A Year in Lubbock: Academics, post 1
Dan Hillman
pieces.]
A Year in Lubbock: Academics
or
Why I Chose to be Unemployed in Boston
Rather than Remain Tenure-Track in Lubbock
In July of 1997, the ObChattel and I arrived in Lubbock, Texas, and I
began my career as a professor at the place I'll call Terrible Texas
University's (TTU) College of Education.
Even before we arrived, we knew that we were only going to be there for
a limited time. The tenure track is six years long, and in the final
year I planned on simultaneously applying for tenure at TTU and looking
for jobs elsewhere to get the hell out.
The obvious question (right after "why would anyone want to be a
professor in a college of education, f'godsakes?") is "why Lubbock?"
Well, in a nutshell, the working conditions kicked ass. Traditionally,
baby professors face a life of horrors and indignity: A heavy teaching
load of boring, huge, freshman-level courses; endless committee work;
and, of course, the need to publish, publish, publish. Young professors
tend not to get much money for stuff like travel and research, and they
have to figure out the byzantine mysteries of how to get tenure, because
the requirements are generally kept a big, scary secret.
Compared to this, TTU offered an academic Shangri-La. I only had to
teach two graduate courses each semester (the largest with 18 students),
and I was given a research assistant, money for travel, and even a slush
fund of a couple of thousand dollars a year to spend on whatever I
wanted. As for the mysteries of tenure, there were none. I was
tenure-track, and I was told clearly that all I really needed to get
tenure was to publish two or so articles in reasonable journals per
year. Hardly a major effort.
Why was I getting such a sweet deal? Because TTU is a school that is
trying to improve; they told me flat out that they wanted me because I'd
been to a better school than they were. I was their new golden boy
(gag), the Cambridge guy, and they were willing to smooth my path for
me. I figured I'd let them. I'd stay here for the early, nasty years,
and then, once I'd published and established myself, get the hell out.
There were trade-off, of course, all of which seem to stem from the fact
that Lubbock sucks ass. Lubbock is -- according to the real estate
guides -- a great place to raise children. That's code for "housing is
cheap, the taxes are low, and it's a pretty good bet that if your stupid
kid chases a ball into the street drivers might slow down." But Lubbock
is much more than that. Lubbock is a foul brew of Texas bravado,
provincialism, and cloddishness -- the bastard child of *Children of the
Corn* and *The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again*.
All this, of course, is because Lubbock is in the middle of nowhere.
Since there aren't any direct flights to anywhere good, it takes almost
a full day to get to civilization. TTU, in turn, survives as a regional
university. Its sole purpose is to give the local hayseeds an
opportunity to pledge a fraternity. Anyone who's actually good goes to a
real school and never comes back.
As a result, the denizens of the town have an inferiority complex.
They're just as good as you and me; they've been to New York City and
they've seen *Phantom*, thank you very much. So why aren't they taken
seriously? They want so much to be up on the things that they see on
television between the tornado warnings, but they fail.
As some small compensation, this innocence does makes Lubbock ripe for
mockery. Double meanings and homoerotic imagery abound. The shopkeepers
don't seem to realize that their "Property of Jesus" T-shirts are
actually purchased as parody presents for friends living elsewhere. My
brother and his boyfriend were pleased to receive "Living the Greek Life
at TTU" T-shirts. My favorite, though, was the football jersey in TTU
colors enjoining one to "Hold my helmet while I kiss your girlfriend."
Combine this sort of bovine unthinking with the idea that asking hard
questions is impolite and disagreement of any kind is embarrassing, and
you have the essence of my dull-witted colleagues. The 'tards are
leading the 'tards, and it isn't pretty. They want to be up on those
big, important issues like being sensitive to multiculturism, but they
always screw it up, like the time one of my administrators had a faculty
dinner party at her house -- on Yom Kippur.
Oh sure, they talked a good game about research and scholarship, but the
truth revealed itself soon enough. One of the first things my program
director told me was that after 17 years at TTU he had been denied
promotion to full professor and was now just putting in his time until
retirement.
My other "peer" in the department had just been promoted to associate
professor. In one of his papers he described software he'd written that
permitted one to symbolically link one e-mail message to another. He
claimed that this would allow, *for the first time,* threaded discussion
in computer-mediated communications. This article was published,
presumably after passing some form of peer review, in 1995.
