Category: faculty

457. Intellectual Property

Posted in faculty, higher education, intellectual property, teaching, writing
August 5, 2026

Faculty create large quantities of content, but aren’t always aware of their intellectual property rights, or lack thereof. In this episode, Kent Kauffman joins us to discuss legal issues associated with copyright law. Kent is a Professor of Business Law and MBA Programs Faculty Liaison in the Doermer School of Business at Purdue University Fort Wayne. He is also the author of Navigating Choppy Waters: Key Legal Issues College Faculty Need to Know.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Faculty create large quantities of content, but aren’t always aware of their intellectual property rights, or lack thereof. In this episode, we explore legal issues associated with copyright law.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Kent Kauffman, a Professor of Business Law and MBA Programs Faculty Liaison in the Doermer School of Business at Purdue University Fort Wayne. He is also the author of Navigating Choppy Waters: Key Legal Issues College Faculty Need to Know. Welcome back, Kent.

Kent: Thank you very much for having me. I’m always glad to talk with the two of you, and I appreciate the invitation again to be on your awesome podcast.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Kent, are you drinking tea with us today?

Kent: I am drinking tea with you today. Due to the heat here in Indiana, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly, but I’ve been drinking the Luzianne iced tea, where the tea bags are turned into an iced tea. So that’s my tea of choice as of late.

Rebecca: Something nice and cool seems like a good option in the heat.

Kent: Absolutely.

John: It’s a hot summer pretty much everywhere. And I am drinking a blueberry green tea.

Rebecca: Green must be the theme in here because I also have green tea today, John. I have a jasmine green.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: Looking for something lighter for the summer. [LAUGHTER]

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss intellectual property issues for faculty. One issue that comes up fairly often for faculty is the question of ownership of course materials that are created by faculty. Who owns the copyright to course materials that is stored in a learning management system.

Kent: Well, I think that’s a really needful and urgent question, and to me, it sort of parallels the urgency of academic freedom issues that faculty face right now. Because both of those issues involve finding out well, what what are my rights, whether it’s my right to teach and research the way my discipline respects, or my rights with respect to the work products I create that are attendant to, in this case, my teaching and also my scholarship as well. So if I can just do a quick tutorial, and I’ll try not to take too much time on this. I think of intellectual property like three siblings and a cousin that’s like invited to Thanksgiving dinner, but isn’t really a part of the family, and the siblings are trademarks and patents and copyrights, and that distant cousin is the trade secret. And the difference I see is this: intellectual property traditionally gets its value from being publicly displayed. That’s the point. What is the value of a song if no one’s ever heard you play it or sing it? What’s the value of a script if no one’s ever said it somewhere? And so intellectual property law, federal law, by statute, protects those particular aspects of our creative property. Trade secret law actually is protected by you, and so there’s a completely different way that we get value out of hiding something that we think is valuable, and that’s trade secret law. For us and copyright, for which faculty more than any other intellectual property, notwithstanding some faculty might deal in patent creation, but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion. But as it concerns copyrights, I think the first question to ask is, “What are we creating that is actually worthy of copyright?” And that’s not to be insulting. That’s just to say, by way of background, copyright does not protect our ideas. Don’t tell someone your great idea. Keep it to yourself. Copyright law protects the expression of your ideas. What the statute calls when your ideas are “put into a tangible medium of expression,” or what I might say, a fixed medium of expression. Your podcast is an example. By talking into this recording device, there’s copyright created automatically because this is a recording of the expression of our ideas. So once we understand that copyright protects our work automatically, we don’t need to seek a copyright registration to get that protection. The beautiful thing about it is it protects it automatically once it’s put into a fixed or tangible medium of expression, but the next question is, and this is the perhaps insulting part, is “What are we doing that’s worthy of copyright protection?” Because that requires creativity, and there is a Supreme Court case involving the phone book to which many younger listeners might say, “What’s that?” [LAUGHTER] But there was a lawsuit over the phone book because a competing company was using the white pages out of a phone book, and that went to the Supreme Court of the United States, and they had to answer the question, “What here is worthy of copyright?” And just to cut to the chase, the yellow pages are protected by copyright, but the white pages are not because there’s no creativity in assembling people’s names and addresses. And one feature the court mentioned is that copyright requires that your work have a spark, that was their word or a modicum, their word, of creativity. So if we think about that, the question then becomes: “Am I doing something that is put into a tangible medium of expression that is worthy of copyright that is instructional materials?” The foundational document probably is the syllabus. I think of the syllabus as the starter yeast of academia because it began somewhere else and it keeps getting handed over and over again as new things are added to it. And so, where I work, my syllabi is longer than it’s ever been – not by design, but because new parts must be added to it. Well, I don’t own a copyright in the works of others, so we jump out of that for a second. If I’m creating PowerPoints or tests or any other materials that come from the publisher of the textbook I might use, then I have no copyright in those materials whatsoever. So then we say, okay, is my syllabus copyrightable if I have enough of my own original content in it. That’s a worthy question.

If you think that you have enough originality, creativity, that your compilation of facts, which can qualify for copyright, are original enough, then you might be able to say it belongs to me. There can be a problem with that because one might argue that the syllabus is the department’s document as opposed to your document, since even if you’ve created the class, it’s still under the aegis of your department and your university as well. But in terms of these instructional materials, whether it’s a syllabus or PowerPoints, tests, really interesting essay assignments or projects that students do, I would argue that a lot of those can be worthy of copyright protection because they are first put in a fixed medium of expression because they’re written down digitally or on paper, and I would say that really, for faculty that care about what they’re doing and trying to make a vibrant life out of their classes, absolutely they can be protected by copyright because they meet those modicum standards, those spark standards of creativity. So yes, I would say this, from an initial standpoint, if you believe that your work meets that expectation of creativity, then you could make the argument that your instructional materials could be copyrightable and belong to you, but there’s this however, and the however might lead to the next topic, which is instructional or institutional policy.

Rebecca: I can imagine that if folks were looking at copyright law at face value, they might assume that this would fall under works for hire because it’s part of your job, maybe, to create instructional materials. So, can you talk a little bit more about where this role of institutional policy kind of dovetails with the law here in determining who has the copyright to these materials?

Kent: Yeah, there’s two issues there to think about, and one is policy, and the other is works for hire. And if I can just swing around to the policy issue, and then get to works for hire next. The beauty from an employment standpoint is that universities, and I’m saying this not as an employer, but from their standpoint, the beauty is that they can create institutional policy that also covers intellectual property. And one way that a lot of universities cover our instructional materials is that they will define categories of work we create at a university, and those are usually three types: traditionally administrative, and then scholarly, and then instructional. Now, someone like me who’s really a big believer of scholarly teaching… One could argue that teaching materials or instructional materials could fall into the category of being scholarly, but that’s again another discussion. As it concerns administrative materials. If you at your university are doing a teaching evaluation of a tenure-track faculty member, no matter how well you write that letter, it’s likely not to belong to you because universities categorize those documents as simply being university-owned property. As it concerns scholarly works, peer-reviewed papers, poster presentations, books we write. What I find interesting there is that: 1. universities tend to exempt themselves from ownership of those to start with, which I think is almost a moot point because I have to transfer copyright to those works anyways to the publisher generally to get them published. And there is open-access publications, I realize that, but still we live in a world where lots of our publications are conditioned on our releasing our copyright. So my university can’t claim ownership to my books, for instance, because I don’t have any ownership [LAUGHTER] to my books as well. So then the next thing is the instructional materials, and here we get a situation where universities do something that I think I’m not comfortable with it. But what happens is they often will say you own your instructional materials, but you have granted to us, by condition of employment, a non-exclusive license to use your materials, and the key there is, if you look at your institutional policy, if it has that, is it will often say non-exclusive because an exclusive license, similar to a transfer of copyright, requires both signatures. I must sign, and so must the proper agent of the institution sign as well. But a non-exclusive license doesn’t need signatures. And so, for instance, Purdue’s policy, the university-wide policy, not just where I work at Fort Wayne, but across all of Purdue institutions, is a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual license. To me, that means that as it concerns my instructional materials that are in… and Purdue uses what’s called Brightspace as its LMS… all of that is, in my view, effectively co-owned by Purdue, not owned because they granted me the right to keep my copyright, which is an interesting language phenomena to say we allow you to keep something that you already own as the author of the copyrighted material, but a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free license does mean that they can use my materials, everything in Brightspace or anyone’s LMS for as long as they want, no matter if I work there or not. Some institutions limit that, they might provide a royalty structure if they’re using your materials in a class you don’t teach. Other institutions might say we will cease using your materials if and when you cease working for us. And those are nice, gracious ways of sort of managing that. But to faculty that put their instructional materials on an LMS, as almost all of us do nowadays, I would say yes, you still would own what is worthy of being owned for copyright purposes, but you sort of now have a co-owner, effectively by your employer, who has taken a non-exclusive or maybe even an exclusive license in them. But the work for hire situation is a different angle to this. There’s two ways to create a work for hire, which would mean that the author is not even the copyright holder. They’ve transferred the copyright altogether. The first is the easy one, and that’s where I transfer my work as an independent contractor to the hiring party, and that requires two signatures there.

A couple years ago, I wrote scripts for some educational cartoons for a business law course that was online, and I created the subjects for what they were looking for. They approved them. Then I gave them ideas, and they approved them. Then I wrote scripts for educational cartoons, and they approved those as well. Well, none of those I own because that contract, being a work-for-hire independent contract, meant that they own all my work. The other way is what is known as what creative works that we produce in the scope or in the course of our employment, and that’s another part of the copyright code. And the scope of employment doctrine is an agency law doctrine that says that if I’m hired to do certain types of things that might involve creating intellectual property, my employer gets them automatically, not by needing a signature because I’m creating them in the scope or course of my employment. For faculty, an outsider might say, “Well, everything you do is in the scope of employment, and therefore, wouldn’t your university own them all? Well, yes and no. And to the no part, I’m not a greeting card writer at Hallmark, so I can’t disclaim some of my really pithy statements and say, “Well, I own this one because I’m hired to do that.” But as agency law looks at what faculty do, as it concerns instructional materials, it’s a confusing world. Is that in the scope of my employment? There’s no consensus on that. Some courts will say it is in the scope of your employment, particularly as it concerns curricular materials. There’s a case, I find it kind of sad, where a woman… she was a department chair at a two-year college tasked with creating a whole new program at her college within her discipline… and eventually she was let go and she brought an age discrimination claim and along the way she filed copyright registrations for the curricular documents that she created. One doesn’t have to do that to own them, but one needs to do that if they’re going to sue someone for infringing their copyright. Well, she lost on both counts and, as concerned the copyright issue, the court said part of her job as a department chair included doing things like creating new curricular materials, and those are clearly the work of her employer. But for regular faculty who are creating courses, not new courses by way of a grant, so if you’re hired to create a new course by way of a grant, that’s a work for hire in the first category. You’re going to sign a document and give up your rights to that material. But for the work we create that’s regular instructional work, there isn’t consensus, in my opinion, legally on whether that really is work for hire, and therefore we don’t own it, anyways. But if there’s an institutional policy that actually carves out the whole work-for-hire concept. So for instance, I know that my instruction materials are not work for hire at Purdue because the institutional intellectual property policy already says I own them and grant them a license. Well, therefore, it’s not work for hire because they said I own them; in a work-for-hire situation, I wouldn’t own them to start with.

John: I know in the SUNY system, any work that’s created for online classes, as part of an agreement with the union, copyright is maintained by the faculty members, however, at least a number of institutions have worked with adjuncts to develop courses as works for hire as a way around that. So that we have a mix of both of those in SUNY. I think that Oswego, we allow the creators to own the copyright unless there’s a work-for-hire arrangement that overrides those conditions. So most of the issues that I’ve seen have been in terms of online content that’s created. But what about lectures that are delivered in person? Do you own the rights to those?

Kent: There’s the question. I enjoy face-to-face classes. I certainly am happy to have online classes, and I take them very seriously. I want to make them vibrant, but I still really enjoy being in a room with people and having a dialog. Here’s an interesting case. So there was a lady who called herself the Banana Lady. You can look her up online. She dresses in a banana costume, and she does like corporate events. But what she really does is she tends to sue people who take pictures of her at her events and claim that these are copyright infringements. And in the federal court system here in Indiana, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals not only ruled against her, but one thing that they said was she was trying to sort of gin up litigation. But they said that people taking photos of her aren’t infringing on her copyright because she wasn’t recording herself doing her banana woman sort of dance routine stuff. So that’s the starting point. If you’re not recording yourself in class, then you’re not creating a tangible medium expression of your teaching, no matter how creative it might be. So, A) are you recording it? B) is who’s recording it, because if your university is recording it either automatically or that you use university technology to record it, I would regrettably argue that that’s not your property. It’s probably your employer’s property if you’re using its technology as the conduit for creating a tangible medium of expression. If you’re recording it yourself and your university is recording it, I think you could claim you have ownership over what you yourself are recording. But if you’re not recording it, there’s no copyright, and that goes to everything. If you put notes on a blackboard, you’re putting it in a tangible medium of expression. But if you’re erasing it, it’s gone anyways. And so the question becomes: “Well, then, what do students own if they’re taking notes from what I’m doing in class?” If they’re taking notes from what you’re saying and you’re not recording it, they have a valid claim that they own their notes. Again, something can be not worthy of copyright, but still be your property. Copyright is a type of property, so I could own something that’s not worthy of copyright. That’s what trade secrets are all about. So that a business who has a client list they believe is a trade secret property that’s not copyrightable, but it’s still their property. So I’m not saying a student owns the copyright in their class notes because that’s a copyright creativity question. But they could argue they own those notes if they’re taking notes off of what I’m saying. If they’re taking notes off of my powerpoints, and my powerpoints belong to me. I would argue that they’re actually just simply transcribing what is already mine, and they don’t own that. There are some cases, very few, but they’re out there, where faculty have sued publishing companies because in some really large universities, publishing companies might sell you notes for the classes that you’re taking that are highly common large enrollment classes, and faculty have sued saying that’s actually my property, but students are selling those notes to publishing companies, who then create study guides out of them. That’s a really thorny question because if they’re simply transcribing what is your property, you’re not transferring your property to them. So that would be a copyright infringement. One area is what’s called transformative use, which is a part of what’s called the fair-use doctrine, which allows a person to raise a defense to copyright infringement by arguing a statute in the code called the fair-use doctrine. And fair use is about limited usage of some of those copyrighted work for reasons that not are allowable, but are part of the variables for determining if you’re committing a non-violation of a use of some else’s material. Transformative use says if I use your material in a way that’s completely different than how you used it, I have transformed your purpose into a new purpose.

So you could perhaps find a situation where a very creative student is creating a graphic novel out of their class notes that might qualify as transformative use, and they might say that’s a brand new thing, and it might belong to me separately. So just to sum that up, if you’re not recording your work, then someone could claim ownership in it, and that could include notes. If you’re in a situation where students are taking down as notes what you’ve already created in a tangible form, generally speaking, that’s not their property. That’s your property.

Rebecca: So, on the theme of recording, we’ve talked a bit about posting materials on the learning management system and maybe sharing through the learning management system. But many faculty also use third-party sites like YouTube or Vimeo that have licenses very similar to what you described at Purdue. [LAUGHTER]

Kent: Yes, right.

Rebecca: So, how does copyright work for those situations or ownership in those contexts?

Kent: That’s a really interesting and strategically powerful question, and I show my students when it comes to the section in business law and intellectual property, I show them Instagram and Meta’s terms of service for example because what they may not realize is that they’re actually granting co-ownership of their property to those sites, and the language is quite broad. It’s hard to find, but it’s quite broad. So you’re raising an interesting question that if I’m putting instructional materials that I’ve created on a third-party site, as opposed to my own hosted site, I’m actually transferring rights to that site. That is a really scary question. I would say the answer is yes, just because vacation pictures aren’t the only thing that social media companies care about claiming as their property as well. But as a general question to conflict of university ownership, you could make an argument that the university can only license to themselves what’s in their system, and therefore there’s no way for them to use what’s in a third-party system because they have no access to it. So if you provide students links to external sites, which may include third-party sites, I think you can get around that licensing issue because it faces like an efficacy problem where it’s just simply not feasible for the institution to get access to it. It wouldn’t take very long for their lawyers to draft new policy that would say you can’t use third-party sites for our classes because even though I don’t think FERPA would have any bearing on this, you could just simply call it a FERPA risk issue. You could call it anything that a lawyer would want to call it. So they could marshal those back into the institutional LMS. They could also say that you must provide them copies of what you create for your courses out of a courtesy of making sure the curriculum is consistent. So they could get around that, and then you’re back to where you perhaps have started. So that could be an issue down the road. But I think initially, certainly on your own created site, you would maintain all ownership over those materials. And if you give students access to those materials, again, you’re not transferring copyright to them. In a way, you’re almost giving them a limited license to have access to your materials, not really sharing ownership of it with them.

John: On a related note, suppose that you’re writing a book and you share drafts of it with your students in an LMS. Are you giving up some of your property rights to that material if the course was created as a work for hire?

Kent: That is a super scary question, and I would say that generous heart of saying “let me share some materials with you” might inadvertently cause you to sort of step on your own rake head there and find out that you got slapped with the realization that you’re losing ownership rights over that material. If it’s protected by copyright… I have put drafts of books that I’ve written, chapters or parts of chapters, into an LMS to share with students as well as an alternative to maybe the book I choose for the course and say here’s an alternative way of looking at the material because that’s already owned by the publishing company. I’m not granting them any rights because I don’t have rights to own it as well. But unpublished work that you maintain the copyright in because you own it as soon as you write it, putting it in an LMS in a way at least grants a license to that, unless you figure out a way to scrub it from your LMS at the end of the semester and remove it as an archived piece of information.

Rebecca: AI has been a very popular [LAUGHTER] topic on this podcast and just in general, and folks are certainly utilizing generative AI platforms to edit materials, enhance their work, use it as a dialog for feedback, and those kinds of things. So, does the user own any rights to images, text, and other content that they’re using generative AI to create?

Kent: Boy, here we go. Who can take another AI discussion, right? It’s like when the zeitgeist has become full tilt, and we just can’t take it anymore. But this is relevant, and it really is a needful question for faculty to think about. So, if I can just do a background on AI and give you a lawsuit involving an Indonesian monkey. So a British photographer named David Slater became friendly with some monkeys in Indonesia as a wildlife photographer. He gave them names. One was named Naruto. He gave them his 35 millimeter camera, and then they started taking pictures of themselves. He then published a book of monkey selfies, which is charming in a variety of different ways. And in came people for the ethical treatment of animals, PETA, who on behalf of this monkey named Naruto sued the author of the selfie book in American court, alleging he violated the copyright of the monkey who took the pictures. I wish I could make that up. I lack that creativity. The upshot of that lawsuit, as it relates to AI, and it does, is this: unlike Solomon, everybody lost. PETA was thrown out of court in effect for saying you have no standing to bring a lawsuit on behalfof a monkey in Indonesia. The photographer lost because he didn’t take the photographs, so he didn’t have the copyright in them. Now you might say, “Well, didn’t the monkeys take them for him?” No, they’re not his employees, so it’s not a work-for-hire monkey selfie book he was working on. Poor Naruto lost as well, ultimately because of this. Copyright law is clear. To be an author, that doesn’t mean just for written word, that means for anything that’s copyrightable. to be an author, you must be a human being. Now, by way of contrast, corporations are persons under the Constitution, but the word “person” is not the word “human being.” So, to be a copyright author, you must be a human being. That moves us a few years later to AI. Nothing that comes out of large language model AI is copyrightable. Now, if we get to this, it’s to me copyright infringement, but it’s not copyrightable because a computer is not a human being. So no matter what it is, if it comes out of generative LLM AI, it is not copyrightable. We know of this for two reasons. One, there’s an interesting case where a super smart guy created his own AI system and had it create some sort of impressionist style painting that he gave a title to, I think it’s called “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” and he sought a copyright registration for it. It was denied. He went through the court system as far as you can go, and he lost every time because AI is not an author and it can’t be. He tried a second bite at the apple by saying that the computer system he generated was a work for hire, and he owned the work itself. And the court’s like, you know what? Again, work for hire start with a copyright author, that has to be a human being. Now that means we know that from case law, and the Copyright Office in 2023 issued a very long pamphlet statement, which clearly states this: there is no copyright in AI-generated work at all. Here comes the however, and there is one, and they did say this, and there’s a case on it. They said there could be, on a case-by-case basis, a copyright granted to what the copyright office called AI-assisted work, not AI- generated work. I would just say, by a quick analogy as an example, if I ask AI to write an essay for me, or let’s just make it worse, let’s make it a paper, let’s go there. I ask AI to write me a paper I want to get published, and then I take what they give me and then I edit it myself. Not only is that unethical and should be unpublishable, it’s not copyrightable because that came out of AI.

But suppose I write an essay that I’d like to get published on today’s educational issues going on in America, and the requirement is that it must be 2500 words, and I just can’t get down from 2700. If I put that into the AI system and ask it to get me to 2500, I would argue that I still own the copyright in that because I used AI to assist me in a relatively minor editing method, as opposed to, in effect, co-generate with me. So case-by-case basis for AI-assisted work, but AI-generated work there is no copyright whatsoever.

Rebecca: I’m so glad you shared some of these stories. These are some of the cases I like to share with my art and design students. [LAUGHTER]

Kent: Well, can I do an art design for you? [LAUGHTER] Because the case I’m thinking of is… and I’m terrible with names. The name has slipped me, but a person used AI to write a graphic novel. I’m old enough to call them comic books, but I guess that shows I’m too old to not know they’re graphic novels. But a really interesting looking graphic novel in which AI was used to generate all the art, and when that author of the graphic novel saw the copyright in it, it was denied because it was AI-generated art, and then the author sought a rehearing, you might say, of that, and they got a Solomon-like outcome in which the copyright office said, “Okay, here’s the thing: you own the words that are in the bubbles in your graphic novel, and you own the placement of them with the AI-generated art, but you do not own the AI-generated art.” So that means if I wanted to use any visual from that graphic novel, I am free and clear to do so because nobody owns it. But I can’t use the cells because the cells are copyrightable, and certainly the language inside those thought bubbles are copyrightable as well.

John: What if you write something and then you run it through AI and it makes some suggestions for change and you adopt those suggestions? Does it depend on the extent of AI assistance in terms of that case-by-case analysis, or would it be determined on where the thoughts originated, whether they were human originated thoughts that were then cleaned up and edited by AI or rewritten or restructured. It seems like there’s no clear dividing line between the work of the human and the work of the AI.

Kent: That’s why, and this sounds like a cop out, and I apologize, but that’s why case-by-case basis. While I’m saying I don’t think the copyright office was wrong in to say that, it creates a line that you’ll never see the end of, of finding out have I done enough for that to work. Like in corporate law, shareholders can be personally liable for the debts of the corporation if the corporation is undercapitalized, but that’s not based upon a mathematical basis of examining debt to equity. It’s done on a case-by-case basis. So, in your scenario that you gave as a hypothetical, I would say to me that sounds like that would belong to the human being who started with the work. But how much of that goes from doing fine tuning to actually creating really what is a new thing with the use of AI? When it becomes a new thing, as I read that copyright advisory document, it’s really not protected by copyright. And the scary thing to think about is this, and I know that some AI companies will tell you they’re still not doing this. You believe them at your own peril. But once you put your own work into an AI system, in my view, you’re contributing [LAUGHTER] voluntarily to the copyright infringement that is the reason for the existence of AI in the first place, and so the web scraping that goes on to create an AI system, which is the subject of a variety of large copyright infringement lawsuits that are still ongoing, you’re at least volunteering your work in an AI system that may allow your work to then be used for training and other purposes that maybe you don’t like as well. So there may be systems that claim that you can eliminate that, or prohibit that, or stop that from happening. Again, the next question asked is how would you take that to court? Because we live in a world that’s controlled by arbitration agreements, and if you have a membership or a subscription to a paid AI system, they’re not going to want you to sue them. So just like with your cell phone agreement and your credit card agreements, you’re going to have to arbitrate that, which would be a nightmare anyways. And so in a way, it’s almost like I would say when they say don’t lend money to family, treat it like you’re giving it away. I would presume to say the same thing, if you’re going to put your work in an AI system, presume you’re giving it away for purposes you can’t control. But if the purpose why you need to use it in an AI system overwhelms that, then just go ahead and do that.

Rebecca: So I want to like pull a thread that you’ve hinted at in a few different places already, which is some of the work that we may have created that are our own intellectual property has been scraped and is part of these systems. And this is certainly something that comes up a lot in my land of art and design, where particular images of artworks or whatever may be scraped and now are part of these large language models that are now used to create these images that are not copyrightable, [LAUGHTER] right? And so faculty may be using AI to generate images and things to illustrate their ideas or other things, but it’s pulling on a database of things that don’t necessarily belong to them. Can you talk just a little bit about that angle?

Kent: Yeah, the question. might be, if I’m hearing this correctly, is it possible that a faculty member is infringing on the copyright of somebody else when they’re using AI materials that they’re pulling out, even if they’re strategically asking for what they want to ask, because what has gone into AI is, to me, an infringement of someone else’s copyright. And I think that’s a big question because even though there’s no copyrighting what comes out of it, what went into it, in my opinion, has violated the copyright of the author. And so I would say that faculty aren’t infringing on the copyright of an AI system by using AI for whatever they’re using it for. The lawsuits that are ongoing are still ongoing, and there have been some settlements. I’m an author of a textbook that’s owned by Cengage so I know I’m in a settlement with the AI system Anthropic, and that settlement is in, I think, the billions of dollars. But what it gives is to each copyright holder a couple thousand dollars. And I think it’s kind of unfortunate, but that is the way that it’s going, is that the capital that those AI companies have is so huge that they can settle a class action lawsuit. And some authors have said, “I’m not going to be a part of this. I’m going to sue individually.” To them, I say, “Godspeed.” But those settlements allow them to just simply wipe that as an expense and then continuing what they’re doing, but the ethical issue is: Am I doing something I really should be doing? Am I using AI to generate ideas for myself or quick answers I can’t find, or am I using it to actually create work that I want to claim as my own if I massage it with my own assistance when in fact it came originally from another author or even an academic author who sort of lost their rights to it when it was web scraped into an AI system. It’s a deep question. It’s not a copyright infringement to the AI system, but it could be sort of an ethical infringement to the original person who didn’t choose to lose their work into an AI system.

John: Now let’s take that just a little bit further. Suppose you used it as a faculty member to generate some imagery that goes into a book that you sold to a publisher, and then the imagery that was created by the AI platform involves a copyright violation of the original copyright holder.

Kent: Wow.

John: Who would be legally responsible for that violation? Would it be the AI platform that generated that, or would it be you as the author who is using essentially slightly modified copyrighted material?

Kent: Yeah, that is not only novel and really brilliant. It is, to my knowledge and my research, unanswered as of now, so I’m only projecting what I think is the case, and I do see a world where perhaps an original owner, let’s say, of art that ended up in an AI system that ended up again in someone else’s work, could sue that end user, saying you infringed on my copyright, and you could find a situation where a faculty member might have to ask themselves, “Do I have an insurance policy that would cover the legal costs of defending myself in an infringement lawsuit?” Because let’s say that suppose that happened to me, perish the thought, is that a situation where Purdue is duty bound to defend me? But if, like you said a book, what we’ve said is these books tend to be not owned by institutions because their copyright is exchanged for some fee structure. But if you read your publishing contracts carefully, you owe the publisher a hold harmless clause to make them whole if they violate copyright because of what you put into a book they published, and so that’s a very scary financial question. And again, that’s something to think long and hard about before using AI-generated art. And again, it doesn’t matter if you have that background knowledge like Rebecca does. It matters if you’re simply using work that really is sourced to somebody else, because the middleman, in this case AI, is not liable for it, at least not yet, and maybe not ever. But you, the end user, could be.

Rebecca: We haven’t talked a lot about the role that students play. Students are often creating work; they’re submitting it to you, maybe as a faculty member to review. Now you have a copy of it in your possession, perhaps. Do students own their own classwork?

Kent: There is a lot to say about students. It’s not just the cheating part, although that is worthy of discussion if you want to talk about cheating and AI detectors and things. But students own their work for the same reason that faculty might own their work as well, and I think students should be treated respectfully with respect to their work. And so, if we say that the student work passes the modicum of or spark of creativity test we talked about, that does belong to them. There can be some exceptions. Sometimes institutions have policies for graduate students if they’re creating work that’s part of a project that is sponsored by the institution. Sometimes there might be policies that say students don’t own their work if it has been hired out by an outside party. For instance, suppose a marketing class has an instructor who’s connected to a business that wants a project done that the students can free help the business, right? Well, who owns that work is a huge question. Policies might carve exceptions out there, but as a general basis, students own their work. So I have, in instances, particularly in online classes, said to students, “You know, some of your work here is so good. Is it okay if I use it anonymously as a template or a model of what ideal student work would look like?” I shouldn’t take their work without their permission. If I take their permission, I seek an email that I can archive and say they granted me permission. There is a case, there are more than them, but there is a case out of a university in Detroit where an art student was asked by her instructor to have students create artwork that would be used by the Mercedes-Benz exhibit at the Detroit Auto Show, and she knew what she was giving up, but she didn’t realize that Mercedes, with the knowledge of her instructor, used more of her work that she created than she had acknowledged to give over to Mercedes. And she sued Mercedes-Benz for copyright infringement, and she won. And it didn’t matter that she didn’t have a market value in her work because there’s another part of copyright law that allows you to get statutory penalties for simply infringing on someone’s copyright. And then she sued her professor for what is commonly known as a breach of a fiduciary duty to her as a student. I don’t know where that lawsuit ended up, but the court allowed that lawsuit to go forward. So I would say that faculty should be mindful that what students create in their coursework, including artwork, musical compositions, and just essays and projects, really do belong to the students, absent some external independent contractor work for higher situation like the Mercedes Benz was for three of the four artwork pieces that ended up at the exhibit. So I do think faculty should be mindful of that. And there’s a separate issue, which is a faculty member could say, “Yeah, but there’s no fair market value in this student’s work. So what does it matter?” Well, that question alone shows why it does matter, because faculty should be respectful of their students as individuals and as owners of their own work. So whether there’s a market value for it to me is not the question. It is, “Does it belong to them?” And if it does, and it does, then I should be respectful and just ask to use it. And if they say yes, get it in writing somewhere, and you’re good to go generally,

John: Following that up a little bit, if we upload student work into a plagiarism or AI detection software package, or perhaps just to an AI platform to get some feedback on student work to assist with grading, would that be a violation of students’ rights? I was thinking in particular of how if there was some artwork in that student’s work that was uploaded that was used for training it, it would be in some ways a similar sort of violation.

Kent: I totally agree with that. Often AI and students, from an HR standpoint at work, is discussed with respect to FERPA. Well, I mean, you’ve got to be an idiot to use AI systems to create education records that would violate FERPA. But in terms of what you’re saying here is, am I really transferring without their even knowledge, perhaps, their ownership into an AI system by using it for evaluation purposes? That is a serious thing to consider. Now, would anybody know that I did that? They could argue the only way that my work ended up in an AI system is I turned it into you, and you stuck it in there. So it wouldn’t be terribly hard to figure that out. But that’s an ethical question and a legal question as well. One issue to think about with respect to AI detection, if I can just mention that, is when you’re using it, you really then transferring copyright because the original plagiarism detector that we all knew… I never used it… in fact, I didn’t pronounce it correctly unless someone corrected me on it is Turnitin, but students from a high school class sued Turnitin for copyright infringement, and I say “you go, good for you,” and they said you took my papers and violated my copyright by sticking in to Turnitin, and the students lost because the court said this is a transformative use of someone else’s work for plagiarism detection, and there is no infringement on their ability to publish their work by being archived for plagiarism detection purposes. That’s not, however, what’s going on now. Because even Turnitin’s AI system has been turned off by some universities. So I would say this: here’s some free legal advice, which means it’s worth nothing. Don’t use AI detectors. Simply don’t do it. It’s not worth it for a variety of reasons, and the most important reason is to me it’s error prone, and the last thing a faculty member should do from a legal protection standpoint is accuse a student of cheating based upon an AI detection system because they have been known to be error prone, they’ve been proven error prone, and even if they’re improving through retraining, they are error prone. If I haven’t said that yet, and if you’re saying I’m giving up my sort of autonomy as a judgment maker to an AI system, which is based upon predicting the next logical word, that’s why they fail. That’s why they make mistakes because they’re based upon perplexity, “What is the next most logical word coming up that we think you want?” So if I say I’m dropping my children off at blank, logically it’s going to be perhaps school or the playground or the pool. That’s the lower perplexity. Well, you’re giving up your autonomy, your judgment decision when you’re saying to AI, check if this has been cheating. Now, if you can reverse engineer that by saying I put your work in an AI system and it showed that it came out of already published work. That’s a traditional plagiarism detector. But AI systems also flag often non-native English speakers as cheating because of the way they write sentences with low perplexity and what’s called burstiness, which is an interesting word. Burstiness is the variation we use in the sentences we write: short, long, those kinds of things. So, non-native English speakers and sometimes autistic students are flagged because of the low burstiness in their sentence structures as being cheating. So, to me, just don’t use AI detectors because AI detectors also sell humanizers to students as well. AI humanizers are like police officers selling radar detectors on weekends. So if you want to avoid being caught by us by this product, when you’re dealing in a world where AI humanizers are already being used by students to bypass your using AI detection, then the question is, what are you doing for your job? Is that your job to be the hall monitor of all hall monitors? And the cheating is rampant. Just recently, I think a Brown University award-winning economics professor realized that allowing his students to do a take-home exam basically the AI cheating was rampant, and he was just horrified by that. So we know that it’s going on, and I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care about it.

