Human Resource Directors and Employee Unions

Tomorrow afternoon, the Faculty Senate at UW-Madison will hear from Bob Lavigna, the institution's Human Resources Director. Lavigna will be discussing HR Design, a new plan I've covered several times recently on this blog. It's a controversial proposal, in part because it shifts the focus on setting compensation from internal equity towards external markets.  It also reduces some of the benefits held by classified staff, who are currently unionized, and for whom perks like substantial vacation time slightly dull the pain stemming from the terrible wages.

I was therefore intrigued when this morning I delved into my Inside Higher Ed backlog of reading and found the results of a brand new national survey of HR directors and their opinions about the future directions universities need to take.  The results help to at least partially set the broader stage on which HR Design is occurring.   (Partially: the response rate for this survey is 15% and with just 324 participants, 42 of whom were at public research universities, who knows if Madison is represented.)

Here are some key highlights related to HR Design:

• Concerns about salary equity are losing ground. Nearly 32% of HR Directors at public research universities said they are paying less attention to equity in faculty and staff salaries than they did five years ago, and just 17% are attending to those issues more often, despite the strong likelihood (given austerity practices) that inequities are growing.

• Almost all HR Directors take a dim view of unions. Close to 90% of HR Directors at public research universities contend that unions inhibit their ability to re-deploy people and define job tasks, discourage pay for performance, and inappropriately protect poor performing employees.   Less than 1/3 of such Directors acknowledge unions' demonstrable roles in securing better salaries and benefits and ensuring fair treatment of employees.

• Few HR Directors seem able to ground their assessments in data. Just 28.6% of HR Directors at public research universities report that they have good data on employee performance, productivity, and satisfaction, and only 21.4% say they use such data in campus planning and policy decisions.  (Sidenote: Oh. My. God.)

• And yet somehow, HR Directors are able to attribute low morale among employees to recent budget cuts. 74% of those at public research institutions agree that budget cuts did major damage to staff rationale, and 20-30% say their offices are unfairly blamed for cuts to employee benefits and services and even layoffs.  The frequency of these statements is twice as common at public research institutions as compared to elsewhere.

These will undoubtedly form a nice backdrop to tomorrow's discussion. I'm hoping Lavigna keeps his statement short and sweet, to allow plenty of time for questions. I'm told this hasn't been the case at recent campus events; for example at last week's Academic Staff Assembly meeting the members were not given responses to ASEC's previously issued comments.  But I'm sure tomorrow will be different-- faculty like to talk, at least as much as we like to listen.

You have read this article compensation / faculty / HR design / HR Director survey / Inside Higher Ed / neoliberalism / pay equity / Performance Pay / staff / unions with the title faculty. You can bookmark this page URL http://apt3e.blogspot.com/2012/09/human-resource-directors-and-employee.html. Thanks!

Faulty Inside Higher Ed Survey Demonizes Faculty

This morning's Twitter feed was rife with news of a story from Inside Higher Ed directly relevant to the UVA fiasco. President Teresa Sullivan was reportedly canned for failing to push an agenda for online education at UVA, standing in the way of so-called "progress."  Is this because she catered too much to faculty, who are increasingly described as the main obstacle to reform?

It seems some people want you to believe yes-- the real problem isn't the rampant excitement over a fairly untested pedagogical approach to education, but the resistance of the educators.  So today IHE shares a new survey: Conflicted-Faculty and Online Education, 2012.  The story's lede reads: "Faculty members are far less excited by, and more fearful of, the recent growth of online education than are academic technology administrators."  Professors are described as lacking optimism, having a "bleak" view of the quality of online education.  The survey report wonders "why"-- rather than praising profs for their skepticism, something faculty are widely known and respected for.


So-- big finding, right?  WRONG.  This story doesn't belong in a respected publication like IHE.  Here's why:


The survey, conducted by a team known for its studies of distance learning, and including advertisements by online educators, obtained a 7.7% response rate among faculty, and a less than 10% response rate among administrators. 
Yes, you read that right. About 60,000 professors were surveyed and just 4,564 provided enough of an answer to be included in the study.  For real? This isn't nationally representative of anything. It's a horribly biased little subsample, and yet the RR isn't even mentioned in the reporting!

