Seasonal, or The Ode to Teachers

Teachers get a little thrill just before the school year starts. No longer bound to agriculture, the teaching planet is still remarkably seasonal. Billions of years ago some random rock knocked Earth off its perfectly perpendicular axis, and here we are. Obliquity – I like the word; it implies a degree of imperfection, a flaw so fundamental it is not a flaw anymore. Equinox, solstice, the turning of leaves, the white Christmas – none of these would have existed if not for that unnamed rock.

California’s weather gave us little warning: well, it was a little cooler at the end of last week. In Siberia, the weather would still count as hot. The start of the school year is about imagining the new students, their lives, faces, idiosyncrasies and breakthroughs. It is thinking of new classes, new things to try. Seasons are all about repetition, yet human life is linear, and seasons are as much about difference as they are about sameness. Every birthday is the same and yet very different from the last one; the start of a school year is like that, except it is less personal and more communal.

One of the few good Soviet achievement was declaring September 1 (the universal first day of school in Russia) the national Day of Knowledge. The idea is credited to Fedor Bryukhovetsky, a famous school principal from Krasnodar. I collected data in his school when he was still alive, in about 1986 for my Russian dissertation. Here is a quote from my field notes:

“When I took over that school in February of 1943, in an almost completely destroyed city, there was nothing in it. Kids, parents and teachers began to bring whatever they could. We cooked ink out of elderberry... Kids were malnourished – skinny, with red eyes. The city gave us four hectares of dirt covered with thorny bushes. Teachers, kids and parents went there to uproot those bushes. Teachers and students both had bloody blisters on their palms. All the crops went to the Railroad Purveyance Department, and they had opened a cafeteria in our school. Every kid could buy a bowl of soup for four kopecks; this is how we fought malnutrition... As for relations between students and teachers, these were relations of a single impulse, of a single breath. Precisely there, on the fields of the supplementary farm, our community came to life... This very attitude towards shared work we always remembered, and tried to preserve in the future.”

Things are less dramatic now, but the essence of the profession is still the same: we connect our lives to our student lives in various ways. There is an invisible solidarity among all people on this oblique planet, who get a little thrill right about the start of the school year.

Do we really need standards or A case for neural networks in educator preparation

In every complex human profession, a preparation program is very broad. Teachers need to have hundreds of skill, big and small, know thousand things. Therefore, professional organizations create standards that are laundry lists of skills we designate as important. For example, California Teacher Performance Indicators is a 14 page document, with 6 domain and some 45 items just in general pedagogy, plus who knows how many subject-specific items. An element can be like this: “Maintain high expectations for learning with appropriate support for the full range of students in the classroom.” Or, let’s take NASP Standards for the Credentialing of School Psychologists; looks similar. Both organizations (and countless others) had tried to reduce the number of indicators for practical reasons, but instead they made them compound. For example, a school psychologist has to “ in collaboration with others, demonstrate skills to promote services that enhance learning, mental health, safety, and physical wellbeing through protective and adaptive factors and to implement effective crisis preparation, response, and recovery.” To figure out whether a student actually meets this standard, you need to observe his or her collaboration with others – not in general, but in the very specific act of promoting services that enhance learning. And then the same thing about promoting services than enhance mental health. Observe a completely different act of promoting safety, and you have to collaborate with someone while doing so. So it is literally hundreds of actual indicators you need not only observe, but observe long enough to gauge the level of sophistication. In other words, proving attainment of these standards is physically impossible. I understand the indent of the standard writers – you don’t want to leave gaping holes in preparation. Moreover, you do not want to be accused of being less rigorous than the last reiteration. However, I think they should start considering the actual lives of the documents they create, including the unintended consequences. Something is wrong with the very premise of standardizing complex professions. Weren’t we supposed to learn this from the epic failure of Frederic Taylor’s “Scientific management”?

Yet we are where we are. What an accredited program to do? Well, we design evaluation forms, which make sense at the end of the program, where we try to “cover” the bulk of the standard items. Our student teaching supervisor observes students 6 times per semester, for less than an hour. It is actually much higher than the national average of about 3-4 observations. School Psych do even more intense observations, and so does Counseling, Leadership and other professional programs. Still what is the chance that one would see something to show that the student teacher “Participates in school, district, or professional academic community learning events; uses professional learning to support student learning?” What if there were no community learning events? We actually did not observe it, it is all secondary information. And yet we have to meet every standard, or lose accreditation. In some areas, the loss of accreditation is a death warrant for a program.

To cope, we pretend. Instead of actually observing some behavior, we hope that someone somewhere in one of the classes possibly about professional learning communities. Of course, as the supervisor, I had never observed that one little thing, but I will check the little box of hope. Yes, we have 40 or 99 items evaluation forms, of which I can only really tell about 10 with certainty. They have to be more holistic (which is exactly what our colleagues did), but still retain plausible coverage of the standard items. The time is precious, and even if I did not observe all the items, I will check them all, for we are required to collect the assessment data. As a result, the granular data if of very little use. In theory, we should make program development decisions based on the data. For example, one semester, we should see – oh, look this semester we scored lower on “Plan instruction that promotes a range of communication strategies and activity modes between teacher and student and among students that encourage student participation in learning.” We ought to do something! Nah, nothing like this ever happens. The data is flat and boring. The forms can be very effective pedagogical instruments, a chance to talk to the future teacher or psychologist about how they do. As data source they are fairly weak. We rarely learn something about our programs from the compliance data that we did not know otherwise.

I think we should give up on the idea of standards altogether. Professional organizations can concentrate their intellectual resources on development of good observation protocols, evaluation instruments, and tests. Just cut the middle construct. Instead of asking what a good teacher or counsellor is, ask what a good one looks like. It is a big shift, if you think about it. How does a very perceptive professional actually recognize competence in others? There are probably telltale signs of both a potentially good teacher, a struggling teacher, or a hopeless teacher. Eye contact, body posture, speech patterns, their kids’ behavioral clues, the kinds of interactions, the ability to pause, the kind of measured display of emotion. Why pretend that we came to these signs through some theory? I think if we commit due attention to the act of recognition, analyze and distill it, we could come up with much better instruments, and much better data. We should concentrate on what is visible, and which signs are more meaningful.

This is where we should try to use the neural network approach, the first realistic application of artificial intelligence. I’ll skip the explanation on how it works – read Wikipedia for that. Fundamentally, the process is this: ask several master teachers to rank video clips of beginner teachers. Don’t ask why; we are studying master teachers’ perceptions, not the beginner teachers’ behavior. The neural network can actually detect what is in common among the good ones. The neural network will “learn” the traits which are basically patterns with a massive data set. The clips that rise to the top through collaboration of humans and the AI, will become the models to analyze and imitate. The neural networks are actually not that good at explaining why they selected particular cases. That is a feature that makes them uncomfortable for humans to use – they really work, but no one really knows how. They also can reproduce human prejudice, because the initial concepts come from humans. We have to be careful. Yet my point is - human intuition is also uncomfortably opaque. As a species, we evolved not to analyze, but to synthesize information. We process whole images, search for cues to reveal patterns. An ancient hunter did not have a checklist of hunting procedures when he taught his son. He presented the whole of his practice, and alerted his son to cues that others do not see.

Why do I remain optimistic in the Age of Trump?

A friend has recently asked me why am I remain optimistic about the American democracy. Indeed, there does not seem to be many reasons for optimism. The man elected to the highest office in the country cares very little about democracy. If you look through the entire body of his speeches and interviews, you will find almost nothing on democracy, democratic institutions, or the rule of law. He cares a great deal about the economy, trade, immigration, politics, and most certainly about his own legitimacy, just not about democracy. It never crosses his mind that democracy is important or that it needs defending. Obama, in contrast, talked about democratic institutions hundreds of times. To be exact, a search on Democratic Institutions yields 310 hits in his speeches. Moreover, President Trump has been very successful at controlling dissent within his own party, thus limiting one important check. He has been partially successful in delegitimizing the free press, his own national security agencies. His term in office is definitely one of the low points in the life of American democracy.

And yet the democratic system is working as designed; it creaks and groans like an old house in a storm, but it withstands. The system was designed with redundancies, exactly with someone like Trump in mind. This is the stress test, and checks and balanced are mainly in place. The Congress pushed back several times, as the media have done. Many states and cities keep pushing back, and within the Republican party there is some resistance even if not very public yet. While the Supreme Court is bound to become more conservative, it is very difficult to imagine it becoming irrelevant, of undermining its own power.

When Putin came to power in 2000, many Russians expressed doubts about sincerity of his democratic commitments. No one in Russia thought the weak democratic institutions could withstand the corrupting pressure from the very top. Those people were right; Putin was able to marginalize and weaken the very institutions he was elected to defend: first, the free press, then the parliament, then the Supreme Court, and last, the civil society. Russia is a dystopian warning of how weak democratic institutions can be hollowed out from the top within a few years. Weimar Republic is one example of erosion of democratic institutions during the early Nazi era. Similar processes had happened in several Latin American countries during their era of dictatorships.