I figured that I'd just smile, ignore them, teach my classes, serve on
my committees, and get on with my work. In a few short years, I'd get a
job as an associate professor at a better school, and leave.
A month after I'd arrived, while revising the previous professor's
syllabi for my courses, I realized that things were going to be more
annoying than I'd thought. Although I didn't have to dirty my hands with
undergraduate teaching, the course content was pure continuing
education: How to do PowerPoint presentations, how to use a word
processor, how to take pictures (not how to develop them, merely how to
point, focus, and worry about depth of field), and how to send e-mail
and use a browser.
In short, my lofty-sounding "graduate courses" were supposed to consist
of exactly the same stuff that I'd taught at the continuing-education
level before I started grad school. Stuff that, if the students had any
interest in improving their own job prospects, they would be teaching
themselves anyhow.
But it got worse.
Forgetting that everyone knows that "Education" is academese for "not
terribly bright," the standards for TTU students were a lot lower than
they had been for any school I'd ever attended. Or any of my friends had
attended. Or that I'd even heard about, even those party-hearty schools
featured in the late-night television movies hosted by Gilbert Gottfried
or Job Bob Briggs.
My first semester, I assigned my students a PowerPoint presentation
project. As part of the process of grading them, I ran the built-in
spell checker.
Pop Quiz: You have to create a PowerPoint presentation for 20% of a
course grade. You have two weeks to work on this. During this period,
your instructor has explained several times that it's a Good Idea to
check your spelling so that you don't have a gigantic typo looming
behind you on the screen during presentations. Do you:
a) run the built-in spell checker and carefully proofread your
presentation before submitting the project, or
b) add some more Microsoft clip art that has fuck all to do with
your topic?
If you answered "b," you are unfit for graduate-level work, even in the
field of education. Looks like you'll have to go to TTU.
Sure enough, a bunch of presentations had misspellings, and I marked
their grades down. What excuse do they have? They're graduate students.
They're using the same software I am. Don't they know how to use a spell
checker? Don't they even have the slightest bit of pride or
self-consciousness to want to avoid looking like a 'tard?
Apparently not.
These folks were shocked (shocked!) that I marked them down for this:
"But Doctor Hillman, you never said that spelling counted."
For fuck's sake, do you remember *anyone* after, perhaps, seventh-grade
telling you that spelling counted? How can anyone get to grad school and
*not* know that spelling always counts? I have every syllabus that I was
ever given as an undergraduate or graduate student. Not a single one
says that spelling counts. An informal poll of my friends and family
found that none of their professors had ever said that spelling counts.
There's no mystery here. I don't care how good the other stuff is, or
how many animated things you've got; if words are spelled wrong, then
it's not an A presentation. How hard is that to understand?
Well, sure as kids will drop rocks from a highway overpass, this got
back to me.
In November 1997, the other two IT professors met with me, supposedly to
talk about a special certificate program I'd whipped up. This was not to
be the case. One of them shut the door and said that this meeting was
actually about me -- that there had been some complaints about my
teaching. Apparently, some students had complained that my grading was
arbitrary.
This was bullshit. I actually spent a fair amount of effort ensuring
that I was blind to students' identities when grading assignments and,
for objective items, ran post-test analyses to ensure that I disregarded
questions that fewer students got right than would have been due to
random chance. My grade distribution, as it happened, was almost a
perfect bell curve, centered around 85. Yeah, that's too high, but hey,
the hard projects were yet to be submitted.
This was dismissed. While being fair was all well and good, what they
were really concerned about was the number of Bs and Cs I was
distributing.
Huh? I confess, I blinked stupidly for a moment.
With a fatherly air, the guy who's waiting for retirement explained that
my problem was that I wasn't telling the students what they were going
to be graded on, and so there was no way for them to know what to do to
get a good grade. This was what they meant by arbitrary: It seems that I
should indeed have written out that spelling counted.
Okay, I said, but was it so terrible of me to expect that these folks
should spell check their work? Must this be explicitly declared? I had
defined the elements specific to the assignment. Isn't it a bit silly
for me to have to explain the obvious? Should I have to explain generic
items of paper writing? Must I declare that papers should be presented
in a non-decorative or ornamental typeface just in case someone had
never been told that printing a paper in Zapf Dingbats might be
unacceptable?
