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Education in America

Textbook Ripoffs: Why college leaves kids in debt

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One of next fall’s English 101 students e-mailed yesterday. This is a kid who was in one of my other courses and decided to take the upcoming class because she liked my style (read: she got a good grade). She asked how much we will be using the textbook and then said she went to the bookstore and found it was selling for $150. She’s not eligible for financial aid this semester and says she doesn’t think she can afford that much. She’s doing the best she can, she adds, to stay out of debt.

A hundred and fifty bucks. For a freshman comp book. That, my friends, is a $30 paperback.

It would be one thing if the book contained a lot of difficult-to-typeset equations (though most publishers use LaTex for that purpose—works like magic, and it’s freeware!). And it would be one thing if the book contained a lot of expensive four-color graphics. Or if writing a freshman comp book required a great deal of arcane and difficult-to-acquire knowledge.

But none of these apply. When I say this thing is a $30 paperback, I’m not kidding. It’s printed on decent paper and it does use color on almost every page. But otherwise…

Graphics? There’s little in this book that can’t be done with an ordinary word processor, and nothing in it can’t be accomplished—easily—with InDesign.

Permissions? It doesn’t cost $150 a copy to get permission to reprint a few sample articles. When I published my textbook, The Essential Feature (which, BTW, sells for a mere $40), I was amazed to discover how many publishers will give away rights to reprint if you murmur the words “and my publisher is a nonprofit.”

Expertise? Research clout? Gimme a break! This is a freshman comp book! A smart graduate student could write it. A competent junior editor in her 20s could write it. What is required is basic literacy, an acquaintance with mechanics and the structure of essays, and passing familiarity with MLA style. That’s it. This is not Laboratories in Mathematical Experimentation: A Bridge to Higher Mathematics!

Lordie.

So I say to the kid, “The school just started a book rental program. Call the bookstore and see if you can rent the thing.”

Says she, “I did. They told me this text isn’t included in the rental program.”

I call up Amazon.com on the computer. Lo! One vendor is peddling the thing for $14.95 used. New copies are going for as low as $40, though most sellers try to extract $80 or $90. This morning I see the $14.95 copy is gone—hope the kid snagged it. If not, she may manage to snare the one that’s selling for $17.90. That’s more within reason.

Even at $90, a book like this is a shameless rip-off. But in the “shameless” department, what excuse is there for campus bookstores to gouge kids $150 for a book that’s overpriced at $90?

The departmental chair told me we are required to order the book and we are required to use it in the classroom. When he heard that another faculty member remarked to me that she knew of an instructor who was not having his students buy the book but instead was using material freely available on the Internet (yes, Virginia, everything in this book—even most of the essays used as examples—is available on the Net), he demanded, with arched eyebrow, to know who this guy was. Luckily, I didn’t catch his name.

Not that I’m suggesting any collusion with a rapacious textbook industry. To the contrary. A department can’t have every faculty member wildcatting Internet sites as study material and hope to maintain any pretense of academic integrity. The chair would fail to do his job if he didn’t see to it that all the courses came up to the standards set out by the institution.

Nevertheless, it’s not surprising that young people commonly graduate from college $40,000 in the hole, more debt than they’d incur by purchasing a Lexus sedan. At $150, this textbook would cost my student almost two-thirds of what she’d pay to register for the course!

So, if you have a kid on the way to college, or you’re en route to those ivied precincts yourself, what can you do to protect your checkbook?

• First things first: As soon as the bookstore puts the next semester’s texts on the shelves, pay the place a visit. Note all the required texts, and write down their ISBNs. The ISBN is a number that appears on the copyright page, usually on the reverse side of the title page; it’s unique to each specific edition of a book. The ISBN for The Longman Writer, for example, is 978-0-205-7399-8. Knowing this number will ensure that you get the correct edition—in the case of this book, that’s important, because earlier versions do not include the revised 2009 MLA style guidelines.

• Next, the path of least resistance is to check Amazon.com. Enter an ISBN in the search function and it will bring up the correct textbook. Buy used. It’s much cheaper. As we’ve seen, even though new prices are less than you’ll pay in the bookstore, even at Amazon they’re out of reason.