Nothing like that is happening in the US, because the institutions are much stronger. The structure of American political system has been created for the times like these. Its multiple, robust separation of various powers make the Russian scenario almost impossible. While I appreciate the creativity of the Handmaid’s Tale, very few reasonable people believe it is likely become true. Even if the first layer of defense for some reason fails, we have police, National Guard, security forces, the armed forces, all of whom share a deep commitment to democracy, Hollywood conspiracy flicks notwithstanding. Americans are obsessed with dystopian visions of post-apocalyptic world. Let us not confuse our fears with reality.

The political science actually tells us that in the so-called “hybrid regimes,” greatly weakened democratic institutions have a tendency to come back to life. In the end, I am optimistic even about Russia. Its institutions - no matter how weak now - will come back to life, eventually. In the US, those institutions will barely flinch at the Trump’s relentless assault. I think it is important to keep in mind. It will take some work, but let us be clear: Donald Trump stand zero chance against American democracy.

What do deans do in the summer?

Summer has a different rhythm, and a different feel than the rest of the year. With faculty and students gone, it is a smaller group of people to interact with (AD’s, chairs and staff), and a different set of issues to weed through. During the year, our meetings are hurried for we need to make many decisions quickly. Summer is time for deeper, less hurried conversations. We try to think bigger and longer, debate lessons learned last year, and identify priorities for the next one. It is a different kind of work, and is as important as putting out fires during the year.

We plan the annual cycle of events, trying to think what is too much, and what is just right for us to handle. Summer is the time to ask hard questions – OK, we thought «A» was a great idea last year, we tried it. What’s the real return on investment? The difficult question is of course whether you let «A» live and grow, or to cut your losses and move our attention and resources onto something else. For example, we have done two cycles of the ReinventEd competition. The results are mixed: On one hand, we have a relatively small number of submissions, and did not produce a big PR splash yet; it costs us both money and staff time. On the other hand, the quality of projects submitted to us is actually quite high, and we are helping the grassroots innovators we intended to reach. If you think these are easy decisions, think again. Uncertainties abound.

One of the most important things to do is to plan for new projects. Just to give you some examples: The College has been asked to lower the cost of instruction, normally calculated as student-faculty ratio. Because we have so many professional programs with extensive field experiences, we are the most expensive college in the university in terms of the cost of instruction per FTES. Another example: after significant, time-consuming work on integrated teacher education programs (ITEPs), we see clearly a need for a universal configuration of our credentials programs into something that can overlap with undergraduate programs. Yet our credentials programs evolved as post-bac option and we cannot copy other states’ undergraduate credentials models for a long number of reasons.

We have several such dilemmas that need to be addressed through a multi-stage collective effort. The best-case scenario is when we are able to delegate a whole project to another group of people. For example, our faculty are remarkably creative and organized where it comes to academic program development. We are getting there in terms of recruitment. For things that are too big or too complex, we usually create a google doc and start meetings, organizing our thoughts and plans in some sorts of lists of issues and later plans of action. Google docs are an ideal instrument for collaborative project management, because they solved the version control issue. However, the most difficult and gratifying part if to turn a problem into a solution, and a solution into action. Technologies do not help here. What helps is the knowledge of the reality of our organization, and the managerial imagination. It is the ability to imagine how things can go wrong, and how they can go right; a form of collective art that we are long time away from actually mastering.

It is still a major challenge to keep multiple projects going at the same time, without dropping the ball on any of them. So, along with planning events and projects, we also need to plan how do we track them.

That’s what deans and other administrative types do in the Summer. And yes, there is also moving, renovations, workload adjustments, the never-ending procedure clean-up, and other minutia of Summer. Oh, I also have written a paper called The Baumol’s Cost Disease and the Trinitarian Pedagogy over two weekends.

Technology and democracy

Not much of a secret, NSA and FBI both have a technology that allows tracking cell phones even if they are turned off. According to Washington Post, it was one of the major contributors to eliminating Al Qaida leadership in Iraq. The Russian security services have that, as well, which helped them to win the second Chechen war. Again, I am not disclosing any state secrets here; the press have written about it extensively. And yet we were unable to find anyone in the law enforcement community who would agree to help us to use the technology to find a missing teenager. Moreover, all of them denied the very existence of such a technology, which was somewhat surprising to me.

I understand that just because one unit somewhere in the FBI can use it, does not mean that every officer has access to it. This is not how it works. Ok, I get it, national security and all that. The question I have is very simple – who gets to decide which technology can be used only to kill terrorists, but not to find a missing child? In a democratic society, who gets to say which is less important? While the very existence of it can be plausibly denied, yes, I’d buy an argument that it not for civilian use. Now everyone who can read knows it exists, since at least 2013, although there were similar reports much earlier, right after Bob Woodward disclosed that there was some “secret weapon” in use in Iraq. The tech itself exists since 2004 or so.

This is not a new question. Many technologies have been first developed for military use, and only then became available for civilian use. GPS is just one of many examples. The Internet is, arguably, another. As far as I know, the conversion process has always been driven by private industry, trying to make a buck. Now, in this case, there is no private industry that would be plausibly benefiting from the technology. Law enforcement does not operate like a business, although I am sure they would love to have a tool like that. I think the government has to step in, the legislative branch specifically. Otherwise, in such cases technology transfer may not happen for a long time, simply because no driver on the civilian side. Parents of missing teenagers are not a huge political force, unfortunately. The military are using public funds to develop all these new technologies, and we all should benefit from them as soon as it is practically possible.

Promises and threats of relational technologies

Why has information technology failed to revolutionize education so far? The reason is as simple as it is unexpected: education turned out to be much more relational and much less informational than we all believed. Various thinkers suspected that to be the case for a long time. Vygotsky, for example, emphasized the social nature of learning. However, it was more of a theory. Now we know for sure –people are almost incapable of learning anything on-on-one with a machine; they need each other to learn anything of importance. Many smart people got excited about MOOCs around 2012, because MOOCs promised to change the economic fundamentals of higher education. Well, if you are still excited about MOOCs, you have not been paying much attention. Not one university has closed down because of the competition from Coursera or EdX, and it is not likely to happen. Students come to campuses for a relational experience with their peers and professors.

The next logical move would be to invest in technologies that somehow help with human relations, by either faking real human interactions, or helping teachers relate to more students, or relate stronger. That is a genuinely new path; no one has really explored what possibilities exist in relational technologies. For example, what if an AI can maintain realistic and sophisticated conversations with thousands of students, and every one of them would get personal attention and encouragement? After all, people are eager to be fooled. Even the relatively stupid machines we have today, like Siri or Alexa, get an affective response from at least some users. Computerized dolls and anthropomorphic robots incite affection as well. Just a little push may produce a reasonable artificial tutor who remembers where you are with your learning, and imitates collaboration within your zone of proximal development.

In addition, what we know about human attachment, may suggest ways of manipulating student attachments to make their teachers more important, more influential, more relatable, hence increasing their ability to motivate students to learn. Would it not be wonderful?

No, it will not. Whatever I was trying to imagine in the world of relational technology began to morph into monstrosity. The possibility of abuse offered by manufactured relations is enormous. I actually find it difficult to write about what can be done, for the fear that someone may actually try to do it. Messing with human relations just feels very creepy to me. In fact, various cults, malignant gurus, gangs, abusive teachers – all manipulate human relationality. Their tricks bind one person to another person in a strong attachment. Do I want such tools become widely available to educators? – Umm, not really.

The reason education is so slow to change and so repellant to innovation is that it deals with human nature. All attempts to make people kinder, eliminate envy, curb aggression and control love are slow, centuries long processes, resisting quick technological solutions. Well, education if one of those slow things. For a whole host of reasons, it is impossible to suddenly raise productivity. What people are able and willing to learn, and whom they can learn with – these are not easily changed. The human condition has something to do with our evolutionary path, with fundamentals of our social organization and economics.

How about gifts to students?

The world of gifts is complicated. Much of the anthropological theory derives from various accounts of gift. From Malinowski to Mauss, from Polanyi to Sahlins, all considered gift giving one of the central cultural phenomena. Last week I wrote about gifts to professors, but how about gifts in the other direction, from professors to students? It is clearly, a much more complicated, and multidimensional issue.

Bourdieu describes gift as an imposition of obligation. He states that, “[T]he initial act [of giving] is an attack on the freedom of the one who receives it. It is threatening: it obligates one to reciprocate and to reciprocate beyond the original gift…” (Practical Reason, 94). On one hand, teachers of all kinds view their work as at least partially a gift-giving to students. There is an assumption that most of us go above and beyond of just what the job requires. We do expect some gratitude from students, and are hurt when it is not shown. Your real estate agent expects a polite “thank you,” but not profound gratitude.