What I’m saying is, out of all the time you have in your life, of which a lot of it is work, how much of it can you give to hunting down the possible AI cheaters in your classes? I don’t have that kind of time, and if I’m going to be wrong, I’m really wasting my time as well. So I think there’s a legal issue with using AI detectors. MIT, who you can, if you want to, you can source MIT as the first creator of an AI system, says don’t use them. So if MIT’s teaching and scholarship learning center says don’t use them, why do I need to seek a second opinion? I’m not going to use them, and so I’m not saying you’re wrong to use them. I’m saying you use them at your own peril because of the issues involving the last thing I want to be accused of is committing an act against a student that is known as arbitrary or capricious. Sometimes it’s called arbitrary and capricious. One of the few areas where a faculty member faces a legal risk is when they act arbitrarily towards a student, and I believe using an AI detector as your reason for accusing someone as cheating is getting you into that arbitrary world that I don’t think is worth risking.

Rebecca: On the flip side, students often submit tests, assignments, and other materials created by the instructor into generative AI platforms [LAUGHTER] without the consent of the instructor. How should faculty address this issue?

Kent: One, and I know you don’t need me to say this, so I apologize for preaching to the choir here. But have a syllabus policy first of all, because this may seem too smart by half, but a student has a good point by saying I didn’t do anything wrong because you didn’t say I couldn’t. And so if we presume they’ll know they shouldn’t do something, then we’re wrong as being in charge of our classroom. So, have a syllabus and specifically delineate what you don’t want to be done. You, again, can’t control what they’re doing on their own time, and unless you get back to that Paleolithic world where we had everything done in class, either on paper or in front of people, it’s hard to catch those kinds of things. People sometimes have students sign honesty pledges attached to syllabi. Those are all well-meaning. They have no legal value. So, other than policies that allow you to go to the dean of students or have some sort of institutional disciplinary process for that if you catch it, outside of a clearly delineated policy and examples and encouragement. And again, this may sound hokey, but like I tell my students, you’re in a business school. A business school is a professional school. What does it mean to be professional? Like, what does it actually mean? It’s not about making money. What does it mean to be a professional in a professional school? How does ethics fall into that? And again, that may seem like I’m wasting their time if they don’t care, but at least they know that I’ve thought about it ahead of time, and that I tell them it’s not worth getting caught, and you’re not going to feel better down the road because you cheated here, and so I just try to be that good angel on the one side of their shoulder, reminding them that it’s just not worth it. Again, that may be a waste of my time to tell them that, but I can’t hunt down all the possible cheating unless I bring everything back into the classroom, which some faculty are again trying to do, and we’re now living in a like a record player world again, where we’re saying, you know, something, let’s go back to the record player and let’s bring the classes not just back into the classroom, but bring the assessments down to more of that low technology world, which cuts down the chance of cheating.

John: We always end with the question. What’s next?

Kent: Well, I’m thinking about or trying to work on creating a podcast for myself, not to compete with you at all, but on legal issues for faculty, and I’m trying to work out how that might come together, and hopefully that will come to fruition sometime in the near future. And I’m working on some conference presentations to interested faculty members and book groups where we get together and discuss issues from this book that I’ve written on legal issues for faculty, and then the fall semester is around the corner, so that’s on its way as well.

Rebecca: Yeah, summer never fails to slip by.

Kent: No, I finished my summer semester about a week ago, and now I’m thinking about the fall semester already.

John: And it’s always good to see more podcasts related to higher ed, including legal issues in higher ed. We’ve lost a few good ones in the last year, so it’s nice to see new ones coming online.

Kent: Well, if I can overcome the technology difficulties I had prior to this recording, that may be something to figure out. Can I actually make this happen? So, thank you for the encouragement on that.

John: If you need any help, just let us know. [LAUGHTER]

Kent: Well, that’s recorded now, [LAUGHTER] so you can’t walk that back. Rebecca didn’t say it; you said it. So I have one person to go to, and I can pinpoint when you specifically said it. So thank you for that invite. [LAUGHTER] Il I appreciate it more than you might care to know.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you. And these legal issues are ones that many faculty are thinking about. So this was really helpful.

Rebecca: And I always enjoy these conversations. So thanks for joining us.

Kent: Thank you very much for letting me be here. I really have a wonderful time talking with the two of you. So thank you again for allowing me to be on your podcast.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC]

438. Where Did My Time Go?!

Posted in faculty, productivity, time management
March 25, 2026

Faculty workload often feels overwhelming. In this episode, Kristin Croyle joins us to discuss strategies that can help us manage time and keep our workload under control. Kristin is a psychologist and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Sciences and Engineering at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Faculty workload often feels overwhelming. In this episode, we discuss strategies that can help to manage time and keep workload under control.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Kristin Croyle. Kristin is a psychologist and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Sciences and Engineering at SUNY Oswego. Welcome back, Kristin.

Kristin: Thank you so much for having me.

John: Thank you for joining us again. It’s been a while.

Kristin: Yes, it has, but it’s always one of my favorite places to be.

John: Today’s teas are… Kristin, are you drinking tea with us today?

Kristin: I am not, because I’ve already had four cups of tea today, and it’s time to stop for the moment.

John: We are recording in the late afternoon, so you’re excused. And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I’m celebrating the coming of spring with candy cane tea. [LAUGHTER] It’s a custom blend from a local tea shop.

John: …and I am just drinking a plain Lady Grey today.

Rebecca: So Kristin, we’ve invited you here today to help you figure out how to manage my time. [LAUGHTER] So why does it often feel like we don’t have enough time to do all the things we would like to be doing?

Kristin: Oh, what a good question. And I think we all have our own answers for that. I think there are a lot of contributors here. One is the role of faculty in general. So the role of a faculty member, and depending on the professional staff position, sometimes also the role of a staff member, is to just be awesome at many things. And that’s why we hire faculty and our professional staff, because they’re awesome at many things. And then we kind of say, well, we need you to do these six things, but go and be awesome. Do 100, that would be awesome. We would love it if you would do 100. We don’t know what those other 94 are, but we know you will figure it out. So in many ways, faculty are kind of working like small business owners, like the more you do, the better ideas you have, and the better the connections you make. And then you have a new project, and you see something that’s wrong, so you think, well, I need to change that too. So I’m going to start a committee or a task force to do this thing, and then that connects with something else. You have a great class that you want to add, and all and all of that contributed to a new research idea, in addition to all the other data that you’ve collected that you haven’t yet published. It is endemic to the role in many ways, and it doesn’t help that all of us are schooled to do this during our graduate training, and that at many universities, the Assistant Professor component of the career is also designed that way… not at all universities, but at many where the explicit task that is sometimes told to people is do as much as you can, as well as you can, and then we’ll see if that is high enough for tenure. I certainly hope that is not the feeling here. I hope that our expectations are more explicit, but basically we develop a culture in which our roles are ever expanding, and they’re ever expanding in ways that are often really exciting. So there are reasons to keep saying, “Oh, that’s a great idea. I want to do that,” and just keep adding on top, on top, on top. So it almost feels against our natures and against our institutional well being to try and pull that back, which leads to many of our most excellent faculty and staff being chronically, desperately overextended.

Rebecca: I think she’s been spying on us, John.

John: And while there may be things that we really enjoy doing and really love doing, we often will look at our calendars [LAUGHTER] and find that more things have been added to our calendars by people other than us on virtually every day, it seems. So what can we do to keep our schedules manageable, so we actually have time to do all those wonderful things that we’d like to be doing or that we’re being asked to do.

Kristin: Well, I’ll also add to that, that even when you have these wonderful, fabulous ideas, there is a bunch of stuff in the middle of that that is super boring and irritating to do to get you to the wonderful idea. Really meaningful service is a good example of that. If someone chooses to step up as department chair, they may have amazing ideas about how to move their department forward and support their faculty and students. And in the middle of it, you got to deal with all the student complaints which are important but a huge hassle. You got to turn in the schedule, which is important and a huge hassle. You got to deal with somebody angry because their office has flooding or collapsing or something, which is important, but a huge hassle. So not only is it other people, but it’s also the actual daily work, even when you’re getting to the awesome stuff, is a big hassle. So what can we do? What can we do to keep our schedules under better control? It’s a great question that all of us ask ourselves… sometimes, like many times a day, how can I get this under better control? One thing that I’ve certainly seen that is different in academia than in some workplaces is that faculty sometimes think of themselves in such strictly academic terms that they don’t recognize the amount of control they have over their time, and they don’t use specific strategies to try and control their time. So for example, it’s a common practice to use time blocking for many people, where you say, ”I’m going to need some focus time to work on this. I’m going to need focus time to work on that.” And I know that months in advance, so I’m going to, I’m going to time block in my schedule, hold these times as special to do this special work. That is very common in some settings and less common for some faculty to do. In our current environment where calendar sharing is much more common, it’s a much easier technological thing to do now. There are certainly a good number of faculty that I work with that I know don’t use their electronic calendars for anything except the occasional meeting invite, which makes it look like that they’re available to do all these other things any other time, and can lead to things like meeting invites appearing at times that are not convenient for them, where they have other commitments, where they might feel pressure to say yes, that if they had exercised some control at the beginning of the semester, those invites might not have appeared. So, some kind of techniques that are very commonly used in some settings or by some people that are really successful include things like identifying focused work time for projects that you need focused work on. So, for example, if you’re tenure track, particularly at the assistant professor level, and you know that it’s very important for your tenure standards that you get some stuff published, blocking off time on a weekly or even daily basis, specifically to work on your research, not to meet with students, not to do grading, not to do committee work, but specifically to work on your research, and keeping that time on your calendar blocked is a good strategy to use, and once you kind of get used to that, you can use it for the rest of your career. Another possibility is setting, for yourself ,strict guidelines about when you are willing to do certain things. Some of us know that we work best on certain types of projects at certain times of day or at certain times during the week. I know, for example, that I do better focused project work at the end of the week than I do at the beginning of the week, because at the beginning of the week, my head is all full of the other stuff that I haven’t done yet that kind of was building up over the weekend, and I was trying to ignore it, but it kind of all comes rushing out of me in the first few days of the week. So I am better at focused work at the end of the week, so I tend to block my time at the end of the week for focused work, but I include time at the beginning of the week for catch up, because those things are on my mind. Similarly, setting boundaries and these vary by the person for what is effective, like, I’m going to check my email twice a day. As dean. If I did that, bad things would happen. So I definitely don’t do that, but [LAUGHTER] it can certainly work in other settings: setting clear guidelines with your students that unless you are actually having an emergency and you need a response from me, I typically take about 24 hours to respond during the work days, and I don’t generally respond on the weekends. Setting up those boundaries can help you to maintain more sense of control over your schedule. And then another piece that I see some faculty using in a very sophisticated way, but others, not at all, is to time yourself for specific teaching tasks so that you have a clear and fairly accurate estimate about how long something is going to take you to do in your pedagogy, and then take that into account when you plan your syllabi. We have some English and Creative Writing faculty that know how long it takes them to grade and give feedback for different lengths of assignments. So if they say, “Well, I’ve got 60 students this semester, and if I’m going to give this assignment and this assignment and this assignment, it’s going to take me this long to grade, how am I going to work that into my schedule? Perhaps I should modify this other assignment so that there is time to get the students the feedback that they need.” I know, for example, that it takes me about three hours a day to keep up on my email, and if I don’t have three hours one day to do it, it’s going to take me six hours the next day. So I try and build in some time in the early morning or late, late afternoon, hopefully not in the evening, to do some of that catch up. But as a new assistant professor, I regularly planned things in my pedagogy that I didn’t realize were going to take me like 100 hours to do. You know, the first time you try a really great project, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, that took so long. Was the student learning worth it?” And planning that into your syllabus and saying, “You know what, that project is awesome, and it takes me a huge amount of time. This other project… also awesome, much more efficient for me, similar student learning. Perhaps I should go this direction instead.” So the theme in general is realizing that you have some control, and taking the control early, proactively, at the beginning of the semester, at the beginning of the year, instead of realizing that you’re completely drowning by week six in the semester, and seeing what you can do to exert control then. It’s never too late to try, but in advance, you end up with a much greater sense that you’re not drowning in work, because once you hit that stage, it’s difficult to get anything done sometimes. What do you two think? What has been helpful to you?

Rebecca: I’ve definitely used the strategies that you’re describing, and have taught students to use those as well. I think that as my role has changed over time, I’ve had to modify those strategies. So it was easier earlier on in my teaching career to be able to dedicate a day or a half a day to research or to not have meetings, but I find it a lot more difficult to block large blocks of time, and instead find it’s probably more strategic to block smaller amounts of time that are the length of a meeting. So then it just looks like you got meetings on your calendar at various times. But that can allow for some catch up, or to do some of the other things that we’re trying to do. So I’ve noticed I’ve had to change that a bit. I still have one day blocked as if I’m going to get projects done. But the reality is, it’s not realistic, and it needs to probably flex and change. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Yeah, my block, because I have other people that sometimes schedule meetings for me as well that can see what the block says. The block says, “try not to have meetings.” And there’s still meetings that appear, but less during that time than would have otherwise. What works for you, John?

John: Nothing this year, it seems.

Kristin: …nothing works. [LAUGHTER]

John: As an example, on Monday, I have four hours of classes, and I had four and a half hours of meetings scheduled, and then I did have some time blocked out, so I’d have a little bit of time to do some preparation that I wasn’t able to get done in the weekend, and that got filled by a commitment that I really needed to fulfill. So I’ve been struggling with that all year, and especially this semester. I’m not sure why this semester seems to be so much work. I generally don’t block out time on my calendar, but I probably need to do it more. But I did try it this week, and I still ended up with meetings scheduled in each of the time slots that I had blocked out as preparation time. And it was only two this week, but both of them ended up being taken up by other meetings.

Rebecca: One other strategy that I think can be useful, especially if you’re trying to schedule meetings between faculty and staff, is that we have different schedules. Staff and administrators tend to work on the hour and half hour, and faculty work on the teaching calendar when classes are offered, which are at odd times. So trying to schedule meetings that are during a distinct class period can be helpful because then it keeps everyone on the same schedule. It’s also a good strategy for blocking your calendar because it looks like you’re in class. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: That’s really good. Another piece that I think is important to mention, is setting the top priorities. So as I mentioned, for folks that are on the assistant professor tenure-track stream, it’s usually much easier to stay on top of the teaching because you got students expecting every day that you have something prepared and that you will get their graded work back to them and like they are knocking on the door if you are not prepared. So for assistant professors, we often recommend set your research as your top priority. It’s not necessarily because it’s the most important. It’s often because it is the most difficult to work in because there aren’t external contingencies pushing people to stay on top of it. So block time during that phase of your career to keep your research going. Even a common recommendation is to try and write for at least 30 minutes a day. Block those 30 minutes so that you get something written, not because it’s the most important, because it needs to be your top priority because of the other contingencies pushing on you. So at different phases in your career, it’s still important to look at what you’re spending your time on and say, “What is my top priority?” and block the time for that. So there’s some good research that suggests that if you spend a minimum of 20% of your time a week on the things that you find most rewarding in your job, it will reduce burnout. So at some phases in your career, you can look at what you’re doing and say, “You know, the most exciting thing for me right now is coming up with the big ideas and helping to push them forward, or it is engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning, or it is meeting directly with students and mentoring them,” but your top priority, your own career top priority, and block that time to make sure it happens, and then let everything else fill in around it. So yes, again, taking control, but taking control for the things that you know need to get done that as the semester goes on, if you don’t take that time to set those priorities and figure out how you’re going to make progress on them, all the other immediate contingencies around you will push and push and push and get you to do the urgent thing that is not as important because someone is asking you to do the urgent less important thing when you really need to do the more important thing.

Rebecca: It can be helpful to kind of evaluate those things on a weekly basis too, at the beginning of the week setting aside 10 or 15 minutes to just establish what the priorities for the week might be.

Kristin: Excellent. So do you have a weekly meeting with yourself?

Rebecca: I do.

Kristin: Excellent. It’s a great practice.

Rebecca: Otherwise, I don’t. I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do. It’s like a reminder. [LAUGHTER] I do it on Mondays like it’s a reminder of what I need to be doing for the week.

Kristin: Yes, doing a weekly meeting where you review your priorities for the week, what has been done, what hasn’t been done. It’s a great recommendation. It can help you really move faster on the projects that you care about. Now I’ve heard recommendations, which I don’t agree with, that you do this at the time that makes the most sense to you. So if you’re worrying about it on Sunday night, you do it on Sunday night. I just think that’s a terrible idea personally, [LAUGHTER] because then it just opens the door for it to infringe even more and more on your personal time. I think you should do your weekly meeting during work time, because it’s work, but to each their own.

Rebecca: Actually, I find Friday afternoons is optimal. I just happen to teach at that time, so I don’t always get it done, but I find if I do it at the end of the week, then I can set the priorities for the beginning of the week and just be able to focus from the start, rather than trying to scramble to figure out how the week should start. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: I like Friday afternoon also, and I’ll tell you why, specifically. If there is something on my list that I don’t know how to handle or what direction I want to take. I’ll make a special note of it, and then I will tell myself “I don’t know how to handle this,” and then I’ll just tuck it away. And there’s all kinds of lovely research in psychology about insight and the role of rest and rejuvenation in that. So I find if I tuck it away in the back of my mind, and I really try not to think about it. I may have an answer on Monday after I’ve had a couple nights sleep, and the path forward may appear after letting it sit for a bit.

John: For me, what tends to happen is I go to sleep worrying about those things, and I wake up three hours later, still worrying…

Kristin: …also worrying

John: …and I get up and [LAUGHTER] start working again because I’m not able to get back to sleep.

Kristin: Ok….

John: So I’m not very good at this.

Kristin: Do you know about writing a note to yourself?

John: I generally just go to a computer…

Kristin: oh John, well…. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Don’t let the blue light hit you.

Kristin: So for folks who struggle with insomnia for reasons like that, and they really want to sleep more, a good technique is to keep something they can take a note on by the bed. So that could be, if you’re not with a partner who’s going to wake up, you could do like an audio note on your phone, or just write a note and say, “this is the thing,” because it will keep some people up, because they’re afraid if they go to sleep, they’ll forget how important it was. So if they write it down, they feel like, now I know I’m not going to forget that, and then they’re able to go back to sleep. But yeah, I wish you more sleep [LAUGHTER] in your future, John.

John: But going back to the issue of calendars, one thing that seems to have happened is that now that we use Zoom for more meetings, it seems to be a bit easier for people to schedule meetings, and they tend to do it on the hour or on the half hour, typically for an hour back to back…

Kristin: …to back to back to back….

John: …with other meetings with no breaks in between. At least when we used to meet in person, there had to be some time for walking across campus, and we’ve lost that.

Kristin: So one suggestion, but it would have to be something that we agree together, is that we’re going to hold those hour-long meetings, or those 30 minute meetings, to 50 minutes or 25 minutes. Say, if you got an hour long meeting on the schedule, you really mean it’s going to be 50 minutes and it only takes one person… It really only takes one person in the meeting to say, “you know, as a practice, let’s just start doing this, because we all need time to take care of our bodies and to stand up and walk around and maybe make it to the next meeting if it’s across campus or whatever.” It really only takes one person to get that started, and we can start moving it along. But it’s a common practice in some settings. You know, it’s been a common practice in medical settings for many, many years. The therapy hour, for example, is typically a 50 minute hour, although now that there’s more Zoom, it’s much more flexible in terms of shorter even, but yes, it’s a great point. Those of us who were working in higher ed during the pandemic who were in meeting heavy roles, some of us remember the nine hours of meetings days you’re hoping that if you just go off camera and mute yourself for a little time, you can run and grab some food and come back. Let’s not do that again. Let’s just not do that again. It’s not good for us.

Rebecca: Another strategy is to stick to the class schedule, because there’s built in breaks between classes. Voila, 15 minutes between classes. It’s already scheduled, at least that’s the time between ours right on our campus. It’s a common practice.

Kristin: That’s a great idea. Can we talk a little bit about how great faculty are at doing things with excellence and how that becomes a problem?

Rebecca: Yes.

Kristin: I know you folks are asking the questions, but I think this is also a theme that interferes with having control over your time, that we are socialized and we really individually value very strongly being really good at our jobs. We’re excellent at scholarship. We prioritize our students and our pedagogy. We try and make our universities and our professions and our communities stronger through service, and we want to do it all at the A plus level.

Rebecca: It doesn’t help that we’re all very curious too, which is why we probably ended up in academia in the first place, right?

Kristin: Yes. And it also doesn’t help that many of our faculty and staff are able to do all those things at the a plus level, if you take them individually, and I’m using the grade because we’re in a grading culture, and we were socialized in a grading culture. If I were to say to many, many of our faculty and staff, “Here’s this one issue at the university, make it amazing,” and we could release them from everything else. They could do it. They could absolutely do that. In fact, I think I could take 15 different things and give them to most of our faculty, in their research, in their teaching, or in their service, and say, “make this amazing,” and they could do it. And knowing you have the capacity is not the same as knowing that you have the time. And it’s a very difficult step for people to give up the idea that they’re going to be excellent at everything they do all the time, because that is just not realistic in academia. It’s not realistic in life. It’s not realistic in any setting, except maybe in graduate school, where that was your one job to be really good at everything they were asking you to do.

Rebecca: It’s hard to imagine someone saying, “Hey, I need this problem solved, but I just need it at a mediocre C level.

Kristin: We need a mediocre, barely adequate solution. Can you please take care of that?

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s hard to digest. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: It is.

Rebecca: I’m sorry I can’t do that. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: But, I think that that is something that our most excellent people come to realize ,that they can only do some things at excellence and the rest is going to be okay, and that that’s okay, because there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything at excellence, and if you continue to push yourself to do that, you’ll be sorely disappointed and feel completely out of control of your time, make yourself sick, and you still won’t be able to do everything excellent. So it’s more a matter of acceptance, like “I accept some of the stuff I’m going to do is going to be adequately mediocre, because that is all that I have time to do here, and that is really all the situation requires. And I’m going to do these other things really excellently.”

John: Which again, requires that sort of reflection that you were talking about earlier to determine what is important and what is worth the effort.

Kristin: Exactly. I know it’s still hard to like, let it go. It’s okay. Not everything has to be excellent all the time.

Rebecca: I think that’s interesting to put next to the idea, which we’ve talked about before, of saying no, and how saying no can be really difficult, especially if it’s something that you’re interested or excited about. What are some strategies we should use when we’re asked to take on more work than is feasible? I’m just asking for a friend. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Let’s see if we can come up with five real quick and on the fly, okay? Five things to do if somebody asks you to do something, in addition, recognizing that there is a huge caveat when there are some people that when they ask you to do something, it’s your job to say yes. So as Dean, if the President asked me to do something, it is actually my job to say, “Yes, I will do that thing” and figure out how to get it done. So not everybody can say no to everything. I may say, “You know that deadline is, oh, that’s a very tight deadline. I may have to put these other things off so I can hit that deadline.” So five things that you can do if somebody is asking you to pick up something new. One, you can give yourself 24 hours or longer. You can say, “Well, that sounds like an interesting opportunity. Let me think about it for…” and ask for at least 24 hours. Depending on what the commitment is, you could ask for longer, but at least 24 hours before you say yes, even if you want to say yes, just for your own to give yourself some time to reflect. So that’s one. A second one would be, ask somebody else for advice, go to a trusted mentor, a colleague, and say, “You kind of know the things I’m working on, I’m being asked to do this other thing. I’m not really sure how important it is. What’s your thought? Is this something I need to say yes to? Would it be politically important in this environment or would it be a really great opportunity I’m not seeing?” So go ask somebody else for advice, some kind of accountability buddy, for service, essentially. That’s two. A third one, if you’ve already given yourself 24 hours… done that first… if you want to say no, you can just say no. That actually is the strategy. You can say, “Well, thanks for that opportunity and for thinking about me…” like you can say it nicely… “but unfortunately, I don’t have time right now for that commitment.” I have people tell me no all the time as Dean, they say “I don’t have time for that,” like, “oh, okay,” and it’s my job to go find somebody else. A fourth one, let’s say that you don’t feel like you can just say no, but you want to say no, you’ve already thought about it. You talk to your accountability buddy, they’re like, “Don’t do that. You haven’t written anything this semester. Start writing something. Say no to this thing.” You could list out several of the commitments that you already have to remind the person who’s asking you, all the ways that you’re contributing, “because I’m spending my time on this and because of this, and we have talked before about how it’s important for me to prioritize this. Unfortunately, I’m not able to find the time.” So it’s not just a straight no. It’s more like, “I can’t say yes right now, because I am so awesome at these other things that I’m doing, so unfortunately… You could also, fifth one, suggest a couple other names. This is not passing the buck, by the way. This is recognizing that if you were the person that they thought of first, because you are awesome, you may know other awesome people that also should have opportunities. So it’s not about passing the buck. It’s about elevating people who may need to benefit from, have a great perspective, in order to contribute more to service or other projects. I’m sure you two both have other strategies. You want to give me another one?

Rebecca: John’s really good at saying yes.

John: Well,[LAUGHTER] I am good, though, at saying no if it’s something that needs to be done today or tomorrow. But what many people have learned to do is say, “Well, you can take two or three weeks to do this,” or “this is due sometime next month,” and when you’re given the chance to do something that you don’t have to do immediately, it’s easier to discount the future time [LAUGHTER] relative to the present time.

Kristin: What is that called?

John: In behavioral economics, it’s referred to as hyperbolic discounting, that we tend to put more pressure on immediate gratifications, and it’s always easier to postpone things into the future. And that tends to be something that I know, Rebecca and I have fallen into quite recently, [LAUGHTER] where we were asked back in December or January, if we’d give a keynote address for a group, and if it was something that was going to take place in January, I would have said no, because we do a whole bunch of workshops here, and Rebecca was working on some workshops on accessibility, but because it was in April, it seemed, well, we’ll certainly be able to find time between now and April, and April is …

Kristin: …but now, April is coming up.

John: …starting to approach, and at some point we actually have to do it. And so that’s the strategy, on the other side, of convincing people to do more than they really should be doing if they were weighing the costs and benefits more fully.

Rebecca: John successfully uses this strategy on me regularly. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: So how do you get around this? [LAUGHTER]

John: We don’t. [LAUGHTER]We do end up doing too much.

REBECCA; We just do it. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: So having a good idea of how long things actually take, yes, and it actually is helpful to me to literally think about my future self. How is this going to impact my future self? If I do these things right now, how is it going to impact my future self? If I don’t do them right now, how is it going to impact my future self? For example, if there’s something I really don’t want to do and I am feeling that kind of negative emotional state of avoidance, sometimes it is helpful to me to think about being kind to my future self by doing it right now, so that my future self doesn’t have to deal with both doing the thing I don’t want to do and whatever consequences there were because I didn’t do it right away. Rebecca, do you have other ideas for saying no?

Rebecca: I’m not a great no sayer, but some of the strategies I use include asking questions about the thing that will take time to respond to [LAUGHTER] to buy time without directly asking for time. A passive aggressive strategy. And then another strategy I sometimes use is, if it’s like a supervisor asking for something, then I usually schedule time to say, “Hey, here’s some things like, what’s the priority?” It’s to kind of get the other stakeholders that might be involved in the things that I’m working on, to find some priorities, because there might be a way that I would prioritize it, but I usually try to make sure it’s in line with some of the other folks that might be impacted by those decisions.

Kristin: So I would disagree that your strategy of asking questions is passive aggressive, because oftentimes, if somebody is asking you to partner on something, they’re asking you because of your expertise. And so if you’re asking questions, it helps them to think through more the kinds of things that they’re asking you to contribute to. So it can help them understand whether or not you’re the right partner. It can help them understand what the real time commitment they’re asking for, and as a not sneaky strategy, but a self-management strategy, if it’s something that you’re thinking about right now, like they ask you in an email, for example, and you read it right then, and you have a response right then, but you kind of want to think about it and slow down the discourse, you can feel free to write that email right away, while it’s on your mind and it’s fresh, delay send it for 24 hours so it slows down the cycle a little bit. Allows everybody to think a little and, if it’s not an urgent thing, most people don’t respond to it within 24 hours anyways, but it’s perfectly fine to slow down the conversation just a little bit, to give people a little bit more time to think about it, and to give yourself a little more time to think about your response.

Rebecca: I always ask about timeline and time commitment. I think those are two important things that are never presented as part of the ask, and are important to know.

Kristin: Excellent, often because they haven’t been thoroughly thought through. So when you’re asking about timeline and time commitment, it helps the asker to think through those things.

John: There has been some research, though, about time and time estimates, suggesting that people who are most productive tend to systematically underestimate the amount of time that task will take. How can we overcome that…

Rebecca: John…

John:… without giving up a lot of sleep? [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Yerah, and what I love is that we all know that occasionally we can actually do things that fast, which just reinforces this bias of underestimating how much time something is actually going to take. We all have very clear memories of like, you have to do the big thing, and then something happened. You only had a tiny amount of time to do it, and you did the big thing, and it was amazing. So clearly that’s how long it takes you to do the big thing, when that is an exception and not the rule. So, for things that are regular tasks, I really do recommend literally timing yourself so that you understand how long it takes. There’s a really wonderful faculty member here that I have had to ask to do many things, because they are really wonderful, and they say no better than anybody else that I interact with, and part of it is because they’re really good at documenting time estimates. So I say, “can we work on this thing together?” And they respond and say, “Well, this is what’s on my list, and this is how long it takes me.” And it’s so compelling. Like, first I’m like, “Wow, that’s really impressive that you know those things about yourself,” but also my opinion of this person, every time they say no, just goes up and up and up, because what they’re sending me is these amazing things that they’re doing that I’m not aware of. All of these things, but also, the way that they’re doing these time estimates helps to protect their time as well, which is fully committed, by the way. But I will keep asking. They will keep telling me no, and I will continue to think how amazing they are all in this process. But yes, it’s very difficult.

Rebecca: I think that’s important to underscore, is that a lot of times people assume that saying no is going to make someone think badly of them or poorly of them in some way, but that often is not the case.

Kristin: That’s exactly right. Now, of course, there are ways to say no where, it will certainly make you look bad.

Rebecca: Yes, [LAUGHTER] that’s why you consult your accountability buddy.

Kristin: Yes. And I certainly have occasionally had people read my emails before I send and say, “Does this hit the tone I’m trying to hit?” And I encourage other people to do that sometimes too, just to make sure that you’re hitting the correct tone for the audience that you are sending it to. You don’t want to sound like you’re combative and that you are never open to new ideas, because, who knows, the next thing they ask about might be really amazing, and you really want to say yes to that. There was a book that we used on campus several years ago, Thriving in Academia, that has a great flow chart in it for taking on new responsibilities, and it basically takes you through the decision-making process. Here’s this new opportunity and maybe a new service opportunity or something. Is this something that you should really say yes to or no to? And I do find myself taking a look at it every so often. I’ve shared it with multiple faculty, and usually, of course, I end up looking at it when there’s something I want to do, but I don’t think it’s really worth my time. I’ll go through the flow chart and it says, “Don’t do it” and I’m like, “Ah, I knew I shouldn’t do it,” but it’s good to have multiple resources.

John: And it has some very good reasons for not doing things…

Kristin: Yes, it does

John: …through that flow chart. So it is really productive. We will include a link to that in the show notes.

