point. If those in support are not supportive, it is likely that either they don’t understand the concept of the core activity or are so arrogant they believe they are the core activity. From an outsider’s perspective it seems as if the perpetual meetings and reports and committees are used as justification for the importance of the support function. Instead of asking those being supported how best to support them, educational administrators plod along often without regard to the core activity or the impact of their behavior on that core function. There is a process in the Academy whereby those at the center and those on the periphery work together to support the mission of the institution. That process is called shared governance. It isn’t about who makes decisions. Quite frankly, I don’t want to make administrative decisions and I will if it is too difficult for those administrators to collaborate with faculty to reach a sound outcome. Many administrators I have had conversations with seem to believe there is an inability of faculty to perform administrative functions. This may be the result of the professionalization of higher education administration. It is actually reversed. Unless an administrator has some disciplinary expertise and the credentials of a terminal degree, they can’t do my job. I most certainly can learn in a short period of time to do their job. Instead of focusing on who is better positioned to do someone else’s job, shared governance is about there being full disclosure and participation by the core with the periphery; with those who execute the mission and those who support them.
Rather than viewing the core as obstructionists or cats in need of herding, they (we) could be viewed as vital to the healthy functioning of the university. That would include having conversations at the front end of an idea, not 8 months later e.g. Senior Thesis. That would include putting requests in writing and creating a paper trail to prevent misunderstandings. Most academics I have worked with have very orderly minds and work better when things are thought through. They work less effectively with ill-conceived or unprepared ideas. Ideas that do not pass muster of the intellectual rigor of academics are likely to be unsound ideas and should be dismissed out of hand.
Formal communication could alleviate those challenges and allow fuller participation in the life of the institution. I find it strange that our university would still be pursuing a West Side campus when the faculty have not weighed in, been heard and been responded to about their concerns. It appears to be administrative hubris once again, believing that administration is the core function that is to be supported by everyone else.
As an intellectual construction, shared governance is an excellent and meaningful tool and process. In practice it is like a relationship. It takes work, commitment and communication to be successful. We haven’t quite mastered it here at CSU and until we do, we will never accomplish what we otherwise could.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Notes from the June BOT meeting
So what better way to spend a Friday morning and afternoon than at the BOT meeting. I thought I would bring you, our loyal readers, up to date on the goings on at the highest levels. First, I would like to extend my congratulations to Professor Victor Sorrell on being named Professor Emeritus. His long and distinguished service has been noted by the university in awarding him this status. Thank you Victor for you wisdom, perseverance and willingness to be of service to the highest ideals of the Academy and this university.
I did get some phone calls on another matter facing the university, namely the fallout from Professor Madhubuti leaving the university recently. The questions were about the future of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, the Black Writer’s Conference and the acquisition of Ms Brooks’ papers. For those who don’t know, the Gwendolyn Brooks Center was approved by the Board of Governors in 1992. This center is the repository of the works of the Illinois Poet Laureate and focuses on advancing the study of black literature and poetry. I thought it only appropriate to broach the subject during the Academic Affairs Committee meeting to wit the following was made public by Dr. Rachel Lindsey, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. First the Center will remain open under the direction of Professor Quraysh A. Lansana. The Center will continue to host the Black Writer’s Conference, with the next one scheduled for April 2011. Unfortunately, we were informed that the university would not be receiving Ms Brooks’ papers, though a contract and earnest money was paid. Upon questioning by the BOT Chairman, it was discovered that the university president demanded an appraisal of the work be done before the contract was executed. There was no language in the contract calling for an appraisal and the agreement fell through.
I did get some phone calls on another matter facing the university, namely the fallout from Professor Madhubuti leaving the university recently. The questions were about the future of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, the Black Writer’s Conference and the acquisition of Ms Brooks’ papers. For those who don’t know, the Gwendolyn Brooks Center was approved by the Board of Governors in 1992. This center is the repository of the works of the Illinois Poet Laureate and focuses on advancing the study of black literature and poetry. I thought it only appropriate to broach the subject during the Academic Affairs Committee meeting to wit the following was made public by Dr. Rachel Lindsey, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. First the Center will remain open under the direction of Professor Quraysh A. Lansana. The Center will continue to host the Black Writer’s Conference, with the next one scheduled for April 2011. Unfortunately, we were informed that the university would not be receiving Ms Brooks’ papers, though a contract and earnest money was paid. Upon questioning by the BOT Chairman, it was discovered that the university president demanded an appraisal of the work be done before the contract was executed. There was no language in the contract calling for an appraisal and the agreement fell through.
