CAN'T YOU HEAR THAT WHISTLE BLOWING? In time for exam week comes news of an adjunct faculty member at Southern Methodist (alma mater of Forrest Gregg, who left a
Packer team that couldn't play to become head coach of a team coming off an NCAA death sentence, but I digress) whose contract was not renewed for reasons that are not clear (that, dear reader, is a characteristic of
Hard America called "employment at will") although this
Scott Jaschik post at
Inside Higher Ed suggests her
tell-all weblog is a contributing factor.
Phantom’s university was one where many adjuncts, like the author of the blog, felt invisible and ignored — not exactly an unusual quality.
But at SMU, at least some students and faculty members (and the university’s legal office) did become aware of the Phantom Professor and the many similarities between incidents at the Phantom’s campus and at SMU. And in SMU’s Department of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs, people recognized themselves and their colleagues. And word got around that the author was probably Elaine Liner, a popular writing instructor and a theater critic for a local alternative newspaper.
At about the same time this spring that people were guessing that Liner was the Phantom, she was being told that the university no longer needed her services after the spring semester. Liner and her many student fans think that SMU is punishing her for expressing pointed opinions about the university.
The administrators, as is the nature of political creatures everywhere, want to have it both ways.
University officials don’t see it that way. They won’t talk about the specific decision not to continue offering courses to Liner, who had taught at SMU since 2001, but they say it had nothing to do with the blog and that they didn’t know for sure that the author was Liner. But they acknowledge that they were worried about the blog.
Rita Kirk, the department chairwoman, says that she received complaints about the blog from students and parents, and that she consulted with university lawyers about what to do about it. Kirk describes herself as a strong First Amendment supporter, but she says she worries that the blog violated students’ privacy rights and upset some students. “People need to remember that words can hurt,” Kirk says.
The spin that follows, however, is priceless.
While Kirk declines to say why Liner wasn’t being asked back, she says that the department was trying to replace adjuncts with full-time professors. But she acknowledges that the department will still be using adjuncts and that it is not clear that a full-time professor will be picking up Liner’s writing courses.
The entire post is worth your attention, and there is a lively bull session going on there. The story has received attention elsewhere. At
Critical Mass, the expertise in things literary combines with the recognition of the spin.
Liner is clearly playing the edge with her blog, which relies heavily on the transgressive quality of posts devoted to the sorts of things professional decorum dictates teachers avoid discussing in public--the private lives of their students and colleagues, the private opinions a teacher may harbor about either students or colleagues, the unsubstantiated stuff of the local rumor mill. That SMU decided her blog crossed the line is not particularly surprising.
SMU both does and does not admit to firing Liner for writing such a revealing -- and inevitably damning -- blog: Though administrators deny that the decision to renew Liner had anything to do with the blog, even going so far as to deny having ascertained that Liner was really the author of the blog, they also admit that they were deeply disturbed by the blog, that they had received complaints about it, and that they had gone so far as to consult lawyers about it. As an adjunct, Liner has no job security, and effectively does not enjoy even the semblance of academic freedom; SMU is free to choose not to continue to employ her, and it is free, too, not to offer her any explanation. As it happens, SMU administrators are offering an explanation that is patently unbelievable--they say they discontinued Liner because they want to begin replacing adjunct professors with full-time tenure-track professors, but they have no plans to assign Liner's course to someone on the tenure-track.
Blogs for Industry has also been following the story, with some careful thinking about the line between whistleblowing, which is defensible conduct, and gossip or innuendo, which is not ethical.
Do the rest of us gossip and make fun of our colleagues and students over Friday beers? Mea culpa. But as you might guess from what I wrote above, the default for serious matters discussed during office hours or in class is that it's confidential. The onus is not on the student to force a nondisclosure agreement on the prof. I think Liner violated that, especially since she did not take into account the fact that if her cover was blown (as it ultimately was), many of the students, including some who haven't graduated yet, could be either identified or misidentified from her posts.
By blogging this kind of material anonymously, Liner was also undermining the student/faculty relationships at SMU and possibly elsewhere. If students don't know which prof will be posting their emails all over the internet this seems to me to be likely to have a chilling effect on what students will email to their profs. Worse, Liner seems to have decided to encourage students to send her gossip that she can use for her blog/book. This seems like a pretty clear case of disrupting the operation of the employer. Liner should be free to be a muckraker about academia...just not from within the faculty.
King at SCSU Scholars also notes that sunlight ought to shine on the muckrakers as well.
There have been questions about authorship of this blog from time to time. I remind readers that I a) am tenured; b) a department chair; and c) quite willing to let you see my professional webspace.
