Deans' Weblog: Dalhousie Graduate Studies

Teamwork and Contribution

As many of you know, I came to academic life relatively late, i.e., after 25+ years working in the public sector, the private sector, and as an independent management consultant. The initial transition was not smooth, and there are a number of people who say it is incomplete :).

One of the biggest surprises to me was around the related question of teamwork and contribution. Outside the academy in absolutely every working environment there were clear teamwork expectations. Of course there was a predictable variation in capacity and contribution, but a combination of performance review processes and peer pressure tended to keep most people on track.

I've talked to many academics about the issue of differential contributions by people; the general view holds the following things to be true:

• there is often a huge variation in the practices and in performance among academic units, and among individuals ostensibly of the same rank and approximately the same pay;
• local peer pressure at the unit level is more likely than anything institutional;
• "social loafing" - to use the organizational behavior term - seems more acceptable in some academic settings.

I had a look in scholar.google.com for research on the last matter.  A quick review yielded lots of studies on student social loafing, "free riding", "coat-tailing" - pick your noun of choice, but I could not find one studying the phenomenon among faculty members.  The phenomenon surely exists. Does anyone know of any research on the topic?

One of the consequences is that we continue to depend on a group of committed contributors for the many "service" needs we have in Grad Studies, needs such as:

• members for a nominating committee for Faculty Council;
• members for an award committee to adjudicate winners of academic and service awards (many of the volunteers on the committee deserve to be nominated for the service award they are judging!);
• members to serve on the search committee for the next Dean.

This last bullet is especially problematic. The choice of decanal leadership is a serious opportunity and risk too. The inimitable Marsha Scott, the administrator in the office, brightly suggested that the selection of the Dean could be delegated to university staff instead of faculty. She's pretty sure she could round up a panel of volunteers in about 15 minutes, even on a Friday afternoon.

Maybe that's worth considering...

In the meantime, one rule continues to be true. If you want something done, you have to ask a busy person. We in FGS are truly grateful for the busy folks on FGS Council that continue to prove the rule. We can name a dozen people who are carrying the load for a hundred.

 

Sunny

 

 

 

Oil and Water / Management and Academics

It's been a long week, what with the return trip from China on university business.

It turns out that 18 hours encased in an aluminum capsule travelling across 12 time zones does not improve the cognition. China is a long way away - virtually on the other side of the globe. And their developing commitment to research and education seemed to be a natural topic for this blog.

And it was. Right up to the point where Dieter came into my office this afternoon with an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

For those of you not interested in wading through the original post and the 40+ comments accompanying the article, the basic argument is straightforward. Universities have to make difficult resource allocation decisions that can (and likely should) involve getting rid of some courses, possibly some programs, and possibly some faculty positions.

The article partly makes the point through a comparison of the fictitious but presumably credible teaching load of the Spanish program in contrast with the teaching load of the Serbian program. The development of the argument then drew an inference between Serbian as a choice and German. Needless to say this logic drew the ire of a number of academics who demonstrated their critical thinking competencies by launching a variety of ad hominem attacks on the author and the institution he represents.

I may regret the following thoughts, but...  Perhaps he should not have made the contrast with a living European language (i.e., German), the language of great philosophers, mathematicians, musicians, etc. Perhaps he should have compared it to the various university courses featuring Klingon. I assume there would have been less vigorous defence; perhaps not.

The point (that there are hard trade-offs to be made) seems clear and totally obvious to me, but then I spent most of my life outside of the academy. The notion of active management does not produce an automatic knee-jerk reaction of horror for me the way it seems to among some of my academic colleagues.They often mistake the noun phrase "expensive unnecessary redundant institutional bureaucracy" with the verb "manage".

Folks at this university once asked me to give a presentation to cancer researchers on management in the research setting. My first question to the assembled multitude - "how many people here signed up to be researchers?"  All of the hands go up.  My second question - "how many of you signed up to be managers?".  None of the hands go up. So great was the horrified look crossing a number of faces, it seemed as if the question had been "do you abuse small animals for amusement?"

My next step was to introduce a working definition of management, my own attempt at the trade off between completeness and succinctness. "Management is the art, craft, and science of acquiring, allocating, integrating, deploying, and sustaining constrained resources to get the best possible outcomes." The next 75 minutes we examined the particulars of the constituent phrases, beginning with "the best possible outcomes".  This phrase necessarily requires someone to have thought about strategic intent, about aims, goals and objective (to use Edward de Bono's construct), about what purposes the institution intends to serve, about what is important compared to what might be interesting.

At the end of 75 minutes comes the last question - "how many of you are managers?"  All of the hands go up.

So it is for every one of us in the academy. We are all managers. We each have an obligation to recognize the limitations of the resources which others will allocate to us, and to consider how to manage those resources as effectively as possible. Whatever the list of competing demands (from a wide variety  of competing stakeholders, including individual faculty members who will have personal intellectual interest to pursue), there will NEVER be enough resources to pursue them all effectively.  At some point if we want to do something new or if we want to do something better, or if we want to do  more of something, we may have to stop doing something else.

