Thankful

I was speaking quietly in my office, so turn up the volume. . .

Lucas reacts

Lucas has been enthusiastic about the prospect of going to a new school, but he didn't understand that going to the preschool means leaving Serena's daycare/preschool. He insisted, "When I go to my new school, I will see Serena a lot."

I explained the reality to him--that we'll still see Serena occasionally, but he won't be seeing her every day--and he took some time to process it. Then tears began to well up in his eyes: "But I like Serena." He swallowed another tiny bite of yogurt and then added, "My kids will be sad."

(That's what he calls the other children at daycare; apparently they're his posse.)

The boy's lower lip started to quiver and his chin to wrinkle. I called Fang out into the living room and we comforted Lucas, who was even more upset about the impending transition than I am. And we all cuddled together. Even the dog (the damn dog, another post in itself) showed empathy for the first time since he arrived 16 months ago, resting his head quietly on Fang's arm and Lucas's lap, absorbing our sadness and resignation.

Even as I understand its growing necessity, I hate this change.

A fierce and mortal green

When I was in college, Dar Williams performed on campus. I had never heard of her, and to say that many of her songs resonated with me would be an understatement. Here's my favorite, then and now. (I couldn't find a clean version of Williams singing it, so here's a video of someone covering it. Go ahead and hit play, and let it run as you read the post.)


I've always been a sucker for songs and poems about place, and a big part of that passion comes from wanting to be grounded, but also frequently from a sense that I'm about to lose the place where I am. I experience, then, a cognitive dissonance of place, where I let myself fall in love with a place even as I'm plotting to leave it.

This feeling is also native to parenthood, but particularly, I think, to motherhood. I love Lucas so deeply at every stage, even as I know that each beloved stage will pass before I even fully recognize it as a defined moment. And as he has moved from fetus to newborn, from infant to toddler and now to little boy, I can feel the changes in my body, even now when he's four years old.

It's a similar sensation to being grounded in a place, but that place is Portuguese Bend, where the ground slides into the Pacific, so much so that pipes are above ground and the main road is under almost constant construction. You're standing on what feels for a moment like solid ground, but you know at the same time that you're headed inexorably to the sea.

There's something about that last verse of Williams's song that always gets me, even as the "you" of the poem shifts for me from being a person to being something unnamed and temporal:

Once I had everything—I gave it up for the shoulder of your driveway and the words I've never felt.
And so for you I came this far, across the tracks, ten miles above the limit, and with no seatbelt—and I'd do it again.
For tonight I went running through the screen doors of discretion,
For I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see:
You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa, and you were not thinking of me.

The intersection of motherhood and my nostalgia for place is a complicated one. It's very easy for me to look at the cost of living here, my imperiled employment (thanks to the clusterfuck that is the University of California), and myriad other indicators of the quality of life and to think I should reserve a moving truck for next week. And because I spent the most intellectually invigorating and emotionally formative years of my adult life in Iowa, it's to there my mind wanders, as if I could recreate the sharpness of mind of a 22- or 24-year-old; the freedom of being a young, highly educated, single white woman; or the optimism (always oddly tinged by depression) of the college or university student who has always been told she has all the smarts and talent and drive she needs to succeed as an academic, or indeed in whatever endeavor she pursues.

As if I wouldn't be freaked out by fears of Lucas freezing to death when my unpracticed hands bundled him up each morning for icy sidewalks and wind chills of 30 to 60 degrees below zero. As if I wanted to worry about snow collapsing the roof or tornadoes or whatever it is Iowans fear beyond losing their grown children to sexier locales or letting the literacy rate drop below 99 percent.

As if I could easily move Lucas after he starts public school in less than two years. Tick tock.

I feel I'm at this huge, sad crossroads, and no two things I value lie in the same direction. My parents, my sister, and my mother's family are all in Southern California; many friends, beloved colleagues, and some of the best public K-12 schools in the nation are here in this town; better opportunities for work definitely lie elsewhere. And let's not forget, of course, that I'm married, and Fang's various dreams and fears further muzzy any attempts at mapping a future.

I've been on the edge of tears all evening, not just because of the complexity of being a working quasi-academic mother and wife, but also because of our decision to move Lucas to a different preschool because a slot opened up there for December. His current daycare/preschool provider, whom I've called Serena in this space, truly loves Lucas--not just as a teacher might, but as a surrogate grandmother. He has been at her in-home daycare for three years, and he has two beloved friends--one age four, one only about 16 months old but wise beyond his year--there.

But many of his peers have moved on to more conventional preschools, and Lucas is now the oldest child there. He's not as social as many kids his age, and when we take him to birthday parties where he doesn't know many of the children, he plays by himself in a corner, never quite joining in play with the other kids. I know some kids are slow to warm up or are shy, but Lucas's reticence is, I sense, much more profound, and he needs to be with a slightly larger group of kids his age.

When I talked today on the phone with Serena, we were both crying. After all, she has been so instrumental in Lucas's development and in making him feel loved in the world. She has introduced or exposed him to so much, from letters and numbers to Nepali and Hindu cuisine, from yoga to (through her own life and those of her assistants) Hindu and Muslim cultures and practices. His life has been profoundly enriched by her attention, dedication, and love--as have ours.

