Tag: Topics in Higher Education

Adjuncting 101: Working at community colleges

This post begins our new series Confessions of a Full-Time Adjunct.

Hi. I’m Dr. Lauren Nahas, and I’ve made my living as a full-time adjunct for about 10 years. Yep, the job that all academics fear. This blog post kicks off a new series where I’ll explain my deep love for working at community colleges (CCs) and the realities of my career as an adjunct.  

In this post, I’ll start with adjuncting 101. If your search for a tenure-track position isn’t going as planned (I feel you on that), and you’re considering adjunct work, below I’m offering some general information that you should understand about how adjuncting works.

I want to be clear, though, adjuncting is a highly problematic job. I think that the over-use of adjuncts is undermining the higher education system in many ways.  However, that’s not my purpose here. Adjuncting is a pretty strange job and information-sharing between adjuncts is one of the main ways to navigate it successfully. So here goes.

First off, my understanding is that the more GE-level courses offered in your field, the more reliable the adjunct work is. I’m in English where they have to staff a large number of first-year writing classes, so the work is pretty steady in my experience (in 10 years of adjuncting I’ve lost a course due to low enrollment only 3 times). However, friends of mine who work in theater, for example, have less employment stability.  

Second, as you probably know, you can adjunct at two-year and four-year colleges  In my experience, most people who make this their full-time job work at a mixture of the two. 

Just a quick terminology lesson: community colleges (CCs) refer to part-time teachers as adjuncts; four-year colleges generally refer to them as lecturers.  

In my experience (and based on what adjuncts at other institutions report), CCs tend to pay better than four-year colleges, but they have worse benefits.  However, four-year colleges don’t have the load limits that CCs do. So, let’s talk about load limits.

Load limits at community colleges

At every CC where I have worked, the District capped the percentage of full-time that an adjunct can work at about 65%. Usually, that meant teaching no more than two, 4-unit courses. However, that limitation applies district-wide. Usually there are several different colleges in one district. For example, there are three different colleges in the Contra Costa Community College District, a CC district I sometimes work for in California.  Geographically, they are pretty close to each other. So it is a huge bummer that an adjunct can’t teach more than those two, 4-unit classes district-wide. 

That means, that you would have to piece together work between different CC districts, which can push the driving time between schools to an unsustainable level. You would basically be driving between different local counties, since CC districts are county-based. So, adjuncts strategically select colleges that they work for to account for this issue. 

This is where working for a CC and a local four-year college comes in. Where I work in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are lots of California State Colleges to choose from, and many of my adjunct colleagues create a “full-time” job by piecing together classes from both a CC and a local four-year school. In my experience, the four-year colleges don’t place limits on workload, so someone can be a full-time lecturer, but it would probably take several years to get your teaching assignment up to a full-time load (about 15-16 units).

Navigating benefits

Another major concern for adjuncts is the benefits situation. Here, again, there are variations between different types of schools.  

At CCs, there is usually a waiting period associated with benefits. In general, adjuncts at CCs aren’t eligible for health insurance benefits until they’ve worked for that CC district for 2 years or so. Once you get to that point, the monthly out-of-pocket costs can vary widely. For example, at one CC my monthly contribution for health insurance for my family was $300 a month. At the other CC I was working at, it would have cost $800 a month, and untenable amount for most people. All of this depends on the particular district’s negotiations with the faculty union. 

At the California State Colleges, the situation is better. As long as you are teaching six units, health insurance is free or very cheap. I’m unsure about the situation at private universities or at public institutions outside of California, but this recent article in The Atlantic makes me suspect that health benefits for adjuncts are either non-existent or made inaccessible by high employee contributions.  

Juggling schedules while adjuncting

Juggling schedules for different schools is just a basic part of being an adjunct. It’s not fun. Different schools ask for my scheduling preferences at different times. During my early years of adjuncting, I always tried to schedule all my classes at one school in a block. So, for example, since I was new and so low on the priority list, they would offer me what was left on the schedule. I would select courses that were back-to-back if possible. Ideally I would teach from 8 a.m.-noon (2, 2-hour classes) Monday/Wednesday at one school. That would leave plenty of space in my schedule to accept courses from the second school when they got around to making course offers.  

Adding in a third school into this equation is a little bananas, but people do it. Basically, in your early years with a school, if you’re trying to put together a full-time schedule, expect to have a terrible schedule that will have you moving from one school to another on the same day and possibly having to teach both very early and very late courses in one day.  However, as you get some years with a school under your belt, you will have better options and more predictable employment.  

If all of that juggling sounds terrible, that’s because it is. I’ve personally decided that the upsides of teaching out-weigh these issues. But I do think it’s important that people who are considering adjunct work understand that juggling different schools and their quirks is a basic element of the job.  

Author bio: Dr. Lauren Nahas has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin.  She is a full-time adjunct in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mentoring and advising graduates on the job market

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on mentoring and advising graduate students.

In many fields, the academic job market gets worse and worse, year after year. In this climate, where even excellent candidates fail to land tenure-track jobs, faculty members tasked with advising graduate students on job-market matters could be forgiven for feeling like the role is impossible. Here’s some advice on how to be a fair, honest, and supportive advisor to the students who are relying on you. 