• If you don’t want to own these objects (and really: why should a freshman comp text collect dust on your bookshelf from now until you die?), google “textbook rental.” Thanks to our handy ISBN, we see that The Longman Writer can be borrowed for a semester from Chegg.com for $26.49, about what the book is actually worth.

• Speaking of borrowing, check the campus library. Often faculty members put textbooks on reserve. Even though you can’t take it home, few textbook reading assignments require more than an hour or two.

• And between you and me, at 10 cents a page for photocopying, you could xerox the entire Longman text for $68.20, considerably less than the bookstore wants for a new copy. Though I’m asking my students to read many chapters in this thing, I’m not testing them on the entire book. A smart student with an advance copy of the syllabus (generally available at the departmental office) could buy a copy from the bookstore, photocopy the relevant sections, and then return the thing before the deadline to receive a full refund.

Ethical? Legal? No. But when publishers and retailers are openly ripping off 19-year-olds, I wouldn’t feel too bad about a little larceny. You can always plead self-defense…

• If you bought the book, resell it at the end of the semester. Check online for resale opportunities that will return more than the campus bookstore will pay you. Remember that you can resell the book on Amazon, possibly for more than you could get on-campus. Enter the ISBN, check the amounts people are getting, and compare with the figure the bookstore is offering. Don’t stop at Amazon; textbook renters often buy used books, as do other marketers—google “buy textbooks” to bring up a variety of sites. Sell to the highest bidder.

Oh, I’m getting all worked up over this. It makes me so angry! The textbook business, which ought to be an altruistic endeavor, has turned into industrial exploitation of a captive audience, made even more inexcusable by the buyers’ youth and financial naïveté.

If you’re a kid, don’t put up with it!

If you’re the parent of a new college student, teach your student where to find textbooks at reasonable prices, and help them to find ways get supplies from sellers that don’t steal from them.

The Joy—and Value Received—of Community Colleges

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Well, I came away from the community college’s four-day-long series of  training workshops feeling quite pleased. Really, I’d call them “courses,” because they were so full of content. A lot of new ideas surfaced, even though the instructor had already introduced me to many of the concepts in one-on-ones over the past several weeks. I also discovered a passle of new-to-me resources, and it was a nice opportunity to meet other faculty.

The faculty support the Maricopa Community College District provides for its adjunct faculty exceeds astonishing. Many of us were actually paid to attend these workshops, unheard-of at the Great Desert University. Not only that, but yesterday another set of paid(!!!) teacher training workshops was announced, coming up this fall.

You have to have worked at a university, where adjuncts are the lowest of the low, to understand how remarkable that is. Of course, it behooves the district to treat adjuncts decently, since 80 percent of its faculty is adjunct. However, the same can be said of any university freshman composition program, and I can assure you, “decently” is not the operative term in those precincts.

From what I can tell, Paradise Valley’s faculty support is outstanding across the board, whether for adjuncts or for full-timers. In the first place, community college full-time faculty are paid a decent wage—significantly more than most GDU faculty earn. But more to the point, Paradise Valley has enough support staff, and their training fits the faculty’s needs.

At this point, GDU West has one lonely (very excellent, very hard-working) IT staffer providing BlackBoard training and support; another who used to help was moved to the main campus. Even before the crash provided an excuse to gut the West campus’s staff, these two women were massively overworked. They could point you in the right direction, but ultimately you learned what you could about the software and about online course design by the seat of your pants. On rare occasions, the university would mount a two-hour workshop, but these were often led by faculty who had no more training than the rest of us in online instruction—it was, in short, the blind leading the blind.

The woman who led this summer’s workshops not only is experienced in teaching college-level courses, she’s completing a Ph.D. in instructional design. And it shows. She has really smart ideas about ways to set up an online course so students can navigate quickly and simply, and she also offered a number of strategies to keep the course academically rigorous without killing the instructor with overwork.

So personally, I’m very pleased about the outcome for the magazine writing course. What I’ve learned from her is going to make the course much more effective, and I’m really looking forward to engaging these ideas.