Complicating matters is that Serena's son has been sentenced to prison for more than 378 years, probably unjustly. (Seriously, explore the advocacy pages at that link, and then write a letter or make some other small or large meaningful gesture). Fang and I have attended rallies and written letters and commented on blogs and forums and have been, I suspect, far more involved in the campaign than have other parents. Indeed, today Serena told me that we are not like other parents, that we are exceptional in many ways. Her daycare business has declined lately, partly out of coincidence that her students were aging out of daycare (though she does offer preschool up to age 6, I haven't seen any kid stay until age 5) and partly because of the pall that fell over the house after her son's unexpected conviction. Serena and her family have paid a tremendous financial and emotional toll over the past six months (and, unbeknownst to most of us at the daycare, for three years prior to that), and I know that on top of all this chaos and sadness, losing Lucas is at once a relatively small thing and yet no small blow.

One of my favorite lines in all of poetry--"it glowed a fierce and mortal green"--comes from Richard Wilbur's poem "The Pardon." It's a disturbing and raw poem that narrates the death, decomposition, burial, and--in a dream--resurrection of a 10-year-old boy's beloved dog. Recently, all my nostalgia about the past, as well as my mourning of the future I thought I'd have but won't, has been colored not gray and black--as depression tends to shade things--but rather the fierce and mortal green of Iowa in early August, when the corn is tall and the soy rolling like an ocean in a summer wind.

Photo by McMorr, and used under a Creative Commons license.

It's the green that comes only from soil enriched with crap and death.

I expect something will emerge from this glowing green that tinges the borders of my vision. Whether the future that approaches will be--to borrow another of Wilbur's lines--"clothed in a hymn of flies" or a bumper crop of something to be desired, I don't know.

I do know that I'm profoundly sad about what's passed and passing. For now, maybe, it is sufficient to feel anything at all.

Not with a bang but a whimper

Welcome to another edition of Leslie's angry ranty depressing blog--now with a grudgingly optimistic ending.

This one's brought to you by the Academic Jobs Wiki. Perusing it this evening for the first time in a while, I discovered that, if the other posters are to be believed, most of the schools to which I applied--including those which I felt were the best fit--have requested additional materials.

I have received no such request.

And this is my third year on the market. Short of not having a book contract (I'm working on that and have received some interest), I'm scratching my head over what the hell is missing from my CV. I mean, really--I have three graduate degrees, peer-reviewed publications, invited papers, presentations, and ten years of teaching experience at four different kinds of institutions and a good balance, I think, between undergrad and grad courses. I've overseen 13 M.A. theses, so I have evidence I can advise grad students, too. I have admin experience launching, running, and evaluating programs, and a ton of service, including now serving on two committees that advise the UC systemwide president. And if the letters I saw from previous years are any indication, I suspect I have rock-solid letters of rec as well from top scholars in their fields. Profs who looked at my application materials say they're very strong.

I suspect, therefore, that it's not what's missing from my CV that's a problem, but rather what is on it. It may be that damn interdisciplinary Ph.D. from a second-tier UC--such degrees are becoming a dime a dozen with all the humanities graduate groups springing up everywhere, and--surprise--no one needs to hire anyone to actually teach in those programs. They're looking for disciplinary folks who occasionally teach interdisciplinary seminars as a hobby.

Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

But between three years of being on the academic job market, with only one (substantial) nibble for a job running a new teaching center, and the news that the California state budget shortfall will be $21 billion this coming year, it's definitely time to be looking very, very seriously at other options.

While I'm not completely giving up hope, I'm not optimistic about my prospects in academia or at UC Davis. So there are a few things I'm experimenting with in the evening and on weekends. I'm expanding my reading, learning about what it means to be an entrepreneur in the 21st century without selling my soul and while still effecting meaningful change in people's lives. I'm reading Havi Brooks's thoughts on destuckification over at The Fluent Self and learning to cuss more fluently while perusing Naomi Dunford's irreverent advice at IttyBiz. I'm reading--gasp!--business books on consulting and web copywriting and LLCs.

During grad school, I did quite a bit of freelance writing and editing, and I'm not looking to do that again--I want to make my own stuff this time and to apply the specialized knowledge and skills I've developed over the past several years.

Everything is still very, very rough, but I'm testing the waters in a few different ponds:

1) Consulting on professional and organizational development. A colleague of mine at UC Davis and I are looking to launch a partnership/LLC next year called Eager Mondays. We have to do something with our furlough and campus closure days, yes? (I've already earned 19 hours of furlough time. Woohoo.) We're turning staff development on its head by encouraging companies to teach, rather than train, their employees. We will help business owners and managers shift the culture of their companies so that they encourage employees to be not just competent, but also curious, creative, and confident. We've already had productive, heartening conversations with two potential clients. I've already received some terrifically positive feedback from this post on using social media to improve professional development in museums. If you're interested in what we're doing, sign up for our very occasional newsletter--there's a general one and one targeting the museum field. I suspect we'll add more niche newsletters in the future, maybe one on improving writing--and deploying it more thoughtfully—in the workplace.