Consider a professor who gives up a couple of hours of his or her day to help a troubled student with understanding course materials. This seems fine, right? What if someone gives a student an expensive laptop? That would raise all kinds of questions, and at the very least look very weird: not a good idea. How about a professor who takes an entire class to a restaurant and paying the bill out of pocket? Well, it is still a bit weird, but maybe not so much? What about several faculty who invite graduating students to a party with tacos and burritos? – Well, that seems totally fine. Why is that? Because tacos are cheaper, or because they split the bill? I don’t know, it just feels right to me, but perhaps not to someone else.

I am trying to show here that there is an implicit cultural norm of gift proportionality, specific to our culture. Yet the norm seems to be ill-defined, and perhaps shifting. The norm does exist, and there is such a thing as a gift too big to be appropriate. Note, it is fairly easy for a professor to turn down a student gift, not s easy the other way around. To be in a position of saying, “Thanks, but I cannot accept this,” is to be in a position of power.

I am a bit worried that if we do not watch it, different faculty will start competing with other programs on generosity, and some will feel pressure to be more generous. Anthropologists know several cultures where competitive generosity got out of hand, including some Melanesian societies. I am thinking we need to both acknowledge the beauty of human generosity, and yet be careful to set some limits.

OK, how do we do that? I have no idea, actually. A written policy seems to be too intrusive, and too rigid. A conversation, perhaps? - how do you hold a conversation like that with two hundred people? This is an invitation to think together.

Student gifts, or How do we regulate Academia

Someone has recently asked me if we have a written policy on student-to-faculty gifts. My answer is this: politely decline all gifts of value other than a thankyou card. Suggest Instead giving to the College or the University. No fruit baskets, no champagne, no Starbucks gift cards. Here is a more detailed reasoning for the case by Lionel G. Standing. If you want a written policy, here it is. As your dean, I just wrote it down, effective immediately: no gifts from students.

More seriously, it is not that simple. Writing a good policy takes time and intellectual effort. With zero-gift policy, there are many nuances and exceptions. For example, you may have an international student from a country where introduction souvenirs are a sign of routine politeness. Your graduate student may also be your colleague and collaborator, older and wealthier than you are. A refusal to accept a gift may be a rude gesture in your own cultural background, etc., etc. To have a good written policy, we should consider all these and other exceptions, define what a gift is (is a ride to a conference a gift? A dog-sitting gig?), set a threshold for monetary value, get feedback from people, revise, vote to approve, publish, maintain version control, etc. It looks like an expensive proposition; we all could be doing something else, moving our College somewhere. So why do all that? We do not really have a problem with student gifts. The absolute majority of faculty have enough common sense to discourage students from gift giving. Spending that much time on a minor problem seems to be luxury we cannot afford. It is really a case of the Parkinson’s law of triviality, which deserves a special blog one day.

Another consideration is that written policies tend to weaken ethical controls. Academia is governed by both ethics and policies, which overlap and mingle in complex and not always predictable ways. Policies often provide an excuse to abandon ethical reasoning altogether. Let me give you an absurd example, so you understand the logic: Let’s say a hospital says to its doctors – no more than two free lunches a year paid by Big Pharma sales persons. OK, there are 22 major pharma conglomerates in the world. That’s 44 free lunches, which a doctor will intentionally schedule throughout the year. Instead of limiting the abuse, the policy presents the bribes as a benign and finite resource, which you would be foolish not to use. So you end up with more abuse than before, because of the way you tried to regulate it.

Another way is to engage in a conversation with the doctors and state that free lunches are not really OK, they are corruptive and unethical. This way, they will be worried about their reputation, and police the problem as a professional community. The ethical constraints are less clear, but can be as effective and less expensive to implement.

Here is what I am trying to do here. Next time a student gives you an envelope with something like a gift card in there, please think hard – how does she or he expect you to return the favor? What is the message you are sending by accepting or declining a gift?

Money loves quiet: CSU and the surplus

I heard the expression “money loves quiet” from a friend of mine. He meant that discussing money need a quiet, serious conversation; it should not be discussed loudly, with much emotions or naiveté. He is not entirely right, there are times and places for loud, emotional, political conversations. And yet, there are also times and places for quiet, realistic assessments and plans.

These are interesting times in California. The State has a record 9 billion dollar surplus, and yet the Governor is arguing for restraint, warning of future economic downturns. It cannot get more serious for CSU and UC systems, which may experience budget cuts despite the record surplus. Even if we do not, the most important serious conversation we need is on the long-term trend. Just look at this one picture by the Government Accountability Office; it is worth many words. The long-term trend nation-wide is to defund public higher education. Some states did I quickly and abruptly, some gradually. California may be unique in many ways, but nothing suggests a different long-term trend. It has little to do with politics, and everything to do with the economics of mass higher education. Simply put, not one country in the world has figured out how to provide quality higher education to the majority of its youth. If you’re curious, there is a wealth of info on the CSU Budget site.

Yes, there are times for students to go to the Capitol and demonstrate against tuition hikes, and for the Unions to demand wage increases, and for the System to lobby the legislature and the public. Then there is a sober analysis of what the public can and cannot afford and what we should do about the long-term trend. The answer is obvious: we must learn to diversify our revenue streams, and to reduce our expenses. I have never heard a quiet conversation that would dispute this simple thought. If any of you did, please let me know.

Our College is a tiny part of the giant CSU System, but the solutions are the same. We need to invest in building capacity for additional revenues. You can count all the realistic possibilities on the fingers of one hand: (1) Expand Continuing Education self-support programs, especially those online; (2) Enter the consulting business (service contracts); (3) Ramp up grant proposals; (3) Build capacity for fundraising, including a possible major gift; (4) Cut costs by streamlining processes and redesigning some very expensive programs, and closing down habitual money-losers; (5) build retail service business (e.g. diagnostic and tutoring services). All five actually require investments and time. As long as we have a relatively stable budget, we will make these investments. There is no money to waste. In fact, I think all academic units should be evaluated, in part, on their investment strategies, not just on their ability to maintain the status-quo relatively trouble-free.

One of the signs of maturity is the ability to distinguish between the loud political conversations and the quiet economic ones. Can you do that?

Prospective memory and the future-heavy world

One of Lisa Cantrell’s podcasts begins with a tragic story of a young father who forgot his sleeping baby in the backseat of his car. Lisa and her guest examine the so-called the prospective memory – remembering to perform a pre-planned action. It is, in a way a memory of the future. Apparently, humans are especially bad at it, because we have not evolved to plan for the future without environmental cues.

The podcast prompted me to think about the school year that is drawing to the end. The College’s leadership group collectively monitored over 80 new projects, not including the routine procedures like part-time pool applications and contracts, class scheduling, six distinct cycles of RTP, probably about a dozen staff searches and six faculty searches, etc. Each of us also kept track of our individual projects. For example I had 52 big enough to get on my to-do list, plus who knows how many that got done without writing them down, or completed straight out of inbox. Each branch chair has a similarly sized list, and every staff member does, too. Every faculty member keeps track of a host of class-related activities, preparing for classes, grading, individual students’ strengths and weaknesses, jokes already told to one group, but not to another, etc. When I regularly taught classes, I though teaching ninety students takes up about half of my total mental capacity. Faculty also keep tasks related to many other commitments – writing, researching, serving on committees, all the external engagements. It is a complicated world with many moving parts; nothing like our ancestors had to deal with. We live in a very future-heavy world. Our brains struggle to remember things that have not happen yet.

We create artificial cues to combat the weakness of prospective memory. In Lisa’s story, her guests suggest putting a diaper on the front seat. We make lists, calendars, routines, activate reminders, create tasks, and ask other people to remember. The gimmicks work to some degree, but I can easily name a dozen things that I initiated with a full commitment to execute, and then forgot to see through. None of it is as tragic as one in the story, but nothing to be proud if either. Every one of my colleagues forgets things. Despite our best efforts to manage projects, some get away from us. “Dropping the ball” is one of the most damaging causes of our failures. Why is that?

People have invented many things to keep themselves on track. The more sophisticated they are (for example, the Gantt charts), the more time-consuming they become. There is a point of diminishing returns, a threshold, after which one can spend so much time on planning and monitoring that no time will be left for actually implementing. Therefore, we trade the risk of forgetting for more time to do things. For example, Outlook has a handy Tasks feature for some thirty years, and very few people use it: too many clicks.

What can be done other than going through panic attacks themed “Did I forget something?” Obviously, I do not have a good solution, or else I would remember everything. However, it helps to identify at-risk projects, and plant some extra reminders for them. The at-risk projects are new; they are not built into any calendars or anyone’s established job routine yet. They may not have a clear and pre-planned chain of events, and depend on the initiative of one or two people. At-risk projects develop an ambiguity about whose court the ball is in. At-risk projects usually begin as great ideas, which is why the decision to go through is taken with too much enthusiasm, without considering the bandwidth capacity.

However, the main solution is to pay attention to Lisa’s point: human beings do not have a good prospective memory capacity. Understanding out limitations is as important as understanding our abilities.