Apparently so.
The same professor then went on to explain that if you tell your
students exactly what to do, 90% of them should get As.
I stared at him in disbelief. "You give 90% of your students As?" I
said, thinking to myself, he's having me on.
"Sure. Because I tell them exactly what to do. It's a checklist for
them."
In retrospect, I believe that he was referring to the 90/90 rule, an
idea from mastery learning which claims that 90% of students can learn
90% about what is important about any topic, given adequate time.
Essentially, mastery theory says that grades should be either A or F, or
what I would call pass/fail. If you've mastered it, you get the A; if
not, fuck ya.
In typical TTU fashion, however, he'd managed to screw it up. First of
all, since "adequate" time may not coincide with an assignment's due
date, the percentage of As would be lower. Unfortunately, I didn't think
to say this at the time.
Second, knowing 90% of something is hardly the same as having mastery of
something. The practice of equating 90 (good enough) with 100 (mastery)
is the sort of easygoing, feel-good sloppy thinking that could only come
out of a ed school. A 90 is a lot closer to a B+ than an A. Would you
trust your life to a pilot who didn't know what 10% of the cockpit
instruments were for? Probably not.
Of course, all of this ignores reality, which says that only really good
work should get As. But I digress.
The other professor (the originator of threaded discourse) followed up
by saying that if word got out that I was an unfair grader (read: hard),
then students wouldn't sign up for my courses and that the
administration would find something else for me to do. That "something"
was left undescribed. Even worse, the department might lose students,
and this would be a catastrophe, since this particular program is a
major cash cow for the college.
Oh, and while they were talking about my teaching, the professors
conveyed the unmistakable impression that the students felt that my
demeanor was "elitist." Apparently my implicit assumption that these
grad students already had a background in basic statistics and research
methods, and my off-hand suggestions that they should just go and learn
the shit if they didn't know it yet, made them feel inadequate. After
all, what was my job other than to spoon-feed them?
It went on for longer than that, of course, but the message was loud and
clear: Spoon-feed the students and give 'em As. Or else.
I went home and talked it out with the ObChattel, a few friends, and my
dad (who teaches law school on the side). Eventually, I decided to cave
in to the grade inflation. As my dad put it, "You have a choice: Go with
the system and give your students their As, or make a career decision."
He was right. Grading honestly would simply have been wasted effort,
because one honest grader in a college full of grade inflation would
merely be interpreted as a nut case. On the other hand, I was not ready
-- at the time -- to make the sort of career decision he was talking
about. Hey, I'd only been at the job three months.
The ObChattel and I did decide, however, that there was no way we were
going to stick around for six years. We were going to leave TTU after my
third year, whether I had another job lined up or not.
From then on, I didn't bother to grade honestly. When I first started at
TTU, I actually worried about ranking papers and agonized between
assigning a B or a B+. No longer. I laughed maniacally and told anyone
who'd listen that I was free, free! because I'd sold my soul -- well,
almost.
I took advantage of a loophole in the grading system. Ya see, TTU
doesn't even bother to differentiate between an A and an A- when
calculating students' GPAs. Ergo, most professors only give an A or a B
and don't bother with the + and -.
I did. From that semester on, if you were pretty good, you got an A. If
you were doing so-so, you'd get an A-. If you were pretty bad, you'd get
a B+, B, or B-. I think I gave out one C. The students didn't care,
because it didn't change how TTU reported their GPAs, but at least I had
the satisfaction of knowing that even if they got all As in their other
ed classes, I would have been the one bastard who put an A- there.
Then came the Spring 1998 semester. This went better. Knowing now that
my students were ignorant of all things academic, I explained that
spelling counted. I emphasized that now that one is in grad school,
there are certain things one takes for granted, like spelling and
grammar ("Don't forget that I'm going to use the built-in spell checker.
I realize that this will be a big disappointment to those of you who
were hoping to just roll your faces across the keyboard a few times and
turn that in as your presentation.").