I can’t say whether this is typical of all community colleges, although I wouldn’t be surprised, since a community college’s mandate is teaching, rather than an amalgam of teaching, service, and research. Lower-division students, in particular, tend to get short shrift at universities: gigantic classes, tyro instructors, and little administrative support. If I had children who were going to attend a state university—or if I were a person who was about to embark on a four-year degree program—I would strongly recommend taking the first two years at a community college and then transferring.

The value received goes way beyond the savings in tuition, which are substantial. The real value: your students will be going to a school where somebody cares whether they succeed.

Elite Liberal Arts Education: Is it a rip?

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Over  at Free Money Finance, FMF and his readers are having a field day excoriating a young woman, one Cortney Munna, and her family for having made the apparently stupid decision to borrow $97,000 to send her to an elite private school, where she took a double major in the liberal arts (religious and women’s studies). With a starting salary after graduation of $46,000—not bad, we might add, for any wet-behind-the-ears kid, even though she’s living in extravagantly pricey San Francisco—she now is looking at a lifetime of student loan payments.

The most generous of FMFs readers suggest that it’s difficult for young people to understand the implications of long-term debt, given the scarcity of practical education in personal finance and budgeting to be found in the public schools, or that the American public is being sold a bill of goods about higher education. Most, however, go in for the kill, ranting about the young woman’s naïveté and her family’s stupidity.

Well, you know… When I was a young thing and wanted a career in nonfiction writing —wanted to be the first female John McPhee—I worked like crazy at it and got published here, there, and everywhere, often in the national markets. And I got a Ph.D. from a state institution. After I’d been banging my head against the steel walls surrounding the top, high-paying U.S. markets, such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, a fellow named Norman Sims published a book called The Literary Journalists. It was a study of the type of nonfiction I craved to publish, illuminated by selections from a group of authors that included my favorite role models plus a few up-and-comers.

The headnote for each article included some biographical details about the author. As I leafed through the book, I realized that an awful lot of those folks had gone to Ivy League or “public ivy” schools: Princeton, Berkeley, Yale, Vassar, Brandeis, Columbia, Harvard, Colgate. In fact, of the 14 senior, mid-career, and junior authors whose work was collected in Sims’s first book on literary nonfiction, only TWO had attended anything other than top-ranked prestigious schools (University of Texas and Union College), and one of those is a private liberal arts college.

As they used to say at Ms. Magazine, CLICK! The light went on. For entrée into a high-powered career, four years at an Ivy League trumps ten years at a public university. While it’s not impossible to break into the upper ranks with a degree from an ordinary, relatively inexpensive school, neither is it likely.

So one might want to think twice about criticizing this family for wanting to get their child into the “best” school possible. And as for blasting Cortney Munna’s choice of majors: At Union, 25% of students major in social sciences, 10% in psychology, 10% in the liberal arts, 10% in biology, and only 11% in the potentially more lucrative engineering. At Yale, the most popular degrees are in social sciences (25%), history (12%), interdisciplinary studies (10%), biology (8%), English (6%), visual and performing arts (6%), and area and ethnic studies (5%). Of those who go to graduate school within a year after leaving Yale, only 1% go into MBA programs.

In 2008, according to Bloomberg Business Week, the median starting salary for a Yale graduate was $59,100. By mid-career, earners with Yale degrees typically made $326,000 a year, while graduates of Kent State, an excellent public school, earned an average of $124,000.

So, I’m afraid that the reasoning behind the family’s ambition to send Ms. Munna to a top-ranking school is not so all wet, after all.

Probably the issue here is that unless your family has the money to foot most or all of the bill for an elite school, you should downsize your ambitions and admit to yourself, right out of the box, that if you can’t pay for an elite degree in cash or are unwilling to shoulder a student loan the size of a house mortgage, you’re unlikely to have an elite career. After all, a salary of $124,000 is not such a bad fate. Ms. Munna and her family had only one failing: their ambitions were too high for their social and economic class. 😉

Another Day at the Grade Inflation Factory

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Hm. This is retirement, eh? Interesting experience.