Rebecca: I know that I like to work on a lot of different projects, as I’m sure you’re aware, but there’s also those middle things that we’ve talked about that are like, not super fun. I like to design a thing, and then I’m not always interested or excited about the final implementation of a thing. That’s like, the part I find most exciting is the beginning and the planning stuff that other people might totally hate, but that’s the part that I like. So pairing up with someone else can be helpful who likes a different part of the process, but procrastination can come into play if it’s a part that we don’t like, maybe, or that we have too much to do. How do we handle procrastination?

Kristin: Well, that’s a tough one, and one thing to think about is that procrastination is really an umbrella term for a lot of different behaviors. So, for example, if you just have a million things to do and you don’t get them all done, it’s really not fair to think that you are procrastinating. You’re just over committed. So there’s really no way to get everything done. So, let go of the guilt that you are a quote procrastinator because you’re not able to do all the million things that are on your plate. That’s one piece. But what if there are some things that you can really see that you are actively avoiding, like you really need to do these things, and you’re not getting them done, you’re choosing to do other things instead that are of less importance intentionally. So there can be a lot of contributors here, but one thing that can be helpful… you know, I really hate this phrase, but there’s a book and a concept that has gotten very popular called eat the frog, based on a Mark Twain quote about, if you eat a frog first thing in the morning, it’ll be the worst thing that you have to do all day, or something along those lines. [LAUGHTER] But it does kind of speak to when our energy and willpower are at our highest to do the hard thing first, before the negative feelings accumulate during the day and your energy depletion accumulates during the day, becomes harder and harder to do the hard thing that you’re avoiding. So trying to do something that you’ve been avoiding first thing in the morning can be helpful. Some people find it helpful… this might sound funny, but to kind of sneak up on it… like, here’s this one thing you’ve been avoiding… don’t think about it for a little bit and then just do it real fast to sneak up on it, so that it can short circuit the negative emotions around the avoidance that you just jump on it and get it done. Another thing that can be helpful is to just tell yourself you’re going to do it for two minutes, literally two minutes, not like two hours for this big project, just two minutes. And you can even set a timer if you want, because oftentimes the thing that we’re procrastinating, if you’re avoiding it and having those negative feelings, once you get even a baby step into it, those negative feelings start to dissipate, and the avoidance can drop way down, and it makes it easier to get into the task again. What have you found to be helpful?

John: One strategy that’s been proposed by behavioral economists, and I know Katie Milkman has written about this quite a bit, is the concept of temptation bundling, that if there’s something you’re doing that you really don’t enjoy, in addition to providing small blocks of times, reward yourself periodically, so that once you accomplish a certain amount of it, you do something else that you enjoy. And that’s a way of combining the unpleasant task with something that’s more enjoyable as a reward, and that seems to be helpful in encouraging people to get past those things.

Rebecca: One strategy for getting something to sneak up on you is to actually just put it on your calendar, like a little bit away from now, and then it’s like, “Oh, I have a meeting. Oh, I have to do this thing.” And then it’s like, “Oh, I have time scheduled to do this. [LAUGHTER] I guess I should do it.”

Kristin: A lot of the things that I work on are with lots of other people, and for me, I tend to be more motivated by social connection. So if there’s something that I’m really avoiding, I will often schedule a meeting, a literal meeting, because for one thing, we’re all working on this thing together, and it will get me moving, if, like, “Okay, it’s time to sit down. We’re going to figure out where we are in our timeline and take our next steps.” And even knowing I have that responsibility to these other people coming up, it will get me to do the thing before we meet. Now, those are not fake meetings. They’re not wasted. They are real things that are needed to move the project forward, but it gives me the motivation that I need to overcome that kind of avoidance barrier. And one piece I would also add is when I said, let go of the guilt. I’m serious, because feeling guilty about the thing that you’re not doing is not particularly helpful for most people, since it makes you feel worse, it can increase your avoidance. So some people are like, “No, I have to feel guilty, because it tells me how bad it is.” Well, that’s not how it works for most people. For most people, feeling worse makes you more avoidant.

John: And this is a topic we’ve talked about on an earlier podcast with Dean Karlan on commitment devices. And one of the issues that economists tend to focus on, again, is incentives. And the idea basically is you alter the costs and the benefits in some way, and one way is through peer commitments. That you know the social pressure of letting your friends down by not meeting with them when you’re scheduled or something like that, can be really effective. And I think at the time when we recorded it, Rebecca was going with a group of friends to the gym, and one time she didn’t go, so they all posted pictures from the gym without her there [LAUGHTER] and asked, “Where are you?” just as a little bit of peer pressure.

Kristin: just sent with care, not with guilt, yeah, sent with care.

John: And it’s something I talk to students about in terms of forming study groups where they agree to meet a certain time, and it’s much more likely they’ll actually do it when they have that peer pressure.

Kristin: Exactly, balancing those plates.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Kristin: What’s next? Well, that’s a good question. So I am regularly in a quest to take greater control over my time so that I am spending it in a way that I think most benefits the college, because that’s my job and the faculty and the staff and students in the college. So what’s next for me is to continue to try and find the balance again, keep up my weekly meetings so that I can set priorities for myself and make sure that my time is being spent in a way that I think allows me to use the skills that I have, and doesn’t allow my time to be completely sucked up by things that are not the best use of my time for the benefit of the college. That was a long answer to say, keeping on, keeping on, trying to do it a little better every day.

Rebecca: Well, thanks’ Kristin. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

John: Well, thank you, Kristin. We really appreciate you joining us today and taking some of your time to do this with us.

Kristin: Absolutely. Thank you both.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.

[MUSIC]

419. Empowered

Posted in burnout, evidence-based practices, faculty, self-care, support network
November 12, 2025

Women faculty of color in higher ed generally receive little training to prepare them for the challenges, unrelated to their teaching quality, that they experience in their careers. In this episode, Chavella Pittman joins us to discuss her new book, Empowered: A Woman Faculty of Color’s Guide to Teaching and Thriving, a resource she created to address these challenges and to help female faculty of color thrive.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Women faculty of color in higher ed generally receive little training to prepare them for the challenges, unrelated to their teaching quality, that they experience in their careers. In this episode, we discuss a resource designed to address these challenges and to help female faculty of color thrive.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Chavella Pittman. Chavella is a Professor of Sociology at Dominican University. She is also the founder of Effective & Efficient Faculty, a faculty development company that works with faculty and campuses across the country to help them develop strategies for creating an environment in which all students and faculty can thrive. Her research interests and expertise includes higher education, interpersonal interactions, research methods, and statistics. She is the author of Empowered: A Woman Faculty of Color’s Guide to Teaching and Thriving, which has recently been released as part of the Oklahoma University Press series on Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Education, edited by James Lang and Michelle Miller. Jessmyn Neuhaus will be filling in for Rebecca, the usual co-host of this podcast, because Rebecca has been called away by our campus administrators to do administrative things all day today down in Syracuse. Thank you, Jessamyn, for joining us, and welcome back, Chavella.

Jessamyn: Thanks for having me.

Chavella: Yes, thanks so much for having me here. I’m excited.

Jessamyn: Today’s teas are:… Dr. Pittman, what are you drinking today?

Chavella: I’m trying to get a little fancy because I’m usually drinking water, but I have fireside vanilla spice tea.

Jessamyn: That sounds like a nice fall tea.

Chavella: Exactly, exactly.

Jessamyn: I am drinking tropical hibiscus tea from my local grocery store chain, Wegmans, and I’m drinking it in my Tea for Teaching mug, one of my prized possessions.

Chavella: I love it. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a spring cherry green tea from the Republic of Tea, which I picked up at Wegmans down near Syracuse. So we have that in common there.

Jessamyn: Wegmans, do you want to fund tea for teaching? [LAUGHTER]

John: They have a very nice collection of teas and pretty much everything else. And I’ve been very pleased. I spend the summers in North Carolina, and there are three Wegman stores within about a 20-minute drive of Duke University now, which is a very nice improvement.

Jessamyn: We’ve invited you here today to discuss Empowered. Can you share the origin story of this book?

Chavella: Yes, so I would say the short version of it is that there are just a lot of gaps in the support provided for women faculty of color’s teaching, so whether it’s colleagues, the literature itself, the scholarship for teaching and learning, faculty development centers, there are just huge gaps. I mean, that’s how I started doing this work as a grad student. I got recognized by other grad students and faculty too for being adept at helping people navigate some of the challenges they were having in the classroom. And so I was giving workshops at departments, I was being a part of the training for TAs, meeting with faculty to help them navigate a range of challenges. Thirty years later, and most people haven’t gotten better at it. So, [LAUGHTER] I ended up writing the book because I was just like, “Wow, like, how do these gaps still exist?” I wanted to get all that information in one place so that people could have a mentor available, 24/7, so that they could just pick the book up if they were facing something in particular. So essentially, that’s the origin story of the book. And I do want to be clear that when I talk about the challenges that people are facing, they’re not anything that have to do with their teaching quality, like I pretty much became adept at helping people deal with teaching challenges that have nothing to do with their teaching quality and everything to do with other people’s expectations of them and social norms. So that’s essentially the origin story of the book, it’s me trying to fill a gap that has remained for 30 years.

John: Now, you’ve already partially addressed this, but who is the target audience for this book?

Chavella: Well, the cheeky answer is everybody. I really do want everybody to read it, because there are lessons in it for everybody, of course, but the audience that it’s centered on is definitely women faculty of color, their experiences often get invalidated or they’re silenced or they’re marginalized. And so I wanted a book that was squarely focused on their experiences, their teaching, their careers, which isn’t to mean that other people can’t get something valuable from it, like there are lessons that everybody can get from it about their teaching. There are lessons that everybody can get from it about how to navigate some of the challenges that they could be facing that might be similar for women faculty of color, but the book is very much so wanted to center women faculty of color, so they’re the primary audience, but the secondary audience are allies that want to support those people and the other secondary audience are just other folks that want to have great teaching and who want to thrive instead of surviving, because the book is very much so about thriving and having like a sustainable academic life and having joy as well.

Jessamyn: What would you like readers to take away from the book?

Chavella: Well, I would say a couple of things. I want people to feel empowered. So I want them to take away that they can feel empowered, that the things that they’re facing have solutions, essentially. That’s part of the empowerment is that you don’t have to just put up with it, or suffer through or muddle through, that you can be empowered, that the things that they’re facing, they can absolutely address. I want them to take away that they can champion their teaching in reviews. So it’s not about just sort of like slinking away and sort of managing some of the stuff that’s going on. It’s very much about proudly proclaiming in reviews like these are the things that I’m bringing to the university, because that’s part of the reduction of stress. It’s like not just managing the stuff in your classroom, but knowing that these things aren’t going to bite them in the butt when it comes time for tenure, promotion, or any sort of retention or renewal review. So I want them to know that they can champion their teaching in reviews, and I want them to feel equipped to teach authentically in a way that amplifies their gifts, in a way that allows space for joy. So instead of having to modify their teaching, or dumb it down, or do the things that people expect, even when those things are not considered to be good teaching, like people are encouraged to do things that are not evidence-based, and women faculty of color are doing things that are evidence-based; they just might be less common. And so I just want them to teach more authentically and joyfully and have space for joy, essentially. So that’s what I want them to take away.

John: You talked a little bit about some of the topics that you’re addressing. Could you give us an overview of some of the other broad topics that are being addressed in the book?

Chavella: As faculty developers, I think that we have the vocabulary for talking about teaching challenges that faculty often don’t have. We think about women faculty of color, and all faculty actually situated in their disciplines, whether it be chemistry or math or English, history, psychology, political science, they don’t have the vocabulary that we have. So I very intentionally don’t introduce the chapters by the threat. So what I do is I sort of describe it. So each chapter opens with a scenario, and the scenarios are meant to be relatable. So every single scenario is something that I’ve either seen in a faculty client or it comes straight out of the research, and it’s something that I want people to read that chapter and be like, “Oh my goodness, that’s exactly what’s happening to me.” And I know, just from consulting for a while, they’re going to relate to that more than me giving the jargon. If I give the jargon, people are like, “Oh no, I’m not experiencing that.” And I’m like, “Okay, I know you’re experiencing that, [LAUGHTER] it’s just that the label that you don’t want to sort of be associated with, or you just don’t recognize it.” So it’s stuff like that. So, for example, chapter two in particular, where I’m telling people to anchor the strong points, I do that in two ways. So there’s a scenario. So I describe something that someone might be facing. So I’m not going to read the whole thing, but I’ll just give you a little bit of it. It starts by saying: “We all know her. In fact, you might know her as you, whether that’s you as you are today, or maybe a younger, more naive version of you. Who am I talking about? The person who sits on every committee as the diversity person, the person who’s asked or coerced to spearhead new initiatives, the person who goes beyond the call of duty to serve students, including students of color, outside the classroom, without being asked and without recognition. Inside the classroom, you’re going all out for these students. You’ve been guilted and pressured to participate as the only woman,” etc, etc, and then says here: “But it gets worse. Despite unflagging extra effort on a part of this woman of color, you guessed it, the University delivers a crushing blow. It’s a ‘no’ to her tenure application, and it’s about her teaching.” So there are more scenarios like that. You get the feel from that one. And this chapter is about extra labor. It’s about additional teaching labor. So someone may not know that as invisible labor. They might say, “Oh, I like doing that. I don’t mind doing that. I’m committed to doing that.” So the chapters open up like that. There’s also another little descriptive piece that opens the chapter: “Gain crystal clarity about your teaching labor, and don’t let your generosity continue to go unnoticed. Reap well deserved benefits from this labor that steals time from research, writing, and grants and, at the same time, banish accusations of bias or an agenda.” So the chapters are all about challenges like that, if that makes sense. I guess the point that I’m trying to make is I don’t want to use the jargon. So the chapters are about challenges such as teaching labor, interactions with students in the teaching, interactions with colleagues about the content that you’re teaching, about expectations for student care. So broadly, that’s what I’m talking about. But I know for a fact that a lot of women faculty of color, shoot, and even the administrators reviewing them, that’s not going to click with them, because they’re not developers. Seeing the descriptions, the outcomes of these things, that’s what’s going to click for them.

Jessamyn: So, thank you for describing the organization of the book and some of the things that are going into the chapters. Can you tell us more about the structure of each chapter and how you hope readers will read and benefit from how those chapters are structured.

Chavella: For sure, the organization of the book is incredibly intentional. I want the book to be used; I don’t want it to just sit on a shelf and gather dust. I want people to be able to use it. So I hope that people read it from beginning to end, but it doesn’t have to be read that way. So, with that in mind, each chapter has the same sections. So, for example, each chapter has a section that’s about the threat. So that way, I’ll describe the common teaching threat that women faculty of color and other faculty might be facing. And the goal is for them to be able to name it, for them to be able to see it, for it to be visible, so that they understand that it’s a structural issue, not a personal failing. Each chapter also has a strategic action. I don’t want to just put threats out there and people not know what to do about them, [LAUGHTER] so I walk them through an evidence-based strategy for dealing with that particular threat. Not only so it doesn’t just tank their teaching, but so it doesn’t tank their reviews for renewal, retention, tenure, promotion, etc. And the strategic actions that I describe, they don’t take a lot of time and energy, because I know women faculty of color don’t have time for that, so they’re streamlined, they get to the point. And each chapter also describes a mine field from the scholarship of teaching and learning. So the scholarship of teaching and learning is incredibly instructive for the evidence-based strategies. It’s just not often a fit for women faculty of color, and so that section waves a flag so it tells them like, “Okay, yes, here are the things you’re doing that are great according to the scholarship of teaching and learning, but here’s how they set up a trap, or how they have a gap that could harm you in your career and your teaching, essentially. And then I have a section in each chapter empowering actions that they can take that week. So if they’re not ready to do the strategic action at that point, there are smaller, micro actions that they can take just to feel empowered in the moment. Each chapter also has a summary that’s sort of like high-level takeaways of all of those things that I just described. And the thing that’s interesting is that even though women faculty of color, like the research demonstrates, are doing all this incredibly wonderful teaching with all of these great outcomes for students, for society, for the universities, there are these nagging, persisting narratives about their teaching as deficient. And so where that comes to play in a chapter, there’ll also be an extra section called “the excellence of women faculty of color’s teaching.” Because, you know, the three of us, we know that literature, like we read this stuff all day. But again, if we think about faculty and the administrators that are reviewing them, they don’t know that literature. So in chapters where there just happens to be a narrative of women faculty of color’s teaching as deficient, there’ll be an “excellence of women faculty of color’s teaching” section that outlines the research of how their teaching is actually stellar. So each chapter has all of those sections, and so that’s how I want people to read the book. I would love it if they read it from beginning to end, that would be awesome. And even after they read it from beginning to end, maybe they faced the challenges that are in chapters one, four and five, and then at another time, they have to flip back to chapter three. I want them to be able to immediately get in and find what they need, particularly if we think that some of these faculty might be under duress, they might be under threat, they might have a review coming up. So I want them to be able to navigate and find what they need quickly at a whim’s notice, essentially.

John: At the start of this conversation, you mentioned that there were a lot of gaps in the materials that faculty were provided. Could you talk a little bit more about the unique contributions of your book to the literature to fill in some of those gaps?

Chavella: I don’t want to give it all away. I want people to read the book, but I would say one of the unique contributions of the book is that I am suggesting that people thrive, that they’re not just surviving, that they care about their well being, that they’re not martyring themselves for the job, for the students. And that does not mean that you don’t still do a great job. It doesn’t mean that you don’t care about student learning. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about your work. Quite the opposite. There’s an entire chapter in the book that’s about joy. So I think that’s one of the large unique contributions of the book. And just given this particular moment, first of all, it’s a moment that other people have been in for a long time… that have been in before, you know, if you think sort of cyclically, and the messaging, I think that most people give is people to just sort of hunker down and slug it out and suffer, and I’m not saying that. So that’s definitely a gap in the scholarship of teaching and learning is that we don’t talk enough about faculty well being. And I very much so want women faculty of color to be well, to be authentic, to be joyful, and all faculty to be that way. So that’s definitely a unique contribution of the book. Another thing I think, I talk about a couple different sort of terms in the book as well, like I’m introducing a couple ideas. We referenced one of them before, and so I talk about what I call super invisible labor. We talk about invisible labor in higher ed all the time, a lot of time it’s about committee work. We do not talk about it as it relates to teaching. So super invisible teaching labor, like I talk about it at length in the book, I talk about what it looks like, the consequences of it for faculty careers, for student learning, for the university, etc. So these are the sort of gaps in the scholarship of teaching and learning that people will find in the book, some unique contributions that it has.

Jessamyn: I love both of those ideas, and just on an emotional, visceral level, talking about joy and thriving in academia, it feels radical, but it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t sound like such a major issue that’s never been talked about, but it should be… recognizing what you do well and how to achieve that important work-life balance and thrive.

Chavella: Yeah, for sure, all of my work from the beginning, has always been about having a boundary, trying to be as efficient and excellent as you can be, getting back to time with your life, doing things… if you want to use that time for research, if that’s what gives you joy, like, do it. Like, that’s been the messaging throughout. And I definitely feel like that’s the part of my messaging that gets shushed, right? Like people are like, “Shhh, don’t say that.” Like, it’s shameful to want to care about your well being, that it’s selfish to care about your well being. And I’m sick of it. Actually, [LAUGHTER] I’m just sick of it. So it’s definitely the thing that I’m yelling from the rooftop at this moment. I’m always yelling something from a rooftop, and this seems to be the thing that I’m yelling from the rooftop, is that faculty well being is important. It matters. It should just matter, because we’re human, [LAUGHTER] and people should care about us. But for those who don’t care about that, it’s important because it does have a lot to do with creativity and output and productivity and all the things that we can do. So we’re much better at our jobs when faculty well being is good. And again, that’s just the argument for people who don’t actually care about us as humans.

Jessamyn: And it’s rooted in recognizing and helping other people recognize what they’re already doing well… such an important part of educational development. But often people come to the centers for teaching and learning with this deficit framework, like, I must be doing something wrong, or there’s something I have to add, and part of our job, it’s so important, is saying, “Let’s look at what you’re already doing well,” and this is why.

Chavella: Yeah, absolutely, it’s interesting. You triggered another thought in me is that it’s one of the reasons that the book is necessary. The origin story of the book is, I think that teaching centers and developers do a good job of that sort of diagnosing, the: “Here’s what you’re doing wrong, here’s something you could do better,” but they’re not as good at “You’re already doing it excellent, and people are resistant to it. Now what?” And I’m not blaming the scholarship of teaching and learning or teaching centers, because they have limited resources, time and energy, and a lot of times they’re put in the position to be a bit remedial or to teach people new things, they just don’t have the space to help people who are already doing it great. They just don’t have the space for that. So I’m glad to fill that gap and to be a partner with faculty developers and teaching centers and say, “Okay, I got those people,” and a lot of times those people are women faculty of color.

John: One of the things you note is that a lot of the characteristics of the teaching of women faculty of color are undervalued or are not recognized. Could you talk a little bit about what are some of the strengths that appear in the way in which women faculty of color teach, but are not always recognized by the institution or by students.

Chavella: Of course, that’s easy. [LAUGHTER] Women faculty of color, our teaching tends to have more active learning. We know from the scholarship of teaching learning the benefits of that. They tend to have learning outcomes, again, active learning, evidence based, you know, the scholarship of teaching and learning. They tend to have learning outcomes such as maybe like development of social and personal responsibility, and these things are very much so aligned with General Education says we should be producing in our students and with what our institutions want produced in our students. They tend to focus on more skills like creative problem solving. They tend to have assignments that are more applied. So instead of just memorizing, they’re actually learning to apply skills. And again, these are all things that are aligned with university missions, goals, and part of sort of the purpose of education. So those are just a couple of examples. There’s much more detail and citations and statistics and stuff like that in the book, but just sort of broadly, whether it’s their pedagogy, their learning outcomes, or their assignments, they’re doing, all the things that the scholarship of teaching and learning and that the university say, and that the employers also say that they want from students and from society. So they’re doing all the things that produce all the outcomes that both society and universities want, essentially.

John: And hearing you say that… last night, we had a meeting of our student committee on learning and teaching here on campus, and we asked them for some of the things they observed in classes that were not very effective, and the most common response was that a lot of faculty are still spending most of their time lecturing, and they said it was really hard to maintain a focus for 55 minutes, or an hour and 20 minutes of someone just talking at them. So anything that encourages more active learning, I think, would be very much appreciated by students, as well as being a much more effective way to encourage learning.

Chavella: You know, what’s so interesting about that is, yes, obviously we all know that we should have more active learning. Lecturing can be done, like interactive lecturing. Like, I’m not a no to lecture person. I encourage people to do lecturettes, is what I call them, on particular types of concepts, like, it has a place, but you can do an interactive lecture for 55 minutes, and very much so keep students’ attention. This is an example of what I mean when I say that there’s a gap in supporting people who are doing it right. Students might not like lecturing. They’re used to lecturing. When you lecture, they complain. When you don’t lecture, they complain. [LAUGHTER] So that’s a really, really good example of some of the resistance to innovation that women faculty of color face in their teaching is because they’re not just lecturing for 55 minutes, they’re doing other things, and because it violates students’ expectations and colleagues’ expectations of what’s supposed to be happening in the classroom. It’s violating sort of the social norms. They already don’t trust those faculty for a variety of reasons, or may not trust those faculty for a variety of reasons. They complain. They’re suspicious when they don’t find lecture, even though we know it doesn’t produce a lot of the outcomes that we’re interested in, and then students complain about it. So that’s a really good example.

Jessamyn: And that’s such a good example of why your book is empowering, because knowing ahead of time that there’s these things at play that student resistance will flare up, so enables the strategic approach and the mindset and everything we need then to go into the classroom and be effective.

Chavella: Yes, very much so, into the classroom and into reviews. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: That’s right. Absolutely.

Chavella: Like you said, it’s like a toolkit. You’re like, “Okay, I know these things are coming, but I’m prepared, and so I can skip off into the sunset…” [LAUGHTER] not that extreme, but that’s exactly what I have in mind for people. Stuff is going on around you. Of course, we acknowledge those things, we don’t act like they don’t exist. We name it, we prepare for it, and we carry on with the things that bring us joy.

John: Joy is good.

Chavella: Yes, it is… [LAUGHTER] essential.

Jessamyn: Well, John and Rebecca always end the episode by asking their guest, what is next?

Chavella: A book tour. That’s what’s next. So I’m very much available to campuses for virtual and in person, like book club discussions or book talks or seminars or workshops on one or more of the chapters. So that’s what I’m really focused on now, is engaging in a book tour. So if people want to bring me in, either virtually or in person for any of those things, book club sort of discussion, book talk, or some sort of workshop or seminar, I’m available.

John: Well, thank you. I very much enjoyed reading your book, and I hope many more people will.

Chavella: Yay, I hope so too. Thank you for having me. This is always so much fun.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.

[MUSIC]

411. The War on Tenure

Posted in faculty, higher education, teaching
September 17, 2025

Tenure is an employment protection threatened by changes in the labor market as well as declining public attitudes toward higher education and expertise. In this episode, Deepa Das Acevedo joins us to discuss the history of tenure, the value proposition of tenure, and what the cost to society and higher education would be if it were eliminated.

Deepa is a legal anthropologist at Emory Law, the Editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, a past Trustee of the Law & Society Association, and has held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools, the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. Deepa has published extensively in scholarly journals. She is the author of The War on Tenure, which will be released in September 2025 by Cambridge University Press.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Tenure is an employment protection threatened by changes in the labor market as well as declining public attitudes toward higher education and expertise. In this episode, we explore the history of tenure, the value proposition of tenure, and what the cost to society and higher education would be if it were eliminated.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Deepa Das Acevedo. She is a legal anthropologist at Emory Law, the Editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, a past Trustee of the Law & Society Association, and has held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools, the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. Deepa has published extensively in scholarly journals. She is the author of The War on Tenure, which will be released in September 2025 by Cambridge University Press. Welcome Deepa.

Deepa: Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Deepa, are you drinking any tea today?

Deepa: I am. I have a cup of roobois here, which I began drinking when I was in college, thanks to a South African friend of mine,

Rebecca: And perhaps the beginning of the journey to tenure. [LAUGHTER]

Deepa: Yes.

Rebecca: How about you, John?

John: I am drinking Kyoto cherry rose organic green tea, which came from a tea store in Canandaigua. Somehow, I ended up with this unexpectedly.

Rebecca: Why? Because I don’t like cherry tea, John? [LAUGHTER]

John: Yes, because you tried it, because you liked the way it smelled, but you didn’t like it. So I got two bags, one a green tea and one a black tea, of cherry-flavored tea.

Rebecca: And it smells so good.

John: And it does smell very good, and it tastes delicious too.

Rebecca: I’m glad I’m not drinking it. I have an old favorite English afternoon tea today.

John: That’s always a nice, good, solid tea. We’ve invited you here today to discuss the war on tenure. Before we discuss this, though, can you tell us about your own educational path to your tenured position?

Deepa: So I always meant to go to law school and become a lawyer, but I like to say that I got a little bit sidetracked into a PhD program. Academia is kind of the family business. My parents are professors. My grandparents, one of them, was a professor. I have an uncle and a few cousins, all of whom are professors. So I decided to pursue a research interest that I developed in college. I started grad school with a project that focused exclusively on religion among second-generation South Asian Americans, but I very soon switched over to a project based in India that was at the intersection of religion and law. And by the time I came back from my field work, I was reading Law and Society scholarship and legal scholarship as much as I was reading anthropology. So I decided that, yes, I did want to stay in academia, to stay in the family business, but I wanted to do so at a law faculty, rather than out of the disciplinary faculty. So I went to law school. While I was in law school, a very prescient advisor told me that “you’re not going to get a job on an American Law School faculty teaching Indian law, so you need to develop a second research area.” I kind of poked around to find an area of scholarship and teaching that would integrate my anthropological background and my interests, and settled on labor and employment law, or work law, and eventually that is what I was hired to teach. So I teach courses in legislation and regulation, employment law, employee benefits, and I eventually found my way to studying academic employment and tenure.

Rebecca: That sounds like a nice segue into our next question, which is: Can you talk a little bit about how you began your book project, The War on Tenure?

Deepa: So I was sitting at home during the pandemic, working on a different book project because even though I’d developed a body of teaching and research interests in Labor and Employment Law, I studied gig work for a while before moving on to faculty tenure. I maintain an active research agenda in India, and so I was working on a book about India during the pandemic and doom scrolling in between chapters. And like everyone else, I read a lot about the reductions in force, the closures of committees and departments, the kind of mass layoffs of faculty, both tenure stream and non-tenure track, that were going on during this period. And it just made me wonder, how often do the terminations of tenured faculty happen despite the fact that these faculty have tenure? I kind of thought that this would be an easily answerable and long-answered question. So on my writing breaks, I kind of poked around higher education literature. I read a lot of industry news sites and blogs, and I couldn’t find an answer. So in a way, this entire body of research on faculty tenure, and academic employment began in the way that I think a lot of academic research projects begin. I had a fun question; I thought it was an easy research question. It turned out to really not be an easy research question, and five years later, I have an original data set, several research articles, and a book.

John: It’s really nice to have a book on this because it has been so understudied. Critics of tenure often argue that it’s somehow different than other types of employment contracts. It stands alone. It’s unique. But you note in your book that there are a lot of other similar types of contracts out there in the form of these “just-cause” contracts. Could you elaborate a little bit on tenure, what a “just-cause” contract is, and what other types of jobs provide similar types of employment protection?

Deepa: Sure. So when I started thinking about how often tenured faculty get terminated, and what it means from an employment perspective to have or not have tenure, I was a little bit embarrassed by how little I had thought about it, despite being from an academic family and despite teaching employment law, because one of the things that I spend weeks teaching my employment law students is about the different kinds of employment contracts that exist out there. So I can kind of break this down into maybe four steps or four different stages of analysis. The first is that we want to distinguish between indefinite employment relationships and definite or fixed-term work contracts. So most of the time, whether you’re a bank teller or an architect or a tenure-stream faculty member, when you start a job, you think that you’re going to keep having that job until either you move, you get fired, or you quit. Those are indefinite employment relationships, as opposed to a job that you begin knowing that it’s going to last for two years or five years, or what have you. In the US, indefinite employment relationships are governed by a very unique default rule or baseline rule, and this is called the “at-will rule” governing employment relationships. The at-will rule, as I make my employment law students recite in class, means that either party can terminate any relationship for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all, for any reason, except an explicitly illegal reason, with no notice and no payment in lieu of notice. What does that mean? That means that you can walk into work and decide to quit because it’s Tuesday. Your boss can walk into work and decide to fire you because it’s Tuesday. Firing somebody because it’s Tuesday is a really unwise reason to let go of an otherwise satisfactory employee, but it’s not explicitly illegal, and the at-will rule says that that’s okay. Your boss doesn’t owe you any money. They don’t have to give you any advance notice. And so, as you can imagine, the at-will rule creates a lot of insecurity for the employees who are subject to it. “just-cause” is a type of indefinite employment relationship that creates a carve-out from the at-will rule. It basically says your employer needs to have reasonable or just-cause to terminate the employment relationship, and just having that requirement makes the employment relationship much more secure from the employee’s perspective. Tenure is a form of just-cause. It’s not the only type of just-cause contract out there. It’s also definitely on the more protective end of the spectrum of employment contracts, even on the spectrum of just-cause contracts, but it’s not sui generis. It’s not even alone on that most protective end of the spectrum. There are actually a lot of different kinds of employees who are governed by just-cause principles. So part of the reason that we see a lot of litigation around federal employees right now is because the federal employee workforce is by and large governed by very protective just-cause principles. A lot of workers who you might not expect to have above-average protections at work, meaning that they’re not subject to purely at-will principles, actually do receive higher protection. So, for instance, I think in 2020 or 2021, New York City passed a law creating last-in first-out time requirements and various other limiting principles applicable to the hiring and termination of fast food workers. All of those principles constrain the employer’s ability to terminate the employment relationship, and they impose a weaker version of just cause. Anyone who is employed pursuant to a union bargaining agreement is employed pursuant to just-cause principles. So the kind of employment contract that tenured employment relationships are one specific variation of is actually, it’s not common. It is probably about 20% of the indefinite employee workforce. But it’s definitely not unique to tenured faculty.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about when the concept of tenure first arose and what the purpose of it was?

