alas, poor bucky

Via Tom, a story by Madison's alternative newspaper here is enough to make a former UW faculty member melancholy about what UW has to contend with in the Wisconsin legislature. Some selections:

Explaining [State Rep.] Nass' 2005 push to make faculty follow codes of conduct, including not making "anti-American" statements, Mikalsen says, "Part of the issue is we have foreign-born professors. Those professors say things."

[...]

Last year, Nass became chair of the Assembly's Colleges and Universities Committee, which oversees the entire UW System. As the UW's foremost critic, he made good on his reputation, joining his GOP colleagues in the Assembly in backing major cuts to specific UW programs and an overall budget that would, over the next two years, force the System to make $120 million in cuts.

Asked how he chose specific cuts, Nass gives a vague answer about looking for ways to reduce spending. It's Mikalsen who responds: "We know where they're hiding the money. We're able to go after line items."

[...]

Among the cuts proposed by Republicans: 17 administrative positions (which Nass considers "duplicative"); 25% of the UW's communications and marketing staff; and $4 million from a special fund to retain "high-demand" faculty. [I presume this is the same fund that was just created to try to help staunch the exodus of midcareer-faculty-with-mobility-options from Madison.] In the capital budget, the Assembly has also eliminated funding for new student dormitories and student unions.

Sigh.

really just a variant on the half-empty versus half-full thing

My unhappiest semester at Madison included having a graduate student in my methods course allegedly express a desire to kill me that was sufficiently convincing that one of the student's peers reported it to the department. I don't think I would have been bothered about it if I had not already, for still the only time in my career, started a file about this student because their classroom and other behavior was so aggressively peculiar. Even then, it's not like I moved that file to the front of the drawer and wrote "READ IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH" on it. But I do remember feeling enormously disenchanted that I was teaching graduate students and had to deal with something like this, the same disenchantment I felt with the two plagiarism cases I had to handle over my four times teaching that course.* Oh, and also that time a graduate student raised their hand as I was in the middle of explaining something about sampling theory to ask, "Will this be on the test?"

Chris posted some advice to graduate students in response to Drek's advice, which was itself inspired by Fabio's excellent series of posts of advice. Chris's #3, though, is part of a lesson I've found especially valuable as a faculty member. Faculty often make broad assertions about "the graduate students" in their department--or about "the undergraduates" or "my colleagues"--but those assertions commonly reflect less the overall distribution of students than what part of the distribution the person chooses to focus on. In other words, assessments about "the graduate students" in a department reflect whether one chooses to focus on those students who are most rewarding or least rewarding to interact with. In retrospect, and as per Chris's advice, I should have focused more on the fun of teaching the most rewarding students and done better about not being made surly by the least rewarding students.**

In general, I let the disappointing part of the distribution of things influence my attitude more than it should, including of sociology itself. I am getting better about this, although, as with so many things with me, progress is uneven and slow.

* The first of these was the paper at the top of the stack of the first assignment of the first time I taught the course. In other words, when I sat down for the very first time as a professor to grade graduate student work, the first paper I read had several paragraphs cut-and-pasted from a book review online.

** I taught over 100 sociology students in those four years--not to mention students from other departments--so of course there was going to be variation. Madison's cohort sizes have shrunk the last three years, but there was an incoming cohort of 39 one year when I was there. Northwestern's typical graduate cohort size is 8. For someone teaching a required course only offered once per year, I'm much more happy with the idea of a cohort size of 8 than 39.

ten points for ravenclaw!

Vacation message just received after sending an e-mail to a certain newly-former colleague of mine at Madison:

The rumors that have undoubtedly reached you by now are, by and large, correct. I have not enrolled in school this term; instead, with my two best friends I am off to fulfill the final wishes of my mentor--to search for and destroy a set of objects of incomparable evil.

So I thought we should start in the New Jersey-New York area. Because of the various shield charms we will need to place over our camp to obscure ourselves from the prying eyes of our enemies, I will have only intermittent email contact for the next three weeks or so. Please forgive me and tune in to secret radio stations for news of our progress.

If you are writing about a problem in regard to my previous capacity as head boy (e.g., office space, teaching assistantships, creatures or ghosts living in the second floor men’s room), please contact the headmistress or the following:

[e-mail addresses of the Chair, Associate Chair, and Assistant to the Chair]

Courage my friends! I hope to see you safe and sound on the other end of things.

this paper is really good! and so courteous for how it is double-spaced and stapled! i need to alert the pikes right away!