Expert knowledge and faculty governance

An educated citizen should be able to see the limits of his or her knowledge, and defer to experts. That is, more or less, the outcome of a long debate about the role of specialized scientific knowledge in a democratic society. One common example is the climate change. Only a tiny minority of the voting public can actually understand the evidence. How does a demosratic make decisions as a democratic policy without understanding the science to support it? We allow the scientific community to govern itself so that the small group of scientist that do understand arrive at a consensus. It is not a perfect mechanism, because the majority of scientists have been mistaken on occasion. Yet it is definitely better than the alternative, where the public at large would decide based on its ignorance. The alternative is the sickening paranoia of climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists, who are simply unable to see beyond the limits of their own knowledge.

Last week, we discussed an interesting version of the same democracy vs. expert knowledge dilemma. As we are trying to create deeper pool of online courses and programs, faculty are quite reasonably concerned about the quality of those offerings. We do not want to gain a reputation of an online diploma mill. Yet in in many program areas, most faculty do not have enough experience and expertise in on-line teaching. So we end up with opinions like “This course cannot be taught on-line, because it is too intense.” The fact is, any course can be taught on-line, although in some cases it may be prohibitively expensive to design right (language learning, performance arts, micro-teaching, etc.). Other courses could converted on-line with minimal initial investment of time, and some are somewhere in between. I wrote about it last year, so won’t repeat.

Back to the governance. Universities have recognized the governance dilemma a long time ago. Quality Matters started 15 years ago, and CSU has put together a very robust peer review process based on the QM ideas. We created communities of experts that can be trusted to make the appropriate decision, so wider faculty bodies can rely on their expertise. However, the process is intended for fairly mature courses, it is takes six weeks, and requires some homework. I want to encourage more people to try the online teaching, and therefore want to have lower entrance barriers. It is another delicate balance between high standards and over-regulation.

Some people start on-line teaching gradually – first, they develop a rich course support in LMS. Then they may try one or two online activities within a regular f2f course. The next step might be a hybrid course, with a significant online component. Then they venture into the online course, and finally get ready for an online program. Others may jump straight into a fully online course and programs. In addition, of course, we have a number of people who have taught on-line successfully.

On-line teaching is not rocket science. If you understand basic pedagogy, you should be able to figure out eventually how to do it well on-line, especially if you learn early on the non-replication principle (do not try to replicate on-line everything you did in a f2f classroom). For our long-term survival, we need the skills of online teaching widely distributed among faculty, so we can serve more students, be more accessible, and have a plan B.

Shared governance: The joys and responsibilities

We have exactly three more weeks of instruction left. The semester is winding down, everyone is tired, and there is so much more grading to do. I just want to remind that we have some of the best jobs in the world. It is never boring, we make real difference in many students’ lives, and we get to decide many things for ourselves. University faculty can shape their own work lives, do what is interesting and meaningful to them. That is not the case in many industries, where organization cultures mat be much more hierarchical, and much less participatory.

The freedom always comes with responsibilities. One obvious responsibility we have is to serve the public. We are a public university, owned and to a large degree funded by the people of California, and we sought our jobs because we value the public service. There are two sides to this: one is pragmatic and another is ethical. Let’s assume that we decide to limit special education options (too expensive, too difficult) and the press got a wind of such a decision. How do you think the legislative session would go where the budget for the CSU system is discussed? This never happens, because we feel responsible for our mission. The ethical side is no less compelling: thousands of California kids are in desperate need of special education teachers. Do we have still have choice? Yes, we do, and we want to make the right choice. If I wanted the freedom to ignore the public needs, I would have chosen another career.

Another responsibility is to the campus and to the system. The 1966 AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities spells out a university presidents responsibility:

“As the chief planning officer of an institution, the president has a special obligation to innovate and initiate. The degree to which a president can envision new horizons for the institution, and can persuade others to see them and to work toward them, will often constitute the chief measure of the president’s administration.”

Our President identified priorities for us integrated teacher preparation programs and shortening time to graduation. That includes the integrated teacher preparation programs. Can we ignore those priorities? Well, in theory we can, but would we? Those are sound, rational ideas, and universities are committed to the pursuit of truth. If we do not support good ideas, all we gain is a reputation of a troubled, recalcitrant bunch. What I have learned from my 30+ years in Academia is this, reputation is the only currency. As a faculty group, we want to be known for creativity, for initiative, for new things we bring to the table, for being team players. There is never enough faculty lines, budgets, space, and anything else. It is only logical that units that support the university priorities get more, and those who do not get less. It is not any kind of vengeance, just good management.

There are times when faculty should say no, when there is a strong and plausible argument, when administrators might be making a mistake, or where faculty expertise in a specific field warrant a different approach.

Open dialogue is always the best way to engage in shared governance. It requires mutual trust, openness, and a commitment to listening. Most importantly, we do not have much of a value conflict. We all want to do our best to serve the State and its youth; we all are committed to justice and diversity. We have the best jobs in town, we get to hang out with lots of smart people, and we have much freedom that comes with responsibilities, naturally.

The world is so big

Did you know about the Sea Worm Festival in Lombok province in Indonesia? Did you know the men’s Chitrali cap in Pakistan sports a peacock plum? I actually met a woman from Lombok and a man from Chitral at a conference in Bangkok a week ago. It has people from 35 different countries, and was organized by a Sri Lankan company (whose vision is ”Revolutionizing the Asian Research Culture”), sponsored by the University of Northern Colorado, and a Lithuanian Vytautas Magnus University. That’s some globalization for you.

You may think the world is getting worse, but it is not so. The global GDP quadrupled over the last thirty years. Many parts of the world are raising millions of people out of poverty, making it possible for them to get education, to travel, to talk to each other. In the past, the world has been connected mainly along the North-South communication lines, where Europe and North America dominated the discourse, for better or worse. It was a simpler world. Now, increasingly, it is South-South communications, where the multitude of peoples come together to share their lively cultures, their experiences, their solutions to common problems.

For example, Thailand’s government has introduced a coupon scheme where its half a million teachers are free to choose any professional development they chose to pursue, from a list of approved courses. I know, that’s a lot of assumptions about the power of consumer choice, and anyone can see potential side-effects. But the sheer scope and audacity of the project impresses me. They are not asking Europeans or Americans for their opinion; they are just doing it.

The University of The Philippines Los Banos has its own original theory and practice they call Developmental Communications. It is somewhere between journalism and public relations, but focused on regional development. They have their own founding figures, the history of the movement, and their own theory. They do not care if no one else in the world does not believe it is even a thing. The little group seemed to be happy, self-sufficient, and interested in what they are doing.

These are just a few examples I caught. But there is a whole wide world out there, with hundred’s, thousands of such stories. Somehow, it is comforting to know. We will never run out of human diversity.

Seeing one’s own power

Power is a weird thing; when you don’t have it, you know it; once you get some, it suddenly becomes invisible. It is not something you alone have; you possess or lack power only with respect to other people. One minute you are disempowered and marginalized, and the next moment you are the powerful and may dominate others. But the psyche is not that fast; it cannot flip in and out of emotions. The psyche carries the wounds of powerlessness into other contexts, where it is out of place.

Universities are very unequal places. Professors wield significant power over their students. A strong dislike by a professor, justified or not, may cost a class, a degree, a year in someone’s life. University is a place often riddled with clashes of values. After all, good education is about changing someone’s mind. Therefore, certain exercise of pedagogical authority is not just permissible, it is often necessary. Yet this is also the danger. It is just so hard to see the boundary, where the exercise of authority for student’s sake slips into the exercise of authority for satisfaction of the professors’ own psychic needs. Education is a relational minefield. I wish I could tell that hundreds of faculty member I have known over the years walk on the minefield with equal grace. No, repeatedly I hear stories of professors getting angry at students, irate, treating some students harshly, because of disagreements, etc. Professors are only humans, and that is not always enough.

Academia has developed a special ethos to deal with the professors’ personal weakness. In general, culture is something that helps us remedy our own flaws. One of the key components of the ethos is the presumption of students’ innocence. Yes, students often carry with them all the prejudices and biases the larger world imbues them with. They may look like the perfect representatives of the world of injustice out there, which is especially difficult to handle when the professor has been a victim of that injustice. The point is – university is a different, parallel universe with its own set of rules. It is a world where students who place themselves into our care are innocent by default. They may be mistaken, but they are innocent, and as such must be protected. A student may be racist, sexist or ableist in his real life, but once he enters the university, he is treated as someone in error, not someone to judge. The very consent to be taught by us is the first step towards redemption. Treating him with moral disdain as anti-educational as it gets.

I wish protecting students from faculty was not a part of my job. Rarely and unfortunately, it is.

Over-promising is one sure way to fail

One certain way to ruin one’s reputation is to take on an impossible task, and then fail at it. The essential qualification of any contractor is the ability to tell what is possible and what is not. Say, if you want to have a floor made of thin glass, your contractor should tell you, no, sorry, you cannot do that.