Deepa: I think, like with a lot of these timeline considerations, there’s a lot of possible answers. So with respect to the start date for tenure, we could say that it’s 1940, that’s when the AAUP developed the Statement of Principles on Tenure that most tenure policies at American universities are based on, and this is the most common origin point that people give for the invention of faculty tenure in the United States. We could go a little bit further back to the late 1800s when Walter Metzger, who’s one of the foremost historians of academia, especially in the United States, says that some tenure-like practices began to be common among American institutions of higher education, but Metzger is careful to note that there were no due process-like features attached to employment contracts in that period. We could go even further back to medieval Europe, when scholars working at the major centers of learning across Europe had benefits like the freedom to pursue and teach ideas without fear of repercussion. They even had benefits like freedom of passage across borders. Some of them were exempt from taxes that were generally applicable. All of that was rolled into what was considered tenure, and in that stage. So there are many possible answers— 1940s, 1800s, medieval Europe. There are also many possible answers as far as what the purpose of tenure has been. But I think Walter Metzler, the historian I mentioned earlier, has one of the best and most broadly applicable responses: “in all the ages of academic man, the age of the master, the age of the employee, the age of the professional, the desire to protect the academic office has run strong.” That’s it. Tenure is about protecting the academic office. What protecting that office means entails various things at various points, depending on what the pressures from the outside and from the inside on the Academy are. It could be freedom of inquiry, it could be sustained employment. One of my arguments is that it’s all of those things.

John: When people argue for tenure today, under all the threats that tenure is being faced with, which we’ll talk about later, they often focus primarily on academic freedom. But as you already suggested, there are many other reasons for tenure besides that, including just this employment protection being an important component. Could you explain why employment protection and some of these other issues may be important in justifying tenure, even in the absence of the academic freedom argument?

Deepa: It is true that faculty often hesitate to frame tenure in the light of employment security. And I think one of the most obvious reasons why is also one of the most correct reasons why, which is that saying that tenure gives me, the jobholder, employment security feels selfish. It doesn’t feel noble. It doesn’t have a higher purpose. It’s about protecting the individual employee’s job security. But the thing is, most people like job security, and most scholars need it in order to do the teaching and research work that they’ve been hired to do. I think that one of the most obvious reasons why tenure matters for individual faculty is also one of the reasons why they are so hesitant to articulate tenure as an employment protection, which is that tenure helps the individual employee keep their job. It’s a personal benefit in addition to being an institutional benefit or a professional benefit. But most people like job security, and I think that most scholars need job security to do the kind of teaching and research work that they’ve been hired to do. I absolutely believe that tenure’s ability to protect academic freedom is a real and valuable function of the employment practice, but my point is just that tenure’s ability to provide job security is real and valuable too. I think that tenure provides job security in a couple of different senses, and breaking it apart may also help us become comfortable with thinking about tenure in this way. So first, I think tenure as a form of job security provides a non-monetary type of compensation for a job that, in many ways, is this a tough sell. Getting into tenure stream or full time academia, even if it’s not tenure stream involves long training and apprenticeship periods that are expensive, either in terms of your explicit costs or your foregone opportunity costs. Most academics do not earn well relative to their credentials, and what those credentials could buy on the general labor market. Most academics have unusually low job mobility because there are relatively few and very geographically dispersed employers. If you’re an academic, this is a phenomenon that I call “quasi-monopsony” in the book, because we think of monopsonies as being markets in which there are few buyers for whatever is being sold, and there are few buyers for academic labor. More importantly, those buyers are clustered, so that we think of a major city as being a rich job market for academics when it has five universities or colleges. There aren’t many fields in which you would say that a particular city presents a rich labor market because there are five potential employers, but academia is such a labor market. I also think that the job security tenure offers provide a form of compensation for the fact that academic labor is hard. It involves serious thinking, careful work, highly intensive, emotional labor, dealing with students and colleagues. It involves free labor in many ways, when we do all of these peer reviews, when we sit on committees in the summer, the fact that most academics do not actually even get paid during the summers, although they are working and doing job-related tasks, job security is a form of compensation that makes up for the lack of monetary compensation attached to all of these tasks or times a year, and for the hard work that these tasks represent. I think the last thing that job security as a form of compensation does is that it provides a safety net for a group of workers who have to do all of this hard, long hour, under-compensated work at the end of expensive and long training. All of these workers have to do this work and do the work well: learning how to teach well, how to mentor well, how to write and publish articles or books well, means that you are less eligible, less desirable for work in the general labor market. You have to essentially depreciate your own skill set in order to succeed as an academic, and so you need some job security for that reason, too. There is a second set of reasons why I think job security matters in academia, and this has more to do simply with the work that being an academic entails. Whether we think of that work as doing research, lab sciences, archival research, field work, what have you. Whether we think that as publishing based on that research, or whether we think of that work as being teaching, mentoring, guiding, the time scale that all of these tasks involve is really long. You spend years planning, devising, executing research, and then you spend years seeing it to fruition as a published output. You spend an entire semester teaching a class, learning what went wrong, what students need, what went right, what to do more of, and then you don’t get to put those lessons into practice again for another year, maybe another two years. And so the risk of not getting something right, whether that something is a research result or a publication or a teaching strategy, is really high. We don’t think of academic work as risky because it doesn’t involve physical risk, but it is actually very risky, and the security that tenure offers helps mitigate that risk a little bit as well. So there are multiple reasons why job security matters for the work that academics do, and I think that we need to get comfortable with articulating those reasons, because in addition to the way that tenure protects academic freedom, it also provides security that is necessary to make the job a rational choice for potential performers of the job and a feasible job for holders of that job.

John: I’m a labor economist, so one of the things we talk about quite a bit in labor economics goes back to Adam Smith, the notion of compensating wage differentials, that if jobs are more pleasant, the compensation does not have to be as large. If jobs are less pleasant, they have to be paid more. And that’s basically, I think, part of the argument you’re making here, that because academics have this tenure, they don’t have to be paid as much as they would to attract faculty of equivalent training, skills, and quality. You’d have to pay people a lot more if they didn’t have that sort of job guarantee, especially because of the risk.

Deepa: I think what you’re saying is absolutely true. There’s a point that I actually don’t remember if I make in the book or not, but when I was hired in my first tenure-track job, I made less than I would have made as a newly minted law school graduate three years earlier. You take a wage cut in order to be able to do this work, and most people who pursue academia are quite happy to take that wage cut because they believe in the work that they’re trying to do. But there are limits as to what people can tolerate, and of course, also limits as to what they will tolerate. We absolutely think that lots of different types of workers pursue their chosen paths for reasons other than purely monetary gain. There’s a lot of scholarship showing how government workers, civil servants, don’t simply go into that line of work because it’s prestigious, it’s whatever. They go into it because they believe in the mission, and because they find the prospect of job security appealing, and they’re willing to take a pay cut, essentially, in order to achieve that job security and fulfill that mission. Academics are very similar. I don’t think that they’re engaging in a rational cost-benefit analysis, saying, “I’m willing to trade X number of dollars for X level of security or Y type of job requirements.” But there is some type of analysis of that nature going on. And I think one of the things that we are seeing is that as it becomes harder and harder to do the work that academia supposedly and ideally, entails, and as the conditions of that work become harder and harder to bear, academia becomes a less viable and, of course, a less desirable line of work.

Rebecca: I think that transitions nicely into this idea that tenure is providing all these protections that we’ve clearly described, but also we’ve seen a decline in the number of positions or faculty that are even eligible for tenure-granting positions. Can you talk a little bit about, like, why that decline has happened, and what that might mean for academia moving forward?

Deepa: It’s been well documented for a few years now, so the statistic is probably outdated, but I’m going to quote it anyway: around 20 to 25% of faculty are, in fact, tenure line, which means that 75 to 80% of faculty are not. That’s a huge decline and essentially a reversal from where the professoriate was, say, in the mid-20th century. Part of the reason for this flip between non-tenure-stream and tenure-stream faculty employment ratios has to do with a common dynamic across industries… it’s not limited to academia… which is that the relative commonality of indefinite employment relationships that I mentioned earlier, the kind that even when they’re at-will come with more benefits and more protections than independent contractor or fixed-term relationships. There has been a decline in those kinds of relationships over time. A lot of industries have gone from being based on an employer-employee model to an independent contractor and client or contract model. A very well-known example of this is the taxi industry, and this is even before Uber and Lyft came onto the scene. Taxis through the early to mid-70s, taxi drivers through the early to mid-1970s, were mostly employees of taxi companies. Now, they are overwhelmingly independent contractors who lease their cars, their medallions, whatnot, from owners of those resources, of those medallions or those cars. They’re not employees; they don’t receive the suite of legal protections or benefits that employees receive. They’re independent contractors doing business as part of a broader, more diffuse network of employment relationships. We’ve seen something similar in computer programming. One of the most famous cases that I teach in my employment law class about how to distinguish between employees and independent contractors has to do with software programmers who worked at Microsoft in the early 90s: How people who were working side by side in the same office, wearing the same lanyards, doing the same work, some of them were employees who were protected by various federal and state statutes. Some of them were independent contractors who weren’t protected by those statutes. So again, in a lot of different industries, we’ve seen this slip from long-term kind of full-service work relationships to discrete, shorter-term, less protective types of work relationships. It’s not just academia, in other words. At the same time, I think that there are some developments that are either uniquely or particularly impactful for academia that also help explain this shift from largely employing tenure-stream faculty to largely not employing tenure-stream faculty. One of those is the declining public valuation of higher education. This is something that we see in the news all the time: “How worthwhile do you think a four-year college degree is?” And if you don’t think a college degree is very worthwhile, you don’t think it makes sense to fund higher education institutions. If those institutions don’t have as much funding through public resources or through grant mechanisms or what have you, then they don’t have the ability to support long-term faculty like tenured professors. Another kind of development that is particularly relevant for academia, I think, is the always shaky, but recently more vulnerable public attitude towards expertise, technical expertise, specialization, kind of highly trained elite knowledge forms and systems. Tom Nichols has a book called The Death of Expertise. If you think that expertise is not valuable, then why would you invest in creating it? Why would you invest in supporting its perpetuation? But if you think that expertise isn’t that valuable, if you think that you don’t need advanced training to be able to do certain kinds of work or to have informed opinions about certain types of issues, then why would you fund the labor that is involved in generating or advancing or perpetuating expert forms of knowledge? So there are both general labor market changes that are also applicable to academia, and there are specific attitudinal changes that are uniquely impactful for academia, and I think both of these combined help us understand why universities in general now are staffed by people who are not full-time tenured faculty.

John: Whenever I have students who are considering graduate study, I warn them that the probability of getting a tenure-track job today is quite a bit lower than it used to be, but they’re often still really excited about it. And I remind them of the costs they’re going to be facing, and you talk about those costs quite a bit in your book, one of the quotes that I really liked was: “The life of the mind is also often and literally the life of the empty stomach.” Would we have as many people being willing to go through this whole process of many years in graduate school, of struggling to get by and pay bills, if they didn’t have that prospect or that possibility of arriving at a tenure-track position at the end of the process?

Deepa: Well, I would like to hope not, but I think it’s important to remember first that academics are no more universally rational maximizers when it comes to their professional decision-making, and I think the last several decades of higher ed employment suggests that academics are uniquely not rational maximizers when it comes to their professional decision-making. So I don’t think it’s simply or simplistically the case that making academia a worse job prospect is going to have a linear effect on the number of people who want to break into academia. That said, I’ve clearly thrown a lot of statistics at anyone who comes to me for this kind of advice, because nobody has come twice. I do think that there is some hope that even if academics or aspiring academics don’t completely lose the hope that leads them into this line of work, that they will be more mindful and more strategic about choosing this line of work, and the reason I have some hope in this way is because of what I’ve seen with law school enrollments. So for years, law school enrollments continued to grow by a few 1000 a year, actually, until they reached a peak first year or 1L enrollment level of around 52,000, that was the highest. That was also around the time when a lot of different actors moved to create more transparency around law school job outs. How likely were you to get a reasonably paying JD requiring job upon graduation if you went to such and such a school? If you had such and such entering statistics, like an LSAT test or undergraduate GPA, where would you expect to land in the hierarchy of law firms, which also correlates, unsurprisingly, to the hierarchy of salaries? And the movement for increased law school transparency, both in terms of admissions and in terms of graduation or post-graduation outcomes, had an effect on law school enrollments. So after that peak of around 52,000 1Ls in 2010, it’s more or less stabilized around 38,000 entering first-year law students every year. And I don’t know, because I don’t study this in a kind of focused way, whether 38,000 1Ls a year is an optimal number or something, but it gives me hope that aspiring professionals, aspiring practitioners of any kind of advanced professional field, if you give them the data, if you throw the information at them, eventually, they will begin to absorb it and make decisions in light of it, maybe making different decisions, maybe making decisions with their eyes fully open to the costs and the consequences and the potential benefits of pursuing their chosen professional path.

Rebecca: If tenure is eliminated and the proportion of faculty and tenure track lines continues to decrease and shrink, what are the costs to students and society?

Deepa: Well, I think the first thing to note is that making tenure less common or less protective means making academia less desirable and less viable as a profession, and without discounting the extent to which academics are not unusually rational maximizers of their own best ends, maybe they’re even less rational maximizers of their own best ends than the average person, I do think that at some point, the consequence of eviscerating tenure is going to be that fewer people are going to try to become academics at all. But I think a second consequence of eviscerating tenure is going to be not just that fewer people try to do the job, but that fewer people are going to be able to do the job well, whether we think of the job as teaching or mentoring or research and analysis, and I don’t mean that fewer people will be able to do the job well because we’ll have fewer good people in the job. I mean that fewer people will be able to do the job well, because the conditions of work will not allow them to do the job well. Job security is a condition of doing academic work well. So if you do not have job security, you are not going to take the risk to do research, to undertake publications that, let’s face it, in the peer review universe take months, years, sometimes decades. You’re not going to fine-tune classes and spend hours off of your regular workday guiding and mentoring students. You’re just not going to be able to do all of that because your job is not secure enough to allow you to do all of the things, and we can debate how we provide academics with job security, what exact name we use to describe the employment format, the contract that provides academics with the level of job security that they need. I don’t think that tenure is a magical word; I think that what tenure provides is magical and necessary. The one thing we can be quite sure of is that if that level of job security is not there, then people are not going to be able to do all of the things that they are required to do for the job in question.

John: Outside of academia, a lot of people believe that tenure provides a sort of lifetime guarantee, that pretty much no matter what you do, if you stop doing any productive work and so forth, you are going to be guaranteed employment. But is tenure really a guarantee of permanent employment as long as you stay out of jail?

Deepa: So describing tenure as a job for life is one of those things that just makes my blood pressure rocket right up because, for one thing, there is no such thing as a job for life. And secondly, if there was, tenure would not be it. I’m walking a very fine line here, because on the one hand, I’m saying “tenure is a valuable form of job security,” and on the other hand, I’m saying, “but it’s not ironclad.” The thing is, those are not mutually exclusive positions to hold. One of the things that I ended up researching and discovering in the course of my quest to find out how often tenured faculty actually get terminated was studying and building an original data set, because we don’t have this information of individual terminations of tenured faculty; there are a lot of smaller studies that look at how often faculty quit or want to quit. There are some studies about how faculty leave academia before they get to tenure. There’s not a lot of information about terminations of tenured faculty, so I did a lot of data scraping and cross-referencing and built a data set of individual for-cause terminations of tenured faculty. That means that these are people who achieve tenure, they were fired for what the university felt was just-cause. The university said, “You did something that warrants the termination of this relationship, despite the fact that you had tenure.” Now, the data set that I built, which covers every four-year institution in the United States, over 20 years, roughly, 2000 to 2021, the number of individual for-cause terminations in that data set, which are presumably because the tenured professor in question behaved badly, whether they behave badly enough or what have you, you know, is up for debate. The number of terminations in that data set over 20 years across all four-year institutions in the United States is less than the number of tenured faculty who lost their jobs through reductions in force at 13 universities in five years. What do we make of that little fact? Fewer people, fewer tenured faculty, lost their jobs because of ostensible wrongdoing at all institutions over 20 years, then lost their jobs through no fault of their own at 13 institutions over five years. That tells me that tenure does not grant a job for life, because even when you do nothing wrong, market forces alone will mean that you are extremely vulnerable to losing your job. You are more vulnerable to losing your job through no fault of your own than because you did something wrong. If you lose your job, whether through your own fault or not, because you spent enough time to get tenure, you learned how to jump through all of the hoops, how to craft the courses and the syllabi, how to publish the articles, how to construct the research. You unlearned, or you forgot, or you failed to learn, the tasks that might make you on the general labor market an employable applicant. So more people are losing their jobs despite having tenure for reasons that have nothing to do with wrongdoing, and then because they did all the things that they had to do to get tenure, they’re going to struggle to get a position in the general labor market. All of these things are so many ways of saying tenure does not provide a job for life, even if you do everything right.

Rebecca: So, given all of this information that you’ve just shared about contracts and not permanent employment, should faculty be concerned who are on tenure-track lines?

Deepa: I think that one thing that faculty should always keep in mind is that academia is still an industry. Tenured employment is still employment, which means that it’s a contractual relationship, and there are no guarantees in contractual relationships. But they should also remember that tenure is still more protective, more security-enhancing than the baseline rule of at-will employment that applies to most indefinite employees in the United States, and even more security-enhancing than most forums of just-cause employment. So tenure is still worth having, but I think that one thing academics should remember is that academia is still an industry. Tenured academia still represents an employment relationship and employment relationships are contractual. You always have to keep your eyes open. One of the reasons why we have all been able to benefit so much from the wide variety of tasks that faculty perform is because there is this idea that you pursue academia, not because it’s the best paying job, or it’s the easiest job to get, or it’s an obvious career path, but that you pursue it because it’s a vocation, it is mission aligned for who you are. And I think that faculty would do well to balance that commitment to the job and what it entails and what it really can be, which I think is magical. After all, I’m doing this work, but that they balance that commitment with an understanding that this is a job. This is a contractual relationship, and you need to maintain an eye on the relationship between yourself and the other contracting party, which is your university employer. At the same time, I do think academics shouldn’t go off on the deep end by saying that, “Well, tenure is meaningless.” It’s really not. It is worth having because it is far more security-enhancing and protective than the baseline at-will rule that applies to most indefinite employment contracts in the United States, and it is even more security-enhancing than the various forms of just-cause contracts that apply to a lot of indefinite employees. So tenure is worth having, but it’s worth being clear-eyed about what exactly a contractual form can offer you and how you should approach a relationship that, in the end, is an employment relationship, and should be treated as such.

John: In your book, you note that at-will employment is much more common in the U.S. than it is in much of the rest of the world. Are we seeing the same attacks on tenure in other countries as we’re seeing in the U.S., or critiques of tenure in the rest of the world, as we’re seeing in the U.S.?

Deepa: That question is a little bit tricky to answer, because at-will employment simply doesn’t exist anywhere else. So carve-outs from at-will employment, just-cause contracts, and specific forms of those carve-outs. Tenured employment has different implications in contexts where the baseline assumption is different. So I think that it’s worth beginning from an understanding that security of employment for academics contrasts with something else outside the United States, and as a result of that, there’s less of a contrast. Even the word tenure doesn’t get used as frequently in many other countries. It does exist elsewhere, tenure. Canada has tenure. Germany, famously, has tenure. There are other countries where the particular employment relationships between faculty, or at least some faculty, and their university employers, are called tenured relationships, but the implications of having or not having tenure are very different in those countries. That said, even though tenure either doesn’t exist in a lot of other countries or doesn’t have the same implications for job security in those countries, because none of those countries are operating on a baseline assumption of at-will employment, attacks on Higher Education, on the security of faculty at universities on the freedom of inquiry of faculty at universities, those are not unique to the American context by any means.

Rebecca: So, following up on that, what are some things that we can advocate for to protect against the war on tenure and against this war on higher education more broadly?

Deepa: So I think that there are a handful of things that we in academia can do, and some of them may seem like they are mutually exclusive, maybe they are, but I think they’re all important. One is that I think we need to change the framing of why the things we’re fighting for, in this particular instance, say, tenured employment structures, matter. So what matters most to us from within academia, what seems the most compelling argument in support of something, may not be what resonates outside academia. I think that a lot of academics want to defend tenure purely because tenure makes academic freedom more possible. That’s a valid argument, but I don’t think it’s one that is resonating particularly well socially or politically right now. On the other hand, I think that job security and the ability to perform a job that you’ve been hired to do and that at least many people still want done and done well, that is an argument that may resonate more broadly outside the academy, and just because many of us think that academic freedom is the reason we should have tenure, doesn’t mean that it is the only reason we should articulate support for tenure, especially when engaging in public-f acing conversations. A second thing we could do is kind of the opposite. So if, on the one hand, we want to change the way we frame arguments in support of tenure, to account for what resonates well with a public audience or even a political audience, as opposed to what seems most significant or relevant to us, we also need to be unafraid to claim what is necessary to describe how things actually happen within academia. We need to be unafraid to say that research and teaching are long-horizon endeavors. We need to say that you need flexibility in order to be able to do the range of tasks that academics are asked to do: teaching, devising syllabi, mentoring, guiding, conducting various forms of research, conducting peer review, engaging in shared governance practices, publication. These are many very different types of tasks. They require flexibility. Flexibility requires security. It also requires long time scales, and it is okay to say this is what it takes to do the job and do it well. I think a final thing we could do to help defend academia against the war on tenure is to try to resist the urge to dig in our heels or circle the wagons around what we have grown up professionally, thinking of as the industry ideal or industry norm. If we think that we are in a period of flux where attitudes towards higher education, understandings of what expertise brings to an individual or to a profession, what the good life is after you complete your education, as you search for a job, then we need to be willing to change with that transformation. Insisting that nothing about the way academia has existed so far in the United States change during a period of extreme flux is unrealistic, and I think it’s also a little unfair. And so even as we say, “this is what it takes to do academic work well. It takes time, it takes flexibility, and those things take security, and that’s why tenure matters.” We also need to be able to think expansively about how to provide those things, instead of saying it must remain as it always was. Where that will take us, I don’t know, but flexibility is not simply something that we do every day in our own jobs. It has to also come into play when we talk about our jobs and think about what they might look like in the future,

John: We always end with the question, what’s next?

Deepa: Well, the more I’ve studied tenure and faculty relationships, the more I’ve become interested in how those practices and these professional structures exist within a broader social context. And so I really started thinking a lot more about and leaning into the study of the academia-society relationship. The way that I’ve been doing this most recently is by thinking about public scholarship and public engagement, an example of which we’re engaged in right now. I’ve been working as part of a fellowship program here at Emory under our senior vice president of research’s office. That’s allowed me to do a mini institutional ethnography on how faculty colleagues across the university, across disciplines and career stages, think about what it means to translate academia and scholarship for a public audience. What are the various ways in which we do this? How do we make ourselves understandable and approachable for the people who ultimately we want to reach? That kind of research, I think, is where I’m headed in an intellectual and professional sense in the near future, but in a more literal sense, I’m about to take my six-year-old son for his birthday dinner.

John: Very nice. Well, I’ve really enjoyed reading your book and public scholarship, I think, is a great way to go. If we just keep talking to each other about our research, it’s not going to have as much of an impact with the public in terms of the public views of higher ed unless we can show that we’re doing things that actually matter in some way to society.

Deepa: Absolutely, I think that this next line of research, or next direction of my research, is basically me trying to do as I say, and to explain and reach out widely, because I think that both academics and the public need to adjust as we figure out where academia is heading next.

Rebecca: Well, hopefully we can have you on again to talk about that topic.

Deepa: I would love that.

John: Well, we look forward to our next conversation. Thank you.

Deepa: Thank you both so much.

Rebecca: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts, and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.

[MUSIC]

343. Writers’ Groups

Posted in commitment devices, community of practice, faculty, feedback, higher education, teaching, writing
May 29, 2024

Faculty writing groups can help motivate writing, provide peer feedback, and lead to higher quality writing products. In this episode, James Lang, Sarah Rose Cavanagh, and Mike Land join us to discuss their highly productive long-term writing group.

Jim is a Professor of Practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame, the author of 6 superb books on teaching and learning and is the author of a regular column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He was the founding editor of the West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, and is now a co-editor of a new series at Oklahoma University Press. Jim also was the founder and long-time Director of the teaching center at Assumption College.

Sarah Rose Cavanagh is a psychologist and the author of four books related to teaching and learning. She is the senior associate director for teaching and learning and associate professor of practice at Simmons University and is also a regular contributor to The Chronicle and many other publications. Jim and Sarah are regular keynote speakers and have both provided keynote addresses at SUNY-Oswego.

Mike Land’s early writing and editing experiences included 15 years of newspaper journalism, a masters and doctorate in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and 23 years of teaching journalistic and creative nonfiction at Assumption, working for many years in the office next door to Jim Lang’s and a short walk from Sarah Cavanagh’s. He’s an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Community Service-Learning Program at Assumption University.

Show Notes

  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The spark of learning: Energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Lang, J. M. (2021). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. 2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Jensen, J. (2020). Write no matter what: Advice for academics. University of Chicago Press.
  • Scrivener
  • A General Education – Jim Lang’s substack account
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2023). Mind over monsters: Supporting youth mental health with compassionate challenge. Beacon Press.
  • Reading groups at Oswego (in the last three we were joined by Jessamyn Neuhaus and colleagues from SUNY Plattsburgh):
    • Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning.
    • Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Hachette UK.
    • Lang, J. M. (2021). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. 2nd ed.
    • Cavanagh, S. R. (2023). Mind over monsters: Supporting youth mental health with compassionate challenge.

Transcript

John: Faculty writing groups can help motivate writing, provide peer feedback, and lead to higher quality writing products. In this episode, we explore a highly productive long-term writing group.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are James Lang, Sarah Rose Cavanagh, and Mike Land. Jim is a Professor of Practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame, the author of 6 superb books on teaching and learning and is the author of a regular column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He was the founding editor of the West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, and is now a co-editor of a new series at Oklahoma University Press. Jim also was the founder and long-time Director of the teaching center at Assumption College. Sarah Rose Cavanagh is a psychologist and the author of four books related to teaching and learning. She is the senior associate director for teaching and learning and associate professor of practice at Simmons University and is also a regular contributor to The Chronicle and many other publications. Jim and Sarah are regular keynote speakers and have both provided keynote addresses at SUNY-Oswego. Mike Land’s early writing and editing experiences included 15 years of newspaper journalism, a masters and doctorate in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and 23 years of teaching journalistic and creative nonfiction at Assumption, working for many years in the office next door to Jim Lang’s and a short walk from Sarah Cavanagh’s. He’s an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Community Service-Learning Program at Assumption University. Welcome back, Jim and Sarah and welcome, Mike.

Sarah: Thank you.

Jim: Thank you.

Mike: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: …Sarah, are you drinking tea today?

Sarah: Never. You know me. I’m drinking seltzer. It’s too late in the day for coffee. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: How about you, Jim?

Jim: I had several cups of tea already today, it’s orange pekoe? And then my last one was English Breakfast actually at about one o’clock.

Rebecca: Nice. How about you Mike?

Mike: I am sampling some Bengal spice which the box tells me is brimming cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and cloves and it’s an adventurous bland.

Rebecca: Does it taste adventurous?

Mike: It does. Everything about this is an adventure to me. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have a blueberry green tea today.

Rebecca: And I have not my favorite tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: And what do you mean by that?

Rebecca: It’s not a good tea. It’s the first time I’ve ever had it. It’s supposed to be gingerbread. And I think it’s kind of disgusting. [LAUGHTER]

John: Now you know why we never get any sponsorships from tea companies.

Rebecca: I didn’t say where it came from. [LAUGHTER]

John: That’s true, but I’m sure there’s probably not too many gingerbread teas out there.

Rebecca: There shouldn’t be. [LAUGHTER]

John: In past podcast discussions with Jim and Sarah, we had heard about the writing group that you’ve all participated in. Can you tell us how this group got started?

Sarah: I guess I can take that one. I think it was about 2014…2015. Mike, do you know the year? He’s giving me a big nod. 2014. And Jim had recently invited me to write the Spark of Learning and his first series at WVUP and Mike was working on a book…had just come off sabbatical doing a cross country trip. And Jim was working on the first edition of Small Teaching. Since all three of us were working on book projects, Jim said, “Hey, why don’t we form this writers’ group.” And we started meeting. And it was really such a beautiful process to write my first book with my editor [LAUGHTER] reading every chapter as it came out, was a very developmental process. And as well as forming some really great friendships.

Rebecca: Sounds like a great start to a long endeavor. Can you talk a little bit about how regularly this group meets and if you still continue to meet?

Jim: We do continue to meet, but not regularly, as you might expect, [LAUGHTER] especially just because we were initially together at Assumption and were all working in the same area, and I just mean sort of geographical, and now Sarah’s in Boston, I’m going back and forth between Worcester and South Bend. So it’s a little bit harder to get us together in the same place at the same time. So we kind of meet on a more ad hoc basis at this point. if one of us has a project that we want feedback on will sort of send an email around saying “I need help, [LAUGHTER] and so let’s get together and can we have a writers group coming up?” So we’re still probably doing that maybe six to eight times a year, I would say. Maybe we were trying to do it every month but now it’s kind of morphed into that kind of more occasional kind of schedule.

Sarah: So we usually squeeze in a Christmas one.

John: That’s true.”

Sarah: So usually a mid December writers’ group. Some of them are in Zoom just because of how we’re spread around but the Christmas one is always in person. It’s really nice.

Jim: Yes, we have holiday themed groups. [LAUGHTER]

Mike: …with teas.

Sarah: Well, for some of us.

Mike: …or beers, but yeah, we’ve tried to have a couple of year that are also just social and in person. We’ve got more used to Zoom,as everyone has, and since we’re in three different…well, Jim and I live two doors from each other, but it’s harder to get us all together physically in the same space, but we’ve try to do that two or three times a year.

John:. When you were meeting regularly at Assumption University, what happened during the meetings when you got together? How long were the meetings? And what did you do in the meetings?

Jim: That would also depend upon where everyone was, in terms of their writing projects. A typical meeting would last maybe 90 minutes. Mike’s especially a social guy, [LAUGHTER] he would sort of want us to start with some social time, we sort of built that in. And so we’d have a little social time initially, you might be around a meal, for example, for the first 15 to 30 minutes, just catching up on our lives. And then we kind of just go through the project, essentially. So we essentially will just pick one off the pile, and say, “Okay, so here’s my essay this time,” like, for example, I might be doing a Chronicle essay or a chapter of a book. You have to read it in advance. So that’s an important thing to note, that we don’t read out loud, which sometimes writers’ groups will do that. You read in advance, we send the stuff out at least 48 hours in advance. You’re expected to read that material, come into the group having already written comments, either online or actually some of us still use the paper versions and bring those in as well. So then, essentially, the person whose material that we’re critiquing is supposed to just sit and ask questions, and the people that have read will kind of go through, essentially page by page, there might be like an initial comment, “overall, this is what I think of the piece,” but then we kind of go through page by page. That doesn’t mean every page is commented on, because it depends on where the issues are. But say, each person’s piece could take 15 or 20 minutes or so to walk through it. And then we move to the next one. And so we move around the circle that way. That’s the basic process, but what am I leaving out?

Sarah: No, I think that’s most of it… Kind of the flow.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of having formed the writing group and what other people might think about in forming a group?

Sarah: It is so invaluable, I think, in so many different ways to have first readers who can read something. It’s so vulnerable writing and putting your thoughts out into the world, and to have a safe place where people can give you feedback on very early drafts, I think is so valuable. And it’s also a really good test of are you expressing your ideas well, and are your references sound. I’m always telling Jim, people who don’t know sports aren’t going to understand this reference, and he does the same for my sci-fi references, and so that kind of tells you what a broader audience might think of your ideas. And it’s just a place to bounce your ideas around as well, like sometimes we do a lot of line-by-line feedback, and Mike is awesome at that from his journalism background. But we also sometimes just ask advice and just say, Is this even working? Should I draft this project and go to something else? Kind of really broad ideas as well. How about you, Mike, what do you see as the benefits?

Mike: The things you said. I think it’s a lonely pursuit, and if you don’t have an audience of people who are intelligent readers to let you know whether you’re totally going in the wrong direction or not, you’ve been staring at what you’ve been working on for so long, you convince yourself that yeah, this makes perfect sense, or this was a good move, or they’ll laugh at this, whatever it is. And so at some point, you got to try it out on audience members you trust and who also understand the writing process, because they themselves are writing and have written a lot. So they differentiate some things, maybe what not to do or to do. There’s a temptation in fiction writing, when I was in the fiction writing program, we were warned about trying not to turn the short story of the person being critiqued just into the story you had felt like writing instead. [LAUGHTER] Well, I figured out what the person is trying to do, and help them do that, and stay locked in on that, to some extent. So yeah, there was a lot there. And it is an extra deadline and something to get you moving.