Find out what your student really wants. 

In a post about mentoring grad students facing the job market, Jenna Lay writes that students and faculty can gain a lot of clarity from a few honest conversations, conducted very early in the process. “What are your core values?” Lay recommends advisors ask. “How do you see a career relating to those values, if at all? Do you value family? Location? Time? Money? Structure? Freedom? Do you desire a career that provides the central orientation for your life, or are you looking for a career that fits into a certain kind of life?” These kinds of big-picture questions—certainly not ones to be resolved in the course of one conversation, but rather revisited over the years—can help a student understand whether or not they actually want to commit to the academic job market. 

Recognize your own strengths and weaknesses. 

If you haven’t been on the job market for twenty years (or more), understand that you may not have the clearest picture of its vicissitudes. If you’ve never held a non-academic job, or not for decades, know that you may not know how to help your student prepare to apply for something alt-ac or non-traditional. Make sure that you have a true picture of what’s going on, and tap your network when you don’t.

Arm yourself with data—and share it. 

Try not to fall into the trap of guiding your students by anecdote. Tales of the experiences of your friends and former students may or may not be helpful to someone who’s looking at job listings in 2019. Find (and pass on) information about job placement rates and trends in your discipline. And see whether your department maintains records of former students’ placements; if they don’t, you should prod them to start. 

Bring up alt-ac options tactfully. 

For some students, a very frank conversation about the restrictiveness of the academic job market and its possible future impact on their lives and finances may lead them to explore non-academic options. Be open to this! But consider that (as Lay writes) this kind of conversation about non-academic options may be better to have with a student early on, when advisees are less likely to perceive an advisor bringing up non-academic paths as a vote of “no confidence” in their academic potential. 

Make a master plan together. 

Start advising students who are aiming for the tenure track early—years before they hit the job market—on things like building relationships that can lead to outstanding recommendation letters, picking the right journals for submissions, and selecting conferences worth attending. As Karen Kelsky has written, faculty should realize that landing a tenure-track job is so difficult now that students must “professionalize” much earlier than their forebears. “For those students who wish to try” to get a rare tenure-track job, “the effort requires years of methodical training and calculation of career chances, from the point of arrival in the graduate program through the dissertation defense and beyond.” Advisors can help by demystifying the process, and save students time by flagging which CV lines are worth their investment. 

In all things, aim for honest and supportive.

This is not the time to sugar-coat the prospects of any student who’s looking for a tenure-track job—even the very brightest star, who you hope will reflect on you well. Try not to make promises. “Be rigorously honest with them and with yourself that no matter how good their work is—no matter how good—the academic job market is not a meritocracy,” Lay writes, “and there are not as many jobs as there are good people.” Above all, if a student determines that their family, finances, or mental health can’t weather years of post-docs, VAPs, and cross-country moves, and decides to leave academia, it’s an advisor’s job to support them in their choice. 

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Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Bringing alt-ac lessons to the tenure track

This blog post continues our series, Scholar at Large, written by an academic who is now on the tenure track at Nevada State College.

It’s happened: I’m on the tenure track. As my grandfather used to say, it’s time for me to “put my money where my mouth is” and step into the work that I’ve been building toward for years. I’m ready and motivated to take on this challenge, but I’m wary of the ways that the tenure track might shape me and my career into a true singular “track.”

How can I continue to build a career in the humanities of my own envisioning, a career that represents one instrument in an orchestra of humanities work? How can I stay focused on this goal and build the humanities from within academia without getting exhausted, overwhelmed, and disheartened by jumping through others’ hoops?

While acknowledging that I write this from a position of extreme privilege within the academy (turns out that job market survivor’s guilt is real), my hope is to continue this blog as a space of advocacy for making the profession healthier and more inclusive. This means highlighting and bringing voice to connections, practices, and viewpoints about academia and the humanities that seem a bit “farther afield” than the normalized grind of that tenured academic life. In this sense I continue as a “scholar at large.”

So, as I sit through many hours of well-meaning but rather overwhelming orientation sessions, I consider how the advice being given to me as a new faculty member can relate to some of the best practices in pursuing other kinds of careers in the humanities.

When you’re new to a community, seek out and cultivate connections to folks with shared values across areas, disciplines, and departments.

One piece of advice I heard was to proactively start getting to know people broadly.

“Don’t wait for them to come to you – go and meet them. This is especially important if you’re coming from a large institution with a siloed culture.”

Introduce yourself to everyone. You may find that you have interests that align across areas and disciplines. This advice reminded me of the connections and networks one gains through doing informational interviews. Drawing from that experience will help me look beyond my own department for collaborations and opportunities I would never have known (or felt confident enough) to seek out.

(Nevertheless…the follow-up recommendation to “jump into service opportunities to learn about the culture of the place” struck me as rather dangerous for my first semester calendar.)

Spend time developing an understanding of how my labor is valued in this unfamiliar space.

While on the job market (both traditional and non-traditional), you are writing frequent cover letters, each of which requires you to frame your work in a specific way that addresses the position—rather than simply expounding on all of your accomplishments.

Now that I’m actually starting out in a new position, taking purposeful time to assess my work seems essential—not just for meeting my tenure benchmarks, but for remaining cognizant of how the steps I take align—or don’t align—with that “track.” Also, what labor is most valued by the institution?

