There are three forms of social aggression that can infect an academic department or college and be hard to root out.¹ I have been mulling these for a while and have only half-formed thoughts; it’s probably best to think of the following as a tentative classification. I hope to have time to discuss possible responses over the weekend.

Gossip because they’re only thinking of the institution: I haven’t been an observant Jew for several decades, but for those of us who are secular, there are some basic principles you’re raised with that carry over into adult life. I’ve got a real fondness this year for the prohibition on lashon hora, which translates imperfectly as gossip about others’ shortcomings. This is different from slander or libel: lashon hora is gossip that could be 100% true but is nonetheless inappropriate. It’s pernicious in academics because of the status competition that can ramp up so easily, and because our work is so often on public display. In a department or college, it’s especially destructive because you know that the colleague who is trying to gossip about a third party is likely to turn around in a different context and gossip about you. Thanks, buddy: you think I can’t keep track of that? It also has all the hallmarks of sidestream bullying: it’s hard to respond without that response becoming reinforcement for the behavior, and the nature of the gossiping can make most captive listeners feel as if they want a shower.

Casual insults freely given: Julian Vasquez Heilig reminded me of this in his recent discussion of microaggression, prompted by a correspondent who called him an “intellectually unrigorous pseudo-scholar.”² Vasquez Heilig puts that insult in the context of social-psychology research on microinteractions and power dynamics, the half-sleights that you don’t know how to interpret, and when power differences or social stereotypes are at play, you have to suspect could be rooted in racism or sexism. Heilig points out that while the venom flung at him was on the upper end of the scale, subtler forms constantly float in the environment, the casual half-insults that some faculty face much more frequently than others. You want to know what white male privilege is in academics? It’s not walking around wondering when the next verbal shuriken will fly.

Equal-opportunity bullying. The existence of microaggression doesn’t mean that horrific environments cannot exist for everyone, a sort of hell without discrimination. Assholes can be nondiscriminatory victimizers. In academics, this can take the form of Boltonic bullying, unconscientious objections, victim-bullying, academic mobbing, and more.

Faculty, students, and staff are humans — we all make mistakes, including on occasion being a gossip or uttering insensitive remarks. Most of us are willing to admit those mistakes and apologize for them when called on it. What tips the balance for a department into a dysfunctional environment is when there is either a core group of individuals who are persistently inappropriate or there is a critical mass of destructive behavior on the part of the whole, licensed by whatever has been happening in the recent (or vivid if distant) past. If you cannot trust that you can go a day without cringing either on behalf of a colleague or because of a comment directed at you (and not at your actions), that sounds like a hostile work environment.

As I wrote above, I think of the literature on microaggression and bullying as rough modeling, an attempt to get an analytical hold on a troubling and messy phenomenon. On the one hand, that leaves plenty of room for active research. On the other hand, it does not necessarily provide a good guide on how to respond to gossip, casual insults, and outright assholism. More thoughts on that over the weekend.

Notes

1. This analysis applies more generally at workplaces, but most of my working life has been in academia, and I’ll restrict my assertions to what I know best.
2. The insult’s phrasing is redundancy and repetition on a scale that creates the worst hyperbole in the galaxy.

In response to the LTI App Bounty challenge issued yesterday by several LMS companies, here is my wish-list for software that has a simple function, does not yet exist, but should:

1. A mashup of the Creative Commons search tool, Zotero, and simple image editing that would allow one to search for a CC-licensed/PD image, snag it and its source, and watermark the image with the citation, with as few clicks as possible.
2. Variant on the above: instead of a watermark, a thin margin strip added to the image with citation and possibly a tiny QR (the only justified use I can imagine of QR codes today).
3. Further variant: similar tool, but the target would be the Digital Public Library of America.
4. A (more clever) variant of browser form-entry saving that you could use for commenting on student work: you set up prompts for comments on work, and when you start typing in a comment, the browser add-on would display (and allow you to pick) comments that you have already written.
5. A variant on the above: the add-on would build, export, and import libraries of comments and prompts.
6. Another variant: exporting the data in a .csv file (or other spreadsheet format). Or, given the LTI challenge noted above, something with an LTI hook.
7. A server utility that could feed a page’s text in small bites to a cell-phone user (i.e., someone who does not have a smartphone but can receive SMS).
8. A utility to gate a cell phone’s SMS messages into an LMS or similar (i.e., let someone contribute to a gated discussion from an LMS, not just let messages go outbound).
9. An essential-systems cloning device — not a complete unit (you don’t need legs or hair for this) but enough to participate in an instructor-permission role online.