So I started grading 50,000 words of student efforts after breakfast this morning, right around 7:00 a.m. Racing along as fast as I could read, making no comments except for a few overall observations attached to the electronic rubrics I post in the terrifying BlackBoard, I finished sometime after 3:00 p.m. That would be eight (count’em, 8 ) uninterrupted hours of grading.

Then their scores had to be entered in the rubric forms, each of which has 20 items, and each had to be added up for this assignment’s total number of points.

Thence to Blackboard. Oh god.

Snailus blackboardiensis

It took an hour and 45 minutes to enter all the points for all the students and then upload all the forms to all the students through BlackBoard’s arcane communication system. It is soooo…slooooowwwwwwwwww.

It took another 45 minutes fill in zeros for all the assignments that students didn’t bother to do, to copy out their total numeric scores, to compare each one to the grade equivalences, and to figure their letter grades.

None of this was helped when FireFox developed a hitch in its pants and decided it would not, no way, NOT enter anything in the ever-aggravating BlackBoard. So I had to go over to Safari, which is OK but slightly more cumbersome to use. No degree of extra cumbersomeness was in any way welcome at that particular moment.

If you are a parent of one of my students, you’ll be pleased to know that all our children are above average. What we have here, in the afternoon section, are 12 As, 4 Bs, 4 Cs, 1 D, and 1 F.

How, you ask, could so many young geniuses cluster in one classroom? Well…obviously, birds of a feather flock together!

In the community colleges, large numbers of students drop. At the first whiff of a D or F (or, among the most ambitious, of a C), the young things shoot out the door like frightened cottontails. After these clear out, the students who have a shot at success remain in the classroom.

Then we have all the devices designed to get them to show up in class. Understand, many of these students are bright enough young men and women who, at the age of 19 or so, haven’t imbibed the best of all possible learning skills. One learning skill is, as you might imagine, showing up in class. To get them there and to address the attention-deficit problem (they can’t stay awake through a full hour of lecture), I fill the days with interminable in-class activities and exercises, each of which racks up 10 points here and 20 points there. Plus, because we’re required to keep roll, they get one point for sitting in a seat and breathing—36 points (for this section) shows the young scholar surfaced in class every day.

Because I’m required to assign only three major papers in English 102, that is all I do assign. So…that’s only 300 points.  By the time the semester ends, the total number of points including the three papers and the drafts and the peer reviews and the quizzes and all the exercises and doohickies adds up to something between 650 and 800 points. For this section, the total possible points came to 766. Thus over half the available points consist of busy-work and breathing exercises.

Consequently, even a kid who can’t write his way out of a paper bag can get a B in this class, if he (okay, or she) bothers to turn in the papers. To get a C, you have to cut class with some regularity; to get a D you have to work very hard to prove your incompetence, and to get an F, you have to be brain-dead. Really, when you think about it a D is a greater accomplishment than an A, because it reflects a great deal more effort.

I hate this. In the first place, I hate flunking students, some of whom do try very hard but are just not up to snuff. And in the second place I hate handing out A’s like Hallowe’en candy.

One of the things you should know about these students is that most of them are pretty bright. Some are very smart, indeed. If they’re not great at academics, it’s because they’re distracted by other concerns, because the state of Arizona’s K-12 system leaves much to be desired, or because they haven’t the temperament or patience to sit through interminable mind-numbing courses.

The best student writer I ever had the privilege to meet got a gentleman’s C in my course. OMG, could that guy write! Given half a chance and a degree from Princeton, he could give John McPhee a real run for his money. So…how come he didn’t get an A in freshman comp? He told me he simply could not bear to sit still through an hour or 90 minutes of class. He said that when he had tried, he would feel so restless and so antsy it made him physically uncomfortable.

True to form, he cut a fair number of class meetings, and he flat refused to jump through the busy-work hoops I’d set up to insure that as many students as humanly possible would rack up enough points to pass the course. Last I saw of him, he was on his way to fight fires in Montana. He promised to take a journal along and think about writing articles or essays about his experiences.