In these first months, I need to:

  • Gain clarity on what specifically I’m being evaluated on, and how it occurs.
  • Identify formal and informal mentors who can help me with this process.
  • Define accomplishments for myself (outside of the requirements).

I’m reminded of using my training as a researcher to understand a new field or career; this time, I’m applying it to a new environment.

Keep track of what I’m doing as a way of celebrating my hard work.

I’ve heard some good pragmatic advice about how to prepare for your annual review reports (which, in turn, prepare you for your tenure application). It involves developing a system for keeping track of what I’ve done: such as emailing myself anything of note and keeping those messages in an “annual review” inbox folder; adding regularly to a living Google Doc; or keeping my Outlook calendar up to date so that it provides a 12-month retrospective of my meetings, deadlines, and other artifacts of my activities.

I’m sad to say that I have never systematically kept track of the work I do in such a holistic way. The degree to which I will need to account for myself struck me as far more involved than simply adding the next line to my C.V.. At first, I was mildly panicked by how daunting a task this seemed to be. But that feeling led me to an important realization: I have fallen into a practice of taking my own labor for granted (which risks inviting others to do so, too). I’m reminded of how it can be a struggle for humanities PhDs to shift how we talk about the work we do in the context of different audiences, and how striking it is when we realize how broadly we do have experience, knowledge, and ability. Actively keeping track of my activities and accomplishments is an opportunity for me to maintain my own sense of worth and capability, irrespective of how those fall on my tenure rubric.

By thinking about this advice for new faculty in terms of the broader humanities career landscape, I feel more equipped to develop and safeguard my own short and long term career goals. Put another way: instead of “getting oriented,” I’m more prepared to orienteer my way through academia. That is, once I make sure I start my first class in the right classroom.

Author bio: Dr. Molly Appel is an Assistant Professor of English at Nevada State College, where she teaches courses on composition and literature. Her work focuses largely on how literature works as a space of teaching and learning for human rights and social justice in the Americas. You find her on Twitter @mollyappel.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Dissertation advice for students

This post continues our series, The Smart Scholar,  on advice for doctoral students writing their dissertations.

With the beginning of the fall semester approaching (or beginning for some) this is an exciting time for doctoral students who are currently writing their dissertations. For those who are further along in the process, you are starting to plan potential dates for your proposal and complete dissertation defense. For those just starting out, now is the time to visit with your advisor and start to map out your dissertation journey. I have several years experience serving as a dissertation coach, so I wanted to provide some advice about how to navigate the dissertation process.

Create realistic timeframes

In my work supporting my Done Dissertation Coaching Program clients, we often discuss their experiences with receiving “timely” feedback. Our conversation usually leads to me asking them “Well, what is your definition of timely?” In one situation a student explained that 3-4 days should be sufficient time for their advisor to provide written feedback. My response was, “Did you write all 30 pages of your section in 3-4 days?” The student had an epiphany in this moment and realized that their expectation of this tight turnaround was unrealistic.

However, what should be a realistic timeline for receiving feedback? From my experience serving on dissertation committees and coaching private clients, I believe 3-4 weeks is an ample amount of time for receiving feedback. This allows your reader to sit with the document and provide detailed notes that will be thoughtful and will  influence your work moving forward. This timeframe also takes into account the other competing priorities (e.g., teaching classes, engaging in research, living life outside of the professoriate) of your advisor.

Your next thought might be, “What should I do in the 3-4 weeks while I wait for feedback?” In the next section I describe my recommendation for using   a “Submit-Write, Revise-Submit” workflow.

Develop a “Submit-Conceptualize-Write-Revise-Submit” workflow

In my students’ experience, the best method to completing a dissertation has been for them to consistently work on the dissertation, even when they are waiting on feedback from their advisor. The goal is to maintain momentum!I recommend my clients use a “Submit-Conceptualize-Write-Revise-Submit” workflow. Below is an example diagram of the process. 

Approaching your dissertation in this way is effective because you are consistently working on the next chapter while your advisor is reviewing the previous chapter. Additionally, this shows your advisor your commitment to finishing your dissertation, since you have a plan in place to approach each section of the work. 

Take breaks to avoid dissertation intoxication

For many doctoral students, completing the dissertation can become a stressful experience. You are managing your own expectations for the process while fielding that infamous question “When are you going to finish your dissertation?” from friends and family. While these expectations and questions may put pressure on you to constantly work on your dissertation, I recommend that you also take a day or two to step away from the project and avoid what I figuratively call “dissertation intoxication.” 

From my experience working with doctoral students, “dissertation intoxication” often is evidenced by the following behaviors:

  • Not engaging in sufficient amounts of sleep
  • Drastically decreasing time spent with friends and family

I point these two out because sleep and engagement with friends and family are critical to your success during the dissertation process (and in life). In particular, sleeping is important because recharging your body—given the heavy cognitive requirements of engaging in the knowledge generation process—is imperative to a successful dissertation. Furthermore,  questions like “When will you finish your dissertation?” are tough to bear, but spending time with family and friends is critical for your self-care. Remember, taking time for yourself is just as important as working on your dissertation!