When students had obvious holes in their background, like cluelessness
about basic stats or experimental design, I continued to suggest that
they do something about it but, to avoid the dread charge of elitism, I
made it sound like I was joking. As, in a way, I was.
One of my courses was entitled Computer Applications in Classroom and
School Management. There were seven people in the course, which was
kinda nice. I've always felt like an asshole doing the lecture thing,
and I find it easier to get a discussion going when there's only a small
group of students. Best of all, I'd changed the course from the way one
of the other professors taught it. The 90% guy used to teach the same
course by having the students go through one of those big Learn
Microsoft Office workbooks. At one point he told me that that kind of
course was great to teach because you could just assign students
chapters from the book and have them work on the projects in class.
Honest.
Anyhow, I'd decided that I couldn't bear the idea of a whole graduate
course spent pointing and clicking through a workbook. Sure, I had to
ensure that they came out of the course knowing how to do Office stuff
(after all, we have standards to maintain), but I assigned the projects
as homework and spent class time discussing related issues like computer
security, typography, legal matters, and good stuff like that.
As it happened, two of the students in the course were related. Mother
and son, actually. The mother was an Ed.D. student in Higher Education
(don't ask) and the son was most of the way through an M.S. in biology
(he wanted to go to med school but hadn't had the grades as an
undergrad, so he was taking another shot by getting a grad degree). I
assume that the mom was taking my course to fulfill her requirements
while the son probably figured that it would be an easy elective and he
and his mom could joke around. For the sake of this work, I shall refer
to the son as MrX and the mother as MomX.
For this course, I assigned a one-page paper (overview, really) to be
written on any legal aspect of computer use. This would count for 3% of
the final grade. I also assigned a research paper (worth 50% of the
course grade). Reading MrX's small paper, I found myself making the
classic professorial war cry: "This doesn't sound like him!"
Specifically, the language and punctuation didn't seem to fit his style,
and, even more damning, the use of single and double quotation marks was
inconsistent. No one does this naturally, but it happens often when
cutting and pasting.
A search on a five-word phrase in metacrawler found a matching article
from Wired News. It was instantly clear that MrX's paper had been
copied, with minimal changes, from this article.
According to the University's operating policy and procedures manual, I
could have failed his ass on the spot. In retrospect, I should have. But
hey, I was a soft touch, and figured that I could teach the guy a lesson
while simultaneously avoiding looking eviiil, elitist, and, overall,
like a hardass with standards, which the other professors had assured me
was Bad.
I spoke with my faculty mentor (a guy I actually respected) and the
associate dean for graduate education about what to do. My idea was to
give MrX a zero for the assignment and a lecture on the seriousness of
his actions. The associate dean agreed that this would be an appropriate
response. My mentor also suggested that I ensure (wink-wink) that MrX
not get an A for my course.
That evening class met again, and I returned MrX's paper stapled to a
copy of the original Wired article, complete with banner ads. Written
across the top was a grade of zero, and a suggestion that he come see
me.
Unsurprisingly, MrX came to my office as soon as class was over. He
proceeded to offer three separate, mutually contradictory excuses, and I
have to say I enjoyed watching him squirm as I pointed out the conflicts
in his pathetic little lies.
His first try was that he must have misunderstood the assignment, for he
thought that I had merely asked the students to get something from the
World Wide Web related to a legal issue.
So I asked him why, if I had only asked for an article from the Web, he
had gone to the effort of paraphrasing sections of the article instead
of merely printing a hard copy. (On further reflection, if he really
thought that was the assignment, why did he copy and paste the article
and sign his name to it?)
To this, he responded that he thought that I wanted it in their own
words. I then asked him why, if it was in his own words, I was able to
find the article by entering a five-word string into a search engine.
He gulped audibly, and said, "Five words?" He then answered that he had
merely forgotten to cite the original article. I finally asked why, if
he was merely quoting the article, he had gone to the effort to change
the order of paragraphs, to paraphrase introductory lines, and had
changed or deleted some words within the paragraphs. (Besides, the paper
had no citations at all, so it wasn't as though he had a dozen and
forgot one.) He ran out of responses at this point.
It was clear that he was systematically trying several implausible, yet
contradictory, excuses. I suggested that receiving a zero on this
assignment was ultimately a small price to pay for what is usually
considered a career-limiting move.