Jim: That’s an important thing to know, too, that it was oftentimes a way of saying, “Okay, I have this book coming out, so I want to make sure I go chapter by chapter, and so I would make the writing group deadlines, my internal deadlines for getting those chapters done.” That’s a really, really helpful structural enabler, when you’re trying to especially do like a long project. The other thing I mean has come up in actually both these comments from Mike and Sarah, about the audience. And that’s true in terms of your audience. Think about your ideal audience who you’re trying to really write for. It’s also really true for your editors and potential publishers. And we often talk about that, like, “Okay, who would really be the right place to submit this to?” And we might be able to share examples of the publishers that we’ve worked with or strategies for reaching out to an editor, maybe we have a connection, and we know somebody. So we can have also that as well. So especially if you have books in your writers group who have published other things, you can start building networks around a writer’s group and I think that’s really important, too. Again, I think what Mike and Sarah are saying about audience is a real big benefit of you’re sort of thinking about the readers that you’re trying to reach, and you can often refine those. The example that Sarah gave about references, like if I’m writing to a community of people who love science fiction, I don’t have to worry about those references. But if I am going to expand beyond that audience then I have to either explain them or make more universal ones, and I think that process of like hearing at least two other readers, helps you expand a little bit in the number of people that you can reach with your writing.

John: And I would think having that relatively timely feedback would be much better than writing a big chunk of a book, sending it off, having it go out to reviewers and then getting reviews back when it’s perhaps a little bit late to make some of those major changes, that getting that more immediate feedback, I would think, would be helpful in keeping the writing project going in the direction you intended.

Jim: Absolutely. For example, I had like a little mini readers group with my Chronicle editor. Now I’d submit my work to her, and she would really sort of hack it to bits, [LAUGHTER] in a nice way, she’s a great person. But over time, I’ve sort of recognized, this is what she wants, this is what she looks for, this is what she changes. And I kind of learned to sort of mold myself into that kind of form that she wants. And the same thing is true for your writers’ group, you can sort of start to anticipate the things that they’re going to point out to you, which are often little habits that we have, which are not always great ones. [LAUGHTER] I always remember that Sarah would always point out that I used the word “so” all the time as like, “and so this,” and I never would have noticed that unless she started to circle all my “so’s” and then “look how often you do this,” that was like a really helpful thing for me to know. So now I’m aware of it, I still use them, but I’m just more aware of it now. So it’s very helpful to see other people’s perspectives and then you can start to anticipate that.Sarah sometimes uses phrase, “I had Jim in my head when I was reading this sentence,” or “I had Mike in my head…

Sarah: Yep. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: …telling this anecdote” or something like that. So that’s a really helpful thing to have as well.

Mike: Yeah. And it’s interesting, you’ll learn those things about each other, and then we can decide when to accept or not accept that, right? [LAUGHTER] In my case, and I think it’s true of Sarah, we can anticipate that if we throw in one too many anecdotes, we know Jim’s going to be there waiting to pounce on our extraneous anecdote that we love. And I’m somewhere in the middle, from the South, so somewhat more elliptical in my storytelling and less linear. So I’m favor of the extra anecdote. But there are times when you can tell, when you looked at it, and you have that voice and you go, “Okay, this really is extraneous, get it out of the way, don’t even bother other people with it.” And that’s that kind of thing and that’s kind of why we assign undergraduate students to do peer editing of each other is to learn to be editors, and to hear those voices too. So it’s really useful that way.

Jim: Mike, you know about other readiness groups and this question, John asked us about, like, guidance for other groups, can you give some examples, Mike, if you know of other writers’ groups that have sort of different ways of working?

Mike: There have been some groups that seem to exist just for people to pat each other on the back. And they don’t really do much criticism at all. A friend of mine who’s dyslexic said that he was in a group where you could never correct anything ever, grammatically or stylistically, which would drive me crazy, because I would want people to note every time I slipped up on something. So those are a couple of examples, and I’ve been trying to come up with some more, but it seems like there are a lot of variations in the rules in how they do it.

Jim: Sarah, you have also one that’s more like keeping you accountable, right?

Sarah: So I have another writers’ group with some friends at Tufts University, and we call it “writing and hijinks.” And so we gather together in a coffee shop or somewhere and we just write quietly, although one of them, like Mike, is very social and has trouble with the quiet part. [LAUGHTER] And so we just write, it’s just dedicated writing time for a couple hours, and then we go out and have fun. Although we’ve been sliding more and more towards just the fun and not doing the writing [LAUGHTER] over the last few years. This is motivating me to say to them, maybe we should bring back the writing part.

Rebecca: We have a writing group at Oswego that functions like yours, Sarah, that you’re talking about, where it’s just kind of some dedicated time, accountable time, this is the time we’ve set aside to write…

Sarah: Right.

Rebecca: …which can be really helpful if you have a designated time and space to do that, if you aren’t good at scheduling it on your calendar otherwise. Julie

Jim: Joli Jensen has a book about writing from the University of Chicago Press, and she actually makes the argument that writing groups for academics should not be content critique groups, which is what we have, actually. And she makes the argument that it’s not helpful, for example, English professors to be working with a psychologist because they won’t get your references and all that kind of stuff, and it won’t be very helpful to you. But actually I would argue that what we’re doing here, because most of us are running for, like broader audiences, the content critique part is really important. If Mike and Sarah don’t understand what I’m saying, well, then I’m not gonna be able to reach a broader audience instead of just writing specific to my little expertise audience. So that’s another way to think about distinguishing content, whether you focus on the content or just the writing, the sort of grammar and the stylistic part of it. So that’s another way to think about what are you actually trying to do in your writers’ group? Are you trying to expand beyond your discipline and getting different kinds of feedback? Or are you just trying to focus on, as Mike said, maybe patting each other on the back or accountability or style and grammar? So there’s a lot of different ways you can go.

John: I think that would depend a lot on who your intended audience is. So that if you’re all psychologists, or all economists, or all mathematicians, if you’re going to be submitting things to journals, it might not be a bad audience. But for a general audience, having someone who is not necessarily an expert in the field, seeing it from a different perspective would lead to a lot of really productive comments in terms of what some of the hidden assumptions are, the implicit assumptions in the writing.

Jim: Absolutely, you can actually even think about it as a teaching thing too, I mean teaching to like a gen ed class, their first-year students, that’s almost like a content critique group in the sense you can’t take too much granted about background knowledge in discipline, like a really focused content critique group, all from a discipline, you’re essentially teaching a graduate seminar. And so you’re looking for different things from those experiences, and you’re being required to explain different levels of things to those two audiences.

Rebecca: So I’m curious what participating in this particular writing group with the three of you has done for you as writers? How has it shaped your writing? And why are the three of you a good group for each other?

Sarah: I think that one of the things that has really shaped my writing process, this is beyond all of the wonderful things that we have said already about audience and things like that, is being in a writers’ group with two English professors is really valuable. I tested out of intro writing in college, so I actually never took a writing course of any sort, and then decided I wanted to be a writer. And my writing is very organic and intuitive. And working with these two really helped me like the things that they would correct. Like I didn’t know periods went inside the quotes, until Mike corrected me. [LAUGHTER] But the first year, we were writing together, and you would think I would just absorb that from reading, but I just never noticed that. And so really tiny things like that, but then also just thinking about the structure of your writing and the organization of your writing, because I had never really done that for this kind of general audience writing. And so having this writers’ group with writing professors is really amazing, as Jim would sometimes send me to the whiteboard, when we would meet [LAUGHTER] at Assumption, because it’d be like, you’d have a lot of really interesting ideas here in the writers’ group, but they’re just in a big pile,[LAUGHTER] and he’d have me map out, do a literal map of my work. And that was very, very helpful.

Mike: That’s one of the fascinating things about being in a group is working with two people that have such different composing processes. And Jim, you’re fairly linear…

Sarah: fairly…

Mike: kind of have it in order [LAUGHTER] and smoothly.

Sarah: …the computer. [LAUGHTER]

Mike: So what was the computer program that you’re using that divided the screen into quadrants?

Sarah: Yes, Scrivener, you can put your bits of writing on literal digital index cards, and just move them all around.

Mike: Yeah, which is something I’ve seen poets do. I’ve seen poets tear their poems apart, line by line and move the lines around in the coffee shops. So it’s just two equally effective ways of doing that. And I guess I’m somewhat in the middle, but with the road trip narratives, obviously, there was someone’s this town and that town, but it’s fascinating to watch how people’s brains work differently.

Jim: Yeah, I think for me, Sarah and Mike are different kinds of writers. But as a result, I’m kind of benefiting from both the sort of storytelling advice that comes from Mike and from Sarah, again, more of the research, making sure that I’m supporting my points well, and thinking about other perspectives on the topics I’m addressing. And it’s helpful to get both those things, because I’m getting different things from others, like editors, for example. I like the idea of starting a piece of writing with a story or something like that, my editor at The Chronicle always wants me to lead with the thesis, essentially. And so I’m trying to put some of Mike’s ideas advices into that kind of storytelling opening, but also trying to satisfy my editor. So anyways, it kind of helps you develop new strategies and see how strategies might land with different people and Sarah’s especially good at ways that I should include more readers, more thinkers from different backgrounds, and essentially making my writing more inclusive. And I think that’s really valuable as well, and making sure that I engage with the research that I might not be aware of, in the teaching and learning fields. So that’s really important, too. So I can look at my own writing and see how it’s benefited from both their perspectives.

Rebecca: I think one thing that I’ve benefited from when I’ve participated in writing group opportunities is actually seeing early stages of other people’s writing, and just what that looks like and feels like and sometimes provides strategies to future me [LAUGHTER] when I’m stuck, [LAUGHTER] like, “oh, wait, this other person would have attempted it like this.” And when I felt stuck on something, sometimes I use the strategies that I’ve observed other people using, which can be really beneficial, that things that I wasn’t taught or hadn’t been exposed to otherwise.

Sarah: That’s great.

John: You mentioned future me. And one of the issues that we know from behavioral economics and psychology is that when given a choice between pursuing your long range objectives and immediate gratification, immediate gratification sometimes wins out, [LAUGHTER] because it’s always easier to start these things tomorrow or next week. And one of the things you mentioned earlier, Jim, was that having the regular meetings of the writing group provided a bit of a commitment device that you want to get to the meetings with some new material you want to share that material before it. Do you think that has helped increase the pace in which your work has taken place?

Jim: For me absolutely, yeah, having that structure there. I think structure is always a really helpful thing in teaching and writing. If you sign a book contract, the deadline might be two years away. So you know that two years, an editor might check in after a year, but like, you need to have more structure in that to kind of get yourself moving along. And I’m a pretty structured person, but I can also fritter time away. I’m pretty good at that, too. [LAUGHTER] But I’m self aware enough to know I need a little help in terms of structure. And so it definitely has pushed me to become more productive.

Sarah: Absolutely. I agree. This whole conversation is making me want us to do this more regularly, [LAUGHTER] instead of the as needed, because I think about especially the beginning of the writers group. And when I was writing Spark of Learning, my daughter was a toddler. And she was only in daycare three days a week, and I was on the tenure track and just doing a billion different things. And I do not think I would have written that book if it weren’t for writers’ group monthly meetings. I think at that point, we were really regularly meeting in person monthly. And just finding the time at four in the morning [LAUGHTER] or terrible times often, but I don’t know that I would have gotten it done if it were just like, “oh, I have a contract and I must do this giant thing.”

Mike: That definitely helped this begin…the structure. I don’t have a long-term project I’m working on currently so hard for me sometimes to come back around and really have anything that’s worth them looking at. But yeah, you mentioned those long period of the book contract, and there’s a long period of only doing shorter things, whereas so there’s not that continuity from chapter one to chapter two to chapter three, and you’re eager to write those next two pages that are the bridge to the next thing, so group can help with that as well. It seems like a lot, but what happens in writing group is when someone is working on a Chronicle column that needs to be turned in in 48 hours or letters and things like that. And I was wondering if you can give examples of that kind of stuff when the group comes into play. That’s not the big primary thing we’re working on, but it’s kind of the emergency stuff.

Jim: We’ve done a little bit of that, but it’s kind of hard because especially for an upcoming deadline, I think typically we’ve handled that when someone just needed something very quickly, we just handled that by email. But the writers’ group is available in those emergency situations, because we already have a quick sense of like, if Sarah sends me something, and it was for a quick turnaround, it’s for The Chronicle, I can be able to spot very quickly a couple of things that you could maybe do in that short window. And likewise for me. So it’s challenging, though, because you want to have time for people to have opportunity to read and think about that as well. But it’s available for those situations. So it’s good for that.

Rebecca: I can imagine that you’re strong relationship with one another, having written with each other for so long allows for that quick turnaround by email, because you can sense the tone someone’s providing some feedback in [LAUGHTER] and it…

Sarah: Help!

Rebecca: …has a different kind of context. [LAUGHTER] Yeah.

Jim: Absolutely.

Sarah: And it’s such a pleasure, like it’s hard to ask for emergency work from people, even people you’re close with, and maybe even especially people you’re close with, because you know, they have so much else going on. But it’s such a pleasure to read these gentlemen’s words, that it’s not a burden at all, even the emergency ones because it’s like, “Oh, I get to relax, not with a cup of tea, [LAUGHTER] and read some words from Jim or Mike.

Jim: That’s true. That part of it is good, because you know that you can help them in the emergency because they’ve helped you in the past, that same situation. Right now, you know, I’m sort of developing a substack account. And I haven’t really used the writers’ group for that. And as a result, I need to have my wife proofread for me,[LAUGHTER] because substack doesn’t have an editor, and I’m really annoying her by this process. So I need to start using my substack columns for writers group stuff as well.

Mike: Yeah, it is really helpful and we know that there’s just a lot less explaining to do amongst the three of us. If I were going to send something cold to another friend, I think I would have to explain a lot more about what was going on for them to get it. So that’s incredibly useful that way. But it’s funny how different it is from like growing up in a newspaper family, and I would interview someone in the morning and I would revise it four or five times in a period of like four hours and hand it to my editor who would then tell me to change three things. And the whole thing from beginning to end was less than a day. But there was no deep thought, there was no deep reflection or big structural things, and then my time sort of expanded magically as I became an academic and suddenly you can get trapped in a lot of whirlpools of uncertainty about which way to go or that way to go. Whereas in journalism, there wasn’t much choice a lot of the time.

Sarah: Writers note, I love that “whirlpools of uncertainty.” If I were in writers’ group, I would say underline it, put a little exclamation point next to it. [LAUGHTER]

Mike: Well, I was a really terrible student in an undergraduate poetry workshop at the same time my sports editor was trying to teach me to write in a linear way. And my teacher said at one point, Mike what you’re writing, as poetry is prose with line breaks in random places. And he said, “Let the language go where it wants to go.” And I was having a hard time imagining telling my sports editor that on [LAUGHTER] Friday night during high school football season, but it seriously took a long time for me to learn I could do both. I could loosen up and be this one kind of writer, and then be this very mechanical quick writer. And that took years as an undergraduate to figure out how can I do both of these things at the same time.

Rebecca: One thing I heard Sarah say is that currently you’re meeting as needed, but then I also heard in the conversation, that maybe we need these things, and we just don’t know it. So having it regularly on the calendar could be helpful. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Mm hmm.

Jim: Yes, we’re convinced now this conversation is very helpful to us. [LAUGHTER]

Mike: Yeah, and plus this almost the end of the semester, so suddenly, we’re gonna have a lot of time on our calendars.

Sarah: …well, those of us still teaching. [LAUGHTER]

Mike: Yeah.

Sarah: I’m at 12-month contract now.

MIKEL Oh, you are?

Sarah: Yeah.

Mike: For you, year round.

Rebecca: Me too, Sarah. [LAUGHTER] Maybe we need a separate writers’ group. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Or therapy. [LAUGHTER] …support group.

John: What sort of advice would you give to other people who are thinking about forming a writers’ group?

Jim: Actually, there have been been other people in the writers’ group over the years, I’ve been in other writers groups too. For me, the thing that I look for is people who I thought were sort of ambitious and were writing, because you don’t want to be the person who is trying to gather people together, when they’re just not writing, they don’t want to write, you don’t want to be like the taskmaster in a writers’ group. So find people that are writing and are interested in writing, and find people that you find interesting, you want to hear more of their thoughts. So that has always been a driver for me. And sometimes, if I’m looking for people that I want to hear their thoughts about my own writing, and I want to talk to them about their own writing, I’m gonna be more interested in going to that writers’ group and participating. And so those are sort of two general points I would make: look for people that are writing and interested in writing, and then people who are interesting, you want to see it develop and getting access to their ideas as they’re developing. And I would just say, most people, I think, are flattered, you would like to hear and read their work. So if you identify someone that and you might say, “Well, oh, you know, they’re probably too busy, or they probably already have other people to work with,” that might not be true. And so extend the invitation and see if they want to join you in pushing writing forward.

Sarah: And I think I would add, it’d be hard to figure this out, [LAUGHTER] but one thing that I appreciate about this group, and I would want in any writers’ group is having a similar level of like sensitivity and openness to feedback and criticism. So I think that all of us are really great at taking feedback and taking constructive criticism, without either taking it personally, or I think Mike referenced this, but sometimes the Jim in my head or the Jim on my page, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m not listening to you.” [LAUGHTER] But then a lot of times you do. And so t o people who are at that level of like, open to hearing criticism, but also confident enough to stick with their gut if they feel it’s right. And yeah, and so that’s a delicate thing. And it’s hard to figure out about someone without actually engaging in writers’ group. But I think if they were in your department meetings or on committees with you, kind of keep an eye and get a sense for how open they are to other people’s thoughts and how willing they are to give them.

Mike: Yeah, and along the line with open is something I always warn undergraduates about, but in grad school it would come up with separating the characters on the page, even the narrator, that that person I’m writing the first person about, it’s Mike, the narrator on that page, but it’s not necessarily all of what I am. So, ‘cause when you’re talking to someone, then you can point out stuff that you think is maybe sexist, or is whatever, but be able to talk about it in a separation where you’re not personally attacking the writer, but that you are holding that in a certain place. I think we’re really good about those sorts of things, we know the level each of us are trying to get to, we’re just trying to help each other get there and again, smooth out anything that the audience might misinterpret. That’s a mental discipline that takes a while to be learned. And I’ve had friends who have been in groups where things have devolved to name calling, and to really unfortunate situations where the writing group had to be broken up, and so I’ve even heard that happen in academic settings, like in actual seminars. Fortunately, I was not part of any of those, but where people went stomping out of the room. And so yeah, having the maturity in just the way you carry yourself in life, I guess, to know how to treat other people and work with them constructively, a really important thing. But otherwise, in terms of advice, let’s say that whatever kind of writing group you want to have, you want to sit and just right beside each other and then go have drinks that what this one’s gonna be, are you all aiming to publish and you’re trying to help each other get published? That can be a very different mentality, depending on what you’re trying to do. That’s my two cents.

John: Do any of you have any other thoughts about writing groups that you’d like to share with our listeners?

Jim: I will say just as an editor, you know, editing the book series, I can also sometimes tell people who had writers’ groups when they turn their manuscripts in who had prior readers. So just from my perspective as an editor, I absolutely recommend this, forming a writers’ group, especially if you’ve signed a contract, and you’re intimidated by it. The fact that you have this deadline, you have this big project coming up, A writers’ group can not only put some structure on to the process but also forestall a lot of the work that I will have to do as an editor. So you can make my life easier when you’ve had some prior readers who kind of work with you to iron out a lot of the kinks that have developed, as any writing project will have in the drafting.

Sarah: Yeah, my editor was very grateful for writers’ group. We met monthly, my editor for Mind Over Monsters and she was wonderful. But writers’ group was like a third character in the room. [LAUGHTER] Because we would meet monthly, I’d be like, “Alright, well, here’s the chapter, but this is what writers’ group says, and they think that I should reframe this.” So it was really like the three of us, or I guess, the four of us, melding you two into one being in the conversation and in the room. And that was an interesting process.

Mike: I think another thing that’s been interesting to me is that because Jim and Sarah have books out a lot of the time, and there’s a good bit of talk about the publishing aspect of it, there are times when say, Jim might know someone that one of us should hit up, or contact, or things like that, or how to interpret an editor’s reaction. And there’s been a good bit of conversation about those things where I kind of felt like I know, these editors I’ve never met. [LAUGHTER] I’m sure that’s a big stopping point for a lot of people is they’ve written this thing, and now they don’t know what to do. They don’t know what the path is, and how to get there, how to get someone’s attention. And so there’s a lot of talking back and forth about things like that.

Rebecca: Do you have wishes for your group moving forward?

Jim: I guess, more regular meetings.

Mike: …more regular meetings, yes. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Sounds like a way to save Jim’s marriage.[LAUGHTER]

Mike: I guess, I should sell them another road trip so I could write another road trip manuscript.

Jim: Yeah.

Sarah: There you go. I would read that.

Mike: As we sneak toward possible retirement…a travel book…that could be the plan.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

Sarah: Well, more regular writers’ groups, I guess. But I think as Mike just referenced, he’s retiring. So he’s going to have a lot more time to write coming up. And Jim and I are both, I think at the phase of thinking about next book projects. And so maybe it’s going to be a new day for writers’ group.

Jim: That’s true. I’m actually doing the final, final, final revisions of my current book manuscript, which are due on April 22nd. So that will be coming up shortly. And so I’m in that phase where like, I’m kind of finishing everything up, and also the editing and all that stuff, and copy editing, but still at least starting to open up in the sort of creative part of your brain about like, what might be next? And so that’s maybe one final thing I might say about writers’ group is sometimes we will come in with just like a one pager of ideas. And Sarah has done that several times. And we kind of give her feedback like, this is the one that seems like it might be the best path to pursue, for example. Anyways, I’m in that space right now. So I hope that for me going forward writers’ group might help me land on the right project next.

Mike: I should mention too that just the venting of frustration is good. And it just crossed my mind, one of Jim’s funnier Facebook posts of all time was when you were finishing up a book and what you posted about how you felt about the book. I don’t know if you recall this or not?

Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike: So tell them. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: So I just remember talking about the fact that whenever you finish a book, I’m just so sick of it. At that point, I never want to think about it again. [LAUGHTER] And then of course, a year later it comes out and you have to think about it all the time. [LAUGHTER] I’m a person that has multiple interests, and they sort of change on a regular basis and like, by the time I finished a book, I’m like, “Okay, I’m done with this now, what’s the next thing?” But then, you know, hopefully a year goes by when it’s coming out, and then you get interested in it again during that time, hopefully.

Mike: Well, the specific line I remember was, “I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate you, stupid book.” [LAUGHTER]. It was that quote.

Jim: Yeah.

John: Well, I can see it’s probably good that you focus on the writing and not the marketing of these books. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: Yeah.

Mike: It wasn’t this book, it was a different book.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you about your work. And we’ve been hearing about this writers’ group [LAUGHTER] for a while. So we were glad to have the opportunity to dive in a little more deeply.

John: And we’re also grateful that we’ve been able to benefit from the writers’ group. I was just thinking back, four of our reading groups over the last few years were products of this writing group.

Jim: Wow.

John: So we appreciate the work that you’ve been doing.

Jim: That’s very cool.

Sarah: Thank you. It’s an honor.

Mike: Yeah, thank you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

[MUSIC]

320. Gender Differences in Faculty Retention

Posted in equity, faculty, higher education, inclusion, social justice
December 20, 2023

Women and men leave academic positions at different rates and for different reasons. In this episode, Aaron Clauset and Katie Spoon join us to discuss their research on the magnitude of and differential causes of gender differences in faculty attrition.

Aaron is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a nationally recognized expert on network science, data science, and complex systems and he is the recipient of the 2016 Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science. Katie is a computational social scientist and a 4th-year PhD candidate, also at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  Aaron and Katie are two of the authors of a paper on “Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty,” which has received a great deal of attention and has been discussed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education, Science Careers, and Nature News.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Women and men leave academic positions at different rates and for different reasons. In this episode, we examine the magnitude of and differential causes of gender differences in faculty attrition.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Aaron Clauset and Katie Spoon. Aaron is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a nationally recognized expert on network science, data science, and complex systems and he is the recipient of the 2016 Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science. Katie is a computational social scientist and a 4th-year PhD candidate, also at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Aaron and Katie are two of the authors of a paper on “Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty,” which has received a great deal of attention and has been discussed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education, Science Careers, and Nature News. Welcome, Aaron and Katie.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Aaron, are you drinking any tea today?

Aaron: I am drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Always a popular tea choice. How about you, Katie?

Katie: I made tea specifically for this. And it’s

Rebecca: Yay!

Katie: …and it’s Trader Joe’s Ginger Tumeric herbal tea?

Rebecca: That sounds yummy.

John: That’s really good. I’ve had that. And I have Prince of Wales today.

Rebecca: And I have some Christmas tea, a little ahead of schedule.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your paper on “Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty.” Could you give us a general overview, of the focus of the study?

Katie: Yeah, so we were interested in this topic of gender retention in academia, because it’s really hard to identify faculty who have left academia. So a lot of studies have had to look at a very narrow or specific population of faculty. And so while there’s a lot of studies on this topic, the majority seem to focus on assistant professors, STEM fields, and higher prestige institutions. And so we were really interested in doing a systematic study across career age, institution, and field.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what data you used for this study.

Katie: So we have a data use contract with Academic Analytics Research Center, which is a company that contracts their data with research teams, and it’s a census for all of the tenure-track and tenured professors at US PhD-granting institutions across, I think, over 100 fields that we grouped into broader domains. And we have data from 2011 to 2020, for all faculty within that period, so we can see if anybody left their job during that decade, then we have that information. And then our study has two parts, we first look at just the rates women and men faculty are leaving their jobs using that employment census. And then we emailed a frame of around 70,000 of those professors from 29 fields, and got about 10,000 responses to a survey looking at the underlying reasons why faculty were leaving.

John: So that’s a remarkably large sample. How did you measure faculty attrition in a sample,

Katie: We calculated attrition risk as just the number of people who left divided by the number of people who could have left in a given year. And then we calculated that across career age. So that’s the year since a faculty member received their PhD. That was kind of our simplest calculation of attrition risk. And then, from that analysis, you could kind of see broadly that women were leaving their jobs at higher rates than men at every career age and the gap seems to grow over time. And so then we did a logistic regression analysis, looking at the odds of leaving a position where we adjusted for other factors.

John: What other factors did you hold constant in the logit regression?

Katie: So we were adjusting for career age, employer prestige, so the institutional prestige, and whether they were trained for their PhD in the US or abroad, and adjusting for those factors, we found women were more likely to leave than men. And that varied a lot across career age, field, and institution.

John: We’ve long known that women are not very well represented in the upper ranks of faculty, but many people would try to attribute that to the fact that we’ve seen a general increase in the number of women entering disciplines. But what you’ve demonstrated is that we’re losing a lot of people along the way, that we don’t see as many women full professors, not just because there weren’t that many women entering that stream a decade or more ago, but also because we’re losing so many people, which I think is a really important result, which I don’t believe had been measured as carefully before. Is that a correct interpretation?

Katie: Yeah, I think definitely both hiring and retention are important for overall gender equity in academia. If you hold the right It’s of attrition constant from our study, then even if you start with a 50-50 cohort of men and women as assistant professors at career age one, then even after a whole career, that falls to about 40% women, and a lot of people leave during that time, like a lot of men too. The majority actually have left over that time, but women are leaving faster, which I think is important to keep in mind.

Aaron: So the gender representation in the U.S. academy is complicated, in part because the academy is really big and diverse. I mean, there’s lots of different fields and lots of different institutions. And this is partly why the literature on this topic is really messy, is because many of the studies look at one institution, they may look at R2 institutions, or fancy R1institutions, or only this field or that field. And so it’s been sort of hard to get a sense of what’s going on. And there’s lots of sort of claims about why it is that you don’t see as many women in the most senior ranks in academia. So the idea that it’s a sort of a demographic inertia thing that in order to be provost at a university, well, you got your PhD probably 20-30 years ago. And so the gender ratio at 20-30 years ago is what sort of sets the maximum gender ratio 20-30 years in the future for those senior people, and of course, that’s a part of the explanation. That’s certainly not wrong. But we were very interested in understanding this attrition aspect of people who are leaving academia. And not just like changing universities, I think that’s a critical piece of the way we measured attrition is that if you went from Princeton to Yale, we don’t count that as an attrition event, you have to leave the entire set of PhD-granting universities in the US in order for us to count you as an attrition event. So these are people who are not just leaving one academic job for another, but like they’re leaving the American academy entirely. And so the results of looking at the data, because this sort of broad census lets us see that the rates, overall, women are leaving at higher rates than men. But it gets really messy when you start looking at individual disciplines. Some disciplines have higher rates than others, some places, it doesn’t seem like there is a gender difference in the rate. And when you drill down to individual fields, it gets even messier because fields have different norms and different sizes and things. So the real power of the study is in part because it has this just enormous view, a quarter million faculty in the data set, which lets us look at differences in these small rates in a really powerful way.

Rebecca: You’re just mentioning that there’s messiness across disciplines and fields. Can you talk about whether or not there was any similarities in STEM and non-STEM fields?

Katie: I think, maybe surprisingly, we found the gender gaps in retention were actually larger in non-STEM fields than in STEM fields. And that was especially true at the full professor level, the gender gaps overall grow with rank. And so that kind of surprised us, I think, because it’s a little counter to what the literature has mostly focused on, which is assistant professors, and especially in STEM. So we actually find that full professors in non-STEM fields are the group with the largest gender gap in retention.

Aaron: This is an important finding, in part because there’s a narrative that sort of underlies a lot of discussion about faculty attrition and gendered attrition, in particular, that once you get tenure, it’s fine. You can’t get fired, tenure is the goal you’re looking for. Everybody wants it. And once you get it, somehow, everything gets better. And so this finding in the paper, that it’s actually tenured women who are leaving at higher rates than anyone else, it kind of inverts that narrative and shows that we’ve been maybe looking in the wrong place for the real effects of this thing.

Katie: And I think, yeah, more on that point, for us seeing that the effect was larger for full professors kind of points to maybe something else going on besides professional things, or work-life balance in the early career, which is what led us to do the survey and check out what was happening underneath the rates.

Rebecca: There’s often a stereotype that women maybe earlier on in their career leave because of childbirth or raising children and things like that. But that’s definitely counter to what you’re suggesting.

Aaron: Women certainly still leave the Academy for work life-balance reasons. So the observation that the rates sort of run counter to the narrative that has been explored very thoroughly in the literature, Katie was saying it really points to there being more to the story, not that the previous story was necessarily wrong, but like there’s just more going on. And also, things have certainly changed in the past 30 or 40 years. Gender norms change. Men are much more involved in child rearing now than they were 40 years ago, and so our study is at a particular decade of time. So we aren’t able to say things as much about what was going on in the 1980s. But today in the 2010s, when the census data on attrition was collected, we can see that there’s more going on and, as Katie was saying, that’s where the survey really helps us go beyond just looking at the rates of things to try to look at the reasons for these rates.

John: To investigate the causes of attrition, you then did a survey. Could you talk a little bit about the sample that you used, how large it was, how you determined it, and what you found?

Katie: So we took the larger census employment data and we selected 29 fields that we considered broadly representative. We wanted a mix of fields across different sizes, different domains of study, as well as fields that had commonly been studied in the literature, like engineering or computer science versus fields that were less commonly studied, like education. And we then attempted to get emails for all of those people, and then ended up with a frame of about 70,000 people who we then contacted. We got roughly 10,000 responses from both current faculty members, as well as former faculty members who either left academia or retired. And then we also looked at faculty who switched institutions. I think the survey really showed us that while there were no visible gender gaps in certain fields, or at certain ranks, in the first part of our study, where we were looking at the rates that women and men leave, we found that the reasons women and men leave are still very gendered, even in those cases. So for example, I think early career STEM faculty, there was no visible difference in the rates that women and men left. But in the survey, we did find that women were more likely to feel pushed out of their jobs and less likely to feel pulled towards better opportunities. And that, while there was a lot of variation across domains in the retention rates, that there wasn’t much variation in that pattern of feeling pushed or pulled, it was like varied more universally, I guess, across domains.

Aaron: That push-pull dynamic is really key, and it was something that had been studied previously in the literature. And so we wanted to incorporate that into the survey. And I’m just going to read to you so that your listeners can hear what we meant by a push and a pull. So the question we asked for the push was,:”I am unhappy, stressed or otherwise less than satisfied in my current position,” and the pull was “I am drawn to, excited by, or otherwise attracted to a different position.” And so the idea of those pushes and pulls is really about whether the person wants to stay in their current position or not. Are they drawn to something else? Is it an opportunity that they’re pursuing to leave their current position? Or do they feel like they’re being forced out, that they’d rather stay where they are, but they feel like they cannot stay. And so that push and pull really sort of illustrates the idea that it’s up to that person to decide whether they feel like they can stay or want to stay in their current job, or whether they are choosing to move to a different opportunity. And people could choose both. I mean, leaving an academic job is a big decision. Sometimes you might feel unhappy, and you start looking for an opportunity and then you find something that looks more exciting. And so survey respondents could check both. They said, “I could feel pushed and pulled at the same time.” And so our results on the push-pulls were just focused on the ones who said either push or pull.