Are you a student with more questions about the dissertation process? If so, tweet your questions to me and @Interfolio and I will create a video reply to your questions! 

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Author Bio: Dr. Ramon B. Goings is an assistant professor of educational leadership at Loyola University Maryland. His research examines gifted/high-achieving Black male academic success PreK-PhD, diversifying the teacher and school leader workforce, and the student experience and contributions of historically Black colleges and universities to the higher education landscape. Dr. Goings is also the founder of The Done Dissertation Coaching Program which provides individual and group dissertation coaching for doctoral students. For more information about Dr. Goings’ research please visit his website www.ramongoings.com and follow him on Twitter (@ramongoings) and for more information about The Done Dissertation Coaching Program visit www.thedonedissertation.com.

Improving the research & grant process: Lessons from The University of Toledo

Improving the research and grant process: Lessons from The University of Toledo

How do you spend less time on finding the right people and more time on crafting the right story?

We sat down with Bill McCreary, Vice President, CIO, and CTO at The University of Toledo to discuss the role that faculty data plays in crucial university processes surrounding grant and research management. 

With over 17 different colleges, University of Toledo employs a diverse set of faculty with a diverse set of disciplines and data. Faculty work can range from teaching and learning to research around health and complex STEM-based projects (most notably 3D & AI).  McCreary must carefully consider stakeholders’ varied needs when making decisions about faculty data. 

Grants and research weren’t always a smooth process

“We were spending a high percentage of our activity on just fact-finding to create the application submission. It was nothing but searching for information on the researchers who would be part of the team,” McCreary said during the webinar. 

This administrative scavenger hunt reduced the time that McCreary and his team could dedicate to strategy and analysis around the research grants and their impact. 

“You can present yourself much more professionally when you can think less about who is on the grants, and more about the problem you are trying to solve with the research. This is a way for us to try to become more professional in the research and grant process,” McCreary added.

Using Interfolio and other integrations to continuously improve the process

Using Interfolio’s Faculty Activity Reporting module, among other integrations, University of Toledo created a database of their faculty members that they could pull in an instant. “When assessing a grant, we want to find people who do good research, and being able to quickly find that information enabled us to collect the information much more quickly.” An additional outcome of the centralized data in Interfolio: it brought to light other faculty members that would make strong collaborators on research projects—showcasing faculty expertise that might not as been as visible before.

With faculty members recording data in one universal place, University of Toledo has been able to focus on hiring strategy as well. They can assess who is currently on the faculty roster and identify who they should be looking for when posting hiring announcements in order to be more competitive for research grants. “It’s been helpful when Deans try to fill out faculty positions. They can look at the roster and say, ‘Who do we really want on it?’”

McCreary acknowledged that it is an ongoing process, stating “We’re looking at yields; there are so many different types of success. We’re looking to hire better researchers, and we’re still on that journey.”

Learn more about Bill McCreary and University of Toledo’s faculty data journey and listen to the full webinar.

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Billl McCreary assumed the role of vice president, chief information officer, and chief technology officer at The University of Toledo on July 1, 2015. Responsible for all information technology, hospital systems, academic technology, the simulation game studio, 3D/virtual immersive reality, and the Center for Creative Instruction, this role brings together all the key areas of technology across the organization into the Division of Technology and Advanced Solutions (DTAS). 

Before joining UT, McCreary held senior executive positions at Owens-Illinois, Kennecott, and NSG, as well as private technology firms. He also has experience in finance, mergers and acquisitions, venture development, engineering, research, marketing, manufacturing, and general management.

The best blogs for academic inspiration and higher ed advice

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on the best blogs for academic inspiration and higher ed advice.

The beginning of the fall semester is a great time to read up on academic productivity, writing strategies, and work-life balance, so you can slide back into the busy season full of new ideas and energy. In the past, academic blogs have been a great place to find this kind of general advice, which applies across disciplines. Although many of our favorites seem to have stopped posting as frequently in recent years (come back, blogs!), the archive of wisdom they pulled together is still evergreen and vital. Here are a few places to start. 

The Thesis Whisperer

The Thesis Whisperer, run by Inger Mewburn, is all about advice for people who are in graduate programs and trying to finish dissertations. The blog has distinguished itself by being super-consistent and high-volume (it had many contributing writers in its first almost-decade of existence), offering post after post on a wide range of matters of concern to doctoral students from:

Get a Life, Ph.D.

Pair The Thesis Whisperer with Get a Life, Ph.D., run by Tanya Golash-Boza. This blog has slowed down somewhat in recent years, but a lot of the advice—on maintaining an exercise habit as an academic parent (yeah, right!) or on restarting a practice of everyday writing after a long time away—still applies. 

The Research Whisperer

The Research Whisperer, which was originally inspired by the thriving Thesis Whisperer, is run by Australians Jonathan O’Donnell and Tseen Kho. The blog focuses on all aspects of doing academic research—not, as the site’s “About” page stipulates, just the matter of finding funding (though that topic is definitely in the mix). Some sample posts include topics like: 

Writing for Research

On his blog Writing for Research, Patrick Dunleavy takes a craft-specific approach, offering posts on such topics as writing abstracts to go along with journal articles and efficiently turning articles into blog posts. 