Okay, the last one is a joke, but the rest are serious. We need these, coding friends.

Jeff Selingo’s new book, College (Un)bound, came out last week. Very brief version of this post: buy it if you want a compilation of good reporting on higher education. You should expect to enjoy it as long as you bring the salt shaker for when Selingo becomes prescriptive.

Slightly longer version:

College (Un)Bound is best thought of as a supplemented compilation of Jeff Selingo’s articles on higher ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education (and a few other places). Selingo’s reporting in individual news articles is generally very good. If you want a slice of critical academic reporting, this book is for you. Selingo’s approach to colleges and universities is skeptical, bordering on vinegary. In most parts of the book, for narrowly-defined reporting, he is careful with the facts, and as a result the general impression I have of the book is that it is a sort of updated, more responsible version of Charles Sykes’ rantings about higher ed. In the book you will find discussions of the bulk of topics that have appeared in higher-education news in the past 5 years, and researchers such as Richard Arum and Anthony Carnevale make significant appearances.

Among the very good bits of the book is Selingo’s scathing treatment of unethical marketing by tuition-dependent non-profits. Selingo documents that it’s not just for-profits that are scamming students and their families. He points out (fairly) that admissions offices generally know more about individual families than the families know about individual colleges, and they certainly know the game of college admissions much better than almost all families. And he also observes that it is difficult to balance the short-term financial obligations of choosing College A over College B against the likelihood of graduation and the (private) payoff over a career.¹

A second area where Selingo makes a substantive contribution is in his discussion of college debt — that is, debt owed by colleges. Selingo correctly notes that many colleges and universities incur substantial debt, often to feed the status aspirations of upper-level administrators. I wish he had discussed the debt accumulated by athletic edifice complexes, but he is on the money (literally) when he discusses the debt attributed to wish-fulfillment construction, such as that tied to health complexes. One note: his use of Moody’s ratings is problematic, and was unnecessary, since for public institutions, at least, debt documentation should be a part of the public records. (Remember: Moody’s fictional ratings of collateral debt obligations was a significant accelerant in shadow-bank leveraging that tipped into the 2008 financial crisis. I trust Moody’s ratings judgments about as far as I can throw the Empire State Building.)

One weakness of the book is Selingo’s occasional overenthusiastic commentary about “entrepreneurial” ideas on higher education. That gullibility is not consistent: he is quite skeptical of fads in places. But for the passages where he is a scribe for various notions such as MOOCs or for individual boosters of higher ed fads such as ASU’s Michael Crow, it undermines his credibility.

A second general weakness is Selingo’s tendency to treat all sectors of higher education as identical for long stretches of the text. While he occasionally spotlights a specific sector, he quickly skips from public four-year colleges to tuition-dependent non-profits and then major research universities (generally missing community colleges). Wasn’t part of his intended audience parents of teenagers, who might benefit by a clear description of how “higher ed” is really several groups of institutions?

But the most general weakness of the book is Selingo’s inconsistency on a broad range of issues, inconsistencies that would not be apparent in individual articles but become glaring in the context of a book whose author claims it has an important argument about the future of higher education. In the course of the book, you can find the following:

• A passage decrying one pair of parents ignoring the value of community colleges… with the rest of the book mostly ignoring community colleges except for limited passages (e.g., in the last chapter, only one example of exciting stuff is from a community college).
• A cry for families to be better consumers, and also a mini-jeremiad against universities who treat students and families as consumers.
• A claim early in the book that English is subsidized by law schools and then a claim a few chapters later that English classes are cash cows that subsidize lab classes.
• A tone asserting that higher education on the whole is defensive and will refuse to move until disrupted, and yet almost every single example of a program Selingo finds admirable appears in … a college or university today.
• An argument at one point in favor of mandatory standardized consumer-report-style outcomes for every college, and a chapter at the end admiring a broad range of innovative programs … without any discussion of outcomes at these institutions or for these programs.