2) Pursuing a growing interest of mine: urban agriculture. There's nothing but a pretty banner up there yet, but I'm working on a site at Urban Farm Resource. I'm hoping to nurture my own commitment to living greener, direct others to opportunities to learn more, and create (read: sell!) my own resources on a number of niche urban farming topics as I learn more about them. I've been reading a lot about niche and keyword research, info product creation and marketing, and about affiliate marketing as well. (Want to learn more about affiliate marketing, content creation, and passive income streams? I highly recommend Lynn Terry's friendly, definitely non-smarmy, and very accessible blog ClickNewz and, if that interests you, signing up (as I did) for elite membership at her forum, where you get access to all kinds of small business owners with terrific expertise in business and internet marketing, including the very generous Lynn herself.)

3) Posting more regularly (I took a year's hiatus) at The Multicultural Toybox, another passion of mine. Over there I write about issues surrounding multicultural learning and point parents and teachers to toys, books, and games I find at places like Etsy, Amazon, and Powell's.

None of these is going to replace my income anytime soon, but I like having a contingency plan and projects I can work on instead of rather aimlessly surfing the web. I probably won't end up writing about them too much here, but I just wanted to let you know what's been brewing.

So, to sum up:

Academic job market = sucky

Entrepreneurialism = the new black

University of California tuition to increase 32 percent

(Cross-posted at BlogHer.)

Today, a panel of the University of California Regents—the ten-university system's governing body—approved a proposal to increase undergraduate "fees" (UC's word for tuition) by 32 percent over the coming year. Should the full board of Regents consent to the increase tomorrow, students will see a fee increase of more than $2,500 by fall 2010.

Needless to say, this is a huge leap.  (By comparison, when I was an undergraduate a little more than a decade ago, tuition at my (non-UC) school increased by 2-4% a year.)  Coming on top of all the cuts being made to education and to supporting units at the UC, the increase is brutal.

The university community isn't taking this news sitting down--unless you count sit-ins.  The Chronicle of Higher Education reports,

Fourteen protesters were arrested at UCLA when they disrupted the meeting and refused to leave. Protesters then stopped the meeting several times, shouting "Whose university? Our university!" and chanting "We Shall Overcome." Hundreds of students and staff members also gathered at Berkeley and UCLA to begin a three-day protest of the tuition increases and faculty and staff furloughs.

University leaders have argued that the fee increases are necessary to compensate for severe cuts in state support. Mark G. Yudof, the system's president, said three out of four students would be shielded from the effects of the tuition increase by additional financial aid.

What Yudof is really saying—despite assurances elsewhere that the university system will raise grants to subsidize students who demonstrate financial need—is that students who can't afford to pay tuition up front will now have the privilege of taking out even more loans.  College has become so expensive that paying back such loans--particularly if a student goes on to grad school--can become a decades-long commitment.  (Me, I'm paying off my UC graduate education on a 20-year plan.  It's like the mortgage I can't afford because I work at the University of California and live in a UC town.)

Jenna Benty explains the impacts the budget cuts already have had on financial aid.  She focuses in particular on a program that was recently cut from UC Irvine, Student Academic Advancement Services, "which helped support low-income, first generation or disabled students." Benty continues: 

Ironically, the program SAAS was recently eliminated due to budget cuts, considering these are the students that are largely affected by the budget cuts and tuition increases. When talking to past SAAS students and now ex-coworkers, Deborah was shocked to find “the students were rationing their food in order to fight the termination and tuition increase just so they could have the opportunity to study abroad.”

Low-income students have now taken the budget problems from both ends, not only will they have to pay a higher tuition; important programs that assisted them in financial aid are being cut. Former SAAS student Leandra Ordorica states “SAAS has helped me find resources to be able to pay for UCI. Every time I applied for a scholarship, there was always someone there to write me a letter of recommendation.” These small amenities make the largest impact on the low-income students where finances are constantly a concern. Not only did the SAAS program assist in finding low-income students scholarships, “each counselor sat down personally with a student to see what their specific needs and goals were. After assessing each individuals students ambitions, they would personally find a type of aid that fit their specific needs,” according to Deborah Lee.

The office of the student Regent (an undergraduate who serves on the UC board) liveblogged today's Regents panel vote.  From the first post on the event:

9:35AM – [UC systemwide president] Mark Yudof is trying give his board report, but the crowd keeps interruppting and booing him.  the chant is “take a stand.” yudof: “regents have to act.  in the end of the day, it’s your job to blaance the budget.  the budget on the table is the only budget out there that will balance the budget.”  Yudof ends his speech early – asks the people that are distrubing the meeting to leave or be removed form the room.  police have just entered the room and are waiting for the protesters to remove themselves.  students please be safe!

These tuition increases are coming at a time when the UC campuses are actually reducing the number of courses they're offering, and when the quality of education at the university is at serious risk of deterioration.  UC is firing lecturers (contingent laborers, unlike tenured faculty) in droves, and the professoriate is loath to pick up the classes the lecturers had been scheduled to teach.  Worse, although UC may now authentically say that undergraduates have more contact hours with honest-to-goodness professors, many of these professors have not taught large classes (and large-enrollment courses of hundreds of students are increasingly replacing smaller ones, tripling or more the size of some classes) for a very long time.  Teaching very large classes is an art that few have mastered; after all, how does one employ best practices in undergraduate learning (e.g. interaction with and among students, activities, ongoing assessment) in a class of more than 500 students?