Moreover, look at the questions-- where'd they get the "fear vs. excitement" answers? Because they only provided those two options.  Gee, am I fearful or excited about a new untested pedagogy being pushed on me?  Well...neither. But I'm not stupid enough to jump on a bandwagon, so I will choose "fearful." By which I mean skeptical.

I have such respect for folks like Doug Lederman and his crew at IHE, that I am honestly shocked this is running in that publication at all. It shouldn't.


Take it down.


Update: I have already heard from Doug Lederman, and he will be adding the response rate to the text of the article and to the PDF of the study. He feels a low response rate is a non-issue here, doesn't imply selection bias, and it is an achievement to get 4,500 faculty to do any survey at all. Moreover, he does not agree that the study demonizes faculty.  We can agree to disagree on that. 

You have read this article faculty / Inside Higher Ed / online education with the title faculty. You can bookmark this page URL http://apt3e.blogspot.com/2012/06/faulty-inside-higher-ed-survey.html. Thanks!

Faculty Involvement & HR Design at UW-Madison

As I recently described, UW-Madison is currently going through a process of Human Resources Redesign.  Today at Faculty Senate there was an unexpected and lengthy discussion of the recommendations of the HR working groups that was at times a bit acrimonious (I say unexpected because it was listed nowhere on the posted agenda). The exchanges between the faculty and the administrators--especially Darrell Bazzell and Bob Lavigna--were fraught with apparent frustration and visible annoyance from both men.  At several points, Lavigna said that faculty had been asked several times to participate in the working groups, but few had. Nothing that had transpired, he seemed to suggest, should be construed as an effort to circumvent shared governance, and transparency in the process was always the aim.  Moreover, he responded to faculty questioning, we should know that "our colleagues" had worked hard on the recommendations, and that he, at least, respected that work.

Driving home afterwards, I had a few reflections and observations I hope it's productive to share.

First, it seems all-too-common for our administrators to mistake faculty critique for dismissal of their hard work.  As if when someone says "I disagree or don't like your idea" they are really saying "You didn't try hard to come up with it."  That strikes me as a defensive posturing that's entirely unhelpful, since the critique is leveled at the idea not the person or their effort.

Second, it is also all-too-common for our administrators to bring forth proposals to the community without providing evidence to support those proposals.  The documents from the New Badger Partnership were heavy on big claims and light on data, and the same can be said for the HR recommendations.  As researchers, this is excruciatingly hard for us to accept.  After all, we spend our days seeking proof for ideas.  As such, we expect from anyone bringing forth ideas to say things along the line of "Based on a thorough review of evidence such as X, Y, and Z, we have concluded Q."  Instead, what we were told today was basically "Believe us, we did research--we talked to people in the community at many forums."  Well, that's not research-- it's a convenience sample of anecdotal evidence.  Where is the literature review? Where are the systematic methods? That's what we need to know.

Third, a favorite refrain appears to be "but we asked you faculty to be involved, and you wouldn't do it. Now you can't blame us."  Well...sorta.  But a key  problem underlying faculty non-participation is how administrators treat advice from faculty.  See above-- would you want to participate in meetings where the people you're having discussions with act as though your difference of opinion with them is an assault on their effort? Where they want to have policy discussions based on anecdote? Where they pull the common punch of "this isn't your area of expertise, so what would you know?"  Where requests for data and evidence are consistently met with suspicion?  This is the environment many of us faculty encounter when we serve on university committees.  So some rightly ask, why bother?

Sadly, that creates a vicious cycle-- out of frustration, we don't spend the time on these key administrative tasks that govern our daily work lives, and in turn we become increasingly disenchanted with the place. That goes to simply prove the administrators' point-- when the going gets tough, where are we?

My honest question is this: Does the administration genuinely want the faculty involved? If so, then the kinds of questions we asked at today's Senate meeting should be welcomed. No one should respond defensively when asked for further information -- instead, it should be sought and provided.  Instead of redirecting well-informed questioners to other people, people not present at the meeting, those who proffered their ideas for questioning should offer to promptly ascertain the information and respond.  Data should be plentiful, evidence brought forth, and open debates should ensue.  That's how academia works.  Despite the wishes of some, UW-Madison remains at its core an academic enterprise, not a business. Thankfully, some professors stood up today and  reminded us of that. 

You have read this article evidence / faculty / HR design / UW-Madison with the title faculty. You can bookmark this page URL http://apt3e.blogspot.com/2012/05/faculty-involvement-hr-design-at-uw.html. Thanks!