These problems are not fatal flaws — as I noted above, the book is valuable as a slice of reporting, and it works as an argument of sorts if Selingo’s basic point is that we are witnessing a higher education fin de siècle. I am moderately skeptical of that claim, but if you ignore Selingo’s prescriptions, the book is a more coherent read. Certainly it would be a useful book to assign an undergraduate or masters class discussing current education policy, as there are many points in the text that can be springboards for discussion. If you’re looking for a coherent policy argument, on the other hand, you may be looking for a different book.

Notes

1. In the long run, Selingo argues towards the end of the book, students would do better to go into greater hock at more prestigious institutions with high graduation rates than slightly lesser hock at institutions with low graduation rates. I will let specialists in higher ed research speak up about the extent to which that reflects current research.

I am starting a local chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Metaphors. Part of my motivation is the release of another Dan Brown novel. But it didn’t hurt my motivation to read the awful thumbnail history in Arthur Levine’s column this week on teachers unions.

Teachers’ unions are under siege nationwide…. What’s caused the uproar is that the world is changing. America is moving from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. The two economies differ dramatically in their expectations for schools and teachers…. Industrial societies focus on common processes, epitomized by the assembly line. Our schools—products of the industrial age—rely on such processes… Herein lies the cause of current conflicts with teachers’ unions. They, like schools, are products of the industrial era.

How many errors?

• Chronology: teachers unionized after World War II, concentrated in the 1960s and 1970s during the shift  in the economy from manufacturing to domination by service occupations.
• Category: education is the epitome of the service economy… with all its flaws. Teachers unionized during a large shift of union organizing towards service industries. Teaching happened to be one of them.
• Rhetoric: Levine uses the typical crutch of global competition as the driver behind economic change. But most of our economy is still selling things and services to ourselves, inside the country.¹

Worst is Levine’s dismissive catchphrase industrial era. “Industrial-era education” is the convenient whipping boy for everyone from Jeb Bush to Cathy Davidson, commonly used for one of two rhetorical purposes:

• Claiming that schools are obsolete in the brand-new world of spanking-clean robots that do all our work for us or would if we would just learn how to program them correctly. 
• Claiming that schools are rigid, dehumanizing institutions.

The term “industrial-era education” is thus a rhetorical gesture, not generally a serious historical claim. A few do make serious historical claims, such as Cathy Davidson, and I have elsewhere explained why I think she is in error on the history. Levine’s use is more clearly an ahistorical foil that assumes, damnit, schools should be getting with the program and not being left behind in the Brave New World which is inevitable and thus must be accommodated because you will be assimilated, and resistance is futile. It is Borg Policy Logic.

Notes

1. A more accurate reading of globalization’s impact on the U.S. in the late 20th century is the fact that it enabled us to shift from selling more things to each other, before the shift of manufacturing overseas, to selling more services to each other, after the shift.

Style note to education beat reporters: an algorithm is not “personalization” of education, no matter how many people make the claim. As computerized algorithms currently exist, here are the things that an algorithm cannot identify in an educational context:

• An algorithm does not know when to pull a student aside at a quiet moment to ask about her mother. When a teacher knows and reaches out, that’s personalization.
• An algorithm does not know when a joke will disarm a tense moment for a particular class. When a teacher knows and launches the joke, that’s personalization.
• An algorithm does not know how long to wait before the student in the second row will not be able to remain silent for one minute longer and just has to speak up. When a teacher knows and waits, that’s personalization.
• An algorithm does not know when the uncomfortable student leaning out of his chair needs to go use the bathroom. When a teacher knows and gives permission, that’s personalization.
• An algorithm does not know who needs to be persuaded against starting a fight at lunch. When a teacher knows and talks the student down, that’s personalization.
• An algorithm does not know when the blank look means “you lost me a while ago and I hope my friend understood what you just said,” and when it means “I’m not buying what you’re selling today.” When a teacher knows and responds to that student, that’s personalization.

This is not a slam against all algorithms — they have their uses. But the claim that an algorithm can personalize education? Not currently possible.

I have a bridge to sell, quite cheap. All it will cost you is the following:

• One halfpenny (British, before metric conversion)
• Three drachmas
• One lira
• Three euros
• One franc (French)
• Four thalers (the coin, not the economist)
• One escudo
• One ekwele
• Ten qirans
• Five kroons
• One hundred C.S.A. dollars (paper bills only)

When I read proposals about “breaking the credit hour” or substituting competencies for credits from proponents from Kevin Carey to Matt Reed, all I can think of is the complexity of tracking competencies as opposed to courses. It is already frustrating enough to students who transfer between institutions to discover that most or all of their previous courses are accepted for transfer but only for “elective” credit–i.e., not to satisfy any requirements at the new institution. Whoever proposes diploma-by-competency is proposing a scheme that would be much worse without some serious rethinking of competencies. It turns a degree program into a scavenger hunt even more than many already are.