Democracy Now recently convened a discussion with a number of UC stakeholders to help people better understand the crisis.  I think Professor Ananya Roy of UC Berkeley's department of Department of City and Regional Planning put it best:

I think there is a very real crisis in California, where continuing budget cuts have devastated the infrastructure of public education, and we have a governor who continues to call for deeper and deeper budget cuts, even though there is nothing left to cut. So we’re clearly fighting for the ideal of public education. We’re fighting for the opportunity of Californians and Americans to get a decent education. But we’re also fighting for the future of our particular university, the UC system, and we’re fighting to be represented by leaders who believe in and can defend the mission of public education.

That bit about leaders may be a reference to UC President Mark Yudof's interview in The New York Times, which is widely regarded by UC denizens as both a disaster and symptomatic of the UC administration's profound misunderstanding of the history and values of public higher education in California.  In that interview, Yudof said he feels like the "manager of a cemetery," admitted he gets about a $10,000/month housing stipend from the UC (his total compensation package is $828,000/year), and admits he doesn't know how he got into education: "It's all an accident," he explained.

In response to that interview, two Berkeley professors wrote a letter to the NYT that included these paragraphs:

These missions of access, excellence and vision have been the essence of California’s Master Plan for Education since 1960. Yudof also says that he fell into education as a profession by “accident.” In contrast, each of us came to Berkeley deliberately, because we believe in the importance of the public research university as an institution — one that provides an outstanding education that is accessible and affordable. We are proud that for decades, our students have gone on to become the next generation of educators, researchers, business developers and public servants.

Yudof’s joking remarks about finance speak to the lack of vision and leadership in his administration. As faculty, we fear that it is not only our present but our collective future that is being destroyed. We need executives who will do more than preside over the collapse of the finest public university system in the world.

In the Democracy Now discussion, moderator Amy Goodman asked Laura Nader, a professor of sociocultural anthropology at UC Berkeley, to explain what she meant by a call for transparency in the UC budget--and suggests it's time for the university to reconsider its priorities:

LAURA NADER: We need transparency about such things as intercollegiate sports, which is a problem all over the country. And Brian Barsky and Alice Agogino, these are people in computer studies and engineering, they can add the figures, and the figures don’t make sense.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

LAURA NADER: The figures, it’s supposed to be—intercollegiate is supposed to bring in money to the university.

AMY GOODMAN: Sports.

LAURA NADER: In fact, they’re in debt, intercollegiate sports. So we’re subsidizing, the student fees are subsidizing intercollegiate sports. And we’re closing libraries. So we had—the libraries are supposed to be closed on Saturdays. There were some students that sat in, professors that spoke. And a wonderful donor, anonymous, gave money to keep the libraries open on Saturday, but the university didn’t fall into line and open the libraries on Saturday. So these are issues of transparency and accountability, fiscal accountability, that are very important today.

Because I earned three graduate degrees from the UC over a period of seven years, taught undergraduates and graduate students at the UC, and have served as a staff member there for more than three years, I've been around the UC block once or twice.  But I've never seen anything like this, nor felt such an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, frustration, and anger at any of the five other universities where I've worked or been a student.  One word comes to mind again and again: clusterfuck.  It's the perfect compound word for the situation.

Really, there's no one person or agency to blame for getting us into this mess, but there are definitely people and offices and agencies who could be working more thoughtfully and transparently to get us out of it.  Because a 32 percent tuition increase in a single year?  That's criminal.

Praying Mantis

This photo may be blurry (damn iPhone camera), but it's the only proof I have that last weekend I was the cool mom at the playground in the park, doing a little entomological interpretation for the kiddies. I was moving the mantis from the play equipment, where it was in danger of being stepped on, to a bush. It was pretty cooperative critter, and I was thrilled that a tiny little girl was the most eager to hold it.

Most of the mantids I see around here are light green, so it was fun to find a brown one.

On the current situation at work

I've been trying to be careful not to write too much about work, lest my position suddenly be Raptured by the University of California gods. But today I commented on a couple of posts and wrote one e-mail that, taken together, nicely reflect my thinking (and frustration) about working for the UC in an era of lean budgets. Here, then, are my comments; you'll see they revisit themes in my earlier post "Cloudy with a Chance of Layoffs."

I. The freshman seminar teach-for-free controversy

My comment on Tenured Radical's incisive post "And If You Give Us A Full Book Of Green Stamps, You Can Teach Macroeconomics", which responded to this article in the UC Davis student newspaper, which in turn reported that our vice provost of undergraduate studies, along with the director of the Teaching Resources Center, invited freshman seminar faculty to return their stipends to the program:

Oy. I work for the UC Davis Teaching Resources Center as a teaching consultant and programs coordinator, so you might imagine I have some thoughts about this issue.

First, please note: My comments here are mine alone, and are not intended to represent my employer's stance on any issues.

I didn't know about this letter, or the budget info mentioned in the article (that first-year seminars will be the last program cut from the unit), until I read the student newspaper this morning.

I have very mixed feelings about the vice provost's request. I don't work directly with this program, so my comments aren't as well-informed as I'd like them to be, but probably better-informed than those of people outside the unit. :)

On the one hand, the program does attract a lot of senior professors from the sciences who are excited about the opportunity to actually teach a small class that requires very high student participation--as opposed to lecture courses whose enrollment has ballooned to 900 students in at least one case (a subject for another blog post).