My first day not being a Wisconsin faculty member, and I'm the recipient of a mass e-mail the likes of which I never before received:

Dear University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty,

I am a student at the University that you as a collective make so great. I humbly ask you as the mentors of this great institution to recommend individuals that you have seen excel in the classroom for entry into our brotherhood.

Our fraternity Pi Kappa Alpha is dedicated to taking men of integrity and principle and turning them into scholars, leaders, athletes, and gentlemen. Many of the men whom we pledge have already excelled in scholastics, leadership, athletics or courtesy. These pledges happen to be the most active and successful in our chapter. Imagine what a group of your recommended students could accomplish as a collective.

We live by our creed. We do not haze our pledges. Our rush period is alcohol free. We have the deepest respect for all people no matter their religion, orientation, race, or creed. We contend that the greater the diversity in our chapter the more we can learn from each other and help each other grow.

The Beta Xi chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha believes that the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison would be the most qualified to identify men who excel in scholastic, leadership, athletic, and chivalrous situations. We would be greatly honored if you could send the name and email address of each undergraduate you want to recommend.

According to Wikipedia, Jon Stewart was a Pike. Then again, so was Karl Rove. When I started at the University of Iowa, the Pikes seemed the most prestigious house, but then had some scandal involving cocaine and other conduct that resulted in them expelling many of their members. At Madison, campus police had a security campaign that put posters all over with the slogan "Badger Eyes Are Watching You." If I was back in Madison now, I would have my own badger eyes on the lookout for chivalrous contact so I could pass those names along. I'm sure in my absence other faculty are now eagerly embarking on doing the same.

Is it common for fraternities elsewhere to send a mass message to faculty asking for recommendations? I've never heard of it before.

jumping to conclusion

The Kaplan story at UW-Madison is mercifully now in its denouement. Statements have been released by UW's chancellor and by almost all of the senior law faculty (including Kaplan himself). These seem like they will be good for helping move the issue out of the news and toward, to use the ubiquitious metaphor for such things, healing tensions at UW. As a social psychologist, the statements are interesting because they invoke the timehonored (and experimentally affirmed) strategy for reducing intergroup conflict--find a common enemy. In this case, the claim of common cause is against the media and other outsiders who are presented as having inflamed or distorted matters.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin State Journal has published a concluding editorial that is basically consistent with my own opinion:

Exactly what Kaplan said or didn't say remains in dispute. But there is overwhelming evidence, including reports from other students in the class, that he was making a valuable point about how the law can be an obstacle, rather than an aid, to displaced ethnic groups, such as the Hmong in Wisconsin.

His discussion included references to Hmong culture and the effects of being a displaced minority, which offended some students. His criticism, however, was aimed at the failures of government and the law to accommodate Hmong people.

It would be unproductive to tell any students in his class that because Kaplan was well-intentioned, they should not have been offended. They feel what they feel, and their feeling should be respected.

But the rest of us have been called to make a judgment on Kaplan, a public employee at our state university. Is he a bigot? Should he be disciplined?

The answer to both questions ought to be unequivocally "No."

There are lessons in the incident for everyone.

First, the reaction to Kaplan's remarks supports his point. It illustrates the frustration Hmong people feel because the rest of us have failed to give them the accommodation and respect they deserve.

Second, we all ought to consider our freedom to discuss controversial issues, particularly in academia. If our professors become afraid of an inquisition over a phrase taken out of context or a discussion misinterpreted, how shallow will our university be?

kaplan statement now available

Okay, so ignore the timestamp, it's actually Monday at 4:10pm EST. Regarding the incident at Wisconsin linked from this post, Leonard Kaplan has made his statement. I've uploaded it here.

Update, 8:30pm: The headline that seems to be going for AP news coverage of this is "Wis. professor acknowledges remarks about Hmong caused pain" (here). Is that really the best one-sentence upshot of this statement? Does one really have to be a thousand miles away from Madison to see that media coverage of this whole episode has been insane?

if they asked the faculty more broadly to sign this, i would sign. since they haven't, i will only link to it.

Via Althouse: Statement of the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I could say more, but will refrain for at least the moment. Perhaps because I'm lame.

my career as a senator

[Note: The meeting discussed in this post was on Monday; I wrote this post earlier this week but am just now posting it.]

In addition to whatever other hats I wear around the University--such as being my department's chief Fashion Don't--I am also a member of the Faculty Senate. My department has a tradition of electing recent arrivals as its senators: the stated principle being that it's a "good way for new people to learn how the university works", which I've suspected is mathematically equivalent to "the rest of us are not doing it again."