Profhacker

ProfHacker, which was hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education for years, has migrated to its own website. Newer posts include reflections on:

ProfHacker always found the sweet spot between writing advice, productivity tactics, and tech geekery, and although posting seems to have slowed down recently, the deep archive of posts is still gold. 

Blogs and social media (here are 10 great academic Twitter accounts) that speak to the academic community can be invaluable as you navigate the nuances of higher ed. What are your bookmarked sites and go-to blogs? We’d love to hear your recommendations. Tweet us @Interfolio.

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Interfolio

In case you didn’t know, Interfolio’s website has several sections of academic content relevant to  individual scholars and academics in research or administration. They partner with academic thought leaders, clients, and others to explore topics in higher education.

DEI in Higher Education with Sarah Guerra

Sarah Guerra, Director of King’s College London’s Diversity & Inclusion, spearheads the College’s strategic vision and implementation of diversity, equality and inclusion for the whole campus community.

Her leadership serves as a catalyst for organisational cultural innovation and generates activity that delivers against King’s ambitions to provide an extraordinary staff and student experience. We spoke with her to discuss the state of equality, diversity & inclusivity in UK higher education.

Why is diversity and inclusivity more important than ever in higher education today?

For me, diversity is a way of describing each person’s unique ability to participate. We know from so many studies and our own personal experience that different people have different levels of opportunity to do this. That, combined with the fact that we live in a complex, increasingly interconnected world with continually developing challenges—political, environmental, economic—means we need every bit of creativity, talent, and insight that we as a human race have to offer. We cannot afford to let any of it go to waste. The research higher education carries out is one of the ways we can meet these global challenges, as well as the education we provide developing the leaders and thinkers of the future. Ensuring that anyone with the talent and drive to become an academic can do so is vital to tackling global challenges.

What role do you believe academic staff composition has on the student experience?

Some may feel it is a cliché to say you can’t be what you can’t see! A colleague refined it recently to: you can’t be what you can’t imagine. Academic staff composition plays so many roles in the student experience, research quality, and global impact. Who you learn from becoming your role models and the people who help set and grow your aspirations. How much you connect with those around you plays into your self-belief, and self-belief has a direct impact on how “good” you are on any given day. So, the make-up of all university staff impacts the ability for students to feel empathized with and to feel related to, and these things influence students’ creativity, effort, confidence—which all feed into their achievement. Looking from a research angle the wider the variety of perspectives and inputs into research the more creative, informed and tested it is to find new answers or ways of solving the multiplicity of challenges in the world today.

What can institutions do to proactively hire a more diverse academic staff?

Where do I start? There is so much that we can do!

We need to make equality, diversity, and inclusion business-critical—like finance, like health and safety—and appoint Chief Diversity Officers and set KPI’s akin to any other key business measure. We must name the problem— and have good data that tells us exactly where we are.

We must invest in everyone we put in a management or leadership position: first recruit them specifically testing their inclusive capability, then continue to develop them to maintain it.

We must be clear about how important diversity (in all its forms) is in every manifestation of our universities. In all our policies, processes, documents, marketing—in writing, in imagery, at events—in all we say and do.
We must invest in great HR professionals and those with diversity and inclusion expertise, as well as review all our recruitment and selection processes—starting with what we currently define to be talent or merit and then reviewing all job descriptions and working patterns. Any time anyone is thinking about something new that needs doing, they have the opportunity to think about how to innovate and get a different kind of person in—rather than following our same, old patterns. We need to understand whether candidates are applying and if so what is happening them through the recruitment and selection journey; and, alongside this, we need to train all those who are doing selection to do it as inclusively and lacking in bias as possible.

I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

How do you think institutions can address the student achievement gap? What recommendations would you give?

Much of what I said for academic representation can be translated to students too; addressing academic representation is a big part of how we impact the student experience and achievement. One of the factors crucial to student achievement is students feeling like they belong—feeling that they are valued and respected – that everyone around them at their institution expects and wants them to do their best. This sets conditions that enable all students to thrive: people who feel comfortable in their learning environment will be able to access the resources they need, feel able to ask for help and take risks—all of which will lead them to be the best they can be. A key area that is emerging more and more is around how to ensure campuses are harassment-free and good quality, lawful dialogue, and debate enabled without shutting out voices or creating hostile environments. Universities need to attend to what this means in practice to help students develop but also ensure they feel safe.

And, by the way, don’t forget about professional services staff —they are just as important to the functioning of a university and the student experience as academics!

If you could wave a magic wand and fix one diversity and inclusion-focused practice or process that you think higher education could do better, what would it be?

If I had a magic wand, I would change how siloed universities are. I’d find a magic way of creating connections and helping people see how many different angles and facets most issues have. Then, people at the university would realize the need to address issues in a more coordinated way and see that if we access the breadth of our resources and talents we will make much more satisfying, sustainable and swift progress.

What role do you think technology can play to increase diversity and inclusion in higher education?

It plays such an important role. There is the obvious in terms of supporting the collection, monitoring and analyzing of data and insight, as well as how it supports recruitment, onboarding, training, and development. But I think there is so much more potential even than this—universities are massively complex and each internal component needs to link up and function in synchronicity with other parts, a bit like a human body. I believe technology can really help with this if we invest in understanding what it can do and are willing to open up our minds to how to work differently.