If the participating faculty really enjoy teaching in the program and aren't hurting for research funds, then I have no problem with them returning stipends to the program. It is a VERY lean budget year, and honestly, I'm scared the center won't be around much longer if we have further cuts--but I haven't seen the latest budget numbers, so unfortunately I can't speak with any certainty. I do know that unless we find grants to pay his salary, I'll be losing one incredibly talented and thoughtful colleague at the end of the academic year.

On the other hand, I suspect there are also lecturers and humanists (I'm one of them) who use the program as you describe--to have access to research funds they might otherwise not get, and it's not fair to apply any pressure on them, and sending out a blanket letter does, I think, pressure these faculty. For that reason, had I been asked about it, I would have advised they send the letter first to only full professors.

As it offers approximately 200 classes enrolling ~15 students each during the academic year, the program itself represents a very inexpensive way for the campus to lower its overall faculty : student ratio, so from a labor standpoint, any outrage might be better focused there.

I will say that it is an incredibly strong program, with very high quality classes taught by faculty who are passionate about teaching (too rare at any research university)--or who become passionate through the experience of engaging with first- and second-year undergraduates. The program holds faculty to rigorous pedagogical standards. For more information about it, see the first-year seminar faculty toolkit (PDF).

It's sad to see the teaching center connected with this controversy, as the Teaching Resources Center really is a fabulous resource and increasingly an intellectual hub on campus--and we run it on a shoestring budget. (We're small but mighty.) The office staff and graduate student researcher who coordinate and evaluate the first-year seminar program also do really terrific work, so it must be especially frustrating for them to see its administration depicted in an unflattering light.

II. Again with the freshman seminar controversy, but also in response to commenters' calls for reductions in administrative pay:

And then, on Eric Rauchway's post at The Edge of the American West:

Remember one of the reasons the first-year seminars are there in the first place: they provide a very inexpensive way for the university to lower its instructor : student ratio–even more cheaply than having grad students teach might.

I get a little bit antsy when people start talking about reducing “administrator” salaries, both because my own salary may or may not fall under that category and because after three years in the staff trenches, I’m keenly aware of the faculty-staff caste system.

Yes, there are many administrators whose salaries seem inflated. But the line between “administrator” and, oh, “program coordinator” (ahem) can be a blurry one. Staff like me have already had our salaries frozen for years, even as we support faculty who have continued to receive merit increases. With the furloughs, I’m now making less than when I started working at UC Davis, and 14% less than I would have made had I received my merit increases. It’s incredibly demoralizing, especially since these slights are coming from the exact university that supposedly readied me for an academic career.

I sat in a meeting w/a top HR admin at UCOP a few weeks ago, and I asked him point-blank if there would be any relief for staff soon, or if things would continue to deteriorate. His response was that “faculty attract people and resources, while staff don’t”; ergo, staff are dispensable. His remark about resources is a gross generalization, of course–it assumes, for example, staff aren’t writing grants, raising funds, or otherwise helping to recruit, support, and retain faculty.

Today a Staff Assembly e-mail claimed it’s not fair to compare staff and faculty salaries, that it’s like comparing doctors’ pay with lawyers’. But when you have countless lecturers, postdocs, and staff with similar credentials to faculty (PhDs, research agenda, publications, etc.), I don’t think that’s a fair analogy.

III. The Staff Assembly madness

As if the freshman seminar controversy wasn't enough to deal with today, UC Davis staff also received--as I reference in my comment on Eric's post--a Staff Assembly e-mail that featured a link to this article.

Needless to say, I couldn't let that stand, so I sent an e-mail to the author:

While I appreciate your reminder to staff (at http://staff.ucdavis.edu/News/not-the-time-for-assumptions) that we keep our heads when all around us seem to be losing theirs, I must take issue with one of your claims: “Comparing staff compensation with faculty compensation maybe more like comparing a doctor’s compensation with a lawyer’s compensation. These are different fields with different expectations and skill sets.”

This is a terrible generalization, as there are many, many staff on campus who have the same credentials as faculty (PhDs, teaching experience, peer-reviewed publications) and the same expectations (teaching, research agendas, grant writing, committee service) and skill sets (writing, teaching, intellectual engagement with academics and the wider world), but who are paid half as much as faculty—or less. My colleagues and I in the Teaching Resources Center, for example, are expected to stay current with trends in pedagogy, research and publish, and teach--only we’re expected to do the same for far less, and to manage multiple programs and projects in addition to the responsibilities we share with faculty. I’m on at least eight committees on campus and systemwide, and I chair several of them.

A few weeks back, I was in a meeting at UCOP, and when I asked a top HR administrator if staff would continue to feel budgetary pain out of proportion to our faculty colleagues, he said, “Faculty attract people and resources, while staff don’t.” Ergo, staff are dispensable—even if we write grants and help to recruit, support, retain (and, in my and my colleagues’ case, train) faculty. To say that faculty deserve better compensation than staff because of different “expectations” is too easy; it’s a capitulation to the campus’s continued denigration of staff and contributes the UC’s erasure of the incredibly high-level work many staff are doing.

So yeah, that's about where I'm at right now. How about you?

Murders, head injuries, and assorted violence -- Is it time to cancel high school football?