Rebecca: Given these findings, what are some things that colleges and universities might do to reduce the gender differences in attrition rates and maybe make it more attractive to stay in academia?

Katie: Yeah, so I think a key finding of our study is that, even where the rates may look the same, looks like there’s gender equity, the reasons could be very different. So I think the first thing would be to also investigate: are the reasons people are leaving gendered, even if doesn’t look like they’re leaving at different rates? And then I think, as far as the particular reasons, we did kind of look into what pushes people were experiencing specifically. And while professional reasons like productivity and funding, as well, so work-life balance, which is things like caring responsibilities and the workload. While both of those categories are definitely still important, especially for faculty at different career stages, we found that climate, the workplace climate, so how someone feels when they go to work around their colleagues, they feel that they don’t belong or fit, if there’s dysfunctional leadership, that those workplace climate reasons were the most gendered, both for former faculty who actually left a position, as well as for current faculty who were considering a hypothetical decision to leave your job. And so I think focusing on the climate reasons, especially as a first step, would be a good way to reduce the gendered impact, specifically, but for retention overall, I think that all the reasons are probably important and listening to faculty, taking people seriously when they say this is why I left, is good.

Aaron: One of the workplace climate findings from the survey that was, I think, most striking is that climate was listed as a very important reason by women at all career ages, whereas the work-life balance issues were most salient early in the career and then it sort of tails off for everyone, men and women. And then professional reasons are sort of high but they also just sort of tail off over time, but the climate reasons are high for young women professors and also senior women professors. So this suggests that this is a place where universities are really not moving the ball forward and trying to improve things because you have both the young faculty and the senior faculty all saying consistently this is a huge issue for their stress. And they’re feeling like they belong, and they feel pushed or pulled out of their academic positions. So figuring out how to move that needle is critical. And there are some efforts. So for instance, Harvard has this CAOCHE survey that many universities do on climate, but it’s typically done at the institutional level, but climate is typically a departmental thing. So if you look at like the computer science department versus the sociology department, they’re very different social sort of contexts. And one department could have a good climate, one is very supportive and inclusive of women, and the other could have a very dysfunctional one. And so these sort of large scale institutional instruments for measuring climate, they may not really be up to the task of allowing an institution to improve in this way. So figuring out how to get down to the level at which climate is actually operationalized, which is the department level, I think, is a key need for institutions of higher education.

John: One of the results that we haven’t yet talked about is, when you were looking at the initial study of attrition rates, when you included a control for the major field, you found that there was no significant gender difference, holding academic field constant, for people at the more junior levels. But at the associate and full professor level, there was a significant gender effect. That result I thought was kind of surprising. I would have guessed that there would have been more women leaving earlier in the career. And I think that’s what many people would suspect because of issues such as work-life balance, and so forth. But I thought that result was really surprising. It certainly has to do with climate, I think, as you’re suggesting, but why would it be more severe at the associate and full professor level than at the more junior level? Or is it just the cumulative effect, perhaps, [LAUGHTER] building up and getting worse over time.

Katie: We added fixed effects for fields to try to get at if you have a woman and a man at the same institution and in the same field, so they’re probably in the same department then or very similar departments. We were trying to get at that average field effect. Our main results are like, if you were to just select someone in the natural sciences, what is their odds of leaving if they’re a woman compared to a man? And women are distributed across fields unevenly. And so basically, adding fixed effects for field lets us adjust for that variation in gender ratio, or other kind of field norms. And so I think the fact that the effect goes away at the assistant professor level, like the effect is not very large to begin with, for assistant professors. And so it’s possible that like, adding that field effect just reduces the gendered effect for assistant professors, whereas the effects are larger for tenured faculty. So really, it’s just saying that even when you adjust for someone’s field and all of these gender ratio, and other field level variables, we do still see something going on. We can’t say for sure why that is, but I think the survey really suggests very strongly, that is pointing to the climate.

Aaron: Our study was not designed to get at the causality of any of the differences in the rates from like a causal inference perspective. And so we can speculate about why senior women might feel like climate is a larger issue in terms of wanting to leave, and then many more of them are leaving, etc., and we can speculate about that. And certainly, if we all have experience in academia, we know women who fall into this category, we probably heard some of their stories. And those stories are real, and probably many more women have those stories than we might imagine. And so we can speculate about that, but the study itself was specifically aimed at looking at the rates for leaving for attrition and then asking in the survey, the reasons that people felt like they could or would or did leave their academic positions. When I was visiting UMass-Amherst last week, and I was talking with some of the folks in their NSF funded ADVANCE grant program. We had a very nice comment session about this specific question, about what it is that the senior women are experiencing. And several of the members of the ADVANCE team there sort of talked about the idea that… it makes a lot of sense… that over the course of a 20- or 30-year career, you might experience sort of the accumulation of these sort of devaluation experiences, and that might slowly sort of erode your belief in the system and your belief in a sense of belonging, even though you are tenured, or you are a full professor, or maybe even distinguished professor… you know, you’re at the top of your career, and yet 20 to 30 years of being devalued by your institution and your male colleagues. I mean, who wouldn’t consider moving on to something else, maybe considering early retirement, for instance. And so it’s not hard to imagine what’s going on with the senior women. But I think that it’s really important that future work really dig into that specific question. Because there is this sort of narrative that once you make it as a full professor, you get to be the boss and everybody else who’s more junior than you. But that’s not what we’re seeing in the data, we’re seeing that the senior women are saying that climate is as much of an issue for them, as it is for the junior professors who have been there for three or four years.

Rebecca: Your point earlier too isn’t lost on me that there’s fewer women in administrative roles. And this is the pipeline for those roles [LAUGHTER] too, that you have to be more senior often to be in those roles. And it’s really concerning about the future of the academy when we’re thinking about how few women are continuing on.

John: So, your study focuses only on PhD granting institutions. One source of attrition, though, that could occur, potentially at least, is faculty may be leaving for comprehensive or four-year institutions and so forth, which wouldn’t be picked up in the data. And that might be a nice thing for someone to explore as a future area of study, to see if some of this might be a shift in institution types. I suspect it’s not, but we do know that there’s a much larger proportion of women in community colleges and a much larger proportion of women in four-year colleges than in PhD granting institution. So it’s possible some of it could be attrition in that form. But that still doesn’t explain why there is such a gender difference in the climate, which seems to have a much larger cumulative effect than immediate effect.

Aaron: This makes me think of our results on prestige. Because nothing makes sense in academia, except in the light of prestige. And one of the things that our research group here has been very active in is in looking at how prestige structures academic careers, and the production of science and so on. So we really wanted to know, like, is prestige lurking on here as well. And we found some really interesting things.

Katie: Yeah, I think the main effect for prestige… it’s gendered slightly… but the main thing is that faculty at lower procedure institutions overall, regardless of gender, are much more likely to leave, then faculty at higher prestige institutions. And again, our analysis is looking at all-cause attrition, so we don’t know if they are leaving to go to a different type of institution or leaving academia altogether, but it’s definitely a huge effect. And then we do find a small gendered effect on top of that, where women are even more likely than men to leave low-prestige institutions, especially full professors.

Aaron: And if we think about how many professors are at those elite institutions, I mean, the Ivy League or the Ivy League plus, it’s a really small number of institutions that receive a huge fraction of our attention in academia. And that’s the prestige game right there. And so if you think about the number of people who are at the elite institutions where the attrition is lowest, it’s not many, most tenure-track faculty are at these less elite institutions. And so they’re experiencing these higher attrition rates. And we don’t have an explanation for why. But we’re very curious to know what is it about these lower-prestige institutions that makes attrition overall higher and more gendered?

Rebecca: Many questions to continue exploring, for sure. [LAUGHTER]

Aaron: Yeah, it’s a mystery.

Rebecca: So why do we care about attrition, anyways? We talk about it with students all the time, we talk about keeping students and retaining students. Why is it important to think about retaining faculty and keeping them in the pipeline in higher ed.?

Katie: I think there are a lot of practical reasons why it’s good to retain women. Studies have shown that people tend to ask different types of scientific questions based on their identity, such as their gender or race. We also know that having women in leadership roles, there’s been some studies showing that that can influence younger women’s perceptions of being a scientist and things like that. But personally, I think the most important reason for doing this is that scientific talent is not inherently gendered, and so there shouldn’t be differences in how women experience their workplaces. This is what I think.

John: And if people are going to invest in acquiring a PhD, that’s a pretty large investment for them as an individual. And it’s really unfortunate to have that wasted, especially if they’re feeling pushed out. If they were moving on to some other position where their skills could be better used, that would be an improvement in efficiency for them and for society, but if they’re leaving because of a chilly climate, that’s probably not the best use of society’s resources.

Rebecca: It’s a lot more resources to bring on new people over and over again too.

Aaron: Every faculty search is a big lift. And if you hire a bunch of talented women, and then they don’t feel like they belong in the academy, and they leave, then not only do you have to hire new people because you have the faculty leave, but every one of those incredibly talented, highly trained, highly productive women, their contributions to science have now been lost in some sense. And that seems like a moral tragedy for all of us.

Rebecca: I think a lot of our institutions focus a lot on having policies and strategies that are supposed to be equity minded. This is an equity gap that isn’t always attended to.

John: And also there’s a lot of research that suggests that when faculty are happy and excited about their work, that enthusiasm tends to get conveyed to students. And we’re losing that we have a lot of people who are unhappy being in the positions they’re in.

Rebecca: Wait, is that why we’re in higher ed, just teach students and get them excited about our fields. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes we lose track of that. [LAUGHTER]

Aaron: In some ways, that’s like the only reason to be in higher ed.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Aaron: As a tenure-track professor, our job is teach the next generation of students and then also make discoveries about the world and so on. And if we didn’t want to do the teaching part, then we would go be a research scientist somewhere. And there’s plenty of people who can do that. But it’s that combination of the teaching and the research that makes being a tenure-track professor in the American academy really special and sort of the envy of the world. In fact, the American system, to a large extent, is being copied and has been copied by the rest of the world’s higher education systems, because it’s such a powerful synergy. And you’re right. If your faculty are happy, the students will feel that and they’ll be excited about continuing on, and they’ll get infected with the excitement of science and discovery and so on. And in some ways, it’s kind of confusing that institutions are so behind the curve on faculty attrition, and especially gendered attrition, because it’s not like this is a new phenomenon. I mean, our paper is the latest in a long history, you know, 40 plus years of studies looking at gendered attrition at different places in the pipeline. And the fact that it’s still something to study is kind of an indictment of all of higher education.

John: And on that happy note…. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I was going to say, on that powerful note.

John: …we’ll move to our final question, which is: “What’s next? “

Katie: Well, we actually have a follow up study that we’re working on right now. Aaron had kind of mentioned a little bit earlier about this accumulation of feeling devalued across a career. We asked our survey respondents what needs to be different about their positions to reduce their stress, or what needed to be different for them to stay in their positions. And we got over 6000 free-text responses to that question. We then read them all and we’re working on writing up the results. But it’s very powerful reading these stories from people and really narrowing in on like, what exactly is going on in the climate? What is going on for older women? for women of color? for mothers? …and so we’re excited to get that out.

John: Excellent. Well, thank you. It’s been great talking to you. And we’re looking forward to seeing that next study.

Aaron: Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, this is important information. I’m glad that we’re able to share it in this space.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

[MUSIC]

291. Navigating Teaching Inequities

Posted in access, accountability, bias, collaborative learning, contingent faculty, diversity, engagement, equity, faculty, first-generation, gender bias, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, motivation, pedagogy, reflective practice, scholarship of teaching and learning, teaching, workload
May 31, 2023

While women faculty of color are underrepresented in the professoriate, they are responsible for a disproportionate share of faculty workload. In this episode, Chavella Pittman joins us to discuss strategies that can be used by individual faculty and by institutions to create a more equitable workload distribution. Chavella is a Professor of Sociology at Dominican University. She is also the founder of Effective & Efficient Faculty, a faculty development company that works extensively with faculty and campuses across the country to help them develop strategies for inclusive learning environments and the retention of diverse students and faculty. Her research interests and expertise include higher education, interpersonal interactions and marginalized statuses, research methods, and statistics. Chavella is also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

  • Effective & Efficient Faculty
  • Neuhaus, J. (Ed.). (2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Pittman, Chavella (2022). “Strategizing for Success: Women Faculty of Color Navigating Teaching Inequities in Higher Ed” in Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. Ed. by Jessamyn NeuhausWest Virginia University Press.
  • Winklemes, Mary-Ann (2023). “Transparency in Learning and Teaching.” Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 290. May 24.

Transcript

John: While women faculty of color are underrepresented in the professoriate, they are responsible for a disproportionate share of faculty workload. In this episode, we discuss strategies that can be used by individual faculty and by institutions to create a more equitable workload distribution.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Chavella Pittman. Chavella is a Professor of Sociology at Dominican University. She is also the founder of Effective & Efficient Faculty, a faculty development company that works extensively with faculty and campuses across the country to help them develop strategies for inclusive learning environments and the retention of diverse students and faculty. Her research interests and expertise include higher education, interpersonal interactions and marginalized statuses, research methods, and statistics. Chevella is also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by our friend Jessamyn Neuhaus, and that’s what we’ll be talking about here today. Welcome back, Chavella.

Chavella: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me back. I enjoyed my last conversation, so I’m looking forward to this one.

John: We did too. And it’s about time we have your back on again.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Chavella, are you drinking tea?

Chavella: I am. I have a lemon and ginger tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds so delightful.

John: And I am drinking a Dragon Oolong tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s a difference for you, John.

John: It is. it’s been in the office for a while and it’s been sitting there feeling lonely. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: We have a good variety today because I have a hot cinnamon spice tea.

Chavella: Oooh. [LAUGHTER]

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: We couldn’t get I think many more different options today. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your chapter in Picture a Professor entitled “Empowered Strategies for Women Faculty of Color: Navigating Teaching Inequities in Higher Ed.” While most colleges have substantially increased the diversity of their student body in the last decade or so, faculty still remained substantially less diverse. Could you talk a bit about the representation of women faculty of color among college faculty?

Chavella: Yes, absolutely. I think that people think that there are more of us than there are. [LAUGHTER] I think people know the numbers are low, but I don’t think they realize like how low the numbers are. So specifically, when you take a look, I think if we’re looking just at women, white women are 35% of US college faculty and women of color are about 7% total. So across all the groups, there’s about 7% of us. So 3%, Asian, about 2%, black, less than 1% of Latinos and about, you know, less than 1%, of Native American. So I think that with all of the talk of diversity, the valuing of diversity, the saying, “we’re going to do the this and the that,” people think that our numbers are much, much larger, and they are really, really low. And they don’t match the population in the US. That’s usually the measure of whether or not groups are underrepresented or not, if they match the numbers in the population. And so yes, there is very few of us out there.

Rebecca: So we were just talking about how faculty of color are disproportionately underrepresented among faculty generally, but also among tenured faculty. And while this might be partly the result of recent increased efforts to diversify the professoriate, you note that this is also due to many women faculty of color leaving academia because of the higher demands placed on them. Can you talk a little bit about the additional labor that’s required of women faculty of color in particular?

Chavella: Yes. One thing I didn’t say before, is that, and this sort of, I think, lay’s upon this question as well, is that even though we’re underrepresented in college faculty, we’re over-represented in certain types of roles. So more of us are likely to be contingent faculty, we’re more likely to be at minority-serving institutions, we’re more likely to be at community colleges, we’re more likely to be at the lower ranks if we’re tenure track at all. So part of the reason I’m adding it here is because it connects a little bit to the additional labor that’s required by women faculty of color, or just women instructors of color, which is that we tend to have teaching overloads, we tend to have like actual higher teaching loads. Somebody might be teaching like one niche course on their research topic, like a seminar, like five to 10 students, but then women faculty of color are teaching, if they’re teaching one course, it’s like a service course. So like, you know, 75 to 300 students. So even if the load is the same, what the load looks like is different because we end up in a lot of these service courses, but in actuality, the load usually is not the same. We usually have the higher load. A lot of faculty that are from privileged statuses, they’re buying out of their teaching in some way, shape, or form. They’re reassigned in some sort of leadership role. So that person really might have a load of one course, whereas a woman of color, who’s an instructor of faculty might have a load of 3, 4, 5, 6 courses, if they’re teaching an overload to sort of make up for whatever… financial things sometimes usually… but sometimes it’s just the way people are assigning us. In addition to actually having a higher teaching load, they tend to have more labor dealing with colleague and student resistance to their teaching. So that takes effort, that takes cognitive load, that takes emotional load, that takes affective load, to deal with colleagues and students that are actively resisting your teaching. So that’s some of the additional labor, and in the prep that comes with sort of trying to navigate some of the inequities of like having too high of a teaching load, and having people who are on a regular basis, challenging your teaching. There’s all sorts of ways in which labor ends up sort of multiplying, but those are the ways that sort of makes the most sense to discuss straight out: teaching overload, student challenges, and then like navigating all of the things. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I’m sure some of that also includes increased mentorship among certain populations of students, getting asked to provide service on certain kinds of committees, that your colleagues are not being asked to do.

Chavella: Absolutely. And in sitting on all the committees that have anything to do with curriculum or pedagogy. And the funny thing is, I rarely mention those. I mean, obviously, the research shows that the women of color are the ones that are providing a lot of that advising, not just to students of color, and students that are marginalized, they’re providing that advising to all of the students, they’re providing that mentoring to all of the students, I tend to not mention those because a lot of times, allies or administrators think that it’s our choice, and sometimes it is our choice. But give us credit for that. We’re doing the labor that the institution says that it values, but we’re not given credit for that. And then sometimes it actually isn’t our choice. A lot of people are asked to be on all of those committees, they’re asked to write those letters, they’re asked to mentor those students. And because we tend to be in these contingent, lower status roles, we don’t often feel that we have the space to say no, even if we are actually overwhelmed by that labor.

John: So in addition to resistance that may be due to racist attitudes, you also note that one of the reasons why there may be some resistance is that women faculty of color often use somewhat different teaching techniques than the general college faculty. Could you talk a little bit about some of the differences in terms of the methods of teaching that are often adopted by women faculty of color?

Chavella: Yes, absolutely, and it’s one of the reasons I wrote this chapter is because a lot of times, the narratives that women faculty of color hear about their teaching are negative, and they’re deficiency based. And it’s because a lot of us don’t know the scholarship of teaching and learning. We don’t know the pedagogy stuff. We are experts in our discipline, but not of the practices that we’re actually using. And so I wrote this chapter, because I wanted people to really see all of the wonderful beauties and benefits and all the fantastic things they’re doing in theirteaching. So I really wanted women faculty of color, to have a different narrative about their teaching. So the research is pretty clear about a couple of features about the pedagogy for women faculty of color. We tend to use more innovative, evidence-based and transformative pedagogy. We’re more likely to do things like active learning, or collaborative teaching, we’re more likely to focus on higher-order cognitive skills, instead of surface learning. We’re more likely to have assignments that are connected to the real world. We’re also more likely to have assignments that are connected to diversity in some way, shape, or form. We’re also more likely to focus on learning goals that are beyond just the straight knowledge and the straight skills, we’re more likely to include things that are about affective emotional, moral, or civic development of students. We’re more likely to encourage them to think critically, and to think about society in structural ways. So those are just a couple of examples. And I think that sometimes when folks hear that list or allies, they’re like, “Oh, I do that, too.” I’m like “Ok.” Yes, no one is saying you don’t do that. [LAUGHTER] But as a group, women faculty of color are doing that at a higher rate. They’re doing it more often, it’s woven through all of their courses. It’s not just the courseware, they happen to have some sort of diversity topic. And so we’re engaging in all of these pedagogies that are shown to be transformative, to have like high payoffs for student learning. But no one is acknowledging that. And so I’m glad that you asked that question because it is one of the reasons that I wrote the chapter. I want women faculty of color to sort of stick their chest out a little bit and be proud [LAUGHTER] of all the fantastic things they’re doing.

John: And those are things that teaching centers have long been advocating that all faculty do, so it sounds really great.

CHVELLA: Yes, absolutely.

Rebecca: So you talk about these kinds of teaching strategies that are maybe less common and that we certainly advocate for in the teaching center and on this podcast: evidence-based practices, active learning, etc. But we also know that faculty who are using these teaching methods face resistance from students, in student feedback, for example. Can you talk a little bit about the bias that we see in student evaluations and peer evaluations, when looking at these teaching strategies?

Chavella: Yeah, at the end of the day, our colleagues and our students are used to what’s familiar, which a lot of times is not what’s best practice. So people, they might be used to being taught a particular way. So then when you come in doing active learning, when they’re used to being in a more of a passive scenario, they’re going to resist, they are now thinking you’ve done something wrong. They already think that you’re not credible in some sort of way. And so the fact that you’re doing something different, they’re using that as evidence that you don’t know what you’re doing. And it’s the same thing with our peers, our peers very much so think that the way that they’ve been doing it is the way that it is to be done. So the moment that you start having some sort of active learning instead of standing in front of the classroom lecturing in a very non-interactive way for like an hour, they’re now thinking that you have done something wrong as well. So all of that stuff gets baked into the formal evaluation of teaching. So this is how we end up with these negative narratives of women faculty of colors, teaching, because colleagues are like, “What are you doing? You’re doing something that’s wrong and disruptive, and it’s not what I’m doing.” And then students are complaining to those same colleagues that, “Hey, this person is doing something that’s different, that’s wrong, and it’s disruptive that I don’t like,” but then that gets baked into the narrative of “The teacher is incompetent, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re getting low evaluations. Their peers evaluating them in ways that are negative.” And so it’s not aligned at all, because what we’re doing is actually what the research says we’re supposed to be doing, it’s just not common practice.

John: And peer evaluations are generally not done by people who have been trained in effective teaching methods or in effective peer evaluation. And they’re often more senior members of the faculty who are likely to be using more lecture in their classes. So that problem is a pretty serious one, it would be nice if we could somehow improve on in the institution.

Chavella: It’s insane. It’s totally insane. And the point that you just made, very often, that’s who’s giving feedback to the faculty that I work with, faculty that come to me as clients is that it is the senior person, it’s the chair in their department that’s like giving them teaching advice. And I’m like, “That’s bonkers, [LAUGHTER] like what they’re suggesting, no one would tell you to do,” but that person is just so gung ho that they know what that person needs to do, and usually it’s like, flat out wrong. It’s not even like halfway in the ballpark. It’s like completely wrong. So yes, I wish we could solve that.

Rebecca: And I think there are faculty in power, who can help to start to solve that, and we need to advocate for evaluations that reflect good teaching and evidence-based practices that in and of itself, will move the needle.

Chavella: Absolutely. I mean, I say the same five things over and over again, that institutions should be doing: the need to sort of monitor and adjust course assignment, you can keep an eye on what those loads actually are for people; to establish a policy for disruptive student classroom behavior, so that there’s some recourse for faculty who are dealing with students who are resisting; promote faculty development opportunities, and reward effective pedagogy, so actually make it a practice so that people know that these are the best practices, and that they’re actually rewarded for using them; provide training on how to interpret the student ratings, which the student evaluations are their own beast, which is why I separate that from implementing sound practices to evaluate teaching for tenure and promotion, that’s more of a holistic thing. And then some campuses don’t have teaching centers, or they’re overwhelmed with other things, or they have a specialty on something other than diverse faculty, or evaluating teaching, which is why I think places should also allocate resources for faculty to get that sort of support off campus, like every teaching center, they can’t be everything to everybody. And so I say those same things over and over again, those are the six sort of pieces of advice that I give to institutions over and over again, to sort of deal with the teaching inequities that women faculty of color, and a lot of other diverse faculty, face.

John: In this chapter. You also note that women faculty of color provide many benefits to the students besides the effective teaching methods that they’re using in their classes in preparing students for a future career and life in a diverse world. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Chavella: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that people get stuck on the idea of college being a place where students come, you teach them the ABCs and math, they come in, they go out and that’s the end of it. When you really look at the purpose of college, it’s actually a much more broad set of outcomes that we want for our students. Unfortunately, are more traditional colleagues are focusing on the ABCs and the math, but the faculty that tend to come from diverse backgrounds, including women, faculty of color, are focusing on that broader range of skills. So I’ll give an example just to make it concrete so I’m not just saying things that are abstract. The AACU has their essential learning outcomes. And whether you abide by these or not, it’s a useful framing. There are four categories. I think most people focus on the knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world. That’s where you actually learned the ABCs and the math, essentially. And then the intellectual and practical skills, people start inching a little bit into that category. So the critical thinking, writing, those things that skill, teamwork, but very few people actually focus on teamwork and problem solving, in terms of goals for college which faculty are trying to do. But there are two other categories: personal and social responsibility, and integrative and applied learning. And the personal and social responsibility are the things that are meant to benefit society. One of the goals of college is to set our students up so that they can actually do well in society, but also to continue society and for it to do well. So some of the goals there are like: civic knowledge and engagement, intercultural knowledge, ethical reasoning, foundations and skills for lifelong learning. So those are the things that our women faculty of color are also focusing on in addition to those other categories. The last category is about applying all of the other categories to the real world, which I mentioned in some of their pedagogy. So they absolutely are, like, “Great, you’ve learned the ABCs, you’ve learned how to do some math, how to communicate ethical reasoning, now we’re going to take a look at how does that apply to the water crisis in Flint.” So using all the things that they’ve learned to apply them to new contexts and to complicated problems. So they’re doing that as well. So that’s how they benefit society by making sure that they’re developing well-rounded folks, versus just teaching them the ABCs and one, two, three.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about the great contributions women faculty of color have in higher education. And we also talked a bit about some of the resistance and barriers that they face. What are some strategies that you offer to faculty of color to overcome some of these biases and inequities, or at least push against them, and give a little bit of a leg up.

Chavella: The other reason that I wrote this chapter is because in addition to wanting women faculty of color, to be able to stick their chest out and be proud, I wanted them to actually be able to be proactive and push back a little bit. Because the teaching isn’t just about the student learning, like these are people’s careers, they just depend on these things for their livelihood. And so the last thing I want is for them to face these inequities and then be out of a job. Essentially, you can’t just talk about student learning, and not talk about the actual reality of a pending review. So whether it’s a review for renewal, a review for tenure, or a review for promotion, and so I made it a point to have a couple of strategies in the chapter of what people can do to sort of deal with these things. And they’re, I don’t want to say basic, but they’re easily attainable, keeping in mind that they already have all this other labor on their shoulders and that institutions should actually be coming up with these solutions, but they’re not, immediately. So the first thing that I encourage people to do is to have a very intentional teaching narrative, which means most of the people that women faculty of color are going to interact with, they aren’t going to actually know the research on our teaching, they are going to have either a neutral or a negative view on our teaching. So you have to have a narrative that’s very explicit, you have to have a narrative that’s informing people, that’s teaching people, that’s educating people about what it is that you’re doing. So you need to be able to say, “I engage in these types of pedagogy, they’re evidence-based, here are the learning goals that I’m trying to achieve with these pedagogies, here’s how this is aligned with the university mission.” So you have to have a very intentional narrative about your teaching, you can’t just be casual about it, you have to be intentional, just to be strategic. And then you have to actually share that narrative. You can’t just sort of get it together for your own edification, and only in your circles that are trusted. You need to be telling that to allies, to administrators, etc., because that’s part of educating and informing people that what you’re doing is not being an agitator, or an outlier. Well, [LAUGHTER] you probably are an agitator or an outlier. But the thing is, you’re doing it right. So, [LAUGHTER] that’s what you need to be informed that you’re actually doing it right. So that narrative has to actually be floating around, because otherwise the only narrative out there is that you’re deficient in some way, shape, or form. And because the way that people currently assess teaching quality is primarily through student evals, which we’ve already talked, people don’t know how to do the numbers, the way they do peer reviews is horrible, you have to have some other sort of evidence that what you’re doing is effective. And so you have to document student learning. So you have to have a way that you’re collecting and analyzing and sharing data that shows that what you’re actually doing in your classroom is successful. And you can’t leave that up to someone else. Because those others probably aren’t going to have a lot of experience dealing with folks who have teaching inequities. They’re not used to it being make or break for your career. So you have to be in a habit of collecting your own data, or analyzing your data, communicating your own data on student learning. And it could be simple stuff, it could be like a pre-post test, maybe the first day of class, you give students like a 10 item quiz of things that they should know by the middle of the class, end of class and then you give a post test, it could be doing something similar at the beginning and end of a course session, you could have students write multiple drafts, and you do an analysis of an early draft, and you do one of a later draft. So it doesn’t have to be labor intensive. But you do have to have your own data. Because unfortunately, the data that people are using of student learning isn’t actual evidence of student learning. So those are the things that I would suggest that women faculty of color do until allies and institutions come to speed about the other suggestions that I made.

Rebecca: I love that you’re advocating building it into your process, that it’s not an add on, but can be really informative to what you’re doing. And therefore it’s just part of what you’re doing. Because otherwise it often feels like so much extra.

Chavella: Yes. I feel so guilty, sometimes telling folks like, “Yes, you’re juggling an actual teaching overload. Yes, you’re juggling a mentoring overload. Yes, you’re having to deal with all this resistance. And let me add this extra thing to your plate.” But it’s required, because it’s going to give you a little bit of space to reflect on what you’re doing, breathe, be acknowledged for it, instead of being punished for it, I guess, so to speak. But yes, very much so baked into what you’re already doing. So I like to tell people the easy lift things to do.

Rebecca: I like that strategy.

John: One of the nice things of this approach is that to the extent to which faculty are sharing teaching narratives about effective practice and documenting student learning, that can have some nice… well, in economics, we refer to them as externalities… that, while they benefit the students directly from the use of these techniques, to the extent to which he is shared with other faculty members who then can learn about more effective ways of increasing student learning, those practices can become more diffuse in the institution, which is something I think many of us would like to see.

Chavella: Absolutely. I talk about that explicitly, because that’s what I want allied colleagues and that’s what I want faculty developers to do, I’m suggesting things at the institutional level, for sure. But the things that people could do at an individual level are to mimic these practices to make them normal. So that it’s not just the diverse faculty or the marginalized faculty or the women faculty of color that are doing these things, but so that everybody’s doing it. So the more normative it gets it would benefit student learning and teaching all around, but it very much still would make it be much more of a mainstream practice, it would just be beneficial to everybody,

Rebecca: I think it’s helpful too to have a box of strategies that you can use as an individual and with your colleagues to kind of have a ground up approach as well as institutional strategies from the top down so that maybe we can meet somewhere in the middle. [LAUGHTER]

Chavella: Absolutely. I love the middle. I’m a social psychologist, so I love the middle. [LAUGHTER] I think so many things honestly get done at the middle. I mean, exactly because of what you just said. I think of an example of that, one of the things I was suggesting that institutions can do to deal with these inequities is for them to establish a policy for disruptive student classroom behavior. That’s very much one that an allied colleague could do in their own classroom, that a faculty developer could suggest to a whole bunch of faculty, like a cohort or two of faculty, that if the policy doesn’t come from the top, it can very much still come from the bottom. As people start to see it, it becomes more normative. Students start to realize different things help and inhibit my learning and different professors. It just makes it normative, that it’s not the wild, wild west, essentially, in the classroom.

Rebecca: I love this reflective approach too, in terms of having your own teaching narrative and sharing that, especially when sometimes you really do feel beaten down, taken advantage of, tossed around. It gives time and space and requires time and space to recognize success or to recognize that what you have done has actually made a difference and to see that other narrative.

Chavella: Absolutely, and it’s one of the things I love most about working with faculty is women of color will tell me like “Oh, you know, I do this thing in my class,” and they’ll describe just the logistics of what they’re doing and what they’re trying to do, and I usually have like a term for it. Like I’m like, “Oh, that’s XYZ pedagogy and like, that’s the goal” and they’re like, “Oh!” So they’re doing all this fantastic stuff, they just don’t always have the language for it, to be able to talk about it sort of out front. So I love being able to give them the language and say, “Hey, this thing that you’re doing that students are very clear that they hate [LAUGHTER] and are telling everybody that they hate, that this is actually the right thing to do, and here’s how you can communicate it to your colleagues that this is what you’re doing. This is where you’re trying to get students to go. And this is why it’s important for you to do it.” Those conversations. are the best for me, because people seem to just like intuitively know how to bring folks into the learning a lot of times from their own experiences either being taught well, or not being taught well as diverse folks. So being able to give them the language in the scholarship of teaching and learning has been a very powerful thing for people to experience.