Is there an alternative? Yes. Let’s scratch the “hour” from “credit hour.” That will allow flexibility on earning credits by competency, but without the unworkable idea that we do not need a currency of exchange in higher education. As long as a high proportion of students swirl between institutions, we will need a common currency, and “credits” is as good a name as any.

Now that the spring semester is over, it’s time for me to catch up on a bunch of reading. In the current-higher-ed-commentary genre, I just finished Matt Reed’s Confessions of a Community College Administrator, and am looking forward to Jeff Selingo’s College (Un)bound, which came out this week. I thoroughly enjoyed Reed’s book, though I have some (expected) disagreement with his comments about tenure and a few other matters. I need to ponder his broader argument a bit more, and the following discussion in the collective-bargaining weeds should not dissuade you from reading Reed’s book. It is what my mind grabbed on to as an issue few other readers would know about.

Briefly, I think Reed overestimates the authority of past practice in a unionized context. What he describes of past practice is somewhat close to my understanding of adverse possession in property law: if a union can allege a pattern of practice, they can use that (even poorly-documented) claim in effect as a contractual right that can contradict the written contract and (unlike adverse possession) without firm documentation. That land rights grab is much broader than what I understand the principle to be: I think of past practices as clear, documented commitments by behavior that can clarify an otherwise-ambiguous existing contractual clause but cannot override what the contract says explicitly.

The classic work on past practice is a 1961 book chapter by Richard Mittenthal that focuses on past practice as part of the (then-new) literature on arbitration principles. Arbitration is the common last (and binding) step for resolution of grievances if they cannot be resolved informally or at previous formal stages. In collective bargaining, arbitration is a quasi-judicial administrative hearing heard and decided upon by a neutral third party (usually someone trained by the American Arbitration Association). In his 1961 article, Richard Mittenthal identifies a number of criteria by which an arbitrator can judge whether the history of managerial decisions constitutes a past practice that is binding on the parties:

• The clarity and consistency of action: Is the behavior objectively clear, with minimal variation?
• Longevity and repetition: Is the behavior longstanding and the common response to a coherent set of circumstances?
• Knowledge and acquiescence: do both the union and upper-level management know about and acquiesce to the practice?
• Is the behavior something that is clearly a mutual commitment?

The principle here is that a contract is not meant to capture everything about labor relations, and that if consistent practices on the ground demonstrate a long-term understanding by both parties, neither party (generally the union’s members) should be punished by the fact that the long-term understanding was not captured in contractual language. For an example of an arbitrator making a decision based on past practice in a community college, see a 2005 arbitration ruling involving an Ohio CC by N. Eugene Brundige. I see Brundige’s explanation towards the very end of the ruling as telling: “If ambiguity [in the contract] exists, then a binding past practice does appear to be present” (emphasis added). Mittenthal leaned towards the narrower interpretation of past practice (the type of reasoning in Brindge’s ruling) as relevant to arbitration: “The mere existence of a practice, without more, has no real significance. Only if the practice clarifies an imperfectly expressed contractual obligation or lends substance to an indefinitely expressed obligation or creates a completely independent obligation will it have some effect on the parties’ relationship” (p. 34). At least in my limited experience, arbitrators are unlikely to use past practice to justify rights of either party in express contradiction of contractual language, and a chapter by Gregory Saltzman in the 2010 NEA Almanac of Higher Education is consistent with that impression, as are a number of webpages from private-employee unions. Only with a very small group of arbitrators can a party to an agreement successfully argue that past practice undermines express contractual language. And even in the context of clarifying existing language or filling a gap, past practice requires documentation with the burden on the party alleging the past practice.