A Post-Racial Era?

A fellow professor at an institution that shall remain nameless (truly) just forwarded me an email he just received. It has been modestly modified only to protect the professor and the university.

"Hello, I see from the Latino Studies Department website that you are a faculty member .  I’m wondering if you would be able to translate something for me?  At our cafeteria we are in the process of naming several of our new food venues.  At our “Mexican Grill” venue, where we will be serving Tex-Mex food items, we are considering some different names for this food venue.  We are considering using Comida Rica or Que Rico for the name, along with “Mexican Grill.”   Does Comida Rica mean Delicious Food and Que Rico, Delicious?  We want to make sure that we are using words properly and have also seen these words associated with “Rich Food” “How Tasty” or “How Rich.”  I would appreciate it if you would let me know  the definition when used with food."

Yes, the professor is Latino.

Is this really the 21st century?

You have read this article faculty / Latino / racism with the title faculty. You can bookmark this page URL http://apt3e.blogspot.com/2012/02/a-post-racial-era.html. Thanks!

Students Occupy Colleges

In a sense, this movement was inevitable.

Higher education has been transformed over the last 50 years, reshaped in many ways that bring into question what it's for, how it works, who should lead it, and most importantly who it is serving. It is the failure of colleges and universities to sufficiently grapple with and address those key questions that led students to Occupy Colleges, and faculty to stand with them, and set up college administrators to be largely inept in response.

The experience of postsecondary education today is highly polarized. Among those attending college are the kinds of students who have always attended college--those who parents and grandparents have degrees, who expected them to go, and ensured they were financially, academically, and otherwise prepared. These are the students who dominate enrollment at the private colleges, take advantage of liberal arts institutions, and who not only earn bachelor's degrees in large numbers but also graduate and professional degrees. But in addition, there is a wide swath of students for whom college was not entirely planned-- it may have felt expected of them, and they did work hard to get ready, but they were unaware of how unprepared college would be to meet their needs. Little did they know that most colleges and universities act as if it's the students' job to get "college-ready," rather than the colleges' job to be prepared to meet the needs of all who enter.

These are the students stunned by the high and rising costs of attendance, and the lack of grant aid available to them. These are the students willing to work long hours to make ends meet, but continually surprised that the faculty and administrators don't respond in turn to accomodate their needs with flexible scheduling, remote advising, and timetables for timely degree completion that don't require full-time enrollment. These are the students who attend the vast majority of our public colleges and universities, and our community colleges, and these are the students at the heart of Occupy Colleges.

Higher education is not sure about these students. Sure, the initial shots were fired long ago, during the Free Speech Movement. But that was about far more than how higher education would work; it was about how society would work. And since that time, colleges and universities have become less--not more-- hospitable to what they like to call "nontraditional" students. Those that some have labeled "tenants" rather than "landowners," decried as "academically adrift," and said to care far less about the hard work of studying. Serving these students has evolved as a speciality, rather than the primary function it ought to be when they comprise at least half of the undergraduate population.

The evidence is everywhere. The growth of the student services industry has segregated the job of meeting students' needs to administrators, letting faculty off the hook. The shift to part-time, contingent labor has lessened the ability of professors to spend the kind of time required to really get to know and address their students' needs--thus creating a stronger rationale for relying on administrators. It would be far better for people to serve dual roles, as teacher and administrator, rather than to continue to pretend the two can be effectively performed in isolation from one another. States have disinvested in public higher education at the same time that the children of the nation's leaders are more likely than ever to opt for private higher education. Public colleges and universities point to those declines in state support and rationalize that since they must have money, they should move to a more "efficient" model of high tuition/high aid, a model that works only in theory. In practical, political life, real world families take sticker prices as real, and mistrust discounting. Politicians and university administrators rarely have the appetite to tie their own hands and fully commit to increasing aid whenever tuition rises. And almost none consider the sharp hypocrisy in their support for free public k-12 education, juxtaposed against their refusal to demand free higher education.

Many, but not all, students are catching on. And therein lies the rub. The move to Occupy Colleges is not a unified front: for every student supporter, there is a student who thinks it's stupid. The students I observe decrying the effort are those who have been well-treated by the current system. Same goes for faculty: those who interact all the time with the so-called nontraditional student and know intimately how we are failing them much more often support this movement. The others, especially those who put research first, often do not.