Rebecca: One of the things I wanted to follow up on, is we talked about sharing the teaching narrative with colleagues, but what about sharing with students? Would you recommend that to women faculty of color?

Chavella: Absolutely. I always recommend this to my diverse faculty. And first of all, I have them put it on their syllabus, usually as an abbreviated teaching philosophy statement. There’s a lot of research about like transparency in learning and how it aids students learning. And I think what it does is it makes it really plain to students that what you’re doing is backed up in the research. So even if it’s not familiar to them, it’s an evidence-based practice. It also makes it really plain to students that the learning goals that you have for them, again, are backed up by the research, because some of the resistance that students give women faculty of color, sometimes, they’ll say, “Oh, this is your opinion, or this is an agenda.” It’s like, no, that’s not what’s going on here at all, I’m trying to actually build your skill in this particular way. And this is the goal, I’m not trying to convert you to a way of thinking. I’m trying to get you to achieve this particular skill. to have this particular outcome. So I always advise diverse faculty to put these things on their syllabus as a way of communicating to students that these are evidence-based practices, these are known and lauded learning outcomes. So I very much will always make sure that they engage in a particular practice on their syllabus. Again, it’s strategic, but it’s very helpful. [LAUGHTER]

John: And we can put a plug in for that we just recorded with Mary-Ann Winklemes, who talks about transparency and learning and teaching and the benefits that result from that. So that’s a nice tie in.

Chavella: Absolutely. Her work is what I’m usually reading about TILT. So yes, I love her work. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: You know, Chavella, I think we often see underrepresented faculty having a lot of struggle. But we also know that this group of faculty is really passionate about what they do. That’s why they explore different kinds of pedagogies and believe in evidence-based practices. What advice do you have to help us all see that joy in teaching and have a really positive way of looking at our roles as faculty members at our institutions,

Chavella: What I would really like to see and where my work has always existed, but where it’s about to go more fully on the front stage, like this is the backstage version of my work, is that I would love for this work to be more about faculty wellness, about faculty development and success, instead of just about faculty productivity. So I’m very much interested in whole faculty development. So work is one part of what we do, but we actually have to have full, rewarding, sustaining lives away from work in order for us to even bring the best version of ourselves and for us to be able to contribute at work. So that’s what I would like people to be much more open about in the front stage and to think about much more in the front stage, is sort of faculty wellness overall. And the timing couldn’t be better for these conversations. Burnout was already existing for a lot of our women faculty of color, a lot of our diverse faculty. The pandemic, George Floyd, like all of these things made it worse. And so maybe this is the point where institutions will really be curious to pursue it, as they see that people are quiet quitting and great resignation and burning out, browning out, etc. Maybe this will be the time for them to actually start investing in the development and the wellness of faculty as humans, not just as cogs in the machine.

Rebecca: It’s interesting when you’re framing it like that, Chevella, because we often talk about things being really student centered. And I’m always thinking like, “Why aren’t we making it people centered, because faculty and staff are also part of the bigger community of learning and making sure that learning kind of is happening up and down and around.” And that’s really what higher ed is about, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.

Chavella: No, it doesn’t at all, and depending on what day you catch me, [LAUGHTER] I’ll tell you… well I’m saying it in a flip way… I will say I care less about the students, I care more about the faculty. But for me caring for the faculty is caring for the students. So it doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the students and I’m not focused on them. I’m focused on them by being focused on the faculty. So I’m very, very, very faculty centered in what I do and staff centered as well, but just trying to shift the lens so that we’re not just only looking at students, because like you said, there are other parts of that equation.

Rebecca: Come to find out we’re all human.

Chavella: Yes, turns out. [LAUGHTER] Who knew? [LAUGHTER]

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Chavella: Well, again, my book is still forthcoming. So I have an entire book that’s for women faculty of color, about navigating these teaching inequities. So that chapter is just sort of a sliver of perspective shifting and strategic advice so that women faculty of color can be successful. And then the book is like a much larger version, a much more in-depth version, for how people can, again, have a shift in lens on their teaching, protect themselves from inequities. And there is a chapter in it about joy, about engaging in joy. So that’s the thing that’s what’s next, and I’ll continue to do things that promote for faculty to be whole, well, happy people, not just cogs in a machine. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m in it for the joy. Let’s have more joy. [LAUGHTER]

John: Joy is good.

Chavella: Absolutely.

Rebecca: We’re looking forward to talking to you again when your book is ready to come out.

Chavella: Absolutely. I’ll be back here with bells on ready to chat about it.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you. And we’re looking forward to that next conversation.

Chavella: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on.

Rebecca: It’s always our pleasure.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC]

273. North of Neutral

Posted in classroom community, emotion, engagement, faculty, higher education, instructional communication, mental health, motivation, teaching
January 25, 2023

Reports of student mental health concerns have been rising steadily during the last few years. The traditional approach is to assist those dealing with these concerns only after they have been reported. In this episode, Amy Bidwell joins us to discuss an alternative approach that focuses on strategies that can help our students improve their ability to thrive, even under adverse conditions.

Show Notes

  • A video in which Christpher Peterson described positive psychology.
  • Martin Seligman
  • PERMA
  • SAMSHA
  • Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Positive emotions broaden and build. Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 47, pp. 1-53). Academic Press.
  • PubMed
  • Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.

Transcript

John: Reports of student mental health concerns have been rising steadily during the last few years. The traditional approach is to assist those dealing with these concerns only after they have been reported. In this episode, we explore an alternative approach that focuses on strategies that can help our students improve their ability to thrive, even under adverse conditions.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Amy Bidwell, an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Health Promotion and Wellness at the State University of New York at Oswego. Welcome back, Amy.

Amy: Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Amy, are you drinking tea?

Amy: I had tea earlier. And I was going to show you my mug but you can’t really see it anyways, It’s called Be Well, but it was a new raspberry green tea that I got for Christmas. Very good actually.

Rebecca: That sounds good. How about you, John?

John: And on a similar theme, mine isn’t so much “be well,” but it is a blueberry green tea.

Rebecca: Mine at least sounds well. It’s the Hunan Jig.

Amy: I don’t know what that is.

Rebecca: It’s a black tea that has some blonde tips in it. That’s pretty tasty.

Amy: Wow, I was thinking, the blueberry one, lots of antioxidants. That’s good.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss some strategies that can be used for anyone to improve their morale during these relatively challenging times. Could you talk a little bit about some strategies that people can use to improve their general mood?

Amy: Definitely. Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca, for having me. One thing that I would love to just start with is the fact that we all know generally what we’re supposed to do to stay well, yet, we aren’t exactly well, especially right now. And so I think the approach that I take from this is slightly different in a sense, where it really looks at the overall person in terms of more, how do we thrive in life? Not “are we healthy?” Because that’s one thing. Yes, we’re drinking our blueberry tea. But are we actually thriving in life? Are we happy in life. And I think that there’s a distinct difference there. There’s the “I’m healthy,” and “I’m well.” And if you go to the doctor, and you get a good, clean checkup, and your cholesterol is good, and your blood pressure is good, you walk out and you’re like, “Ah, good, I’m healthy,” but are you well? and that’s really the perspective that I take. Because if you look at overall health, it really looks at “are all of your measurements healthy?” But what thriving really looks at is we really want to stay with what we call “north of neutral.” And Christopher Peterson is a huge researcher, he has since passed, that really put this into the forefront, which is how do we stay north of neutral? So the typical kind of treatment method of health is to make sure that we’re treating any sort of issues so that you can be healthy. Well, staying north of neutral is really developing skills in your toolbox, resources in your toolbox, to allow yourself to stay healthy and well, so that when adverse things happen, like major pandemics, your body, your mental state, your physical state, can actually absorb that trauma and that stress and be able to handle it and still be considered well. And that’s really the difference. So if we look at a treatment method, from more of the traditional psychological perspective, really take somebody that may have some mental health issues, disorders and then treat them to get them at that zero baseline. So we go from maybe a negative seven, where we have some sort of mental health disorder, to a zero, but then when a pandemic hits, or something as simple as a nasty email that pops into your inbox just really bothers you, right? So you’re now at a zero and then you went back to your negative. We don’t want that negative, right? So if we can keep people north of neutral, and so again, at maybe a positive six, positive seven, when they get that nasty email, it might pop them to maybe a four, but they’re still on that positive side. And so that’s really that difference. And obviously, when you have significant trauma, a death in the family, a pandemic, loss of job, those are going to impact your overall well being much more. But again, if you can stay north of neutral, it still won’t get you to that zero or negative side. And so a lot of the tools and strategies that I have researched myself, but there’s actually an enormous amount of research… I counted this morning, I have 77 articles on my computer right now that are waiting for me to do a systemic review on. I haven’t done it yet. They’ve been sitting there and they’re going to get done soon. Martin Seligman is kind of the founder of positive psychology in the modern day, and he was, I believe it was in 96ish, he was the American Psychological Association president for a year and that’s when he really started working with Christopher Peterson and kind of looked at this phenomenon of north of neutral. And why are we focusing so much on treatment, when we could actually be focusing on prevention? So he started this positive psychology movement, which has since really turned into more the study of human flourishing. Some of the theory that Martin Seligman came up with is this theory of wellbeing that looks at PERMA. And what PERMA is, is positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishments, and then since over the past 10 years, vitality has been attached to that. But what that is, is those are those six components that an individual must have in order to truly flourish and thrive in life. So staying north of neutral. And what I’ve really been researching is those six aspects, and I’ve actually used them in my classroom a lot.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’re always thinking about is, and we’ve talked a lot about mental health challenges that our students are facing and also burnout [LAUGHTER] that faculty are facing from addressing a lot of the urgency around the pandemic, and you’re talking a lot about moving to north of neutral, I think many of us are feeling like AAAHHHH, [LAUGHTER] still having a lot of stress. So what are some strategies to help us as faculty and staff maybe stay north of neutral or get a little above neutral so that we are able to handle the stressors of our everyday jobs and the added stress of working with other people?

Amy: Rebecca, that’s a great question. There’s many answers, but the easiest that everybody can do right now is social media. So what I mean by that is, I don’t know what the percentage is, but John, you probably have this stat somewhere, the percentage of negative comments that are on social media versus positive. My number one recommendation is, and I did this myself, I have completely gotten off social media. Now, when I say that, I still use Pinterest once a while, I’m not sure if that’s considered social media, but I do have a backyard I’m trying to landscape. But when you get up in the morning, everybody grabs their phone to turn their alarm off, you need to put that phone right back down. A lot of the research says that for the first hour that you’re awake, no technology… imagine that, like John, comprehend that one. He’s thinking, nope, that’s not gonna happen. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ll see. I’m mostly just on Facebook and Twitter, and that’s only positive material, [LAUGHTER], as I’m sure you’ve experienced too.

Amy: Which is why I don’t have Facebook and Twitter anymore. [LAUGHTER] And honestly, it’s funny, because I’ve had this conversation with people about Facebook. And of course, you know, in my generation, that’s kind of what it was. My daughter does Snapchat, but I’m the Facebook generation. So the thing is, even if you go on today, and you see your best friend in this beautiful Caribbean vacation, it’s supposed to be something happy, right? Well, not so much. Because as I’m sitting in my office, I’m looking at a rainy gray sky. So immediately, my emotion has now changed. And ironically, as I’m miserable looking out my window, because it’s gray and gloomy out, I just received an email from someone berating me about something I didn’t do. So now I’ve just gotten a little bit higher, and it just compiles and then I have someone knocking on my office door… this isn’t really happening… but someone knocking on my office door asking more from me. And it’s like, AAhh, I can’t do it. And all this started with looking at my friend’s Caribbean vacation. And again, there’s a ton of research to support how our emotions are affected the second we wake up. So another tool that’s really great… and I got my students to do this… is okay, your alarm goes off, you turn the alarm off, you turn your phone off, you’re not gonna get on technology. Before you get out of bed, visualize your day. So for instance, Rebecca, you had already mentioned that you have three recordings on Friday. So immediately that’s stress, right, the immediate stress that that can cause. I’ll use a different example. I unfortunately had a cousin pass away unexpectedly a few months ago. And all of a sudden, I found out I had to drive my mother to North Carolina. So in a car for 12 hours with my mother, just the two of us. And it was like, “Okay, the next day we had to go.” And so when I woke up in the morning, I immediately visualized what my day could look like, not what I’m thinking it might look like but what do I want it to look like? And so by doing that, the second you wake up, visualizing the good in your day, instead of “Oh my gosh, I have five meetings, three recordings. I have to sit in the car for 12 hours with my mother,” those types of little tiny things are things that can really help us

Rebecca: I think in a time of great distress, little things are always a good first step, for sure.

Amy: And that’s what it’s a lot about, is these little things. And when people think of positive psychology and the science of happiness, they kind of immediately go to oh, “let’s just walk in a room and be happy.” It’s not that at all, it’s these little tiny things. And again, it starts with the second you wake up in the morning. A tool that I used with my students, that was amazing, first time I ever did it this November, right before Thanksgiving break, I had them all sit in class and write a letter to someone that they’re grateful for, and grateful letters, they have been researched for the last few decades of the importance of positive emotion. But the kicker was they had to write it, then when they went home, they had to go to the person’s house, stand there and read it to them. They said it was literally life changing. And not only that, the research shows that doing grateful letters or gratefulness, the impact over a long period of time is substantial. And so that’s a really great simple, simple thing that we can do to help improve our day-to-day emotions.

John: And even just reflections on things to be grateful each day have been shown to be effective in improving overall happiness and satisfaction.

Rebecca: If we all start with a little more gratitude, we probably will be much happier when we’re around other people and [LAUGHTER] we’ll spread the gratitude-ness. [LAUGHTER]

Amy: But Rebecca, what you said, that’s actually scientifically proven, that if the three of us are in a room together, and I come in in a more positive mood, it immediately affects you too. And so I have really changed as a department chair. Unfortunately, when I took over as department chair COVID hit the next semester. So my whole experience as chair has essentially been putting band aids on things. But the first 18 months or so I would walk in a room like a chicken with my head cut off. And what happens is that vibe is now spread across my conference room. Since I started taking this nine-month training that I was granted funding through SAMSHA and the Counseling Center to basically learn the scientific study of human flourishing, I have completely changed my approach to meetings. And it’s something as simple as my attitude walking through the door. I’m not rushed. I’m not flustered. It completely changes the vibe of your staff.

REBECCAS: …or of a classroom, I am sure.

Amy: Yes, and I haven’t mastered the art of getting to class early yet. At some point I will. I get there on time, but definitely not early. I agree with that 100%, and I certainly can share some ideas of things to use in the classroom as well.

John: You started with an acronym, maybe if you could talk a little bit about each of the components and provide an example of how each component can be used in practice.

Amy: Definitely. So, again, PERMA-V. So P is positive emotion. And that’s really where most of the research is at this point. And this is something in the classroom that can be really important because if we look at Barbara Fredrickson’s research on broaden and build, there is so much research on changing the attitude of the classroom the second you walk in to more of a positive state. It could be that, and I was just discussing this with someone earlier on a meeting, having each person go around and just quickly yell out one thing that they’re grateful for that day. Now, obviously, John, in your 400 Student economics class that might take some time. With that said, if you just, once a week or twice a week, have three people randomly do it, it keeps people on their toes. And that immediately changes the vibe of the classroom, which then increases those individuals’ ability to learn and retain information. So the positive emotions, there’s a ton of research with that, from an employee/faculty idea is this kind of negativity bias. And again, that’s something that’s been studied a lot. And that’s the thought of going in with that negative emotion. So I’m walking into a staff meeting, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe we have another meeting about meetings. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to listen to this person just sit on their soapbox.” So going in with a positive attitude and saying, “I’m excited to see my colleagues again,” really changes things up. The next one is engagement. And this is where you are in a situation where you are 100% engaged in what you’re doing. And so I can just see looking at John and Rebecca they’re just totally engaged with what I’m saying.

Rebecca: And so you only can see that because we’re on video while we’re recording [LAUGHTER]

Amy: But, you were so engaged with what I’m saying, I’m sure. And I know everybody that listens to the Tea for Teaching is very much engaged in what they’re listening to. And so think of something that you can do every day where you completely lose track of time. For me, it’s reading, I just absolutely love to read. I’m going to say actually, it’s also going down the research black hole on PubMed. But those are the things where you completely lose track of time. Your classroom, you want to give students activities or something that they can do where they actually are so engaged that they lose track of time, which I don’t know if anyone’s really mastered that yet, but we’ll get there. Relationships, research shows that social wellness, in fact, a lot of the COVID research now they’re saying that the social isolation that we experienced during COVID was more detrimental to our health than obesity. So I find that interesting. Relationships from a college perspective, one of the number one reasons students leave college, they don’t feel socially connected to the campus. We have to provide relationships. So breaking down those barriers with our students where the professor is up here and students down here, we want to try to create those relationships where the students understand that it’s not just this person speaking to us, but they’re with us.

Rebecca: It seems like the Relationship-Rich Education book would be a great resource for people to tap into to think about ways and roles that relationships play in a positive affect towards their college or university.

Amy: In fact, when I was reading that book, I was part of that book club, it was almost like I was reading a book on human flourishing, it was spot on; everything that they said was spot on. So I agree with that. Meaning… meaning is “What is your overall purpose in life?” And I do this with my students, especially with first-year students. Okay, what do you want to do when you graduate? Okay, I want to be an engineer, I want to be an economist. But what is your passion? What is your purpose? In 10 years from now, when your alarm goes off on a Monday morning, after a long weekend, do you jump out of bed? Or do you say, “Uh, I gotta go collect my paycheck.” You want to do something that truly brings you some sort of purpose or meaning. For me, it’s helping my daughter with her homework. That’s not much. But that gives me a sense of purpose. Accomplishment… we all know we need this, not to say that we give everybody a trophy, but we need to experience some sort of excellence or accomplishments. And this goes back, John, I know you’ve talked a lot about low stakes-grading and low-stakes assignments. Students need that, because it’s giving them that little touch of positivity, that touch of achievement. Accomplishment increases their emotions. And then the last one is vitality. This is what we hear about when we think of well-being. This is our health. This is our mental health. This is our physical health. This is getting enough sleep, decreased stress. But in general, like I said, the PERMA-V theory of well-being states that we should experience all of these each day. And it can be in small amounts, very small amounts, something as simple as actually saying hi to the person at Dunkin Donuts, instead of just saying hi, it’s like, hi, like look them in the eye, something as simple as that can increase positive emotion.

John: How have students responded when you’ve discussed some of these strategies in your classes?

Amy: It’s interesting, because if you ask my students what positive psychology is… actually, they would know because I do use that term a lot. But half the time they don’t even know what they’re doing, like in terms of “Oh, this is actually increasing my happiness,” or “this is actually making me feel fulfilled.” And so in my first-year course, in my Be Well course, I probably, if I had to take a guess, about 15 activities throughout the semester that I incorporate that are specifically evidence-based activities and resources that I implement. And in fact, I am currently collaborating with a group from the UK to implement the exact same resources and activities in both communities, both schools. But the students, because I actually did evaluate the effectiveness of it… it’s amazing. And I’m not just saying that from an anecdotal perspective, I did actually do the research. I’m in the process of analyzing the data right now. And we did some mixed methods analysis to look at: 1. did it actually help improve their ability to flourish and thrive? So we’re using evidence-based validated surveys to measure this. And then we’re also doing qualitative data where we’re doing some semi-structured interviewing and looking at the themes that are being pulled and one thing that always kept coming to the top was this theme of this positive emotion in the classroom. So the atmosphere that I portrayed, but in my class, it’s slightly unique… so I do have coaches that I use and their attitude in the classroom. And one thing that we did in almost all of our classes is the one thing that you’re grateful for. That was something that we did all the time that they absolutely loved. But the visualization that we used to do, we would spend the first five minutes of class journaling. And I know this isn’t feasible in all classes. But even if you did two minutes of journaling, by visualizing, what is the rest of my day going to look like? Because again, if you sit there and say, “Oh, my gosh, I have three more classes today,” there goes that emotion. And so we visualize “What does this day look like?” Yes, you have three classes after this. But let me write down and visualize how I can actually make this day look a little better. It sounds superficial, but it had huge impact on them. The low-stakes assignments they really liked, because of that sense of achievement was really, really important. The social connections… and again, I don’t teach large classrooms, the largest I’ve ever taught was 50 students… so I don’t know what this could look like in a large group setting, but they really loved having this kind of collaborative group that they were able to text and become friends with, that really enhanced the relationships. So those are some of the main themes. I would say stay tuned, because my colleague Jessica Harris and I are literally in the midst of writing a paper that will be submitted by the end of the month on all the data that we’ve collected on this whole positive psychology in the classroom.

Rebecca: I’m curious, Amy, about some initial resistance that you might get from some students, and then maybe they try it, and it works well. And how you might counter some of that initial resistance that you might get.

Amy: Great question. And I will tell you that 90% of the time, I have resistance, so I’m not going to pretend that this is all happy-ology. It’s not, it is difficult, and I would say you just keep doing it. So, for instance, one thing you’re grateful for, it’s like, “ah…Mom, really?” and they all say “Oh, my family, my friends.” Well, then I take that off the table, and it makes them dig a little deeper. But this is the thing, Rebecca, is I don’t need to keep reiterating the importance because they do it once and they feel it, they actually feel the change that it has in their emotions. There’s a great tool… I would love to do this… I’ve yet to do this in my class… but, I went to a happiness retreat two years ago. And one of the activities that we had to do, and these were complete strangers, we had to stare into the individual’s eyes for five minutes. I mean, you could blink it wasn’t like a game, but you literally just stare into their eyes, the emotion that comes up with that is intense. And so you just do this once, and the students feel it, they feel the change that it has in their emotion, and they buy into it. But no doubt, resistance is there. It’s just a matter of “Guys, let’s just play along, play along with me, try this out. Let me know what it feels like.” Meditation… I would do it with meditation. I’d say it got the most resistance with that. But we worked around it. And now I think there’s probably more students in the class that meditate than not.

John: One criticism of positive psychology and also the research on grit and on growth mindset is that it’s sometimes accused of being a very western individualistic approach, which ignores the role of society in influencing happiness and economic inequality. And the fact that some people are in really difficult circumstances, and it assigns responsibility for their happiness to them, when there are societal influences. Given those concerns, why might it still be worthwhile to work on these things?

Amy: Great question. And the importance of that question in this day and age is huge. The research shows that anywhere from about 40 to 50% of our overall happiness is genetically influenced. Then we have about 10% that is affected by our circumstances. So our financial circumstances, our socioeconomic circumstances, where we live, but there’s about 40% that is in 100% our control, so there are controllable factors. And so there is no doubt that if you are struggling financially, and I know during COVID we had lots of people losing jobs, but just from an equity perspective, you still have 40% that’s in your control on your day-to-day activities, in your day-to-day actions. And there’s a lot of research about happiness and money. And John, you probably know more about that than I do being an economist. And I don’t know if this is still the case, I know at one point, they said that as long as your overall needs are met, that any additional financial gain doesn’t necessarily bring happiness, I have since read things that are kind of saying the opposite.

John: The original research on thst was a little bit flawed in that it was treating the impact of additional income as being a linear effect, so that $1,000 increase in income would have the same effect on someone whose income was $10,000 a year as it would for someone who was making $1.5 million a year. And it turned out that for higher incomes, the same dollar increase did not yield as much of an effect. However, once they use a log transformation and they looked at percentage changes that broke down. And it turned out that, in most of the studies that I’ve seen, it’s a percent change in income which matters. So it takes much more income to make a really wealthy person happier than it does for a poor person. But when you allow for that, income seems to be extremely important, but also so does relative income. Because, in general, when societies become wealthier, people often will revert back to their original happiness when there’s a sudden change in income. But in general, at any given time, an increase in income, will improve happiness, but it’s the percent increase in income that seems to matter the most.

Amy: That definitely makes sense, and one of the things that we study in this human flourishing realm is the hedonic treadmill. And so this hedonic treadmill really kind of gets at what you were just saying, and from a financial perspective, and going back to your original question, from a financial perspective, money can buy happiness in a sense, where if it’s pouring rain out, and I have to walk to campus versus getting an Uber. If I have the money to get an Uber, then I’m going to be happier, because now I’m not soaking wet. But what this hedonic treadmill says is this kind of setpoint that we have, so we get a new job, and we get a 20% increase in a raise, we are happier for a momentary period of time, but we go back down to that setpoint. And that setpoint might be a little higher now, because our financial status has changed. But it’s that whole idea of keeping up with the Joneses. If we start to make more money, we live in different areas we associate possibly with different people, and so now your setpoint has actually increased. But does your happiness correlate with that? And research says no, because you get back down to that set point where, “Okay, it’s great, I got a 20% raise, but now I want this $100,000 car instead of the $40,000 car.” And so we’re constantly reaching for that next best thing. And if we look at it from that perspective, it doesn’t matter what your financial situation is, it doesn’t change the fact that you have control over 40% of your happiness on a day-to-day basis. And the research has shown that it’s the small wins that you have every day that create more happiness than these larger wins, where I just was promoted to tenure, or I just got this new car, that space that brings you back down, whereas our every day strategies that we can use is what really going to make a difference. So again, that’s in our control. And it’s really unrelated to our financial or socioeconomic status. Because, again, if we use example of getting up in the morning and staying off social media, that has nothing to do with anything other than your controllable factors.

John: And also, as individuals, we’re not going to be able to eliminate the inequities in our society, but we can perhaps try to make lives better for ourselves and for the people around us, including our students.

Amy: And I think of the negativity bias as soon as you said that, because I can think of a handful of students where when they tell me their stories, I want to cry, because they’re so deep, and they’re so intense, and they struggle so much, and where they are, I just want to give them a hug because I’m so proud of where they are. But what makes one person who’s from the exact same background struggle when somebody else from that exact same situation thrives and is resilient. And I think a lot of it’s this negativity bias where you come into your space, your classroom, wherever it is, with this thought of “Woe is me, I’ve been given these bad circumstances, I’m not going to thrive. I can’t do this.” Whereas another individual that has those same circumstances walks into the room and says, “I am so grateful for this opportunity, I am going to take full advantage of it and thrive in this community.” And so I think that’s really where we get into this individualistic change in response.

Rebecca: And I think that there is that community aspect that you’re mentioning too of relationships or just how your emotional state at any given time does impact the people around you, because they’re responding to that emotional state.

Amy: Yeah, I think of all those times that I have that unfortunate poor student that decides to walk in my office right after I read a nasty email, I’m like, “Oh, man, I don’t want to take this out on you, but you’re just my first person that walks through the door.”

Rebecca: I’m sure there’s much of that that happens that we are unaware of, but maybe could be become more aware of and actively take action on.

John: You mentioned earlier issues with mobile devices and with social media. And this is one of those issues we see in our classes where students may be continuously using these things, while they perceive themselves as being focused on class as well. And yet there is a fair amount of research dealing with our ability to multitask. How do you address that with your students?

Amy: Well, I used to take the approach that probably most faculty took, which was no cell phone. Well, obviously, that doesn’t work. Because although they think they’re sneaky, they’re still sneaking them out. I have gone with more of a passive aggressive approach, which I’m actually finding is working pretty well. And it’s not passive aggressive, but in a sense, it is. I explain to them this concept of multitasking, and that you can’t multitask. If I’m speaking to you, you can’t be doing anything else. And so I go with, if you are not 100% engaged in my class, or want to be engaged in my class, you shouldn’t be here. And what I mean by that is, if you are going to check that text message, that immediately means that you’re not multitasking, which means you don’t find this classroom important enough to you. So don’t be here, I’ve yet to have anyone leave. And I will be honest with you, they all literally put their phones away. And then I tell them about the research of, even if they have their cell phone laying on the table, because you know, you’ll tell them to put it away, and they just put it on the desk and flip it over. There’s research to show the anxiety that that cell phone brings to the person next to you. Because the stress that the individual has that’s sitting next to you is thinking, “Oh, when is that person going to pick up that phone? And when is that going to now distract me because I see them picking their phone up.” And so I kind of take that approach of you can’t multitask. And it actually has helped. I would like to throw faculty under the bus with this. When we’re in meetings on Zoom, can anybody literally say that we sit there and we’re giving 100% attention to our Zoom meeting? Or do we have another screen with email on it. We’ve all been there. It’s not increasing your ability to thrive, multitasking cannot work. And this is something as simple as when you talk with your significant other, you sit there and you put everything down, and you talk to them and you look them in the eye, and it’ll immediately increase your emotion.

Rebecca: Of course, we always have students that need devices for accommodation reasons, perhaps to take notes and things or maybe a student has children and they’re sick, and you’re kind of monitoring. So there are occasions where we’re forced into multitasking, even though we know it’s not the best situation. But making people aware of how that might distract or impact others can be really helpful. I know one strategy I’ve used is encouraging people that need to be monitoring or using their devices to be more on the periphery so that they’re not right next to someone where it might be distracting,

Amy: …or cell phone breaks. I know teachers that will do a text break, a two-minute text break. I haven’t done that. And to go back to what you said, Rebecca, I have one or two times actually answered my daughter on my watch in the middle of class because if my daughter is calling me in the middle of the day, something’s wrong. I get that. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I do have to say that some of my highest productivity is during zoom meetings, when I can actually get some work done without other interruptions.

Amy: I agree, John, I so want to agree with you. And I so, so do it. So this is one of those things, do as I say, not as I do. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Well, it may be that you’re just focused on the other task, right? And the other thing’s just background noise. [LAUGHTER]

Amy: That’s it. That‘s definitely it.

Rebecca: You’re not really multitasking, you’re just tasking with the illusion that you’re doing two things.

John: Right. So our names are up on the screen. And it looks like we’re focused if we have the cameras on.

Amy: …except when you see your eyes, the eyes drop because you could tell you’re reading the email lower.

John: or one of the resources shared by the presenter. [LAUGHTER]

Amy: Of course.

John: That’s a good excuse to do that.

Amy: There we go.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Amy: What’s next? I have amazing stuff that’s coming up down the pike. I am in the midst of creating a brand new course called Thrive, which I actually I have been offering. And it’s 100% about positive psychology, it’s actually a seven-week course. And each week, we do a different aspect of PERMA-V. And I’m hoping to offer that to as many students as possible. But I’m also in the thought process in my brain of putting together some sort of training type thing to help individual faculty learn some of these strategies. And that training will probably start with a spring CELTworkshop that I might do during breakout in the spring of how to actually take what we just talked about and give you substantial resources that you can actually use. So I’m in the process of having a student work with me right now to create a website that has just drop down menus of all the resources so that people can just pull right from that and say, “Let’s do this today.”

Rebecca: Sounds like a great resource to look forward to. Thanks for joining us, Amy.

Amy: Thank you. This was great.

John: It’s always great talking to you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC]

271. Should I Say Yes?

Posted in diversity, equity, faculty, gender, gender bias, higher education, mental health, new faculty, professional development, race, reflective practice, self-care, stress management, teaching, time management
January 11, 2023

Busy faculty and staff are known to get things done, resulting in additional requests to engage in service activities. In this episode, Kristin Croyle and Kendra Cadogan join us to discuss how and when to say no throughout your career trajectory.  Kristin is a psychologist and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego. Kendra is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Interim Director of the James A. Triandiflou Institute for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Transformative Practice at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

  • Ansburg, P. I., Basham, M. E., & Gurung, R. A. (2022). Thriving in academia: Building a career at a teaching-focused institution. American Psychological Association.
  • Thriving in Adademia. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 252. August 31, 2022.
  • Webinar:  The Art of Saying No, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity.
  • Monday Motivator – “Just Say No”, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity.
  • Five Ways to Say No, Chronicle of Higher Education (August 28, 2014),Transcript.

Transcript

Rebecca: Busy faculty and staff are known to get things done, resulting in additional requests to engage in service activities. In this episode, we discuss how and when to say no throughout your career trajectory.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Kristin Croyle and Kendra Cadogan. Kristin is a psychologist and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego. Kendra is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Interim Director of the James A. Triandiflou Institute for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Transformative Practice at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Kendra and welcome back, Kristin.

Kristin: Thank you, John.

Kendra: Thank you so much.

Rebecca: So today’s teas are:… Kendra, are you drinking tea?

Kendra: I’m not. I’m drinking a protein shake [LAUGHTER] if that counts.