This was a man that…well, any young woman in her right mind would fall all over herself to land him as a husband. If we were still living in the cave, he would be bringing home the mammoth steaks for us all. And he also would be keeping the peace in the clan: he was a natural leader. The course, in the first place, wasn’t challenging enough for him, and in the second place, the classroom experience asked him to do something he wasn’t really suited for.

The next time I teach this course, there’ll some changes made! We’re required to assign two 750-word papers and one 2,500-word paper to the 102 classes. Twenty-five hundred words is more than three times the length of each shorter paper, and so next time around, I’m going to make that gigantic hunk of a paper worth 300 points. That will devalue all the in-class activities, so that assiduous presence and faithful hoop-jumping will not, of themselves, carry one through to a passing grade.

In addition to that, they’re starting the semester with annotated bibliographies. They. WILL. Learn. A. Style. Manual. If. It. Kills. Us. All. This activity will occupy great wads of time and also will give them a running head start on their research paper.

Next semester we’re using the “Assignments” function in BlackBoard, which (if I’m informed correctly) speeds the exchange of papers, automatically creates a grade column in the online gradebook, flags you when one of the li’l thangs has submitted a paper, and enters your grade when you’re finished reading the thing. This will speed matters along to some degree.

It also appears that BB will let you enter a letter grade instead of a numeric score and, possibly, create a running averaged letter grade for each classmate. If I can figure out how to make that work, then next fall we’ll be reverting to my old, unreconstructed SchoolMarm Grading System, whereby each hapless student starts with 100 points and gets two to six points dinged off for each crime and misdemeanor that I have told them (a thousand times!) not to do. This, oh fellow pedagogues out there, is an effective way to teach students grammar, style, thematic organization, paragraphing, and sentence structure, theories to the contrary notwithstanding. By the end of the semester, they’re all writing coherent copy with very few grammatical, punctuation, and style errors. It also has the advantage of letting you see their equivalent letter grade at a glance.

If university juniors and seniors who are mostly transfers from the junior colleges can do that, I’ll bet junior-college freshmen and sophomores can do it, too. You have to work with them, but you can get almost all of them to that level, with a few LD and ESL exceptions.

The Eng. 101 students got off too easy, too, though their grades were not quite so skewed to the higher range. Next semester, all four of their papers will be researched, including the two little Mickey Mousers that are not so required by the district. They also will start out with a cold plunge into MLA style, and in fact, I’m going to make them buy the MLA Manual, a great improvement over the half-baked composition textbooks we have in hand. I’m also going to make them learn Strunk & White, which I probably can’t make them buy but which I sure as hell can make them read online. In all its sexist pre-1970s glory.

The little pistols are going to come out of 101 knowing how to write a bibliography and enter an in-text citation, and, not only that, knowing how to write tight. And what a pronoun antecedent is. Maybe even what a subject and a verb are.

They are going to do a lot more work, and I am going to do a lot less work.

A Degree from a Proprietary School? Is it worth the cost?

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Reader Robin commented on Thursday’s post, “It Never Rains but It Pours,”

Off topic, but I watched Frontline’s investigative piece on corporate higher education (i.e., The University of Phoenix among others) last night and found it dismaying. Couldn’t help wondering how you felt about this burgeoning overlap of academia, corporate America and Wall Street.

This program aired on May 4, 2010. Anyone who’s interested in the state of higher education, who’s thinking about pursuing a degree at the University of Phoenix, Argosy, or a similar institution, or who has a son or daughter contemplating a program in one of these schools should watch it.

Graduation ceremony at Oxford

@ Robin: The University of Phoenix is huge. At 450,000 students it is now the largest university in Arizona, Michael Crow‘s pretensions to empire notwithstanding. It’s popular among people who want a degree for no other reason than to get a job or a promotion, because most or all of the coursework is online, few gen-ed courses are required, and the courses are very easy.

A friend is teaching an online course through UofP. Pay is even worse than in the community colleges. To give you an idea, at Paradise Valley Community College I earn $2400 for sixteen weeks of work. The course she teaches is a watered-down version of freshman comp. The amount of attention it demands is so slight she manages to hold down a full-time editorial job at Arizona State University, a part-time job tending bar, and a substantial freelance contract from a huge textbook publisher and still “teach” UofP courses.