My observation here is tentative: I know a small piece of Reed’s experience from a brief email exchange, plus an interesting explicit reference to past practice in the current collective bargaining contract of the County College of Morris (Reed’s first public CC job). Apart from that explicit reference, the CCM contract does not have a zipper clause¹ that might be interpreted in the way Reed describes. But that may not be the whole story, as contract language changes. Further, while my (lay) understanding of past practice is that only a very small number of arbitrators would view past practice as expansively as Reed claims, maybe they are all concentrated in New Jersey (or maybe New Jersey and also Massachusetts, where Reed currently works). Finally, college administrators (and a CC’s in-house or contracted lawyer) may recommend avoiding grievances based on past practice, and so the informal (if incorrect) understanding spread, that any and all past practice claims are binding commitments. But my sense of the world and experience suggests that if Reed is operating on the assumption that vague allegations of past practice are binding, he is practicing “defensive administration.”

Does this matter to Reed’s overall argument? Not really, since his proposals in Chapter 6 are not directly about faculty relationships. But I think he somewhat exaggerates the portion of inertia that is attributable to union contracts and their enforcement.

Notes

1. A zipper clause is something that is broadly inclusive in an “everything not talked about explicitly here” sense, and contracts can have zipper clauses that confer expansive rights on either a union or management.

We’re at the end of the semester here at USF, and this is a short debriefing of the semester. My particular form of craziness this semester was teaching three courses while serving as department chair. Technically, I was teaching four sections of our undergraduate Schools and Society course, but two of them met in the same room at the same time and were divided to reserve some of the seats for a particular program. The other two sections were on the Lakeland campus, as part of the teachout that comes with the closure of USF Polytechnic at the end of last June, and I ended up with them because the remaining teachout faculty did not have anyone qualified to teach that course this semester, and I could not persuade either qualified adjuncts or full-time faculty to teach either section, even with an overload payment. So I taught the sections, with TA support, and we ran the course in a blended format for both sections. Thank goodness I made the effort last summer to write a textbook for the course, as the discussion questions in the text could be used to start online discussions.¹ Other factors that made this a little easier: I was already gearing up to teach the dual-section course in Tampa and thinking about TA organization and communication; I had a wonderful group of TAs for all the sections, I have an Audible account and had a list of audiobooks I was interested in listening to; and most importantly, the students were wonderful about communicating their needs and interests, and my department colleagues were patient and understanding that their chair was essentially offsite for 15% of the semester. Now, for the (teaching) lessons learned:

• The advantage of a blended format, or any requirement for occasional mandatory online discussion: students cannot hide in an online discussion. I used Instructure Canvas as the platform (which is now USF’s platform, though faculty can still use Blackboard for a few more terms). Canvas allowed me to force students to write an initial response to each discussion prompt before seeing their peers’ responses. (Yes, I made my Tampa students respond to the same prompts for the most part, as preparation for our classes. Writing for an audience of a professor and a few TAs is a little different from writing for an audience of a professor and peers.)
• I probably need an average of 60-75 minutes face-to-face with undergraduates to cook the grits for this class. Having had several weeks without contact in the blended section, I just don’t think that gap worked as well as the end of the semester, when I saw students face-to-face every week. Or at least starting the semester with a good string of weekly face-to-face meetings is important, even if there are a few gaps. Some part of that conclusion may have been affected by the fact that students did not have a choice of a face-to-face class: as noted above, my assigning myself to the classes was not my first choice, and as a result of my other duties, the blended format was a matter of practicality even if program faculty had talked about a blended option before this semester. 
• Google Docs forms and mail-merge worked well to help with TA organization/task management, especially on major assignments. Some of the questions for individual assignments came from the rubrics for the assignments, and others were prompts so that I could turn everyone’s scores and comments into a letter to each individual student.² I think this system worked well both to use TA time wisely and to make sure students received the feedback they needed.
• My “conceptual scavenger hunt” assignment needs additional fine-tuning.³ This is an assignment I originally created last summer where I asked students to identify major course concepts and illustrate them using events in their own lives, in the lives of people they knew, or in news articles. In both the summer and this semester, I had students submit drafts of a subset, but students made the same types of mistakes on the final version as in the drafts, at least this semester, and they made some poor choices on concepts. I think I need to give them a restricted list of concepts and tell them they can only use events in their lives and the lives of people they knew personally. And maybe use the format for a few low-stakes pop-quizzes early in the semester.
• On the other hand, giving more choice to students in that assignment revealed a new misunderstanding of students: confusing the ways that people value both public and private purposes of schooling, on the one hand, with public and private schools, on the other. I need to figure this out, because I started the semester by exploring arguments over higher education as a private and public good. (Students don’t know that at the start of the first class: I just ask them what a USF degree is good for.) This is a critical concept in the course — you want future teachers and anyone else who takes the course to understand the tensions between different goals people have for schooling — and I need to help students with this. Oh, and we cannot really change the label to avoid the dual public/private terms: public good and private good are standard in economics.
• An interesting misunderstanding: in a few places, students conflated the discussion of normative ethics (and specifically virtue ethics) with the historical expectations that teachers will be morally upstanding. I think this is because both topics are in the same chapter in the current version of the text. But this is not the only example of students conflating historical debates with normative content–students readily misinterpret the early 19th century arguments over gender (specifically, part of the feminization of teaching could be attributed to beliefs that women were more nurturing and thus would be natural teachers) with an essentialist form of gender truth (the regular claim by students that teaching became feminized in the 19th century because women are more nurturing).
• I also discovered a brand-new student misunderstanding about social capital, but this one was all my fault. I was trying to explain the difference between human-capital models and social capital, and I blurted out, “In social capital, it’s not what you know but who you know,” and despite the illustrations I gave, a significant number of students conflated the sharing of information that’s typical of social capital with outright favoritism in job-seeking. Are they related? Absolutely! But they are not the same, and I obviously need a different explanation.
• I still struggle with explaining cultural capital, which I find the slipperiest major concept I emphasize in the course. I found a very good talk by Annette Lareau on Youtube that a few students said helped them, and I may make it (or parts of it) required viewing in future sections. But because cultural capital is a model about intangible habits, a sort of invisible college of social class, it is inevitably going to be a more difficult concept to teach.
• Long-term goals: There are important concepts that are about as difficult to explain as cultural capital, mostly around the politics of bureaucracy, and I know that improving how I teach them will require a good bit of experimentation. Right now, I present them in a lumpish fashion in a single chapter of the text. I know what you’re thinking: “Undergraduate class on school and society, a chapter devoted to the structure of policy and social-science models of bureaucracy. What could possibly go wrong?” I asked students to write songs about bureaucracy based on the chapter, which helped a little. But while I was excited as an undergraduate to learn about the historicist critique of structural-functionalism from David Karen,⁴ that really can’t be at the center of my class. My friend and colleague Barbara and I talked a few months ago about whether we really have the chance to include a comparison of structural-functionalism, conflict, and neoinstitutionalist models in an undergraduate class where few of the students have touched sociology, and now that you have read the beginning of the sentence, you know what her answer was.
• Another long-term goal: figuring out what pieces of critical theory to include and where. I sprinkle bits and pieces in the text, and my inclination is to write a seventh chapter of the text that will include critical theory and some other material labeled as advance topics. Maybe I should move some of the bureaucracy topics into that chapter.

That’s enough for now; grades are due today, and I have a few tasks left.

Notes

1. The textbook is currently missing an advanced-topics chapter on critical theory and a few other matters, as well as featurelets I am planning to add–I forget the text-publisher’s term for what I am calling a featurelet. As I have told my students, if I know that the major options for a text were all mediocre and overpriced, they should at least have a free mediocre text.
2. The process in a little more detail: a TA used Google Doc form to score and provide comments on each of her or his students’ work. I downloaded the spreadsheet, created a template document, and then used mail-merge to create and then edit the individual feedback letters. I divided the letters into groups based on TA and then sent the TAs their own sets of letters. All the TAs had to do at that point was go into Canvas, fill in the rubric, and copy and paste an individual student’s feedback letter into comments.
3. In this course, we have a number of common paper assignments for all sections in Tampa, but the conceptual scavenger hunt is something just in my sections.
4. Very briefly, a structural-functionalist model of schooling has a very difficult time explaining change except in the “it’s turtles all the way down” sense. Oh, I see that expression on your face: want some coffee?

Sports Reporter #1: Here comes Florida Atlantic associate professor Jim Tracy, just off his triple face-palm asserting a conspiracy over the Sandy Hook shootings.

Sports Reporter #2: Let’s see what he does here. Tracy is relatively new to high visibility academic nuttery, at least at this level of competition.

#1: Tracy looks at the timekeeper, reads the news, and … oh, my! He’s done it! A quadruple face-palm conspiracy claim!

#2: Let’s see what the judges think. They’re consulting and … it stands.

#1: Is this the first time that we’ve seen a quadruple face-palm in public?

#2: I think so. Tracy must have been practicing very hard in private to pull this one off.