The notion we can continue to add to our opportunities and responsibilities incrementally without making hard choices is the thinking we expect from children. So let's make the choices intelligently and act like grown-ups. Getting the best value out of the resources that others give us is a moral obligation, however difficult it might be to measure "value". One other thing deserves careful note. We have an obligation to communicate the value of what we do in an ongoing way in order to get the resources we need to do our work.

And if anyone thinks they might benefit from the the 90 minute articulation of "management in the research setting", let me know. The presentation is ready to go.  In the meantime, wise people will remember that a man will stand on the top of a hill for a long time with his mouth open before a roast duck will fly in.  In the academy, we'd better work hard at demonstrating our value.

 

Sunny

Learning Outcomes

There were a couple of presentations planned last week here at Dalhousie around the topic of choosing a vendor with software for recording student learning outcomes.  On the face of it, this hardly seems like news. Except of course for the fact this is 2010, and we don't have such a formal system in place already. We have a way of recording grades, of course, but that isn't the same thing at all, is it?

In all of the counsel I have had about becoming a better academic in the last 10 years, while moving through the various stages of tenure and promotion, the phrase "learning outcome" was never mentioned to my recollection. "Teaching" was frequently mentioned of course, but "learning"? - not so much.  Maybe everyone was assuming some kind of immutable relationship between these two activities.

As a person who works assiduously at hiding the fact he has an undergraduate degree in economics, I can assure you such a relationship is primarily theoretical, and often very tenuous. I had good teachers and I learned very little.

In the early days of my university career, I learned that the harder I worked at teaching the more I learned about the subject. Needless to say, this is not what the university of was paying 40% of my salary for. Gradually I figured out that there was different guideline worth considering: the harder the students worked, the more they learned.

This guideline is subject to a number of important cautions.  The activities the students work hard at have to be specifically designed to improve the likelihood of them learning something worthwhile, and if possible, learning something related to the course. These are different ideas. (In an e-commerce course, I had the students submit five different reading and analysis portfolios on e-commerce in the context of a company of their choosing. When questioned about what they had learned from the experience, one student said he was astonished at how much he could produce in five chunks compared to what he could produce in one extended chunk. A great lesson. Nothing to do with the course.)

At the end of the first presentation, it occurred to me that the biggest challenge of the project is not going to be choosing a software vendor. It's going to be getting the faculty to articulate what learning outcomes they seek in each course, and how each student activity is connected to the learning outcome, and what might count as evidence the learning outcome was achieved.

This is going to be a non-trivial challenge, but a worthwhile one, it seems to me. The initiative is focussed on one of our undergraduate programs, but why wouldn't this apply to graduate course and program quality measures too?

Sunny

Communicating Value

One of the challenges of contributing to this blog every three weeks is coming up with a topic. Some weeks the topic is ready-to-hand, some weeks produce a blank, and then some weeks offer too much in the way of choice.  For this week, it was the latter. 

There is the potential impact of the Obama factor on post-secondary education in America that may have direct impact on Canadian universities. There is the draft Canadian budget with its various connections to universities in general and Dal particularly. Then there is what is on my mind personally, chiefly the presentation I gave this morning to the Human Resource Professionals Association's conference.

As it turns out, they are inter-related. My topic this morning was not exactly ground-breaking and innovative, focussed as it was on the notion of the "value proposition".  I think of these presentations the way most people think of going to church.  You don't expect the message to be any different week to week, but it's probably a good thing to be reminded of it.

The principle of the "value proposition" is that organizations must clearly articulate how they are valuable, and this value statement must be expressed not from their own perspective, but from the viewpoint of those who they serve.  This last point is something we don't do particularly well at universities, in my experience.

Of course the presentation this morning focussed primarily on the idea in the context of HR folks, but the principle applies to every organization. Not only is it important for the organization as a whole, but the idea applies to every subset of the organization, too. The importance of the "value proposition" concept cascades down through the various levels, becoming more and more specific, until it lands on the desk of each and every one of us.

Clearly American post-secondary institutions have been clearer to their leaders about their value than we have, given the evidence of the recent responses of the two national governments.  Of course, it's easy to take the position that our leaders are obtuse, or insensitive to our arguments, or more sensitive to the arguments of others, or some combination.  This may or may not be true, but it's our job to create a clearer more compelling message whatever the communication challenges.  And judging from the front page news item in today's Globe and Mail, we have not done a good enough job on the science research front.

Such a message can only begin with an understanding of what is actually valuable to others, how we serve those needs, and what language communicates this value effectively. 

It's a major challenge indeed. It is also not optional.

Sunny

What's a University For?