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)

Last night, 16-year-old Melody Ross, an honors student and track and field athlete, was shot to death at the football game between rival Wilson High School and Long Beach Poly High School in Long Beach, California. The shooting took place at Wilson High School, which you may be slightly familiar with if you saw the Freedom Writers movie or read Erin Gruwell's The Freedom Writers Diary. The school serves some of Long Beach's most upscale neighborhoods, but is no stranger to violence by students and even, unfortunately, by a teacher or two. Poly High School, the oldest high school in the district and the alma mater of both Snoop Dogg and, well, me, serves the "inner city" neighborhoods. Poly High has also had its share of violence; my senior year, I was responsible, for example, for the yearbook's obituary page--and that was 16 years ago.

It's not yet known if the shooters who fired into the post-game crowd were students. One of Long Beach's newspapers, the Press-Telegram, reported that parents complained about the lack of Long Beach Police Department presence at the game. The security for the event, according to the Press-Telegram, included three Long Beach Unified School District safety officers, 19 campus security officers from schools across the district, 10 administrators, and 15 teachers.

Here's a thought: Any high school that needs 37 security personnel plus city police department support at its football games knows it has a problem with violence. Any high school that has more than three dozen security personnel and still ends up with three young people with gunshot wounds--two men were also wounded--needs to reconsider having football games at all.

Parents know the district has a problem. In addition to complaining about the absence of LBPD officers, parents worry about violence in Long Beach schools. The Press-Telegram cited a parent's observation that families have actually moved out of the city to keep their kids out of Long Beach's high schools.

Folks, it's long past time to call off high school football games in Long Beach and in other violent school districts.

In calling for the cancellation of football games at high schools with a recognized pattern of violence, I have undoubtedly raised some readers' hackles. Some of you will argue, as does Sue Cooley, that football is actually an antidote to violence:

For example, an individual who is involved in the football program at school is less likely to be involved with alcohol and drugs, as this would have a negative effect on one's performance. In the same respect, an individual who is involved in such a program would have less time to become involved in such activities that may lead to violence. The athlete is not left unsupervised after school, as he or she is required to practice and compete on a daily basis. This results in less time to become involved with such negative situations.

In other words, I see high school football as a positive alternative to violence. It offers participants a means of channeling their energy into something positive. Contact sports are not examples of violence. Violence does not occur as a result of competition and hard work.

But I didn't say that we should cancel football--just the games, or at least evening games where it's more difficult to monitor the crowds milling around in the dark outside the stadium. If football fans get violent, or if games are magnets for violence by non-participants--if high school students (or anyone) is dying, then the games need to go. The latest incident is not an isolated one; there have been multiple reports of violence at football games, including a brawl at a Los Angeles-area high school that involved 100 students. The fact is that while schools are getting safer overall, incidents of violence at football games are increasing.

Because let's be honest: Football is violent in multiple ways. As it is coached and played today, football promotes physical violence on the field that transcends the game play. Increasingly, football is coming under scrutiny for the long-term head injuries that collisons engender--and not just in NFL and college football, but also in high school games, as NPR reported yesterday. Indeed, Malcolm Gladwell equates football's violence with that of dogfighting. In an online chat following the publication of that article, Gladwell had this to say to a high school football coach:

Both you as a coach—and, as importantly, people like me, who are die-hard football fans—need to consider the possibility that the game is irretrievably harmful. It’s way too early to decide that yet. But I think we have to commit to following what the science tell us—even if it means walking away from a game we love.

In addition, high school football players and wrestlers are far more likely than non-athletes to get into violent altercations.

There are countless school-sponsored extracurricular activities in which teen participants and fans do not die and that do not result in violence. Schools need to consider new revenue models that will allow them to both bring in the funds that football games have been generating (but only at significant risk of student health and safety) and pay for additional productive and creative activities, including sports that do not promote violence on the field and off.

When teens are threatened by gang violence, parents, police, school administrators, clergy, and others step in to change the contexts in which teens live. Why aren't we doing the same with the culture of violence perpetuated by football players themselves, by fans at games, and by people outside of the games? It's time to reconsider our priorities and values.

Your thoughts?

National Academic Standards Draft Released (and Free-Market Ideology Unleashed)

Cross-posted at BlogHer

Earlier this week, a panel of experts charged by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers with crafting a set of national academic standards for English and mathematics skills released the first official draft of the standards. The draft outlines those skills students are expected to have developed prior to graduating from high school. The release of the standards marks the beginning of a 30-day comment period before the panel launches into writing standards for individual grade levels in K-12.

Bloggers from all points in the political spectrum are weighing in on the standards--or, more commonly, on the idea of national standards, especially when they come from the federal government (though, as The Washington Post points out, the federal government really is more of a bystander) or if the federal government will be offering money as an incentive to states that adopt these standards. So far 48 states--Alaska and Texas being the exceptions--have signed on to the initiative.

At the New York Times Room for Debate blog, experts were invited to submit brief comments on the standards. Their backgrounds are diverse--they range from a representative of the libertarian Cato Institute to a charter school founder to a professor of urban schooling--and their comments aren't really surprising. You've heard them before: from Neal McCluskey's tired lament that teachers are fully to blame for all the ills in public schools and that parents will always make the right decisions for their children to Ernest Morrell's similarly cliché (but alas, true) observation that our schools aren't going to improve if we can't provide enough books, better-trained and highly educated teachers, and reasonable class sizes, the comments are predictable.