The State Legislature is asking us, the teacher preparation industry to solve the problem of teacher shortage. Our culture is that of public service, and that is true for both state-supported and private institutions. Of course, we say, “Yes, we will do our best!” The Legislature hears something slightly different, “Yes we can do it!” The difference between what we say and what they hear is tremendous, but as it is often the case, it goes unnoticed. Then we fail at what they think they heard, year after year. They get frustrated and look elsewhere, trying to deregulate teacher preparation so that almost anyone can do it, school districts, private schools, county offices, and very soon - Starbucks shops. It still does not work, for poorly selected and ill-prepared teachers stay on the job for shorter and shorter gigs. The vicious cycle is the consequence of unclear, unarticulated response on our side and wishful thinking on their side.

Of course, the State wants to solve the problem without raising teacher salaries, and without investing a dime in teacher retention. Who wouldn’t want that? The State is willing to invest some in teacher recruitment, mistakenly believing that recruitment is the main source of the problem. However, retention is far more important, and it boils down to salaries and working conditions.

The labor economics, just like any market, works on the supply and demand balance. The reason plumbers are so expensive is that not enough people want to be become plumbers, so those who remain demand and get higher salaries. I am not an economist, but can probably find a friend who can calculate exactly at which salary point the State of California will not be short on special education and math teachers. They would come from other states, from other professions, from other segments of teachers. Credentialed, but not working teachers would come back. Is anyone interested in finding out what that salary level is? I don’t think so, not yet anyway. No one wants to hear the truth, for truth will require higher taxes.

OK, teacher preparation, don’t be a loser. The first step is to be honest about what you can and cannot do. And say it very clearly. CSU as a system has a really valuable know-how. We can prepare a fairly diverse and competent educator workforce, starting with regular students, on a massive scale. But we cannot attract many people to STEM and Special Education without achieving the economic balance.

Forgiveness is a skill

We tend to dress forgiveness in heavy ethical clothes. It is perhaps because all the world religions recognize the pragmatic importance of forgiveness, and tried to enforce it. No society, small or large, can function without the ability of its members to forgive each other and move on with their lives. Otherwise, with time, conflict would erode all social cohesion. I work in Academia where people work together sometimes for decades in tense, conflictual environments where benefits and hardships should be constantly renegotiated. Inevitably, small offenses happen, no matter how much people try to avoid them. Most of us – thank gods - are able to forgive and forget, start anew, and just continue to get along.

Yet sometimes I hear stories of very old grudges. I just feel very sorry for the person who cannot forgive. It is sad, really, to observe. It is really a failure of emotional self-regulation that hurts the person more than his or her old nemeses. An ancient grudge is like an obsessive thought or habit, a kind of addiction to re-running in one’s head the past injury. Reportedly, there is a Polish word “jouska,” that is a compulsive dialogue one is running within one’s head. I am sure such experiences cannot be pleasant. Such a person is addicted to indignation, to the need to remember, and to self-destructive fantasies of revenge. It is the addiction to the feeling of wounded self-righteousness. It is also an illusion of control over the relationship. Withdrawal of politeness and refusal to work together serve as a constant reminder of an unforgiven transgression.

Religious traditions usually include some sort of ritualistic apology. They are right; apology seems to be an important cultural mechanism for getting past conflicts. However, for old and trivial injuries, even the act of apology becomes silly. What do you say? I am really sorry ten years ago I did not let you teach the course you really wanted to teach? Apologies work when they are timely; with time, they become ridiculous. They also don’t work when the offender does not believe she or he did anything wrong. Holding a person at a distance will not change her or his mind. The opposite is true – the reputation for stubborn grudges will make you less credible, and make you look less reasonable. So it is a double loss – you feel bad and people respect you less.

Back to the skill thing: The ability to forgive can be learned. It is a form of self-therapy any reasonable person can figure out. I won’t go into various therapy schools here; any of them might work, for the inability to forgive is not a disease. It is simply a bad cognitive routine, a glitch in our emotional circuits. The initial and the most fundamental questions are these: Why am I so angry for so many years? What does this feeling do to me? Is the person I am angry at really so bad? After that, retraining one’s mind is a matter of time and persistence.

Hunting Russian trolls, a field guide

How do you identify a Russian troll? It is simple, really. Scott Shane caught one by just noticing that the activist’s English was a little odd. It is a form of simple linguistic analysis, and it works. You may not know, but linguistic analysis was critical in catching the Unabomber. But you don’t have to be a linguist to catch a troll, because they are not as smart as Ted Kaczynski.

No matter how proficient one gets with a second language, the first language always “seeps in.” Unless you were lucky to grow up fully bilingual, the native language’s syntax and idioms will inevitably show up in your second language writing. The troll factory in Saint Petersburg is a massive operation, and they simply cannot afford to hire truly fluent people, or even reasonably smart people. Shane also shows that Americans who bought into Russian trolling efforts are, well, less than brilliant. So the troll infection is a case of the dumb leading the dumber.

Here is a few tips on how to spot a native Russian speaker who is trying to pass for an American:

1. Because our language does not have articles, their use does not come naturally to us. My friend once told me, “You do not even hear articles.” That is true, Russian speakers tend to filter them out as noise, and that is why we are slow to learn article usage as adults. Besides, English has a whole class of article use that is purely conventional, especially in geographic names (The Hague, but simply Paris, for example). There is a whole slew of exceptions (you go to school, but go to the hospital) that simply needs to be memorized. Either missing or overused articles will point to the Russian origin of the author.
2. The written form of Russian tends to have longer, more convoluted sentence structure, with dependent clauses placed at strange places. Russians are more likely to use awkward passive constructions. They may be grammatically correct, but not common. A Russian sentence has a free word order, and we tend to recreate this kind of variety of sentence structure in English. It often looks unnecessary complex. 
3. Watch for weird idioms. If they do not quite make sense, they have probably been borrowed from another language. 
4. Prepositions are very important and nuanced in English, while Russian has grammatical cases to express the same syntactic relationships, so Russians pay less attention to prepositions. Misuse of prepositions is a common error, because Russians will tend to remember the root of a verb, and ignore which prepositions modify it. Or else, they will simply transpose the Russian equivalent preposition into an English sentence. For example “it depends from.”
5. Russian punctuation is somewhat different. Watch for extra commas where you do not expect them to be. For example, look for restrictive relative clauses surrounded by commas. However, an intro clause in the beginning of a sentence will not have a comma in Russian. For example, my instinct would be to write: “In the second decade of 21st century social media was weaponized by both foreign powers and internal political parties.”
6. Watch for false cognates: A Russian may call guerrillas partisans. Similarly, a Russian may place a real English word in a wrong style. For example, in English, “banal” would be more of a high style, while “trivial” – medium. In Russian, banal is a bit more colloquial than trivial. The out-of-style usage will often give away a non-native writer, although native speakers may do the same thing on occasion. 

There are hundreds of thousands of native Russian speakers in the States. So when your Facebook feed shows someone with a typical American name, radical ideas, improbable stories, and strange writing patterns, ask your Russian friend or colleague to read it. In many cases, an educated Russian will spot errors, idioms, and stylistic moves that we all make.

There is also a non-linguistic telltale sign: the trolls have daily quota. They will spam your Fb and Twitter feeds a lot. They completely dominate forums with their incessant postings. No one can have that much free time for real. The trolls will also try to bait you, to challenge and, well, troll you, because the engagement rate is also important in their daily quota.

Good hunting! Let me know if you need help. Remember, they are not that bright, and we collectively can weed them all out. Troll hunting is a group sport. Yes, Facebook and Twitter should do more to track down both trolls and bots. However, the engaged citizens should also be a part of the new immune system to fight the weaponized social media. It is a relatively new phenomenon, so it may look scary. I think it helps to take a lighter look at this troll thing, to laugh at it a little, so we can figure out ways of fighting it.

“I can easily do it,” a path to over-commitment

Here is a trap I used to find myself in, a lot: I am sitting in a meeting, with good ideas flying around. This is what I live for – ideas, new things to try. “Wait,” I think at some point, “I am the best person around here to do this thing, and I know a trick about how to do it.” Then I blurt out: “OK, I will do it.” And here I am, walking out of the meeting with 2-3 items of homework.

To begin with, deans should not be walking out of meetings with homework. In fact, my job is to find people, resources, incentives, ways and means, shortcuts and tricks for things to get done WITHOUT my direct involvement. That’s what delegation is. One of my management friends told be a while back: If you a general and you happened to be the best machine gunner, you still should not be manning the machine gun, or you lose the battle.

However, the accidental commitments is not only among managers. Many faculty succumb to the urge to volunteer to do many unrelated things. Some of our academic brethren have excellent organizational skills. That group does not represent a significant majority, let’s just say that. So, people are swamped under a million of small projects, on top of the regular mayhem of student e-mails, paper grading, and committee meetings. And once you get behind, all things get behind – accidental and critical.