UofP classes are canned courses: management gives the instructor a ready-made syllabus and a ready-made set of assignments with ready-made rubrics. Then they sit the instructor down and explain exactly how the course is to be conducted and how the assignments are to be graded. So there’s no room for flexibility, no room to communicate any research expertise, no room for much of anything. It is, in short, as a can of Green Giant peas to a basket of garden peas fresh off the vine. However, there are some reputable programs out there, such as DeVry’s business management program; you just have to sift through the suspect schools. Reputable sources such as U.S. News‘s “Best Colleges 2012” review online and part-time programs of this nature.

I do think this strategy represents the wave of the future for higher education, and probably in time for secondary education, too. Although mounting courses online is expensive, once you have it all in the can, running the operation is cheap: you don’t have to hire tenurable faculty, you don’t have to provide office space and computers or any other support for faculty, you don’t have to build classrooms. You don’t even need full-time faculty at all. Hence no expensive benefits.

And students love online courses. When I first started teaching online—I created the first fully online course in my college—I was astonished at the number of people who swarmed to get in. Offer a course online, and it fills in two days. So, these enterprises are potential engines of great wealth for their proprietors, some of whom are already billionaires.

Indeed, Arizona State University President Crow so likes the model that he regards these proprietary schools as direct competition and is moving to go head-to-head with them. Arizona State offers a number of online degrees—you can now get an MBA with ASU’s relatively prestigious name attached without ever entering a brick-and-mortar classroom. Online courses are offered in almost every department, and some of them have no caps. One adjunct writing instructor was assigned an upper-division course in Writing for the Professions that ended up with 400 students in one section! Under those conditions, of course, the quality of education students receive from a state university will be no better than what is described in the Frontline documentary.

Few employers care where rank-and-file white-collar or even middle-management workers get their degrees. I know people who have obtained master’s and doctoral degrees through proprietary online “universities” and then walked into high-paying jobs. One of my former students, who can’t write her way out of a paper bag, wouldn’t recognize a comma splice if it bit her on the ankle, and knows nothing about literature or writing, got herself an M.A. from a London-based for-profit online school and forthwith landed a full-time job teaching English at a Maricopa County college, where average salaries range from $63,000 to $68,000. Another got an online Ed.D. and was promoted at Arizona State to assistant dean, a job paid upwards of $70,000, depending on your department.

On the other hand, obviously if you’re training to be a nurse and your clinical is at a day-care center, as four of the former students of one proprietary school report, you’re not going to get a job. And just as obviously, if you aim for an elite career in business or government, you need a real degree from an elite school. You don’t see any U.S. presidents or cabinet members who graduated from Arizona State University or the University of Phoenix. But if you’re just going to be a working schlep, counting the days to retirement? Meh…maybe. Still, if it’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, why not take an online program at far less cost from a public school?

The problem is, these proprietary outfits pass themselves off as “private” schools and charge commensurately for tuition. Undergraduate tuition for an online degree at Grand Canyon University, which is mentioned in the documentary, ranges from $250 to $415 a credit hour: given a typical 120 hours for an undergraduate degree, a B.A. at this place could set you back $30,000 to $49,800! This will leave you strapped for cash, deep in debt, and with no guarantee of a job.

Graduate tuition rates at private nonproprietary schools are even higher. Over a year ago, a young friend of my son graduated with a master’s of international management from the Thunderbird School for Global Management, a school that has a decent reputation. Payments on her student loans are $1,400 a month. She’s never been able to get a job. She had to move back in with her mother and is now earning under-the-table cash by harvesting marijuana seasonally for a California grower. And that’s with a degree from a high-ranking private school.