I did take a moment to remind the full Board later in the day about good news of the Center remaining at CSU and the disappointing news that once again, the university loses a valuable asset. First, CSU eliminated the Hospitality Management Program and three years later DePaul University opened a new Hospitality Management Program. Second, Professor Haki Madhubuti leaves the university under circumstances that are less than cordial and then is hired by DePaul University. I would fully expect DePaul University to become the repository for the papers of the Illinois Poet Laureate within a few months. Is there no way to compete with DePaul University? Yes, I believe there is; by valuing the assets we have here and not casting them off out of hubris.
I also took some time to speak about that subject near and dear to most faculty, shared governance. Apparently, some $4 million was released by the State to the university to begin work on the West Side Campus (WSC). The money is contingent on having a plan on how to use the funds. I implored the BOT not to waste one second of time on this idea until the campus has addressed its $75 million of deferred maintenance amongst other things. Rumor has it though, the CEO and BOT Chair were out scouting for sites on the West Side, an activity your humble narrator finds curious as the faculty haven’t even been asked what we will do at this new campus. I would think that we would want to have some vision of what we are doing before we go looking for where we will do it. I reminded all in attendance that whether it is something as expansive as the next Strategic Plan or as specific as the WSC, faculty need to be involved in the discussions.
And on another facilities note, the elevator in the Cook Administration building will be the first to be repaired in the elevator upgrades. Timing on the other buildings will follow. I am glad our senior administrators will not be forced to use the stairs any longer than necessary.
I have heard from more than one new administrator that the university doesn’t function like corporate organizations to which I replied because it isn’t. The inherent presumption of the superiority of the corporate model relative to all others is misplaced and incorrect. If that were the case, the self correcting market would have prevented the financial crisis we are in, the environmental disaster in the Gulf and the unprecedented concentration of wealth in this society. So the corporate model is not superior or inferior. It is what it is. The academic model is the same. Respect for the difference is typically what educated people practice. I appreciate the struggle of those who have never been in Academe AND there may be some professional Darwinism here. Adapt or die. No single person is able to change a system. Presidents have come and gone and the system remains in place. So the complaints about the dysfunction or inefficiency of the Academy vis-a-vis the private sector are noted. And as scientists have long accepted adaptation to surroundings has proven to be the best survival strategy in history.
I also took some time to speak about that subject near and dear to most faculty, shared governance. Apparently, some $4 million was released by the State to the university to begin work on the West Side Campus (WSC). The money is contingent on having a plan on how to use the funds. I implored the BOT not to waste one second of time on this idea until the campus has addressed its $75 million of deferred maintenance amongst other things. Rumor has it though, the CEO and BOT Chair were out scouting for sites on the West Side, an activity your humble narrator finds curious as the faculty haven’t even been asked what we will do at this new campus. I would think that we would want to have some vision of what we are doing before we go looking for where we will do it. I reminded all in attendance that whether it is something as expansive as the next Strategic Plan or as specific as the WSC, faculty need to be involved in the discussions.
And on another facilities note, the elevator in the Cook Administration building will be the first to be repaired in the elevator upgrades. Timing on the other buildings will follow. I am glad our senior administrators will not be forced to use the stairs any longer than necessary.
I have heard from more than one new administrator that the university doesn’t function like corporate organizations to which I replied because it isn’t. The inherent presumption of the superiority of the corporate model relative to all others is misplaced and incorrect. If that were the case, the self correcting market would have prevented the financial crisis we are in, the environmental disaster in the Gulf and the unprecedented concentration of wealth in this society. So the corporate model is not superior or inferior. It is what it is. The academic model is the same. Respect for the difference is typically what educated people practice. I appreciate the struggle of those who have never been in Academe AND there may be some professional Darwinism here. Adapt or die. No single person is able to change a system. Presidents have come and gone and the system remains in place. So the complaints about the dysfunction or inefficiency of the Academy vis-a-vis the private sector are noted. And as scientists have long accepted adaptation to surroundings has proven to be the best survival strategy in history.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Epilogue: Madhubuti moving on...