It's clear who has long been most successful. After all, there is now a move to slash a federal financial aid program (Pell) whose costs have risen (a) because it is doing its job in serving the needs of many students from low-income families and (b) because powerful interests have ensured that government considers to subsidize private and for-profit higher education. If Occupy Colleges could end (b) then the costs of the Pell program would fall dramatically. It won't happen--because higher education refuses to even consider being more about the economically disadvantaged student.

Students are laying these issues at the feet of college administrators and they are stumbling and mumbling in response. Their power-hungry allies, including their overly-compensated athletic directors and boosters and police forces, are doing everything they can to stop it.

It should not be stopped. Students should Occupy Colleges. Let's try that again. Students should occupy colleges. Not administrators. Students, and their educators, should occupy colleges.


NOTE: This post was amended on November 23 in response to a very cogent comment submitted to the blog.

You have read this article differential tuition / faculty / loans / need-based financial aid / Occupy Colleges with the title faculty. You can bookmark this page URL http://apt3e.blogspot.com/2011/11/students-occupy-colleges.html. Thanks!

A Few Thoughts on Faculty Productivity

Richard Vedder isn't an easy guy to get along with, but he's good at one thing: pushing the agenda, sometimes in students' best interests.

I totally disagree with the guy when it comes to financial aid-- there's no way it's making students lazy on average, or causing them to party. On the other hand, he asks some good questions about our college-for-all movement that offers no alternatives for students who don't want to go to college right away, and he also raises good questions about institutional resistance to change.

In his latest piece, he takes on faculty. Boo-hiss, I know... The guy has the nerve to suggest that on average we don't teach enough. His analysis comes from Texas A&M (so popular these days, eh?) and finds a “sharp disparity in the teaching loads for individual faculty members” at UT. Strikingly, they find that the top 20 percent of “faculty with respect to teaching loads teaches 57% of all student credit hours” while the bottom 20 percent teach “only 2% of all student credit hours.”

His point, while overly aggressive (heck, I know something about that), is mainly that we established a way of putting students and teachers together a long, long time ago-- and since then colleges and universities have tried to save money on that approach by shifting to a part-time contingent workforce (reducing average teaching load), allowing more and more professors to buy out of teaching with grant money, and keeping class sizes about the same even while enrollments expanded dramatically and technology made other solutions possible.

When Richard says it, people freak out. A rebuttal from a Texas A&M political science professor tries to bat down the accusations. But he seems to miss the point of Vedder's approach, which is to say that every decision about staffing matters-- so we should lump together faculty in different categories given that theoretically the distributions could be changed. Case in point: "First, much of the skew in teaching duties observed by the CCAP report authors is simply a function of the fact that UT employs a large number of part-time faculty." Well, yes, but that's part of the point-- and a big problem. Universities do that NOT to serve students better but to save money on benefits. PT faculty are perfectly good at teaching but are overworked and underpaid so don't have time for out-of-classroom interaction. His second point, that there's a potential consequence for education quality is right, in theory, yet he cites not a single study showing that large class sizes are associated with diminish instructional quality in higher education. And that's because he can't-- such studies don't exist. Doug Harris and I covered this at length in our La Follette working paper released last year. I do agree that there should be adjustments by field, but this needs to be carefully done because decisions about offering fields with lower enrollments are also strategic decisions and institutions have to be accountable for them. I'm not saying don't offer them, but you can probably only do it if you high-demand fields are very productive. Finally, I see nothing about the use of our resistance to technology, especially blended learning, about faculty in the professor's rebuttal. Technology breaks the iron triangle between access, quality, and costs -- it makes it more possible to offer a high-quality lower cost accessible education. I'm on-board with that and it may be one thing that sets me apart from most other professors.

All that said, Vedder's analysis is far from perfect. It doesn't introduce the issue of impacts on students in any rigorous way. It doesn't take on strongly enough the political and economic reasons why part-time labor is being exploited across higher education. It doesn't question a business-style approach to measuring higher education "outputs." And it doesn't take seriously the need for faculty to LEAD this discussion so that reforms stand a chance of really being implemented.