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Follow Sarah Guerra on social media: @equalitywarrior or find her on LinkedIn

Q&A: Lynn Pasquerella, President, American Association of Colleges & Universities

Lynn Pasquerella has served as the president of the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) since July 2016. We are honored that she will give the keynote address at the 2019 Interfolio Summit, a unique three-day event featuring educational sessions, interactive workshops, and networking opportunities for the academic institutions that use Interfolio to manage faculty hiring, data, and professional reviews.

As an educator and former college president, what inspires you in your role as the President of AAC&U? What do you find most exciting and rewarding?

I am inspired every day by working with colleagues across the country and around the world who are committed to AAC&U’s mission of advancing the vitality and public standing of liberal education and equity as the foundations for excellence in undergraduate education in service to democracy. Despite a prevailing national rhetoric that calls into question the value of higher education, in general, and liberal education, in particular, colleges and universities continue to represent powerful institutional forces in catalyzing individual and societal transformation.

What I find most exciting and rewarding is the opportunity to work with the extraordinarily talented staff at AAC&U in taking up a collective call to action to reaffirm the role that a liberal education plays in discerning the truth; the ways in which it serves as a catalyst for interrogating the sources of narratives, including history, evidence and facts; the ways in which a liberal education promotes an understanding that the world is a collection of interdependent yet inequitable systems; the ways in which it  expands knowledge of human interactions, privilege and stratification; and the ways in which higher education fosters equity and justice, locally and globally. 

In an era where more and more is being asked of faculty, in terms of teaching, service, and research, what do you think the biggest challenges are for the academe today?

The most significant challenge facing higher education today is a growing economic segregation. Community colleges and other state institutions enroll more than three-quarters of all students, and yet public education is becoming increasingly privatized. Student aid has failed to keep pace with rising tuition, and the fact that publics have had to do more with less has led to more contingent faculty, larger classes and widening gaps between publics and privates in spending per student. It is no coincidence that the shift away from the notion of higher education as a public good toward viewing it as a private commodity coincided with opening the gates to women, first-generation college students, students of color and the poor.  College completion rates for those at the lowest socioeconomic rungs continue to lag far behind those of their wealthier peers.

Until we change the reward systems within the academy, structural impediments will continue to marginalize the critical work of those dedicated to providing the broadest access to higher education through humanistic practice and promoting student success through high impact practices. And yet at present, we go so far as to discourage pre-tenured faculty from focusing too much on teaching and service. Activities engaging actual, questioning human beings, whether in the classroom or in the community, drop out of professional focus. Academic institutions should actively reconsider pathways to recruitment, tenure and promotion, placing scholarship into reasonable balance with humanistic modes of activity in the classroom and beyond–not by eliminating scholarship, but by broadening what we value as an expression of that mastery.

How has the higher education landscape changed since you first became President of AAC&U in 2016?

We are living in an ostensibly post-truth era, characterized by the denial of authoritative knowledge and the disdain of experts, and in which rational inquiry built on evidence has all but been abandoned. Arising from an entire industry designed to sway public opinion, a rhetoric-for-hire has emerged in which the art of persuasion has been replaced by incivility and misinformation, giving rise to widespread anti-intellectualism. In this arena, asserted claims become orthodoxy regardless of the absence of evidence and in the face of enduring questions. This trend signals the extent to which the marketplace of ideas is at risk of falling prey to those who have the resources to control the shaping of public opinion and policies.

A false-crisis narrative has been fueled by politicians who have gone so far as to advocate for their state workforce needs by proposing legislation that would base funding for public colleges and universities exclusively on job acquisition for college graduates or stripping out so-called frills, such as “the search for truth,” “public service,” and “improving the human condition” from their university system’s mission statements. A liberal arts education, they would have us believe, is reserved for those within the ivory tower, reflecting a willful disconnect from the practical matters of everyday life.  This positioning magnifies the image of a liberal education as a self-indulgent luxury—an image that has led to the excising of humanities programs, especially in public institutions, in favor of vocational and pre-professional programs that are regarded as singularly responding to demands for economic opportunity. Talk of higher education as a public good and of investing in society through education has been replaced by talk of a return on investment—tuition in exchange for jobs. The narrow focus on earning power undoubtedly makes it is easier for state legislatures and taxpayers to justify defunding higher education. This has coincided with a push toward the unbundling of higher education and proposals to outsource the entirety of a student’s education to companies that can deliver fast-track certificates to meet employers’ demands. 

How have technology and innovation played a role in those shifts?

There is no doubt that advancements in technology and innovation have resulted in a focus on STEM in training the workforce of the future. Yet, with rapidly changing technology becomes rapid obsolescence. More than ever, we need to integrate the arts, humanities and STEM. This conviction is supported by the National Academies’ report, Branches from the Same Tree. The report found the need to “achieve more effective forms of capacity building for twenty-first century workers and citizens,” through the acquisition of broad-based skills from across all disciplines “that can be flexibly deployed in different work environments across a lifetime.” It concludes that “In a world where science and technology are major drivers of social change, historical, ethical, aesthetic, and cultural competencies are more critical than ever. At the same time, the complex and often technical nature of contemporary issues in democratic governance demands that well-educated citizens have an appreciation of the nature of technical knowledge and of its historical, cultural, and political roles in American democracy” (54). For, “truly robust knowledge depends on the capacity to recognize the critical limitations of particular ways of knowing,” and “to achieve the social relations appropriate to an inclusive and democratic society” (54).