I'm enthusiastic enough about University Service, but my experience in faculty senate meetings has varied from finding them mostly boring to regarding them as the single most systematic waste of time inflicted on me during my time at Madison. Yesterday was the last meeting of the year, and I was looking forward to skipping it, but then it turned out that I needed to read a memorial resolution for a deceased emeritus sociologist and so not only did I have to attend, but I had to sit in the front row through the whole thing.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison prides itself on its "shared governance." In faculty senate meetings, you will hear the principle of "shared governance" extolled every ten minutes or so; it would be one of the squares you'd be sure to get out of the way early if it was on your Faculty Senate Bingo board. We are also regularly reminded about how, as faculty senators, we are the crucial cogs in the shared governance machine.

In terms of how things actually work, a big part of what shared governance means is that almost all of the real work gets done in small committees who interact with the faculty senate through reports. This indeed does seem an effective way of accomplishing things, and I can imagine where serving on these committees could be interesting and rewarding. Sitting in an auditorium hearing reports from those committees is many times informative but doesn't exactly make oneself feel a part of "governance," if you know what I mean.

The other part of what shared governance means is the discussion and debate portions of the faculty senate meetings, which is mostly comprised of the same four or five old guys talking to one another. Seriously, there are something like 150 senators, and, over the course of this year, I would estimate that at least 75% of the discussion and questions from the floor have been by five guys (yes, all guys: by my count, women have stepped to the microphones for discussion three times total in the eight meetings this year--generally speaking, faculty senate meetings are the most massive manversation I have ever witnessed).

Yesterday, one of the frequent contributors sat in the seat nearest one of the microphones and literally raised his hand to offer an observation for each and every new point of business that was raised. Personally, I just can't ever imagine having the sense of self-importance required to monopolize a forum like that.

(This particular senator, it should be said, generally does have opinions I agree with. In contrast, there are a couple others who, when they speak, I cannot believe the pampered sense of elitest entitlement that comes out of their mouths. I mean, we can complain about the unfriendly Board of Regents and state legislature, but sometimes I can't help but feel if the citizenry of Wisconsin got to hear what some faculty members feel faculty "rights" are and what is owed to us, they would be even more supportive of giving us a hostile budgetary comeuppance. Perhaps the part of being a professor that I like least is that part where you are expected to presume yourself to be more worthwhile than other people in lesser jobs. That, and the part where are you are supposed to think you are more worthwhile than other people while simultaneously lamenting why the rest of the world can't be As Good A Liberal as you are.)

In any case, the strongest preoccupation of the Faculty Senate has been how to protest the way the Board of Regents handled the dismissal of a tenured faculty member (named Marder) at UW-Superior. The dismissal happened in 2001, and this dispute has been going on ever since. It is said to mark the beginning of a slippery slope that will eventually compromise tenure and academic freedom for the entire UW system, although, as far as slippery slopes go, if you go five years without any further episodes of slippage, it doesn't seem to this bumpkin like the ground you are standing on could be all that slick.

In any case, so far as I can tell, the Board of Regents did handle the case badly, although part of what has the faculty senate up in arms is that the state is supposed to recognize the special right to extrasecure tenure that faculty have over other kinds of state employees whose positions also involve "tenure." A reference to how tenure for us is not the same as the kind of tenure that state government offers to "custodial staff" was made in one discussion. Sure, I am onboard with this argument when it pertains to actual academic freedom, but--sacrilegious as this might sound--when the idea seems also to be that faculty are also supposed to have special rights with regard to, say, a series of charges of gross (in various senses) sexual misconduct, etc., etc., I get less enthusiastic about the idea of rallying around professorial privilege.

Yesterday's meeting featured two separate motions about the Marder case. One was a straightforward and seemingly reasonable motion that passed unanimously after brief discussion. The other was this proposal by this elderly professor in the math department who wanted to faculty senate to make some kind of wideranging condemnation of the Board of Regents and the last two Wisconsin state attorneys general. His motion was last on the agenda, and by the time we got to it, it was already a few minutes after 5 (the meeting is supposed/hoped to be over by 5). Rather than just quickly get his motion open for discussion, he insisted on giving a long, rambling speech on behalf of his motion, which was following by him providing a long, rambling response to a question from one of the other four guys who speak. So that by the time there was any possibility of real discussion from the floor, it was already 5:30 and all kinds of people had left. Which meant that then, of course, somebody raised the question of whether we still had a quorum, and they counted and we were way short. The meeting was thus immediately adjourned, and the math guy will have to introduce his motion next year, which I am sure he will.

But, alas, I'll be in Cambridge. The department has already figured out which assistant professor will fill out my term. My response to him when he accepted the job was: sucker.