I've long wondered why I teach today in approximately the same way my colleagues did a half-century ago. Why stand in front of classrooms of 30-50 undergraduates several times a week, rather than meeting with 300 of them twice a month and the rest of the time online? Some will inevitably say that will produce lower-quality instruction but they have nothing to point to-- studies of blended learning are strongly suggestive of positive impacts. Forget online-only, I'm not talking about online only and neither are most proponents of bringing technological advances into university teaching.

And let's get real: right now there are hundreds of professors who have to cancel classes in order to attend conferences, meetings, and such. They resent the requirement to be in-person all the time to teach, when nothing else in their lives requires that anymore. Some of them never reschedule, others hold makeup classes, and some use Skype to teach. The latter is a very low-tech approach and it's used because we're not given other options. What if we were? What if faculty could teach more students, more flexibly, and even with better pedagogy (for example by getting more regular feedback on student performance, rapidly, to use in our teaching) -- and this, together, helped preserve public investment in higher education because it demonstrated productivity gains? Why not?

I suspect part of the reason "why not" is because when you hear "online" you think "for-profit" or "business." When you hear "big classes" you think "community college." When you hear "improved pedagogy" you think "someone's going to tell me how to teach?" And when you hear "productivity" you think "neoliberalism, market-driven education." I know, I sometimes do too.

This is a problem-- professors are thoughtful, careful people and it's essential we not have knee-jerk reactions to ideas that aren't yet being shoved down our throats in propaganda-spun-out policy proposals. This is one we can help shape and get in front of, and make it our own. Or, we can wait until the Republicans bring it to us, and tell us what to do.


PS. One more thing. Richard's claims that faculty can do more because he's done more--juggling research and teaching--that's just plain silly. There's been a major change in the faculty workforce--it's feminized. Something I know for sure-- Richard never juggled teaching, research, breastfeeding, and taking care of small kids. We can and should do more, but there's no reason to base the model on Richard Vedder's style.

You have read this article faculty / Richard Vedder / teaching with the title faculty. You can bookmark this page URL http://apt3e.blogspot.com/2011/06/a-few-thoughts-on-faculty-productivity.html. Thanks!

UPDATE: Budget Balancing For Dummies

The Wisconsin State Journal has the update on this recent blog post ("Budget Balancing For Dummies").

Almost all state workers will have to take furloughs, regardless of whether their paychecks come from the state, federal grants, or private sources, under versions of the budget passed by both the state Assembly and Senate.

Some state workers paid with federal grants, particularly university researchers, argued they shouldn’t have to take the 16 unpaid days off as mandated by Gov. Doyle over the next two years because it wouldn’t save the state money.

An amendment proposed by Rep. Kelda Helen Roys, D-Madison, that would have shielded some of those employees from taking furloughs never made it into the Assembly's budget.

No one proposed a similar amendment in the Senate, making it unlikely that it will be inserted in conference committee, which reconciles the budgets passed by the two houses.

Seems to me that this brain-dead policy choice is completely counter to economic stimulation. By unnecessarily reducing workers' paychecks through a policy that saves the state of Wisconsin $0, how much will the state lose in income tax revenue, retail sales taxes, and the like as a result of this policy aimed solely at 'feel good' public relations?

Also, treating non-state-funded university faculty and staff in this way sorta flies in the face of the retention fund aimed at keeping high-demand faculty in Wisconsin. At best, it's going to create a run on this fund - by slapping UW faculty and staff with the furlough, plus the rescinded salary increases over the next two years. That's money out of the state's pocket.

What was it that Forrest Gump said?

You have read this article budget / college / Education / faculty / fed / university / University of Wisconsin / UW System / Wisconsin with the title faculty. You can bookmark this page URL http://apt3e.blogspot.com/2009/06/update-budget-balancing-for-dummies.html. Thanks!

U. Minnesota Leads the Way

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports a new policy on academic freedom at the University of Minnesota, designed to ensure that faculty can speak truth to power on issues related to university administration. The policy defines academic freedom as “the freedom to discuss all relevant matters in the classroom, to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression, and to speak or write without institutional discipline or restraint on matters of public concern as well as on matters related to professional duties and the functioning of the university.”

Good going UMN. We should all follow suit.

You have read this article academic freedom / college / faculty / University of Minnesota with the title faculty. You can bookmark this page URL http://apt3e.blogspot.com/2009/04/u-minnesota-leads-way.html. Thanks!