You followed an inspiring and somewhat non-traditional pathway through higher education to the presidency, and now leader of AAC&U, beginning your career as a community college student working 35 hours a week at a factory in your hometown while caring for your chronically-ill mother. But your experience also mirrors the realities of most college students, with independent, part-time and working students making up a larger and larger share of higher education today. How can faculty members learn from, and better support, these students?

We need to engage in pedagogical practices that enable us to view students through a new lens—one that offers a more complete picture. If we are to help students to see their world beyond their own front doors; to find their passions; to align the people they are with the people they hope to be, we must make strides toward an equity-minded approach to higher education, which requires that we reject, once and for all, a “deficit perspective” that focuses on what students are missing, and instead adopt an “asset perspective,” offering evidence-based interventions and high impact practices through the targeting of cognitive, non-cognitive and psycho-social factors for all students.

We know that such practices have a disparately positive impact on women, students of color and first-generation students, and yet, as my colleague Tia McNair points out in our publication A Vision for Equity, while many institutions are disaggregating data on retention and graduation rates of students from traditionally underserved groups, “far fewer are disaggregating data on students’ participation in high-impact educational practices or on their achievement of educational learning outcomes”. Questions about equity in student outcomes must be a core component of student-success initiatives if we are to fulfill the public purpose of higher education.

Has your previous experience working on the frontlines as an academic leader shaped your viewpoint of the national higher education scene?

Absolutely. Today’s college presidents are called upon to serve as multidimensional CEOs of complex organizations. Presidents must communicate compelling messages about the value-added of attending their institutions to political leaders and an increasingly skeptical public concerned about the costs of higher education, student debt burdens and the employability of graduates. This task is made more difficult by scandals involving admissions, like the recent Operation Varsity Blues, high-profile sexual assault and harassment cases, and violations of NCAA rules and regulations. In addition, they must negotiate among different constituencies—board members seeking rapid change to secure a strong financial future, faculty who are suspicious of the corporatization of higher education, and alumni who are concerned about safeguarding the reputation of the institution and the worth of their credentials. At a time when political polarization on college campuses is greater than it has been in more than half a century, and a single tweet, blog or Instagram post could lead to a campus crisis that reaches the press before it ever lands on the president’s desk. Having had the experience of being a college president makes it easier for me to understand the complexities of accomplishing sustainable institutional change in support of AAC&U’s mission of promoting liberal education and equity in undergraduate education and to identify ways to break down barriers toward achieving our shared objectives.

What excites you about the future of higher education today?

The students I meet want to make a difference in the world. They don’t just want to get a good job, they want to live a good life. Faculty and staff are eager to help them find meaning and purpose in life. Despite the growing demands, there is an overwhelming commitment by faculty and staff at all types of institutions to provide a deeper-level understanding across subject areas, connecting knowledge to experience, and adopting a holistic approach to evidence-based problem solving that incorporates diverse, sometimes contradictory points of view, as a means of preparing students to thrive in work, citizenship and life.  

International hiring with London Business School

How did London Business School implement an international faculty recruitment and hiring system that is optimal for both applicants and administrators?

London Business School had been using a manual process that slowed down their academic recruiting and hiring efforts. We met with Sian Smith, Assistant Director, Faculty, to discuss London Business School’s adoption of Interfolio and hear how their experience led them to become the first international school with a full faculty information system.

Watch the free webinar here—featuring our presentation with Sian, and a demonstration of Interfolio for academic hiring.

Improving the administrative processes created a better experience for their applicants

When asked about initial challenges, Smith cited manual workflows, endless spreadsheets for tracking candidates, and inconsistent submission of application materials. Originally, in 2014, they were looking for a system that could work for both administrative staff and faculty—but quickly realized that they needed a separate, more specialized system for academic staff.

Smith, part of the central office for faculty affairs, collaborates closely with London Business School’s seven departments for faculty hiring. With Interfolio, both Smith and her counterparts have drastically reduced the time spent on paperwork–making the process more efficient and transparent. Says Smith, “I used to receive a massive pack of all the documents in the internal mail, which was very time-consuming for the different subject areas. Now I just hop on the system, and I can download the CV it if I want and take a look before I go into the interview.”

Interfolio webinar with London Business School showing academic hiring product
The free webinar discusses how London Business School has benefited from using Interfolio for academic hiring since 2014.

Before Interfolio, faculty candidates were confused about what documents were required for their application. This lack of clarity resulted in incomplete applications and “email attachments flying around the place,” as hiring committee members had to track down documents, with much back and forth, causing extra time to be spent on the application process.

After implementing Interfolio for faculty hiring, the candidate experience is a smoother one, and the candidates’ documents are more accessible to committee members now that they are in a centralized, online location. When asked about the submission of required documents, Smith responded, “Now applicants can’t move forward in the process without doing those things. […] The experience of the applicant is really straightforward and clear.” As importantly, Smith mentions that the system is intuitive for staff to use as well.