What's interesting to me is the way people--and here I refer to the NYT's invited respondents as well as bloggers elsewhere--are making the same claims about competing agendas. For example, at the NYT, Robert Siegler claims that variations in state standards "hinder learning, especially among children whose parents move often" and make it difficult to evaluate the learning taking place in different states. Yet McCluskey argues that it's the presence of uniform standards, rather than their absence, that slows learning.

There's probably truth in both statements, and honestly, I haven't done enough research to know which end of this standards continuum is drawing on better evidence regarding student achievement. I will say this: the standards themselves are fairly tame and--aside from a provision asking high school English teachers to teach students how to read texts from other disciplines as well as the traditional literary works--will likely not prove controversial in this draft. (Expect the dust to kick up once grade-specific standards are released.)

I do resent folks who are using this opportunity (as does McCluskey) to argue that we should unleash the forces of the free market on the education system, letting parent-consumers decide what's best and closing those schools that don't receive sufficient parental support. God forbid people who went to school for 5 to 10 (or more) years to study learning theory and practice, who have made it their life's calling and profession, have some say in what students learn. (But hey, I'm biased: I went to school through grade 24, so clearly you can count me among the anti-parent elitists.)

I'm hearing the free-market argument not only in K-12 education but also in discussions of what should be funded (or, rather, cut) in cash-strapped universities. By one measure, if undergraduate engineering majors go on to earn higher salaries than, say, English majors, then engineering is a more valuable major and should be better funded than English, even if equal numbers of students on campus are interested in each major. Similarly, some are arguing that if corporations are giving more money to science professors and researchers than they are to humanities and arts faculty, then the state university should invest its resources similarly because the markets have spoken. Of course, I hear this argument most often from the mouths of science faculty (and, interestingly, mostly white male science faculty).

So what happens if we let "the market" choose what K-16 students will learn? Taken to one (I'm afraid believable) extreme, we see a narrowing of the curriculum, with high school English teachers transformed into drones teaching students to interpret technical texts and universities cutting (as we're already seeing them do) foreign languages, literature, history, arts, and the humanities more generally. As state universities emphasize the lucrative fields of science, technology, engineering, and medicine, the last bastions of a real liberal arts education (by which I mean an education incorporating both breadth and depth across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences) will be those few elite four-year colleges that can afford, by dint of their endowments or their ability to attract top students, to continue to offer what may come to be seen as an outdated (or maybe "classic") education. But these institutions tend to be pricey, so such education may even further become a privilege of the elite--by which I mean either wealthy families or families that are savvy and well-connected enough to know which schools offer the best financial aid in addition to opportunities to expand students' horizons.

And now for a round-up of what folks are saying in the blogosphere:

Think Tank West addresses some myths--and, it ends up, not-myths--about the interplay of No Child Left Behind, federal and state control and funding of education, and national standards.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers makes a tentative case for national standards.

Writing a few months back at The American Prospect, Dana Goldstein recounted a roundtable debate among Weingarten, New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and D.C. schools Superintendent Michelle Rhee. Goldstein sums up the conversation:

So there you have it: Three of the most influential education leaders in the country, all supporters of national standards, but all raising their eyebrows at the current state and testing-industry-led effort to get there.

Melanie Smollin asks, among other questions,

How will teachers know how to align curriculum, instruction, and assessment with these new standards in ways effective enough to enable all students to have a shot at reaching them?

Chester Finn, writing at the Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog, laments the Byzantine mess states have made of standards:

Yes, those who abhor the thought of national education standards and tests for the United States will find all sorts of reasons to oppose them. I don’t know if the forthcoming product, once fully massaged, will be to my liking. But I do know that our present motley array of state-specific standards and assessments is obsolete and dysfunctional—as well as mediocre or worse in many states. (There are a few happy exceptions.)

For some good discussion on an earlier leaked draft of the national standards, see the comments section of Robert Pondiscio's post Voluntary National Standards Dead on Arrival at The Core Knowledge Blog.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What do you think about the standardization of curricula, either within state borders or across them?

Cloudy with a Chance of Layoffs

I.

A couple days ago, I was reading Lucas some bedtime stories; among them was one of my favorites, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. As I read, Lucas was mumbling about something else, so I had to focus extra hard on the text. Reading deliberately, it turns out, has its dangers; in the middle of the book I had a revelation that the book wasn't at all about the challenges of having food fall from the sky.

In case you're not familiar with Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett's book (1978), a quick plot synopsis: A man tells his two grandchildren a tale of the tiny town of Chewandswallow, where instead of having supermarkets or raising their own food, the townsfolk depend on the weather to bring in storms of hamburgers, orange juice rain, clouds of sunny-side-up eggs, and Jell-O sunsets. But then, inexplicably, the weather takes an erratic turn, and, besieged by pea soup fogs and house-crushing giant food falling from the sky, the people of Chewandswallow flee the town for a new land, where they must adjust to rainwater, packaged food, and supermarkets.

As I read the book this last time, it increasingly seemed at once an allegory and a parable for my own life.

II.

Recently, I caught up with several far-flung friends and colleagues, and I heard--explicitly, in the anecdotes they shared, and implicitly, in the alternately wistful and frustrated tone of their voices--a desire to move on to something new, even if it meant walking away from their current careers, where over decades they have built up a good deal of respect, authority, and expertise. They're in their 40s and 50s, and I'm 34, but I must admit I was feeling the same existential angst.