What do they say about a prophet in his own land?
"He's swapping one iconic black heroine for another. Haki Madhubuti, the founder and director emeritus of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University, has been named DePaul University's new Ida B. Wells-Barnett university professor. This fall he will teach two classes, lecture and conduct faculty workshops on race at
DePaul..." --Laura Washington, Chicago Sun Times, June 7, 2010
http://www.suntimes.com/news/washington/2361184,CST-EDT-laura07.article
"He's swapping one iconic black heroine for another. Haki Madhubuti, the founder and director emeritus of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University, has been named DePaul University's new Ida B. Wells-Barnett university professor. This fall he will teach two classes, lecture and conduct faculty workshops on race at
DePaul..." --Laura Washington, Chicago Sun Times, June 7, 2010
http://www.suntimes.com/news/washington/2361184,CST-EDT-laura07.article
Friday, June 11, 2010
AAUP Conference on Shared Governance
Given the discussions at CSU in the past year plus, I thought I would point out that the AAUP is holding a conference on shared governance this fall, with a call for papers right now. Here is the information directly from the AAUP's website:
"The AAUP Committee on College and University Governance is holding what it intends to be its first annual fall conference on shared governance on November 12-14, 2010. This conference will be held in Washington, D.C. The conference will be a combination of training workshops for governance leaders and those aspiring to positions of leadership, as well as sessions consisting of paper presentations exploring all aspects of college and university governance.
The Committee is therefore soliciting proposals for paper presentations from individuals or groups of individuals on all topics relating to college and university governance. Some possible topics for presentations and discussions are:
- corporatization and challenges to shared governance;
- principles, structures and effective best practices of shared governance;
- faculty governance, pedagogy, curriculum and curricular reorganization;
- the relationship of faculty governance to central administrations;motivating faculty to participate actively in governance structures;
- the role of tenured faculty, contingent faculty, junior or untenured faculty in shared governance;
- faculty participation in budgeting, financial exigency or strategic planning;
- shared governance and assessment, accountability and accreditation;
- governance and faculty hiring, promotion and tenure;
- faculty governance and collective bargaining or governing boards;
- shared governance and individual faculty or departments.
Proposals should be submitted not later than July 15, 2010."
Sunday, June 6, 2010
"Contract, Contract..." (part 1)
"Contract, Contract, who said contract? Did you hear me mention contract?"
--Oscar to Lily in On the Twentieth Century
I've been keeping my head buried in the end of year paperwork morass that seems to demand more attention every year, so I haven't heard much of anything lately, but at some point this summer I believe we will be negotiating a new contract. The few faculty members I've spoken to have begun asking the same questions: "Has the contract negotiation started?" And more importantly, uh, "what are we negotiating this year?"
"And it's one, two three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me I don't give a damn..."
I hope individual faculty members and the Faculty Senate in particular will give a damn about this summer's contract negotiations (apologies to Country Joe & the Fish). No, we're not fighting the Vietnam War, but we should start to grow some backbones around here and fight against the perpetuation of business as usual at CSU, kowtowing to patronage politics and Southside political interests (“contracts, contracts who gets the contracts?”) and the failure of CSU Administration to permit real shared governance on campus.
Since the debacle of last year's presidential search, when that rump board of Trustees gave virtually no voice to the faculty, staff, or students of CSU in the choice of its president, the union negotiators should demand that “shared governance” be built into the next contract. Last year should have opened up faculty eyes to the type of university in which we teach. Unfortunately, too many faculty want to avert their eyes, or worse yet, be active participants in the political game playing. Yes, we do good things around here that go unrecognized by a lot of people, both on campus and off, but let's face it, we do good things much of the time in spite of, not because of, who runs this place and allocates the campus resources, determines hiring, or doles out the contracts. And yes there are sincere administrators and some of those who even want to change this top-down structure (what a senior colleague of mine once referred to as Elnora’s “plantation model” administration and now our current CEO’s Chicago pol-style governance). Unfortunately too few administrators are afraid to say anything, let alone advocate for it. We’re all locked into the much bigger game of Southside patronage politics and until we look it in the face and admit it, however discomfiting that may be, we will continue to limp along and grumble, and the idea of “changing the culture at CSU” that we had hoped for two years ago at the end of Elnora Daniel’s tenure will truly fade into cynicism. How can we expect a different outcome if we keep doing things the same way?