Indeed. And I don't see any dishing on individual students who are having coping problems over there. The Phantom, on the other hand, seemed to thrive on that. Some of it is pretty standard stuff. Consider an
excerpt from a pop-quiz on spelling, grammar, and general knowledge.
Most common answer to "What is a nonagenarian?" was "a person with no age." Funniest answer: "Someone too old to date."
OK, I've done that too, and editorialized (with somewhat higher hopes, and more than a few of the kids didn't let me down) on
the results; and
Milt Rosenberg has frequently mentioned on his
radio show the outcome of one of his quizzes, where his favorite answer to "Who wrote Tosca?" is "Toscanini." So far, I'm as guilty. There's
this observation, from the Phantom's recently-resurrected greatest hits page.
The title thing goes both ways. I remember a time when college teachers addressed students formally by their last names, as in "Do you have a question, Miss Farquhar?" and "That's an excellent observation, Mr. Fenster."
I liked the formality of that. It kept a certain level of decorum in the proceedings and it was way easier to tell one Ashley from another that way. But that was long ago, in the olden days when girls didn't show up for class with their bellybuttons exposed and boys didn't wear caps in class because their mommas had taught them it was rude and disrespectful.
Again, that's been a common theme around the Shops, where the Superintendent has long maintained that teachers and professors have contributed to their profession's loss of respect by giving up some of the social distance they used to maintain. (A sidelight: Northern Illinois does not object to professors putting a no hats rule in a course outline, along with sanctions for misuse of electronic shackles during class.) There will be more on the social distance topic in the upcoming week, when posting time ceases to be procrastinating from grading exams, some of which look quite good, and some of which might provoke the
kind of whinge Phantom deals with here.
Yeah, toots, now that the semester is over, suddenly you have time to do some work? Darling, sweetie. Our business has concluded. Your grade is chiseled in stone. You made a B-minus. You deserved a C and I was feeling generous because you actually stopped by my office a few times to bring me a Starbucks nonfat latte and dish a little campus dirt. I reward that. It's good PR for students to make these little gestures occasionally. But extra credit after the fact? I owe you nothing beyond the 14 weeks we spent together in my classroom. By next week I will have forgotten your name. By next month I will have forgotten your face.
This is the tenth student from the fall term to protest his or her final grade. To paraphrase the immortal Mr. T, I pity the fools who hire these young idiots for jobs in the real world.
I've had some such thoughts many times (don't even think about the latte or the dishing) and I get the kind of emails that require a similar if more tactful and more firm response, but as those aren't comments on the contents of Cold Spring Shops, they're not fodder for posting. (There is plenty of more public news to hold forth on.) Likewise,
this.
I'm a tough grader. I've written "This stinks" on student assignments. I tell students when I think they're B.S.'ing me or when I think they've gotten lazy. I push and prod to get them to work harder. I give them D's and F's when they deserve it. And when I do, I always tell them "It's not personal. It's about the work."And boy, do they NOT take it well. I've had young men and young women in my office sobbing over a grade or over a comment on a paper. They say, "I always got A's in high school!" And they run through every excuse, from ADD to eating disorders to writer's block (which I don't believe in, even for real writers).
I've had to learn how to criticize creatively so that I don't have to face the nervous breakdowns. And I blame parents for this. Trying so hard to be their children's pal, they forgot how to toughen them up for real-world criticism. Too many pats on the back for stupid stuff: "Way to stand at the plate, Travis!" "Good job finishing that sandwich, Ashley!" The kids don't know what it feels like to actually accomplish something worthy of praise.
Perhaps there are different challenges at a state-located mid-major. Our student affairs division did some research including a question in which the most popular choice of Northern Illinois students to complete "If I were a car, I would be ..." is "a beater." (This is likely a multiple-choice question.) The extremely upscale "Ashleys" (a name which is headed downscale; details to come) of Southern Methodist aren't that common around here (although your Superintendent wouldn't recognize a $1500 handbag if someone clouted him with one) and many of our students will take an education from comments ("this stinks" could be a bit over the top; it maps non-commutatively as "wrong" or "superficial" in my commenting style. But I'm an economist. Substance matters.)
These
observations on the late-middle-age male professoriate are painfully accurate, however.
Cute male professors are in scant supply at this place. The men at this campus tend to be middle-aged (or older), rumpled, bald or getting that way, unfit and uncaring about their appearance. The youngish ones are a really squirrelly bunch. They prefer khaki Dockers -- a fashion faux pas no student would commit -- and every nerd's fave accessory, the pocket protector. The older ones, subscribing to that age-old wardrobe statement of college professors everywhere, scuff around, fall, winter and spring, in well-worn corduroys and saggy sweaters. They hide their weak chins behind scraggly beards. Their bifocals tend to be unfashionably framed and exceptionally smudgy.
Is it sailing season yet?