What could be more important than the education of a society?  It is the foundation of all wealth (whether material, social, emotional, or spiritual), depending on developing the full potential of each and every citizen. As the world becomes more and more complex, the question of how to develop the nascent potential of a people becomes more and more complex too. 

It is the modern university where we find the leading edge of the creation and dissemination of knowledge in society. Institutions of higher learning continue to create the building blocks of a productive and caring society through their discoveries and their graduates. However, they are under pressure to adapt to a constantly evolving world. The question they face is easy to pose and difficult to answer – change to what?  What is a university for – today and tomorrow?

The long traditions of these institutions are both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, they provide a rich foundation of intellectual tradition and openness to inquiry.  On the other hand it is not clear whether this intellectual tradition serves the needs of modern society or whether it acts as a barrier to productive and effective change.  It is one of the paradoxes of universities that their self-perception is one of leading edge thinking while at the same time they are extremely conservative and slow to change as organizations. 

One of the reasons for this resistance to change is found in the many intellectual communities in the university.  These different and differing communities do not themselves share a common view about what the university is for.  Therefore within the university itself, there is no consensus that might form the basis for creating momentum for change.  For example, there is the traditional community of scholars such as the classicists, Shakespearean scholars, and those souls who continue to keep alive ancient Greek and Latin.  This particular community has a strong interest in knowledge for its own sake, rather than knowledge for its instrumental value.

Then there is a significant element of the university community which clearly is involved in what can only fairly be described as "vocational training".  Examples of this would be the medical school, the dental school, pharmacy, and perhaps even engineering.  Even in the case of these four professions, the training and education we give our students is inadequate for them to practice these professions. The graduates of these programs must still complete significant training to prepare them for practice in the community and this training is delivered outside of the university.

There are probably communities which belong between these two extremes.  An example of this would be the business school.  While one might imagine that their programs are highly vocational in nature, one would be wrong in this thinking.  Most of the instruction given in commerce and business administration courses is primarily academic and in fact not skills-based.

There is not much discussion among these different academic communities on the topic of the fundamental purpose of the institution as a whole. The lack of any sustained and meaningful discussion on the topic is probably because there is a substantial amount of tension among the different intellectual communities on campus.  Rather than confront and explore the tensions, the professoriate finds it more convenient to simply ignore these differences and continue with "business as usual".  Not only is it more convenient to ignore each other, the professoriate does not want to take into consideration the broader range of people who have an interest and an opinion about the role of the modern university.

It is inconvenient to consider other stakeholders such as the students, the parents of students, prospective employers, governments that fund the universities, and the community at large.  If we include the perspectives of this broader set of people with an interest in what happens at the university, the story gets rapidly more complex.

This is yet another opportunity for discord between those communities interested in instrumental knowledge (e.g., students and their parents who hope that graduates are being prepared in some meaningful way, however indirectly, for the transition to the workplace) and those who are interested in knowledge for its own sake.  It is clear that there is a middle ground between these two extremes but it is difficult to get the representatives of these different positions to explore what that middle ground might look like.

Universities are now large expensive complex enterprises. Dalhousie University itself has an annual budget of very close to one quarter of a billion dollars.  As the old saying attributed to the American politician Everett Dirksen has it, a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there -- pretty soon we are talking real money.  The people who provide these resources (i.e. the extended stakeholders - government, students, and the public more generally) are going to be insisting on higher levels of accountability.

Wise administrations will anticipate these new levels of accountability and prepare themselves to articulate more completely the answer to the question "what is a university for?" And in answering the question, we will take into account a much wider audience of interest.

 

Sunny

 

 

 

 

Home for the Holidays

Walking out of the building today gave rise to a reflective moment for me. The door decorating contest is over, the sweet treats packed up, the songs of the seasons turned off, we have embraced our colleagues and team-mates for the last time this year, and we have closed the office doors to go home for the holidays.

The halls of the academy have now gone quiet, almost silent, here on the winter solstice. This the shortest day of the year - its very darkest point.  Ancient societies always worried about this: what if the sun did not return? What if we are condemned to ever-increasing darkness? We know better now, of course, but most of us in North America are pleased to celebrate the ceremonies of the light, whether it is the miracle of Hannakuh, or the birth of the Son, or both.

There are still other things to fear, such as ignorance, poverty, misunderstanding, hatred. Living and working at a university is a great place to light a candle against these darknesses. Far more satisfying than cursing them.  But keeping this candle lit is not easy work, in my experience.  Not easy for most students. Not easy for faculty and staff. Not easy for administrators. For there is never enough money to do what we want. There is never enough time.

So I am looking forward to a rest, to go home for the holidays. And if you are not able to go home for the holidays, we hope you can celebrate in your heart, which is where your real home will be in any event.   The Deans and staff of the Faculty of Graduate Studies wish you a Happy Hannakuh, and a Merry Christmas!

Sunny