“And its 5, 6, 7,” what are we waiting for?…
A president from another university outside ILL told me that there are two ways to get things to change at a university:
1. accrediting agencies
2. faculty & staff contracts
No one needs to be reminded that these are difficult times. Does anyone remember that at one of his town hall meetings this spring, CEO Watson said we here at CSU are going to have to trim the fat, tighten our belts, stop living high off the hog? --I can’t remember the exact clichés that he used. At the time I wondered if anyone else thought how little this CEO knows of CSU if he thinks we have been living so high all this time. I buy my own printer paper and printer cartridges by the end of most semesters and don’t forget those state of the art classrooms that we are in, and unlimited xeroxing privileges, and oh yes, how much did I get as a book budget from CSU last year? Can I call students from my office if the call is long-distance? Have I received a new computer every couple of years? Puh-leeze. I’m happy if I walk into a classroom that doesn’t look like a storehouse for broken down desks and has a chalk tray that is clean and a whiteboard that is not stained beyond use.
Let's face it, our days of selling out and abnegating governing power to the Administration for raises is ending, not, I am sorry to say, because a majority wants it to, but simply because there is no money to be had. Someone mentioned another faculty union negotiation in the state of ILL that concluded with a 0-1-1 contract (no raise the first year, 1% the year after that and 1% the third year). I wonder if we can even be that pathetically optimistic. Already word is coming down that the Admin wants to eliminate:
1. cues for coordinators/assistant chair positions
2. cues for assessment coordinators (gee, I wonder who’ll do that tedious time-consuming job for no cues)
And don’t forget, this year the CEO has already eliminated:
1. sabbaticals (except for one or two scientists who are already getting their own funding)
2. Research Cues except for those he will hand-pick à la the Chicago pol-style governance (he nullified any “advisory” input from the Faculty Research Cues Committee this year and put at the head of its ranking those he himself thought worthy). Why did he do this? Because contractually he could. Yet another “advisory only” committee that shows how powerless the faculty truly is.
If you think changing the culture on the CSU campus is hopeless look at the website for the Illinois Better Government Association (remember that they took an interest in the shenanigans of our presidential search last year). Andy Shaw, head of the IBGA, has been on NPR this week commenting on the great Blagovich trial. I’m wondering how many of CSU’s political friends will be paraded out to testify. Check out http://www.bettergov.org/
And so far, none of CEO Watson’s connections to the Illinois pols seems to have bought us very much-- $42,000 worth of flat-screen tvs? Buy-in to the political pork project of a west-side campus? A fat contract given out for a feasibility study for the building of another dorm on campus? Nothing that could stave off employee lay-offs this spring.
CSU’s faculty, staff, and students were not given the pretence of a share in the determination of CSU’s president last year. The faculty did not share in the decision to eliminate sabbaticals or allocate research cues this year. The union’s contract team must keep the issue of shared governance in the forefront of its negotiations.
More on instituting shared governance at CSU in the next blog.
--Oscar to Lily in On the Twentieth Century
I've been keeping my head buried in the end of year paperwork morass that seems to demand more attention every year, so I haven't heard much of anything lately, but at some point this summer I believe we will be negotiating a new contract. The few faculty members I've spoken to have begun asking the same questions: "Has the contract negotiation started?" And more importantly, uh, "what are we negotiating this year?"
"And it's one, two three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me I don't give a damn..."
I hope individual faculty members and the Faculty Senate in particular will give a damn about this summer's contract negotiations (apologies to Country Joe & the Fish). No, we're not fighting the Vietnam War, but we should start to grow some backbones around here and fight against the perpetuation of business as usual at CSU, kowtowing to patronage politics and Southside political interests (“contracts, contracts who gets the contracts?”) and the failure of CSU Administration to permit real shared governance on campus.