One of the best ways to improve a project or a process is not to do it at all. You would be surprised to find out how many things from our work lives can be safely eliminated without significant damage to the overall functionality. Here is a small example we are considering right now: Faculty have to submit their office hours through a special form, then staff process and print out this information, post office hours sheets on faculty doors. The problem is – compliance rate is low; no more than 30% of faculty actually complete the form each semester. In addition, work effort is significant. My guess is, we can simply ask faculty to post their office hours on their doors; it takes the same time as completing the form, perhaps less. It won’t improve the situation, for the same 30% will comply, but neither will it make it worse. On the other hand, we would eliminate a whole work process. The sheets also won’t look as pretty. So, it is a question of balance, but I bet a change won’t ruin anything.

Another psychological trap is reluctance to abandon something that is not working. It does not feel good, and smacks of admitting defeat. Failure is always problem; the reluctance to stop doing what is not working, is a bigger problem. So, stop doing what you’re doing right now and ask yourself three basic questions: Is this essential to our core mission? Is it moving us forwards? Is it a lot of fun to do? If the answer is no to all three, get busy with something else.

Must Innovators be asked hard questions?

Consider a typical start-up cycle: The idea first is germinated, bounced by many people. Then people create start-up, produce some sort of a pilot, and must defend their idea over and over again in front of a panel of potential angel investors, or their own family members willing to pitch some money. Then they face the hardest test of all by entering the market place, and getting their first buying customers. And then they need to convince real investors to pour money into expansion. A whole set of business incubators and accelerators helps people to get through these hurdles. If a business fails, it fails quickly, and start-uppers move on to the next project.

Consider how innovation is done in Academia: a small group of faculty typically sit in a few meetings and brainstorm a list of courses for their new programs. Sometimes they do a little looking around for similar programs. Then a number of curriculum committees will ask a few questions, and approve the new program. Sometimes, a university Board will get involved, but usually very superficially. Voila, a new program is born! Once it is born, it will go on for a long time, despite declining enrollments. While birth is easy, death is slow and protracted.

The difference in the latter case is that no one is structurally encouraged to ask tough questions. An idea that sounds good will usually get supported. It is not just academic programs, but various managerial innovations, restructurings, and platforms – their birth is too easy, their death is too hard. Almost no one ever asks for hard proof, for evidence that something is worth doing.

It is so easy to be critical of Academia, but it is not so simple. The danger is, once you start asking the very hard questions, you eliminate any development, any innovation. Start-upers are often motivated by the slim chance of striking it very rich or very famous, or both. This why the startup world can generate the tremendous energy and risk tolerance. In our world, the outsize rewards are very unlikely, and people do things for different reasons. The different institutional arrangements make for a very different culture of innovation. And one has to admit, American universities are fairly innovative, despite the lack of powerful incentives to innovate. Perhaps we need to learn how our own gears work and oil them, rather than importing a whole set of alien mechanisms?

What makes things move?

At one of our last “Troika” meetings (the two A-Deans and I), we were wondering why some of the processes seem to go on their own, and need no or little pushing. Yet other processes and projects require constant following, or else they peter out. Some have their own little engines, while others rely on the leadership pedaling power. You would think it is likely old versus new things? Well, not really. Website updates is an old process, and yet it is not moving at all. Curriculum revisions – we had to push these hard. Recruitment for some masters programs went nowhere for some time. Yet RTP goes on in mostly orderly fashion, almost on its own, and so are dozens of other important processes like scheduling, admissions, contracts, etc.

The explanation may be simple – when we have specific staff or faculty assigned certain duties with deadlines, it happens. If responsibility is not clear or distributed – no one takes the lead, and the process stalls. In other words, if we did not set it up correctly, a n organizational process will not advance. It is probably a large part of an explanation, but not all of it. Some of the fundamental processes happen even if no staff is currently responsible – other people around will notice, help, remind, and generally make it happen. Moreover, the opposite is sometimes true – someone may have a specific task and yet it slips away.

The institutional theory tells us that in larger social systems, some aspects are more resilient, and somehow more fundamental than others; they are called institutions. Some patterns of human behavior are grounded in more authority and legitimacy. It is not just that people get used to certain norms, they also view them as more important and more legitimate. By extension, other things are not institutionalized, and are viewed as non-essential, temporary.

Martinsons (1998) has developed an interesting theory of institutional deficiencies. When the rule of law does not work very well, a country will rely more on relationship-based commerce. The process is somewhat similar at a workplace. When I ask something to be done, it could be viewed as a fully legitimate, well-established, rule-government assignment. Or, it could be viewed as a personal favor I am asking someone to do on top of his or her responsibilities. Some people (like Trump) mistakenly believe that personal loyalty is a way to go. Which simply means that the authority lines are so strong that any worker will do anything she or he is asked to do with equal enthusiasm.

However, Martinson shows that in the end, institutions based on law are much more stable and efficient. There are only so many favors one can ask without returning a favor, which starts a cycle of the relationship-based organizational patters that will eventually undermine legitimacy. Or, to put it differently, a leader that is over-invested his resources in personal authority, can only do it by destroying the institutions. This is, by the way, the source of Putin’s increasing authoritarianism: he wanted to make the system governable and responsive so badly, that his personal authority eroded the weak democratic institutions in Russia.

More sensible managers will always try to institutionalize new or weak processes, make them a part of culture, of collectively held beliefs. It is not easy, because we do not really understand the mechanisms of institutionalization. What I do know, it is definitely not proportional to the volume of manual pushing things through. It looks like some things just take quickly, while others will not.

The problem with institutionalization is that any long-lived organization also collects some dead-weight routines that look legitimate, but have lost their original usefulness. I can give many examples, but so can you.

OK, I have been at Sac State for a year now. The project is still as fascinating as ever. Looking forward to the next chapter.

The procedural menace

Managers impose rules on staff, and then forget about both. The rules and staff live their own entangled lives, invent routines, understandings, habits and tricks to deal with them. Because rules tend to add, but never diminish, the procedures become excessively complex with time. Why this is happening? Well, there are theories, I prefer Wilson’s. But the “why” does not matter that much. The important part is what do you do about it.

We tried to take stock of all the procedures in use at our College. It is to 33 pages of dense text, and we could easily double that. There is a lot more that exists in organizational memory, in people’s heads, in files in various hard drives, sheets in various drawers. I am awed by this richness of organizational knowledge, and by staff’s ability to navigate it. However, there is a theoretical limit. You cannot add for years without removing anything. Procedures make an additive, not decremental process.

The natural reaction to complexity is specialization – different people will learn different part of the system. It creates an enormous pressure when people leave, and others are unable to pick up the pieces. It has not happen to us yet, but it will, eventually. When people are upset or have to work overtime, it is one thing; when consequences will over into the world of real students, faculty, and their lives, that’s a different story; a story I would like to avoid.

What we really need to do is figure out a way of systematic rule pruning. In the normal course of work, nothing like that exists; there is neither time nor method for doing so. I am so looking forward to when AI will be able to help, but it is not available just yet. What is the next best thing? Does anyone know?

The clarity temptation or How to write a good policy

In policy-making, the greatest temptation is clarity, and I am going to make the case for resisting it. The case in point is our College’s Retention, tenure and promotion policy that we just recently adopted, but the logic applies to the entire policy-making world.

What is a policy? - A tool that should help us make more consistent and thus fairer decisions. The biggest temptation is to write a policy can help us avoid making decisions. Wouldn’t it be great to simply look into the document, apply a policy, and make an automatic, and therefore fair and objective decision? No one wants to hurt other people’s feelings, or defend one’s own judgement. Well, it simply does not work that way. In the legal universe, this has been known for a long time, in both Roman and Common law systems. You do need a judge and/or jury to consider cases and apply law, no matter how detailed the law is. In fact, the attempt to pre-empt judgement mostly backfired, as it was the case with the three-strike laws and with the minimum sentencing laws. Laws and policies that are closed to interpretation always lead to absurd consequences. For example, a guy steals a pair of $2.50 socks gets a life sentence.

In our little case, thanks God, stakes are much lowers. However, they are also absurd. Most of our faculty members going through periodic reviews are outstanding. This brings the embarrassing question of what crowd exactly are they standing out of, and the whole Lake Woebegone effect. What happened? Well, people who were writing the policy tried to take all arbitrary judgment out of it. It basically, requires evaluation committees to see if there is evidence in various categories. If you do have evidence in so many categories, you’re good, if you have in so many more, you are outstanding. The policy does not ask question – what kind of evidence, because that would open the decision to subjectivism. The document removes the potential bias out of the decision, which guarantees to generate absurdity. The result is that if you have published a paper in AERJ, which is the world’s top education journal, it is the same if you paid $300 bucks to a predatory paper mill that publishes absolutely anything. Or, if you sat through a few meeting of an entirely decorative committee, it counts the same as if you were reviewing hundreds of student IRB applications. How is this fair?