Addressing faculty diversity and reporting

“We use it for hiring, annual review, and the performance review process, and we also use it for promotion to tenure and full professor and for PhD recruiting,” states Smith. London Business School adopted Interfolio’s Review, Promotion and Tenure module shortly after they implemented Interfolio’s Faculty Search. In 2019, they began implementation for Interfolio’s Faculty Activity Reporting module to become the first institution with a full faculty information system outside of the United States.

When asked the benefits beyond hiring, Smith responded, “We struggled to do diversity reporting before Interfolio. We had paper-based monitoring forms that we then transferred into a spreadsheet and created tables. Now we just download a spreadsheet of that data and adjust it into the template needed for the Equality & Human Rights Commission annual reporting.”

London Business School also plans to use faculty activity data for streamlining the accreditation process in a similar way. States Smith, “It’s very helpful for accreditation. Reporting for AACSB can be confusing. Now, we can run reports at the touch of a button versus doing manual spreadsheets.”

With the faculty information system being implemented shortly at London Business School, Smith is optimistic for the strategic results their institution can realize now that “we have everything we need in one place.”

Siân Smith is the Assistant Director, Faculty HR at London Business School. 

To learn more about London Business School’s success with Interfolio for academic hiring, promotion, and data, watch the free webinar here.

Embracing the “alt” of academia: how departments can prepare job seekers for an inclusive humanities job market

This blog post continues our series, Scholar at Large, written by an academic on how departments can prepare job-seekers for an inclusive humanities job market.

During my postdoc year, I ventured into the fog of mythology around the “alt-ac” world as I forged ahead on the traditional academic job market. As Interfolio’s “Scholar at Large,” I’ve written about how these pursuits are far more related than we realize. I’m happy to say that this process has helped me find a career opportunity that matches my values and will allow me to holistically grow my PhD skill sets and expertise. In August, I will be starting as an Assistant Professor of English at an equity-focused, public liberal arts college in southern Nevada serving primarily first generation and non-traditional students. 

I am positive that the career exploration processes I undertook helped me secure a tenure-track academic position that is an excellent fit for who I am as a humanities practitioner. Throughout my interview process, I found myself using the  knowledge and conversational approaches that I honed during my career explorations as I spoke with search committees, deans, and students. Most importantly, my understanding of how the work of the humanities takes many shapes will enable me to become a better professor for my students and for my colleagues. 

With that news, I end this iteration of the Scholar at Large series by highlighting four small shifts that humanities departments can make—based on things that they are already doing—to embrace the “alt” and prepare their job seekers for an inclusive job market that enriches the humanities as a whole. 

1. Bring the “alt ac” conversation out of the shadows.

My conversations with PhDs working outside of the academy consistently highlight how their career trajectories are hidden from those within the academy. This norm means that not only are PhD students losing out on a valuable network of diverse colleagues, but also that they aren’t as equipped to help their new departments promote the career opportunities that a humanities degree can yield.

What might bringing the conversation out of the shadows look like? 

  • Keep track of and celebrate all career outcomes of graduates. Make this information available on your department website. 
  • Bring all alumni (tenure-track or otherwise) back to campus for career discussions with current graduate students.
  • Connect graduate students with robust resources for careers both inside and outside of academia – and include those career possibilities in the same conversation. 
  • A more advanced step: begin to make changes to the graduate program itself. This could involve anything from how graduate course syllabi are designed to approving non-traditional dissertations. 
2. Affirm that job opportunities (academic or otherwise) are a single point along an extended career trajectory.

Help graduate students approach the job market with a sense of confidence and control by encouraging them to think strategically about what a position might offer them. A particular position might be a good fit for the job-seeker at this juncture; it is not a contract for what a job seeker may do for the rest of her life. What form might this support take? 

  • Teach graduate students to do informational interviews (this will help them with networking at academic conferences as well). 
  • Shift the language of your department’s “placement committee” to that of a “career planning committee.”
  • Develop workshops that will help students understand career resources. This could be as simple as including them in your Fall Orientation.
3) Emphasize skills in addition to content knowledge; that’s how transferability becomes clear.

Embrace the idea that the training you provide to graduate students already produces skills along with expertise that are applicable in a diverse array of humanities careers. Embracing this does not mean that professors need to teach graduate students differently, or that rigorous intellectual projects and academic research will be compromised. All it means is talking more openly and inclusively with graduate students about these issues and shifting the language we use to talk about putting our PhDs to work. And on that important point:

4) Discourage language or messaging that suggests that careers beyond the academy represent a “Plan B,” that students are “giving up” or “can’t cut it,” or that such job-seekers are not committed to the advancement of humanistic knowledge.

I cannot overemphasize how crucial this small shift in rhetoric is for job-seeking success, and more importantly, for the mental and emotional health of job-seekers. If you do nothing else, work toward developing an affirming, rather than damage control-oriented, departmental culture of career exploration.

Do you have experience with a job-seeking practice that worked well? Continue the conversation with me on Twitter and through the hashtags #withaphd and #PhDchat!

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Author bio: Dr. Molly Appel is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Penn State University. Her research explores how literature works a space of teaching and learning for human rights and social justice in the Americas. You can find her on Twitter @mollyappel.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.