Since the debacle of last year's presidential search, when that rump board of Trustees gave virtually no voice to the faculty, staff, or students of CSU in the choice of its president, the union negotiators should demand that “shared governance” be built into the next contract. Last year should have opened up faculty eyes to the type of university in which we teach. Unfortunately, too many faculty want to avert their eyes, or worse yet, be active participants in the political game playing. Yes, we do good things around here that go unrecognized by a lot of people, both on campus and off, but let's face it, we do good things much of the time in spite of, not because of, who runs this place and allocates the campus resources, determines hiring, or doles out the contracts. And yes there are sincere administrators and some of those who even want to change this top-down structure (what a senior colleague of mine once referred to as Elnora’s “plantation model” administration and now our current CEO’s Chicago pol-style governance). Unfortunately too few administrators are afraid to say anything, let alone advocate for it. We’re all locked into the much bigger game of Southside patronage politics and until we look it in the face and admit it, however discomfiting that may be, we will continue to limp along and grumble, and the idea of “changing the culture at CSU” that we had hoped for two years ago at the end of Elnora Daniel’s tenure will truly fade into cynicism. How can we expect a different outcome if we keep doing things the same way?
“And its 5, 6, 7,” what are we waiting for?…
A president from another university outside ILL told me that there are two ways to get things to change at a university:
1. accrediting agencies
2. faculty & staff contracts
No one needs to be reminded that these are difficult times. Does anyone remember that at one of his town hall meetings this spring, CEO Watson said we here at CSU are going to have to trim the fat, tighten our belts, stop living high off the hog? --I can’t remember the exact clichés that he used. At the time I wondered if anyone else thought how little this CEO knows of CSU if he thinks we have been living so high all this time. I buy my own printer paper and printer cartridges by the end of most semesters and don’t forget those state of the art classrooms that we are in, and unlimited xeroxing privileges, and oh yes, how much did I get as a book budget from CSU last year? Can I call students from my office if the call is long-distance? Have I received a new computer every couple of years? Puh-leeze. I’m happy if I walk into a classroom that doesn’t look like a storehouse for broken down desks and has a chalk tray that is clean and a whiteboard that is not stained beyond use.
Let's face it, our days of selling out and abnegating governing power to the Administration for raises is ending, not, I am sorry to say, because a majority wants it to, but simply because there is no money to be had. Someone mentioned another faculty union negotiation in the state of ILL that concluded with a 0-1-1 contract (no raise the first year, 1% the year after that and 1% the third year). I wonder if we can even be that pathetically optimistic. Already word is coming down that the Admin wants to eliminate:
1. cues for coordinators/assistant chair positions
2. cues for assessment coordinators (gee, I wonder who’ll do that tedious time-consuming job for no cues)
And don’t forget, this year the CEO has already eliminated:
1. sabbaticals (except for one or two scientists who are already getting their own funding)
2. Research Cues except for those he will hand-pick à la the Chicago pol-style governance (he nullified any “advisory” input from the Faculty Research Cues Committee this year and put at the head of its ranking those he himself thought worthy). Why did he do this? Because contractually he could. Yet another “advisory only” committee that shows how powerless the faculty truly is.
If you think changing the culture on the CSU campus is hopeless look at the website for the Illinois Better Government Association (remember that they took an interest in the shenanigans of our presidential search last year). Andy Shaw, head of the IBGA, has been on NPR this week commenting on the great Blagovich trial. I’m wondering how many of CSU’s political friends will be paraded out to testify. Check out http://www.bettergov.org/
And so far, none of CEO Watson’s connections to the Illinois pols seems to have bought us very much-- $42,000 worth of flat-screen tvs? Buy-in to the political pork project of a west-side campus? A fat contract given out for a feasibility study for the building of another dorm on campus? Nothing that could stave off employee lay-offs this spring.
CSU’s faculty, staff, and students were not given the pretence of a share in the determination of CSU’s president last year. The faculty did not share in the decision to eliminate sabbaticals or allocate research cues this year. The union’s contract team must keep the issue of shared governance in the forefront of its negotiations.
More on instituting shared governance at CSU in the next blog.
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