Proprietary schools, which are anything but high-ranking, can be enormous rips. The quality of their education is highly suspect. At one point I had a client who hired me to turn her dissertation into English; she was pursuing a doctorate at Argosy University. Her dissertation was extremely weak. Sections of the document that made no sense and reflected no credible research were accepted, and it soon became clear that her chair was simply pushing her paper through to move her out of the program. Unable to get into Arizona State’s graduate program because of her inadequate preparation, she was so anxious to obtain a doctorate—largely, she admitted, for reasons of ego—that she was willing to pay extravagantly for it, and to hire someone else to rewrite her dissertation under the guise of “editing” it. This woman was going to end up with a degree that would leave her no better trained or educated than when she started and would qualify her for nothing.

Students who seek vocational degrees tailored to help them land specific kinds of jobs would do far better to attend community colleges and universities. Many decent public schools now offer a broad choice of online courses and even entire programs conducted online. If your grades and test scores are too low to get you into a university at the outset, two years at a community college will generally qualify you for entry at the junior level. Compare a community college’s $71-per-credit-hour cost with Argosy’s breathtaking $510. A fully online undergraduate program at Arizona State will cost you $3,980 for twelve credit hours, or $331.66 per credit hour. Take yourself in person to the campus, and the cost is a bit lower, $3,423 for anything over 7 credit hours; for a 12-credit semester, that works out to $285.25 per credit hour.

Costs are still very high, but nothing like the gouge from a proprietary school. And an established public college or university does have a tradition of legitimate teaching and faculty who are paid decent salaries to teach, do research, and share knowledge creatively with the next generation.

That is different—way different—from what you’ll get from a course that comes out of a can.

Another sad day for academe

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Deflected from writing a post this afternoon by the startling news from Alabama: denied tenure, a junior faculty member tried to take out her department and succeeded in killing three colleagues.

What a tragedy for everyone, the maddened assistant professor as well as those whose lives she ended, and all their families.

Considering how much commitment, work, and struggle go into attaining a Ph.D., how much more struggle, work, abuse, frustration, and sometimes downright misery a junior faculty member goes through, and how much rides on a single tenure decision—often made by committees not all of whose members may operate with the purest of motives—it’s surprising this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often. In fact, the fear that it could does surface every now and again.

Some years ago my department on the West campus of Arizona State University decided to dismiss a tenure-track assistant professor after the chronic frustration of working at that august institution had driven him quite insane. One of my students, a police officer, had let it slip in front of another student that she had arrested this guy for beating up a young boy; I reported this to the dean. The dean and the campus cops confirmed its accuracy, but no action was taken. Only after he threatened to cut off a colleague’s head and pee down the hole—giving said colleague an excuse to decline to come into campus even to meet his classes—did our administrators finally feel moved to get rid of him.

The chair of the department went to the man’s house, accompanied by a phalanx of armed police officers, to give him the news and to tell him he was not to come back to the campus. Before he left on this mission, however, the chair called some but not all of the faculty members and warned them to stay away from campus that day. Strangely, he didn’t tell everyone. It was obvious as day that if our disaffected colleague walked into the second-floor office suite carrying a street-sweeper, he wasn’t going to distinguish between those who merely annoyed him and those who drove him to distraction. But some of us were left to take our chances.

Jayzus! Imagine having a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University and then being denied tenure by a public school in a state like Alabama…probably the only state in the Union that’s more backward about education than Arizona. How crushing!

For those who don’t know what this implies: it’s extremely difficult to land a tenure-track job at a university in the best of times; during times of recession, almost impossible. To hang onto the job and build anything resembling a career in academia, you have to fight your way to tenure, usually on a three- to seven-year deadline. Tenure decisions require you to jump through many flaming hoops, and too many times the decisions are anything but fair. If you fail to obtain tenure, your job at that institution is over and your chances of landing another tenure-track job are nil. Should you stay in the academy at all after that, you’ll likely end up teaching five sections a semester in some junior college, with no research agenda and no chance of ever having a research agenda. Effectively, tenure denial ends the career for which you spent 10 to 15 years preparing.

So, all the while a junior faculty member is working toward tenure, he or she is under soul-wracking pressure. It is, even for the best of us, a difficult time. It’s not surprising that some people crack. Given the pervasive violence and madness in our culture, I guess we’re lucky events like today’s are rare.