#1: Up next is Niall Ferguson, well-known to our audience. He’s regularly performed triple face-palms, and he’s sure to have the confidence to try a quadruple in public.

#2: He’s a competitor, Ferguson is. With appointments at Harvard, Oxford, and the Hoover Institute, he has a reputation to uphold, and here is this upstart from Florida trying to take his crown away. He’s not going to take Tracy’s accomplishment lying down.

#1: But where will he go for a quadruple face-palm? He’s covered it all before.

#2: Let’s just watch. He’s at a conference talking with financial advisors this week.

#1: He’s up. He’s talking macroeconomics…

#2: Oh, my!

#1: He’s done it!

#2: He gay-bashed John Maynard Keynes!

#1: A second quadruple face-palm! First Tracy, and now Ferguson!

#2: Hold on. The judges are conferring and … yes, they want to be very careful here. Let’s not proclaim Ferguson a nutter on the level of Tracy without…

#1: They’re declaring it, Jim.

#2: Oh, yes. It’s confirmed.

#1: Niall Ferguson has landed more than a few triple face-palms in public before today, so we knew he was capable of it.

#2: But to see two academics perform quadruple face-palms in succession. It’s been quite a year.

The difference between Ferguson and Tracy? In terms of “accomplishments,” Tracy is much more limited, focusing on conspiracy theories, while Ferguson is happy to blather ignorantly about all sorts of topics. More importantly, for academic freedom, Tracy is at a public university, and since his conspiracy claims about Sandy Hook, there have been several calls for firing him, which have been repeated since his new claims about the bombing at the Boston Marathon. I see no just cause for firing Tracy based on his statements about either Sandy Hook or the bombing; Tracy’s claims are deeply wrong, but he has the academic freedom to make them without discipline or firing. Florida Atlantic’s leadership handled the first controversy poorly, using the tactic of complaining that Tracy did not distance himself from the institution.¹ That left the FAU administration in a worse situation in the last week. If FAU President Mary Jane Saunders had stated clearly that Tracy’s public statements were his public statements, period, end of story, then they would just need to repeat that claim today.

Harvard and Oxford do not need to make any such statements, because even though FAU has fewer options in firing a faculty member because it is a public employer, the political realities are that there will be more political pressure on public institutions, even though private institutions do not have the same legal obligations. The Hoover Institute could easily separate itself from Ferguson, but we’ll just have to wait to find out if they see any problems with the particular form of nuttiness that is Niall Ferguson.²

Addendum: We may have to reclassify Ferguson’s performance as only a double or triple face-palm after his apology.

Notes

1. Short explanation: when making statements in public, faculty should not pretend that they speak for their institution unless they really do. For faculty who have no administrative role, that is an obligation of omission: just don’t claim you’re speaking for anyone other than yourself. There is no obligation to go around with the verbal equivalent of a sign around their neck, “I’m speaking only for myself.” As a department chair, I have a slightly greater obligation: when commenting on issues related to my role as an administrator, such as in educator preparation, I do my best to make clear on this blog that my policy views are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my two dozen department colleagues or my college.
2. Note: my original blog entry misattributed any potential tolerance to Jim DeMint, who I erroneously identified as the head of Hoover. Mr. DeMint is instead the head of the Heritage Foundation.

For some years now, I have been giving undergraduate students a 24-hour “grace period” after the formal deadline for papers. If a student is trying to upload a paper five minutes before a deadline and the student loses her internet connection, I don’t need the hassle of making a decision on where to give extensions, and the student doesn’t need the stress of uncontrollable technical problems compounding what she should be doing (writing the paper). So if there are technical problems right before the deadline, no big deal: go to bed, wake up the next morning, and upload the paper during the grace period. No late penalty applies. (Currently, I apply a 20% penalty for papers submitted after the grace period but within the week after the deadline, after which credit is not available. But the specifics do not matter as much as the concept of a short period that functions as a margin of error.)

Some students make a choice to wait until the grace period before finishing the paper (or, in some cases, starting the paper). I make clear to students that I do not know and do not care why a student uploaded the paper in the grace period. But… any problems that arise from a student’s choice to procrastinate are not an excuse any longer.

Having a grace period also allows me to be generous in offering help with drafts without rewarding procrastination: I am happy to comment on drafts submitted before the deadline. But if you view the grace period as an invitation to wait until after the last minute, feedback is no longer available.