We admitted to intellectual fatigue, to wanting to have new conversations rather than rehashing the same old ones that kept arising. We wanted to move forward, to be creatively productive, to be proactive rather than merely reactive.

III.

As many of you are undoubtedly learning through articles in higher ed publications or--God forbid--first-hand experience, the University of California is kind of a sucky place to work right now. We've gone beyond the point where the budget cuts are damaging the quality of our programs; the cuts have become personal. Some of us have been more than cut to the bone. We're oozing marrow.

We're in hedgehog mode, rolling up in little balls hoping to escape the budget scythe, hoping we don't lose our jobs and health insurance and our ability to provide for our families. We're being kicked while we're down.

So is it any wonder that when I read "Whatever the weather served, that was what they ate," I felt as if I had been punched in the chest?

Last week we were informed that employees represented by the clerical and technical unions that had not agreed to furloughs would be laid off for the same number of days that they would have been furloughed. I'm not represented--not by my choice, I assure you--but half of our office staff is. We non-represented employees are having our annual salaries cut by a percentage that varies with how much we make (e.g. I'm taking a 6% cut), with each paycheck being reduced by that amount. So yes, losing 6% of my salary sucks, even with the 16 furlough days I've "earned" as a result, but at least the pain is spread across 12 pay periods. Not so for the union-represented employees. My coworkers will be temporarily laid off for a certain number of consecutive days. If I were union-represented, for example, I would be laid off for 16 consecutive workdays--meaning my paycheck for that month would cover only 4 days. How many of us could live for a month on 4 days' wages?

Worse, these union-represented employees will also be required to observe the 11 mandated campus closure days (during which the rest of us will be using furlough days). They'll need to cough up some vacation or comp time or take those days off without pay. Which means a union-represented employee earning my salary could lose 27 days of pay this fiscal year.

Whatever the weather served, that was what they ate. Overcooked broccoli. Brussels sprouts and peanut butter with mayonnaise. Or nothing but Gorgonzola cheese all day long.

Another day there was a pea soup fog. No one could see where they were going.

III.

I asked our budget person about upcoming cuts. As I said, we're already hemorrhaging, losing staff and being asked to find grants to pay for our own keep. She said she expected another $100,000 in cuts to our unit this coming year. We've already lost at least $200,000, maybe $250,000--I've lost track. Here's the deal about the $100,000, though--we only have $70,000 in our current budget for non-salary expenses. You do the math.


IV.

Confession: Fang and have $30 in savings and something like $75,000 in debt from student loans, debt Fang brought into the marriage, emergency car repairs during grad school when I was only making $13,000 a year, dental bills, vet care for the last dog, etc. We try to live within our means, but our means are a bit modest right now.

Alert: Fang needs $1900 in emergency dental care at the end of the month. We found out today the dog might need shoulder surgery. And we're spending $1,600 to attend a relative's wedding next month. We can't not attend the wedding because the groom is shipping out to his first tour in Afghanistan shortly thereafter.

When you take into account the university's freezing of staff (but not faculty) salaries the past couple of years, my pay has actually declined 13% over the past two years--and that doesn't account for inflation. Considering only one year I've worked here has the university offered merit increases (of 4%), I'm making considerably less than when I started.

We live, in short, hand to mouth. The cost of living in this town outstrips our salaries. And I'm tired of freelancing, of selling used books on Amazon in an attempt to make ends meet. I don't want to have another yard sale.

I know there are people in far worse shape. At least we have jobs. (For now.)

Everyone feared for their lives. They couldn't go outside most of the time. Many houses had been badly damaged by giant meatballs, stores were boarded up, and there was no more school for the children.

V.

So what do we do in the face of tomato tornadoes and hurricanes of hard rolls?

VI.

Well, what did the people of Chewandswallow do?

A decision was made to abandon the town of Chewandswallow.

It was a matter of survival.

The townsfolk made sailboats out of giant pieces of stale bread and set sail on their rafts for a new land.

VII.

So I ask myself: What constitutes a new land?

Never have I had so many ideas and so little hope. I feel over the past few years I've set sail a dozen tiny boats, none of them seaworthy on their own.

Right now I'm trying to find the one or two projects on which I really want to focus, the ones where I can get busy slathering peanut butter between two huge pieces of stale bread before I jerry-rig some sails from oversized slices of pizza and Swiss cheese.

And I'm doing it all without the benefit of medication, which is making it especially hard on me, and on Fang as well. It's hard to be positive or to imagine--let alone chart a path to--a better future. In my current financial situation, it's hard not to resent the university--both as the grantor of a three graduate degrees I'm realizing are largely unmarketable and as my current employer. It's especially hard because in a perfect world Lucas would have a sibling, but my fertility and I are staring down the barrel of "advanced maternal age" and we can't afford another child, and won't be able to for a long time. I feel as if that decision has been taken out of my hands somewhat by my decreasing salary, and I resent that, too.

I'm so ready to be somewhere else--mentally, intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, perhaps physically. I used to be the kind of person who could steer her own life in an appropriate direction. But for now here I am, with my stale bread and my peanut butter, wondering which way the wind will blow us next.