We would not need judges or evaluation committees if it were possible to automate decision-making. We could have a student assistant to flip through evaluation portfolios, check a list, and be done with it. A computer algorithm would be even better. Alas, it does not work.

A good policy may set a few examples, but it has to use evaluative criteria, not finite lists, or numeric values. In some contracts and policies, there is a word “normally,” which irritates many people, but not me. What a great way it is to indicate that exceptions are still possible, if they are within the spirit of what is normally the rule. There is no way to get a holistic judgement call out of decision-making. Such judgments are inherently biased and prone to mistakes. However, they are much better than the bean-counting process that simply assure certain level of absurdity. Multiple layers of independent review, certain level of mutual trust, and professional ethics can significantly improve decision quality. Adding more precision to the document rarely can.

Can Sac State become a startup university?

Stanford reports spinning off 6000 companies. Forbes lists 50 most productive startup universities, and if the top of the list is not at all surprising, the lower half is worth examining. For example, our sister campus in San Diego is there. Well, she may be a wealthier, more popular, and better looking sister, but a sibling nevertheless. The list is not as exclusive and elitist as one may expect.

The big question is whether such schools as our, with a different mission and more limited resources can enter the race, and if yes, to what degree. Well, Dale and Katy Carlsen apparently believe so, hence the major gift they provided to boost innovation and entrepreneurship here. The question is - do we on campus believe it is possible?

Here is a short case why we cannot: We do not do as much sponsored research, and just do not invent many technologies worth commercializing. Our faculty teach too much to have any time for anything else, let alone working on startups. Moreover, most of them really like teaching, and embrace our mission, and may not be willing to spend time on anything else. Pending the entrepreneurship center, we do not yet have much in a way of supporting spin-off companies. There is little culture of entrepreneurship on campus.

However, last Fall we had this informal group called Bigger Ideas in Education. Among other things, the group has casually generated a dozen startup ideas, about half of which I believe are viable. For disclosure, I have seen hundreds of pitches for educational startups, and generally follow the field. You can trust my assessment somewhat. It was easy to do, actually, and I am sure our faculty and students can generate dozens more.

While we do not invent many technologies, we collectively possess a ton of in-depth knowledge of our fields, which is a prerequisite for generating valuable solutions. I would not underestimate the value of the rich contextual knowledge. Startups often rely on technologies in search of applications, but we can offer applications in search of technologies. In education, specifically I find most of solutions offered to educators were never asked for. Innovators imagine that a teacher might like something, but they really do not know much about teaching. We do.

As for the second half of the doubts, here is an interesting thing. Right now, there is a huge interest to educational innovations among investors. In 2011, the US private VC investment in educational innovations was $224 million. In 2017, it reached $1.4 billion. Because of the influx of venture capital, it is just possible to bypass the stage of inventing a new technology, and go straight to products. There are not that many break-through technologies and investors are looking broader. For example, some of the best-known startups spun off by Stanford and MIT do not have any new technologies: EdX, Udacity, Coursera. Our lack of time and support are obstacles, but money can buy all of that if we can access it at earlier stages of startup development.

Just and FYU, typical entrepreneur is a married 40-year old with children, and with significant work experience.

How to build a killer T&P portfolio

You know that annoying student who wants you to tell him, how exactly he has to write a paper, and what to write in every section, exactly? Well, don’t be that student. T&P committees evaluate, among other things, your ability to organize a portfolio/dossier/file, or whatever else it is called at your institution. At Sac State, it is WPAF, don’t even ask.

The most important thing first: Do not ever use plastic sleeves; those are legendary annoying to reviewers, expensive for you and utterly unimpressive. They also make your binder too fat, force you to go into the second and third volume, and no one likes carrying these things around. Just punch the three holes for God’s sake!

The CV is really the most important part of the portfolio. It is amazing how many people make mistakes constructing the basic document. Just a few tips: number your publications and presentations if you have more than five. It is always better to disclose the status of your publications – peer-reviewed, editor reviewed, the Scopus quartile, the acceptance rate, or another indicator of the journal’s status. Consider using more modern indicators like H-index (you will need a Google Scholar profile for that; it is more generous than the alternatives). If you got a grant, include the amount, and if you were a PI, co-PI, or a team member. In short, don’t make people guess. If they start guessing, they also start checking, and are more likely to disagree with you. A clear CV will keep your committee away from Google.

One common error is turning your T&P binder into the graveyard of evidence. The worst kind of advice one can get is “collect everything.” Such a strategy misunderstands the nature of evidence. We need evidence of quality, not evidence of fact. You do not need to prove things have happened; you need to show samples of your best work. If you served on a committee, there is no need to bug the committee chair to give you a thank you letter. We trust you about the fact, and lying is so risky that almost no one would attempt it. Hand-made student thank you cards may be cute, if you have one or two, and if they are truly interesting. Printed out e-mails always look like you’re anxious, desperate, and insensitive to your readers. Instead, tell us something specific, for example, you were the lead author on a policy document, and include it. Or you were in charge of such and such project. That would be impressive. You were not just sitting there for a year, approving the minutes, you actually accomplished something! It is the same thing with conference programs – we trust you went so no need to include a 10-page program with your name highlighted in its glory. However, did you have an awesome presentation and would like to share? Not twenty similar presentations, just give me one that shows how you have aced the genre. If you put in a syllabus, we do not know whether it is your masterpiece, or you simply inherited it from the previous generations, with slight modifications. If you actually invented something, how would we know? A sentence like “Major revision, ¾ new assignments, and all new assessments” would go a long way.

An important part of any dossier is the narrative, or section narratives. What works best is if you provide a strategy, a vision, a coherent agenda of some sort, a list of priorities, or other way to conceptualize your work. For example, my scholarship is going to focus on these one or two themes, and my home scholarly society is so and so, and I have a long-term plan, and here is how much I moved toward it. And who said that the narrative should be 3 pages of small font, single-spaced, with NO bullets, NO tables, NO charts? Remember Alice in Wonderland: ‘and what is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?' No, the opposite is true, bullets, subheadings, tables, charts, bolded words and sentences, everything that makes it easier to skim. Yes, it ain’t a novel, you cannot expect your readers to savor every word of it.

Summarize! Think of composing your file as writing a paper – how to make it logical, present the data well, and make it visually appealing and easy to read. Tables, again go a long way, for example: semester, course title, mean student evaluations, perhaps even standard deviations, and comments (“this is a required stats course everyone hates”). Such a table makes the entire history of your teaching obvious. Don’t make reviewers hunt for data; it is better to present it in one place, then explain. If you had a dip in student evals, tell us why and what’s the plan. In teaching, the ability to grow is on par with constant excellence.

However, in some cases people do not say enough. Where we deal with specifics of your subfield, do not simply assume people know what your journal and conferences mean. For example, in some organizations pre-conference workshops are just blah, while in others they are more like lifetime achievement awards. In computer science proceedings is everything, while everywhere else they are easy. In some societies, proceedings go through a separate, rigorous peer-review process and professional editing, whole in others they are just an archive of raw stuff. In arts, exhibits are the same as publications, and there is a complex signaling system about the status of the show. Books are great in humanities, but not so huge in social sciences. In more professional fields, publications for practitioners are weighed very differently than in academic fields. Peer-review status is normally a quality check, but there are exceptions, but if you get into New Yorker, well it is a different story.

Most people have no idea how to judge professional social media publications, such as blogs, or online newsletters. If you give the readership numbers, provide some baseline for a typical publication of the kind, and include a couple of samples. The same thing with awards and honors – you may think they are obvious, but ask around, and realize that no one outside of your small group have heard of them. In short, providing context about your field is critical. As one wise editor once told me, never underestimate your readers’ intelligence and never overestimate their factual knowledge.

In the end, the art of putting it together is not that consequential; it is definitely not worth obsessing about. The truth will shine through regardless. Senior faculty and administrators who look at the portfolios tend to be sophisticated, experienced, and well-meaning. No one is out there to get you. Your job is to make your stuff as clear and concise as possible, and the least annoying to get through.

My mother's voice

I saw Mama in December, just four weeks before she died. She could not remember me, but kept saying that I look very familiar. Just in case, she decided to treat everyone she met as a potential family member. Perhaps this is how we all should try to live? She would ask everyone how they were doing, how are children, and offering tea. She told storied from her childhood, could name the village, the street where she grew up, names of her parents. She actually looked happy. When she spoke, the timbre of her voice woke up a small part of my brain. Something within me started to vibrate in unison with her voice. It always happens when I do not see her for a long time, and it always surprises me. Here I am, way over fifty, and I get the profound sense of bliss just from hearing my mother’s voice. Aren’t we supposed to grow out of it?

One of my memories is when I was about 5 or 6. My brother and I are at home, it is dusky and chilly. And then Mom walks into the door, we hear her voice. As we run to greet her, the apartment suddenly feels warm and light. I even remember wondering about this physical sensation at the time, “but it did not actually get lighter and warmer, did it?”