Before he left, MrX expressed concern that his research paper, worth 50%
of the course grade, would receive a grade high enough to still get him
an A for the course. Talk about balls; I've just caught him in a blatant
case of plagiarism, with embarrassing ease, and he's still thinking that
there's a chance that's he's gonna pull an A for this course. While
thinking of my mentor's suggestion that he get a B, I explained that he
would get whatever he earned for the paper, and the numbers, calculated
as specified on my syllabus, would determine his grade one way or the
other. Leaving, he suggested that since his research paper had already
been accepted by *The Fancy-Pants Medical Journal*, he couldn't imagine
that I would give him anything less than an A.
[Continued in "A Year in Lubbock: Academics, post 2"]
--
Dan Hillman hil...@quahog.org http://www.quahog.org/hillman/
Alan Gore
>Even before we arrived, we knew that we were only going to be there for
>a limited time. The tenure track is six years long, and in the final
>year I planned on simultaneously applying for tenure at TTU and looking
>for jobs elsewhere to get the hell out.
>The obvious question (right after "why would anyone want to be a
>professor in a college of education, f'godsakes?") is "why Lubbock?"
In general, the worst thing to do with a new Piled Higher and Deeper
is to stay in academia and spend years in baby professor peonage. It
makes sense only at times when the economy is in the crapper. Right
now is the diametric opposite of one of those times. Go forth in to
the world and get a real job, making lots of money, in a place you
really wouldn't mind living in. Years from now, if you ever do decide
to return to academia, it will be in an advanced position as a
sought-after "retired professor from industry".
ag...@primenet.com | "Giving money and power to the government
Alan Gore | is like giving whiskey and car keys
Software For PC's | to teenaged boys" - P. J. O'Rourke
http://www.alangore.com
wesol...@freewwweb.com
Bro Jack
In article <1dv151t.13l...@ppp39-149.thecia.net>,
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Bob O`Brien
>I went to Lubbock to study an advanced course in Buddy Holly.
>
You really need to go back there, and take Beginning Usenet Quoting Etiquette.
Bob O`Bob
--
+ email replies without this line will be discarded hwk4k7jh (expires 09aug99) +
No spammer could ever be too broke or too hungry.
Bob O`Brien
>
>{LONNNNNNNGGGG LOUD FART} Ahhhhhhhhhh. How's that for etiquette, punk.
>
Quite an improvement, actually. Thanks for the effort.
wesol...@freewwweb.com
ob...@best.com (Bob O`Brien) wrote:
> In article <7msdot$14s$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, <wesol...@freewwweb.com>
wrote:
> >
>
Etiquette.
>
> Bob O`Bob
{LONNNNNNNGGGG LOUD FART} Ahhhhhhhhhh. How's that for etiquette, punk.
Bro Jack
wesol...@freewwweb.com
wrote:
> >
> >{LONNNNNNNGGGG LOUD FART} Ahhhhhhhhhh. How's that for etiquette,
punk.
> >
>
>
> Bob O`Bob
Whatever turns ya on. Different strokes for different folks. Shall I
conjure up another?
Bro Jack
Alan Gore
>In article <7msdot$14s$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, <wesol...@freewwweb.com> wrote:
>>I went to Lubbock to study an advanced course in Buddy Holly.
>>
>You really need to go back there, and take Beginning Usenet Quoting Etiquette.
Actually, he's a fiber salesman...
Gerald Belton
entire fucking 500-line message only to add:
>I went to Lubbock to study an advanced course in Buddy Holly.
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick! Would you PLEASE learn to use your
fucking newsreader and trim the damn quotes!
John S. Novak, III
>Whatever turns ya on. Different strokes for different folks. Shall I
>conjure up another?
You do that every time you open your mouth.
--
John S. Novak, III j...@concentric.net
The Humblest Man on the Net
wesol...@freewwweb.com
j...@concentric.net wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jul 1999 09:32:47 GMT, wesol...@freewwweb.com
> <wesol...@freewwweb.com> wrote:
>
> >Whatever turns ya on. Different strokes for different folks. Shall
I
> >conjure up another?
>
> You do that every time you open your mouth.
And you keep coming back for more.
Bro Jack