Bowlby, Harlow, and Ainsworth have created the theory of infant attachment. It is perhaps one of the most important patterns of all human sociability. Eli Sagan, unlike Freud, thought that mothers, not fathers, are responsible for the birth of morality. Morality is universal, because it draws on the same experience of being nurtured by a mother. Our mothers or their substitutes literally make humans out of us in the first few months of our lives. What happens to the attachment when we grow up, move away? I’d say, it is still there, somewhat hidden, buried under all the layers of adult lives. Her voice could bring it back, and that is what I am going to miss. 

Meeting God on Saturday

Svetlana and I have a new grandson, whom I am anxious to meet. With children, you never know what to expect. The fun is to catch an occasional glimpse of one of many genetic lines, in a shape of an ear, or in a behavioral trait. The profound pleasure is to watch a human life unfold; a pleasure only grandparents have full access to, while actual parents are too busy taking care of their kids.

Whatever our silly thoughts, the new person comes into the world, his very presence is a statement, a challenge, and a profound question. Children are our real masters, our jury and judges. Even if you do not have children, other people’s children rule the world. Do not get fooled by their apparent weakness. They are the genetic and cultural treasure of the species. Their power comes from the presence here and now, without pre-conceptions, as vigorous and as imposing as life itself. “I am here, what is the gift you are going to leave for me?” Under the X-ray of a child’s gaze, all accomplishments look small. The world looks very big.

Children are our best available cure for despair. If you ever wondered whether life makes sense, get a child, visit a child. You will get an answer, so strong and obvious that you will be wondering how stupid your question really was. Or, more likely, you will forget the entire doubting episode as if it never happened.

Look into a newborn’s eyes, if you want to meet God. I am going to, at the end of this week.

A dictionary of euphemisms

In my native culture, sincerity and directness are often valued above politeness. Like other East Europeans including Ashkenazi, we tend to take direct talk as a sign of trust. We argue with people we respect, and agree politely with people we do not. Well, it works well for people you know well already, and for people who share your cultural assumptions; not so much for people who are more distant, or whose cultural assumptions differ. I have built a little dictionary of more diplomatic expressions, to counter my more natural instincts. I will never be as sophisticated an average Brit, who made an art out of polite questions that often mean the opposite of what they sound like. I am sure others have their own, so please share. It is fun. Like with regular translations, I will use Source and Target languages.

S: You are doing a bad job at this
T: Is there anything we can do to help you perform you work better?

S: Where the hell are you with the project?
T: Can you give me an update on the progress?

S: This is a terrible idea
T: This is an interesting idea, but I am not sure how it fits with our priorities

S: You should spend more time in your office
T: Hey, could not find you yesterday

S: You cannot give me assignments
T: Wonderful idea; would you take a lead on it?

S: No one cares about this
T: Who do you think would be your support group?

S: What you are saying is nonsense
T: Could you give me some examples of what you mean by this?

S: You are a terrible teacher
T: How would you use student comments to grow as an instructor?

S: Stop badmouthing your colleagues
T: What do you suggest I do?

S: You are either exaggerating or outright lying
T: How would other side describe the situation?

S: No
T: Let me discuss with our leadership. I can see a number of objections, but it does not hurt to try

S: No
T: Great idea, but we should really think where the funding would come from

S: No
T: Good point, but let me (or other people) worry about this

S: No
T: Yes

The pedagogy of relation and defunding of public higher education

Until relatively recently, defunding of public higher education was caused mainly by economic reasons. States had mandatory and increasing spending on K-12, healthcare, pensions, etc. and reluctant to increase taxation. Now we have a much stronger political component: more conservatives have convinced themselves that universities turn normal kids into flaming liberals. See a recent WP piece for evidence. It is ultimately a self-defeating for the mainstream conservatism illusion. Universities have always been liberal, from their inception, and will remain so. There are a few conservative universities, but unfortunately, none of them can be honestly called great. Those that you will recognize on the list are not that conservative, really. It is not an accident and not a conspiracy; free thought is the essence of the university. You may think liberalism is evil and even a form of totalitarianism, but you cannot deny that without liberal universities, no contemporary society can survive. If you think Trump’s core electorate – men without higher education – is going to sustain American economy, in 21 century, you’re simply in denial. Not one economist will support such a preposterous idea, neither liberal nor conservative. There is no way to turn back to the elitist model of higher education. The mass higher education is here to stay, and starving it of funds will not make universities more conservative.

Only three states have increased their higher ed funding since 2008: Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Arizona has an over 50% cut, which makes it a complete outlier. California is still below 2008 funding, and has allowed an over 60% tuition hike. With all my sympathy for state-level lawmakers, what is it they expect us to do? In theory, there are only two suggestions: one is to learn how to make money, and the other is to become more efficient.

I am somewhat sympathetic to the first suggestion, up to a point. Yes, we could enter some other markets, like online learning, professional development, and consulting, and make up some of the needed revenue there. But It would be irresponsible to think that universities like ours can rely on these additional earnings as a major revenue source. The depths of those markets are not that great.

The industry has given an honest try to the efficiency demand, too. We (the collective we) tried computerized instruction, MOOCs, tried cutting staff and administration, tried to replace many tenure-track faculty with lecturers. None of these things brings major gains in efficiency, and all have hard limits. Regular on-line teaching can be very effective, but it does not save much money in the end (you save on facilities, but lose on faculty support and IT infrastructure). The reason for that is not obvious to the public, and even without our professional community it is still needs explaining. It turns out the core of education is human relation. It is something peculiar to our species: most higher learning is only possible as social learning, and there has to be a teacher-like figure; not to transmit knowledge, but to make someone want to learn. The economic fundamentals of education depend on person-to-person affective labor. We have no relational technology whatsoever, not even in prototypes. Technology is not coming to our rescue any time soon. Although someone is better start working on how to reproduce the relational side of education with technology.

I am not trying to be alarmist; those who foretell a quick demise of American universities does not appreciate the strength of the tradition. Parents of all classes want their kids to attend college, and they are willing to both pay for it and to vote for public funds. No one in the world has quite figured out how to pay for mass higher education without bankrupting the country or eroding the quality; not the free public universities like in Northern Europe, not the tuition-charging private model. In fact, the American model of mixed sources of finance may be better than either of the other two models. In the medium range, state governments would have to find resources, while universities must do their hardest to become more entrepreneurial and efficient. In fact, state funding formulas may be tweaked to reward those universities that show more market shrewdness and innovation.

On on-line teaching

In face-to-face teaching, we use many communication techniques subconsciously. The most typical example is this: an instructor demonstrates a particular way of thinking, and asks students to apply it. With just a few facial twitches and vocal cord modulations, the instructor give all students immediate feedback on how close the student responses are to what the instructors wants. The process is very efficient, very economical in terms of instruction time, because it uses the natural patterns of relationship buildings we have as social animals. In an on-line environment, all these subconscious clues suddenly become unavailable. A whole set of tools developed through evolution and enculturation are suddenly gone, which is why it is such a shock for many first-time online teachers. And this is why so many very competent teachers become so skeptical about on-line teaching.

An experienced on-line instructor, however, have learned to compensate for the lack of the communication tools, in two major ways; first, such an instructor makes the clues explicit, and second, she or he develops new communication tools not normally available. The process is somewhat similar to the communication strategies deaf or blind people use to compensate for the absence of one of the communicative channels. It is also not that dissimilar from what writers did for millennia by describing feelings, scenery, and other imagery instead of showing them. A proficient on-line instructor not only is able to compensate, but also sometimes achieves more. All those who claim that their particular course cannot work online do not have credibility unless they actually try and fail. Human mind is infinitely flexible and imaginative, so yes, you can teach most of the things online if you apply some creativity to it.

The experience in on-line teaching will definitely help in a regular classroom. For example, I taught philosophy of education f2f for years, and I thought was good at it. However, as I was trying to teach the course online, I suddenly realized that I have no idea what it is I am teaching. Specifically, I could not explain to myself and to students how philosophical way of thinking is different from all others. Now, after figuring it out, I can BOTH explain it AND continue to use the subconscious communication techniques. It is a much better deal for students who are less able to read facial expressions, or interpret voice tonality. IN other words, f2f is not great for everyone; some students actually thrive online.

The F2f mode, with all of its advantages, is very good at creating an illusion that everyone got what you were trying to teach. They look you in the eye intelligently; they nod, and can give confident comments occasionally. However, if you dig deeper, it turns out a significant number of student understood very little. The on-line environment forces everyone demonstrate their mastery of ideas and concepts all the time. It is much harder to hide.

Another advantage of an on-line class is that it fits any schedule, and you do not need to drive and look for parking. Instead, a student can spend a little more time actually reading and practicing whatever you want to teach them. If you consider our poor record in graduating students on-time, on-line options for the hard-to-get classes seem to add an ethical imperative side. I am not proposing anything radical; we’re not going massively on-line. However, it looks like we should at least moderately increase our on-line classes for both undergraduate and graduate students