Rebecca: I think that might be the first protein shake that we’ve had. [LAUGHTER] So that’s good. Usually we get coffee, diet Coke, etc. How about you, Kristin?

Kristin: I got a tea for Christmas, an early Christmas present. It’s turmeric chamomile, And it’s very tasty.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds tasty.

Kendra: …sounds good.

John: And I’m drinking an Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: And I have blue sapphire tea again,

Kristin: Oooh. It’s got the best name

John: …that’s getting repetitive.

Rebecca: I know. [LAUGHTER] But I only have like one more pot left. And then I’m gonna switch to something else. Because I’m running out. I think I have one pot left.

John: Maybe you can play a green sapphire or something?

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: So we’ve invited you both here today to discuss the challenges faced by those faculty and staff who made the mistake of being productive in some service role, and then continually get asked to do more. We often hear that expression, “if you’d like to have something done, ask someone who’s a busy person.” And we know both of you have experiences as volunteers to do service work, as well as in your current positions, asking other people to do some work to assist in your roles. Why do we end up with such an uneven division of service requests of faculty and staff?

Kristin: One thing I love about starting with this question, because we’re going to talk about some strategies that people can use to think about service and say no, but you didn’t ask that as the first question. What you asked was about the structure of the institution, and what makes the structure of higher ed create uneven service roles. So, without answering to start with, I’m just gonna say, I love that as an entry question, because it’s easy to talk about the difficulties people have saying no as an individual issue, but it’s an issue that people can develop individual strategies for. But it’s not an individual issue, it’s an institutional issue, it’s an academia issue, it’s a structural issue. So, good question. And I’m gonna start by saying that there is no good institutional tracking of service. I’m sure all of us on this podcast have asked people to serve. But it’s not like we’re looking at a list and saying, “Well, this person is already advising two student orgs and serving on six committees and doing all of these other things.” There’s no master list. So we can’t look and say, “Oh, it would be so much.” And, at the same time, I also realized that’s a total cop out answer, because, even though there’s no institutional lists, we also know, don’t we? Like I could ask this person who is chairing faculty assembly… you know that’s what she’s doing. I could ask this person that I’ve seen at the last 12 committee meetings that I went to, and that’s not at one committee that’s at 12 different ones. [LAUGHTER] So, on the one hand, there is no institutional tracking, but on the other hand, the frequent targets, we know who they are. So, why don’t keep asking the same people? What do you think, Kendra?

Kendra: I think that those are all great points, Kristin, and I totally agree. You mentioned the chair of the Faculty Senate, who happens to be a woman. And I think that segues into another trend that we see really well, which is that we often see women and minoritized faculty being asked to do things more frequently. I think some of that is related to just some antiquated stereotypes that we have about gender and ideas about human being nurturing, and all of those things, and maybe willing to please, or able to serve and roles that we might not traditionally ask male faculty and staff to serve in. But I think that some of it, particularly for women, and I guess for minoritized faculty, too, is about the pressures that women sometimes face in the workplace around their careers and around advancement and wanting to make sure that they’re always going above and beyond to prove themselves. And we never want to say no, because you don’t know how that will reflect on you. And you certainly don’t want to be seen as less capable or not a team player or not willing to take charge or take initiative. So all of those things in ways work against folks and I think make it easier for us to continuously burden certain people with a plethora of requests.

Rebecca: One of the things that you both highlighted a little bit is that the faculty and staff who are regularly involved, regularly volunteering, regularly providing service, become more visible in these spaces. So those are the people that you think of first because they are visible. There’s a lot of faculty and staff who may actually be great folks for particular things but they’re just not as visible as well. I’m not really sure how we raise the visibility of some of those folks too, but I think that is just something that does occur.

Kristin: And part of what you’re mentioning is also that service really is a skill, and that when people do certain things they get better and better at it. So if the Dean is looking for an interim chair from outside of the department, the list of people who has both the skill set and the temperament and proven leadership skills, that’s a shortlist; that’s a very short list. Certainly, as people serve in more challenging roles, they really do develop unique skill sets that make them more easily tapped in the future. But on the other side of it, in asking newer faculty and staff to serve, I don’t know what you do, Kindra, but I actually, in the college, I look at a list, like, here’s the entire list of faculty and staff in the college. And I look down the list to make sure that I’m not just thinking about the people that I have run into and talked to in the last few days, or that have served in a similar role in the past, so that I can think about and tap people who could potentially grow from a service opportunity. So it is both a skill set, but also an opportunity for a lot of different people.

Kendra: That’s a great strategy. Kristin. Typically I try to ask around, I ask for referrals, I ask for deans or the provost or whoever, faculty who maybe live and work in those spaces already to provide recommendations. “Hey, is there someone that you know who’s up and coming or who’s looking for more experience in this particular area that could benefit from me tapping them to do this thing?” [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: One thing we didn’t talk about specifically, is the desire to have diverse voices in many of our service opportunities, and how that is unduly burdensome for some faculty and staff.

Kendra: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I think that’s a big conversation. On one hand, of course, you want representation, representation does matter. Like we say that all the time, and I think that we really, really mean it. But then again, it’s also very easy to fall into the patterns of “these are the diverse faculty that I see or interact with regularly, or who are very active in these spaces, so I’m gonna keep tapping them for the same things.” I think part of the solution to that or a path toward a solution is to make sure that we are centering inclusivity and belonging in our institutional priorities, and really thinking about how we help others develop their DEI skill sets and elevate their DEI practice, so that they can step into those spaces and be impactful and provide leadership and guidance in the way that we heavily sometimes rely upon faculty and staff of color, in particular, a diverse faculty to provide. It’s kind of a long path toward a solution, but I think it’s one way of really beginning to eliminate that problem of constantly overburdening diverse faculty and staff with requests.

John: And part of the issue is the underrepresentation on college faculty and staff of the groups that we have been referring to… and those same faculty and staff, though, often have more demands on them from students, because while our student bodies have become much more diverse, the faculty and staff have not been, and many students will reach out to people from affinity groups that are again, often somewhat limited on many of our campuses, which puts additional burdens on those faculty and staff.

Kendra: Yes, absolutely.

Rebecca: And that service… that’s often invisible, it’s easy to count or say like, “oh, this committee, that committee,” but I think advisement and mentoring that takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s not as well documented. Clearly Kristin already [LAUGHTER] raised the flag that we don’t have a great way of tracking these things anyways, but I think that, in particular, is something hard to quantify, because it doesn’t look the same for everybody.

Kristin: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think that one of the difficulties with this is that the recipient of the service is the student, which makes it highly visible for students, and almost invisible for faculty colleagues. So if you’re advising a student organization that is really active, they may be doing amazing work, and the work that a faculty member is doing as that advisor may be the thing that makes the difference in retaining those students and mentoring them to successful careers, but their colleagues may not see any of it, because it’s happening directly with the students and their colleagues are not going to the student org meetings, because their student org meetings, not faculty organization meetings. So not only is it downplayed sometimes in tenure and promotion materials, their faculty colleagues don’t catch that it’s downplayed. If they were serving in Faculty Assembly or on the Gen Ed Committee, or the Curriculum Committee, their colleagues would say, “Wait, hey, didn’t you do all of this stuff that you didn’t talk about?” But it’s both not given as much credit as sometimes it deserves at some universities, but it also is sometimes literally not recognized because people didn’t see them do it.

Rebecca: So why do we say yes to so many things?

Kristin: Why do we? Rebecca, I feel like you should ans….. No, I’m kidding. You’re actually very good at this.

John: I’m actually asking because I need some advice here. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Kendra, why do you say yes?

Kendra: Oh, man, that’s a loaded question. [LAUGHTER] It’s hard to say because it’s hard to say no. It’s hard to say no sometimes. And when you feel like someone is coming to you, because there’s a need that you can fill, sometimes you can get carried away with this idea that you are the person who has to do the thing, because if you don’t do it, it can’t be done. And then there are some of the other things we’ve talked about: the pressures of our careers, wanting to be taken seriously, wanting to be credible, wanting to be able to advance. You can often feel like your path to advancement is going to be barred at some point. If you keep saying no.

Kristin: The number one reason that I say yes, is one that Kendra mentioned, it’s usually because the ask comes from people I care about in professional terms, colleagues that I respect who are doing good work. And if they say, “Can you help me with this good work?” I want to say yes to them. And they’re often asking about issues that I care about… colleagues that are doing good work on things that I think are really important… I want to say yes to that. But I also say yes, because I am interested in a lot of things. And if people say, “I’m going to work on this thing that you haven’t worked on,” sometimes that’ll be a yes, because I just want to learn about that new thing. And when I learn about new things, that is a type of personal growth for me and I get renewed from that. So saying “yes” sometimes also means that I get that personal growth boost. Or there have been times when the ask has been like “You’re the only one who can do this, can you please step up?” …and I know that faculty have that implied experience too, not always like the explicit, someone literally says, “You are the only one who can do this, can you please do this,” but sometimes it’s just implied. And it can be a strong implication like ‘In your small department, you are the only tenured faculty, how about you become chair?” So I do want to question… just push back a little bit. If you stick around in higher ed for longer than about 15 years, you’re going to start realizing there are ways to get the business done, it is almost impossible that you are truly the only way, almost… not 100%, but like 95%. Now, I don’t want anybody to think that they’re really not irreplaceable, because everybody, at least at SUNY-Oswego, I think, is irreplaceable. But do you really have to do that one thing you really don’t want to do? Isn’t there another way that the institution can find a way to get the work done? And if you think about your colleague who’s really good at saying “no,” you see how that works, that there is a way that if this really is going to push you beyond your limits, there’s a way… there’s a way.

John: So what are some good ways of saying no to those requests that push you a bit beyond your limit?

Rebecca: …or that just provide inequity?

Kendra: Well, I think it depends. One of the things that we didn’t really mention was that the flip side of always saying yes, you know, there the positive reasons that Kristin really just highlighted, but there are also some more practical reasons that aren’t always so positive, like tenure, or time spent as an institution. For newer faculty and staff, it can be really scary, or unclear even, about how much can I say “no” to? What is a directive and what is an option? And if you’re new, if you’re not, I think too a lot of times, maybe at even a public institution where you do have some backing of unions, the employment structures are a little more forgiving. In some cases, it can be really scary to say “no” as a new person, a new faculty member, a new staff member. So I think that there have to be strategies for someone tenured and who have been in a place for a long time can employ that will work really well for them, that might not work so well for someone who’s newer. And it’s important, I think, to maybe flush out what’s a good idea for someone who’s been here for a while and what’s the strategy that a newer person might employ to say no.

John: For new faculty who are struggling with all the other commitments they have to do to be successful and advancing towards tenure, what are some good strategies to say “no?”

Kristin: I think it’s a good question that speaks to learning academic culture. And even if you’ve been around a long time, you’re still learning the academic culture, because your role is always changing. It’s a strategy that an Associate Professor uses or a full professor or someone who has transitioned from faculty to staff, there are all kinds of culture change questions. How do you negotiate this new culture? And the first thing I would say is to be clear what you need to do for your job. And if that’s, “I need to make tenure, so I need to publish this much,” if that’s “I now am in a staff position and staff often have less flexibility in saying yes and no, and these are the outcomes that I need to achieve to keep my job.” So part of it is being absolutely clear. You can say yes to 50 things right now. But if you’re on tenure track, and you don’t get your publications, your master service is not going to pay off. So being very clear on what your job is. And if you don’t know, which is a real possibility sometimes, you develop your kind of committee of mentors. Who do you go to and say, “Hey, I got this really interesting request” or even like “I got a cold outreach from a publisher to write up my course as a textbook. I got a cold outreach from this person I don’t know on campus to fill a university wide-service role.”? You got to have somebody to ask So developing your committee of mentors, not one mentor, but your committee of mentors, because they’re all going to have a different view. And then you combine that with delay, especially like the sidewalk ask, you know what I’m talking about, right? Or like I caught you after this meeting, or I’m just going to do this quick ask. So the first answer is to delay. Say “that sounds like a great opportunity. Let me think about it for a day or two and look at my other commitments,” delay, then you go to your committee of mentors. And if you don’t literally have one, John, you had this great book for a new faculty reading group in the fall Thriving in Academia. And I think you also did a podcast, right?

John: We did, with all of the authors.

Kristin: So in Thriving in Academia, there’s a table, a little flowchart, a flowchart that says, with this service request, what do you think about first? And what do you think of next? So if you can’t go to your committee of mentors, you can go to these three authors, as your committee of mentors and check the flowchart. Does the flowchart say you should do it? Or does the flowchart say, Oh really, think hard about this one. This is a no. What would you add? Kendra?

Kendra: I’m just thinking about myself now. How do I usually say no? And now I’m wondering if I say no often enough? [LAUGHTER] Probably not sometimes. But when I do say no, on the rare occasion, what I try to do is also think about who I can point to, to the person asking me for whatever, to actually fulfill the request. So is there someone who’s better suited to complete this project or do this thing than I am? I think about resources. And I try to make sure that rather than just saying a flat no, and leaving someone hanging, I’m pointing them in the direction of someone who can help, someone who can fill the need and hopefully benefit from it, not just someone that I can shove the work off onto, but someone who can really fill the need, benefit from fulfilling that need, and it can be a mutually beneficial situation. I also think about just being mindful of self in those moments. So re-centering self care, we talk about self care all the time in higher ed, we write about it, we research about it, I think we’re actually really bad at it a lot of the times. You have to really center yourself. When someone is making a request, you have to think about yourself. What am I able to do? It’s like they always say on the plane, you have to put your oxygen mask on first, before you put someone else’s oxygen mask on or else both of you will be out of luck. So I think in those moments, you have to really be mindful about centering yourself and tuning in and knowing where you are: what your bandwidth is, what can you give, and is it something that you can do and still be healthy and still be whole and still be able to do all the other things that you’ve already signed up for, that you’re already responsible for? So I don’t know that those are necessarily strategies, per se, but they’re things to think about when you say no. Sometimes you just have to say no, very clearly and concisely, [LAUGHTER] you can’t do it.

Kristin: Kendra, do you have a script in mind when you say no? Like, do you have the words?

Kendra: That’s actually a really good question. I think when I do say “No,” it’s usually something very pleasant. Like, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to do that.” Sometimes I’ll literally just say, “Unfortunately, I don’t have the bandwidth, but here is someone who might help.” Or “here is another option,” maybe another way of accomplishing this task, another group of people who are already doing this work and can give you some additional assistance. So it’s usually like the nice thing that like the pleasant but clear, “No, I’m not able to do that.” And then the “but here’s how I can help you by sending you in this direction or sending you towards these resources.” That would probably be my script.

Kristin: And part of that is because I think your role is unique. And so when people are asking you, they’re really asking you. [LAUGHTER]

Kendra: Yes.

Kristin: So being able to provide another alternative, or another way that you could contribute, is a really nice option. In other choices. There could be just “That sounds like a great opportunity, but right now, unfortunately, I don’t have the time. I look forward to seeing what the results are. I look forward to seeing the report from that committee.” And no, of course, you don’t always have to provide an explanation. You can just say, “No,” you don’t have to say “I’m too busy.” You can just say no. But perhaps that person is going to be someone you’re asking to serve in the future. So it can be nice to continue to develop the relationship even if you have to say no. Something that frequently serving people sometimes forget that they can do is also think about how much time this commitment is going to take and asking for that time back. So let’s say you’re in a small department and your colleague is injured and is out for half of the semester in the course that only you can double up on. So this is one of those where you’re almost irreplaceable, there really isn’t anybody else who can step in. And you know that if you’re injured in the future, you’d really like your colleague to step up. So there’s a little bit of a social contract where you want to say yes, but that’s a significant time commitment. So what are you going to lose from spending your time on that and how can you get it back in the future? So you could ask, if the area of your rub is really financial, you can ask for extra pay, and you probably should get extra pay either way, because it is extra work. But if your area of rub is research productivity, that you’ve been really trying to write, you can say, “Well, if I’m going to do this, then I need a course release the next semester” and negotiate for the thing that you are having to sacrifice to see if you can get it back in a different way. And that is not an unusual thing. So it wouldn’t be like the weirdest thing that anyone has ever asked for, even if you’ve never thought about it before, someone else has thought of that and asked for it before. So you can always ask, what is your trade off =and how can you trade that back? If you’re a junior faculty and your chair is asking you to do something that you really don’t think you have the time to do, but you’re a little concerned about the chair ask you can say these are the things I’m doing right now, w hat would you suggest I take off my plate? How would you suggest I reorganize this? I’d love to say yes to this, but right now I don’t have the time. How would you suggest that I prioritize so that I am ready for my next tenure review? So there are ways… there are ways. But it is good to have a script in mind because we can all say “no” when we’re actually not being asked to do anything, you could just make one up right now. But if you’re in a higher pressure situation where someone you care about their opinion is making an ask right at that moment, it can be hard to come up with an answer unless you already have one in mind. So “that’s a great opportunity. Let me think about it for a couple of days.” Go ahead, use that one, just go right ahead. Even if it’s me doing the ask, you can say it right back to me, I’ll be okay with that.

Rebecca: One strategy I’ve used too is, in that delaying tactic, is always asking for clarification: what the responsibility will be, what the time commitment will be, what the meeting schedule is, so that you actually have enough information to make an informed decision. Because often the ask doesn’t come with all that information.

Kristin: And you know what happens when you ask those questions, right? The person making the ask is like, “Oh, I don’t have answers to all those. We should have goals and a timeline.” … you know, good stuff.

Rebecca: Sometimes you really want to say yes to something because it just is very appealing for whatever reason. What are some strategies so that you can say yes? We’ve mentioned negotiating for time or other resources. But the other thing that I think about is you look at all the things on your plate, and see what are some things I could roll off of, if I want to roll on to something new? Or if I want to pursue something different? What can I get rid of or step away from? Are there strategies for being able to step away from some of the things that you were committed to before that we could think about in terms of strategies for ultimately saying yes, but saying no to something else? [LAUGHTER]

Kendra: One of the things that we didn’t necessarily mention before in the saying “no,” but that applies here is this idea of acting as a consultant. So if a great opportunity comes up, and you really want to say yes to it, but you have a whole bunch of other things that you’ve already committed to, it might be a great time to reevaluate those other things and determine what are the things that I really need to put the legwork into and be boots on the ground on? And what are the things that I can provide a perspective on or give some guidance on in a more passive way, that then frees me up to maybe actually do the heavy lift for this other opportunity? That’s really great that I really want to be involved in. So I think that’s one way to move yourself closer to a yes [LAUGHTER] and an offload of some of the other things that might be standing in the way of that “yes,” Kristin, if you have any thoughts?

Kristin: Yeah, and again, thinking about I say, a five year plan… some people actually have those. I’ve never had a five year plan. But I admire people who do. But I do have my idea of my career trajectory, what I find really rewarding and what I don’t. And when I’m offered a service opportunity that aligns to the things that I find really rewarding, that it is exciting and I’ll learn something new about, and be able to contribute about things that I value, I want to say yes, even if it’s really time consuming. So yes, I look at the combination of things that I’m doing, think about how they contribute to both the things that I value and what the institution has hired me to do, because I do have a job that I have to do. And there are always ways to rollback your commitment on some. Many service opportunities require only an intermittent time commitment, you got to really hit it hard for a couple days here and then you can back off for several months, and figuring out how to fit that together. And consult, consult, consult, ask other people, I actually used the flowchart myself in the book at one point a couple months ago saying, “Oh, this looks interesting. Should I do that?” My flowchart says no. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: And the flowchart can’t possibly be wrong. [LAUGHTER]

John: Actually, the flowchart most often says no, because of concerns about faculty taking on too many responsibilities.

Kristin: Yes, because the first question in the flowchart is, “Do you have the time?” which leads you to “no” a lot of the time but it was also of low institutional value and not really important to me and not really important to anyone else, and I didn’t have the time and like “flowchart says, “no.” I was like, “well, probably right, [LAUGHTER] those are all good points that I should have been thinking more about.”

Kendra: Well, Kristin, I think to your point, too, about going back to your five-year plan and think about your career trajectory, and how well the things you’re involved in are serving you toward that end, it is absolutely okay to go back to previous commitments, and say “I had a wonderful time, this has been a great opportunity. I’ve learned a lot. but this doesn’t necessarily fit anymore in my larger plan. This might not be as helpful for me in my trajectory as it once was, and so I’m going to maybe end my involvement as of such and such a date.” Sometimes it helps to give folks a timeline on your end, clearing your plate for other things doesn’t mean that you have to immediately walk out the door on whatever else you had going on, right? …It’s probably not advisable, actually. But I can tell you that I’ve reached out to folks to ask them to serve on things or to participate in things that they’ve been participating on. And they’ve had really nice responses that are like “Kendra, I really appreciate this opportunity. I’ve really enjoyed the work that I’ve been doing, but I’ve taken on some new responsibilities that are more in line with some of my other interests or other needs or professional development, and so I won’t be able to participate in this anymore.” And I can’t be upset about it, it’s a lovely response. And I totally understand that folks want to develop, they have other interests, they need to be able to spend their time and spread it around sometimes and they’ve really been helpful to me in the time that they were able to engage in the thing that I needed them for. And I’m more than happy to say, “We’re going to miss you so much, you’ve been amazing, but I wish you the best of luck in this new thing that you’re really interested in. And let me know if I can be helpful to you.” Or let me know if these two different interests have any synergies or if there’s ever any way we can collaborate in the future. So it’s certainly okay to sometimes walk back from previous commitments very tactfully and very appropriately, but it can be done.

Rebecca: I think it’s also possible to say yes to just a part of something…

Kristin: Yeah.

Rebecca: …like, maybe the ask is like this big, like, it’s huge, but what they really want you for, or where you could provide the most value, is during a brainstorm session, or designing how something might be implemented, but not actually work on the implementation. So there’s a way to sometimes contribute without committing as much as the ask was originally.

John: …and defining a scope upfront.

Kristin: Yeah, that’s a great point. With all the searches that we do, I hear a lot from faculty about the incredible amount of time that goes into searches, and different ways that departments organize them that burden some people versus the others, but I think that’s a great example. If you can say, ”I’m gonna take candidates out to dinner,” which is a huge time commitment, but it’s very focused, it only happens during the visits, “I don’t have time to review all of the applicants and to serve on the committee in that sense, but I can take them all out to dinner,” there are trade offs that can work better for life in the way that your time is structured, that you can see that other people can’t see. So nobody’s going to suggest to you, how about you just do part of this, but they may be very open to that response.

Kendra: I would say in 9 times out of 10, someone’s asking you to do something and your response is, “Here’s the piece that I can do, I’m not able to provide assistance in these other areas,” that person is going to be more than happy with what you are able to contribute. So those are great points and great ways to be able to clear room to say yes.

John: What are some of the differences in the constraints of faculty and staff when they’re being asked to engage in service roles?

Kristin: I think the differences there are really baked into the differences in the roles, that faculty are expected to serve institutional priorities, but in some ways, almost work as independent contractors. It’s like ”here’s work to do, figure out how you’re going to get it all done in this amount of time, we’re going to come check on you in a year, see how you’re doing,” whereas staff are expected to stress institutional goals on a day-to-day basis. They work much tighter in teams, and their collaborative skills are usually much more highly valued. And because of that, if a faculty member says no, the expectation is well, that’s because they’re busy doing the other stuff that they’re supposed to do. We don’t even need to ask them what that is right now, because they’re hopefully writing. But if a staff member says no, in some ways, it’s weird. Staff say yes. Because so much of their work is being asked, being asked to lead, being asked to run a program, being asked to show up at 11 o’clock at night to serve a midnight breakfast… being asked, and the expected answer in many cases is yes. So being able to constrain the role and say no is often more fraught for a staff member. Kendra, what has been your experience working with staff and helping coach them to shape their time as much as they can?

Kendra: Yeah, that’s a great way to articulate the differences between faculty and staff, I think. I don’t know if faculty have performance programs.

Kristin: …not like that, not like staff do.

Kendra: Yes, exactly. Staff have sometimes very prescriptive performance programs that literally layout, area by area, theme by theme, what all of the duties and expectations are going to be. And then of course, there’s the other duties as assigned. So it can be very difficult for a staff member to say no, and it can also be very confusing, I think, in some cases for staff to understand “What are the things that I can potentially say ‘no’ to? What are the things I’m given latitude on to exercise autonomy and say, ‘No, I’m not interested in this,’ versus what are the things that are more imperative.’” When working with staff, what I try to do is be very clear with the folks I work with, with my colleagues, about what are the expectations and the needs versus the options and opportunities. So I tried to be really collaborative with colleagues and say, “Hey, there’s an opportunity that’s coming up,” or “there’s a need that needs to be filled, you have expertise you have, whatever the reason, I see you as a great fit for this.” Now, the conversation can then go one of two ways. One way, which is what I try to always have it be is, “Please let me know what you think. What are your thoughts about this opportunity? Are you interested? Is this something that you would want to do?” And that gives the staff member agency to think about what’s on the table and to make a decision about whether or not they want to be involved. The other option is to say, “This is something that needs to be done. you’re the person strategically for the job, so I really need your help in completing this.” And that’s less of an option, but at least it gives folks and understanding of like, okay, this is not necessarily optional. This is something that I need to do to be a strategic and fully collaborative member of this team. So sometimes it can be a little tricky. But I typically find that if I’m really transparent with my colleagues, and let them know, “Hey, here’s what I’m thinking about. Here’s why this makes sense. And this is either something that I’m offering to you that you have agency to say yes or no about, or this is something that is part of our strategic plan that I really need you to be responsible for. And here’s what you being responsible for it looks like.” Folks seem to deal with that really well. I think it’s much harder for staff when there aren’t clear expectations and when they’re also not given any input in decision making, when you’re just “voluntold.” …not even really voluntoldl, like literally just, “this is what you’re going to be doing.” It’s always better to include folks in the decisions that you’re making, and to provide as many opportunities for options as possible.

Kristin: Absolutely, you can see the differences in other ways too, like if a faculty member is asked to serve, usually no one is asked except the faculty member, the department chair isn’t asked, the dean isn’t asked, unless it’s someone like, “Can you think of anybody?” and then you suggest them, but usually it’s straight to the faculty member and it’s up to them to figure out whether or not they want to say no. Oftentimes, when staff are asked to serve in different roles, their supervisor is asked first, could you release them for this? Would it be okay with you if they do this? And sometimes faculty who move into administrative roles will start to experience that difference in culture in subtle ways and may not understand, like, what is happening around them? How come when I’m in this committee meeting, only the faculty say no to something. the staff say yes, or how come when I approached this person for help, I got a little cranky email from their supervisor. So it’s good to know that there’s a difference and also to respect that the two kind of different cultures, that both have a role and their pros and cons, and to know what you’re stepping into when you’re asking people to do things.

Rebecca: I think this highlights a little bit of what you were mentioning before, Kristin, about knowing what your role is or what your position is. Because sometimes staff would also have the opportunity to ask a clarifying question like, “How does this fit into my performance plan?” or “How does this help us meet the goals or initiatives that my division or my group is meant to be achieving?”

Kristin: Absolutely.

Rebecca: Because if there’s not alignment there, then that’s a pretty easy “no.”

Kristin: Absolutely. Do either of you two have strategies that have worked for you?

John: I have never been very good at these decisions. Rebecca?

John: I say no, sometimes.

Kristin: How do you do it?

Rebecca: I’ve worked really hard to make sure, and it took a long time to do this, but to align my scholarship and research and creative practice with service and my institutional responsibilities. And there’s pretty good alignment with those things at this time. And when something seems like it’s not in alignment, that’s when I have a pretty clear “no.” When it does seem aligned, that’s when I have a harder time saying “no.”

Kristin: And you don’t want to.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Kristin: That’s a great strategy. And the people I have known and worked with that say no the best, they have developed over time clear guidelines, very much like that. I worked with someone who was really good. This is something I could never do. I could never say no to a student who wanted to work with me in research. I don’t think I’ve ever said no to a student who wanted to work with me in research. I have occasionally matched them to someone who’s a better match. That’s different. But he was very good at saying no to students who wanted to work with him in research, which was like my Achilles heel, but he just had very clear guidelines: “I only work with students who are at this point, X, Y and Z,” and they were not unreasonable things. And then he would say yes to those students. And it opened up time for him to really mentor them. And I’ve been lucky to work with people like you and him. You have a way that you approach your career that you have thought about. This is where my limit is, so I can say yes to these students who want to work with me and really work with them. But I can say yes to this giant time commitment, because I know it contributes to my research and to my service,

Rebecca: I think that it can help to also just have colleagues around you who say “no.”

Kristin: Yes.

Rebecca: …and seek out that camaraderie. [LAUGHTER]

Kendra: I think that’s a great point. And it goes back to something Kristin said about when you’re that faculty member, you don’t understand the faculty staff. dynamic and you reach out to a staff member to ask for help and get a cranky letter or cranky email back from their supervisor. That does happen. But the reality is, I think we need to, again, be more supportive, particularly of newer colleagues. I’m thinking of new staff very specifically, and I’m thinking about this from the perspective of a supervisor. I think it’s really important when we’re mentoring new staff, and helping them develop professionally and think about what the next steps are for them, we also need to provide some additional support to them in helping them to say no, helping them to really prioritize and think about what serves them and what doesn’t. And one of the things that I’ve said to folks that I’ve worked with in the past is they’ll come to me and say, “Well, Kendra, someone’s asking me to do this, or this or that, and I’m not really sure that I want to do it, or I just don’t know.” So like, okay, let’s talk about how this fits into your professional trajectory. Does it makes sense for you, does it make sense in the work that you’re doing? And if the conclusion that we come to is really no, this doesn’t serve you, then by all means, feel free, if you don’t feel comfortable saying to this person, for whatever reason, no, if you’re too new to feel comfortable doing that, then by all means, I’ll be happy to reply as your supervisor and say, “This is not going to work, this doesn’t fit into whatever,” I’ll just say no for you. Or you can always feel free to say, I spoke with my supervisor, she doesn’t think it’s a great time for this, I don’t have the bandwidth. Feel free to throw me under the bus. Because I do think that part of what I have to help folks learn is, of course, how to advocate for themselves and how to be full adult professionals, but it’s also to be supportive, and to help them to kind of get their legs under them. And sometimes part of that is helping them say no.

Kristin: Awesome,

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Rebecca: Please tell us how you’re going to redo higher ed [LAUGHTER] and make this better?

Kristin: That would be awesome. And you know, the funny thing about that question is that it’s always a problem that we don’t keep track of service better. But the other side of me is like, “Oh my gosh, what a pain that would be, a huge amount of work for very little payoff.” Is there a better way to do it? So I don’t have an answer on what’s next for supporting service, except to be more proactive in my request to say this is what the commitment is, let’s talk about your current commitments and how we can shape what you’re doing to support both what you want to get done and what I’d really like to ask you to do, [LAUGHTER] not just the single ask, yeah, not just like, here’s the one thing, but instead to ask in a more comprehensive way.

Kendra: And I also don’t have any solutions for fixing higher ed, unfortunately, at this time. [LAUGHTER] But I do think that we can also make sure to just model the behaviors that we’re talking about, again, just being mindful of our own personal practices and making sure that we’re not just talking about saying no, but that we’re actually doing it for ourselves and so that the folks that we work with and work for can see what this looks like and be mindful for themselves too, about how they need to think and work through this space. I think that’s one small thing we can do.

Rebecca: Well, thank you for joining us.

Kristin: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

Kendra: It’s been fabulous. Thank you so much for having me.

Kristin: It’s great talking to both of you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC]

269. Faculty Book Clubs

Posted in contingent faculty, faculty, faculty learning community, higher education, learning, pedagogy, professional development, scholarship of teaching and learning, teaching
December 28, 2022

College teaching is often a very solitary endeavor and can result in feelings of isolation, especially in turbulent times, such as those we’ve experienced recently. In this episode, Jessamyn Neuhaus joins us to discuss the role that a faculty book club can play in building a learning community in which the participants share their successes, concerns, and strategies.

Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She specializes in the study of pop culture, gender studies, and teaching and learning. Jessamyn is also a recipient of the State University of New York’s Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence and the editor of Teaching History: a Journal of Methods. She’s the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is also the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning, which was released by West Virginia University Press.

Show Notes

  • Neuhaus, J. (2019). Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers. West Virginia University Press.
  • Neuhaus, Jessamyn (2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Jessamyn Neuhaus (2019). Geeky Pedagogy. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 82. May 22.
  • Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology. Harvard University Press.
  • Darby, F., & Lang, J. M. (2019). Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-Rich Education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.
  • Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Hachette UK.
  • Addy, T. M., Dube, D., Mitchell, K. A., & SoRelle, M. (2021). What inclusive instructors do: Principles and practices for excellence in college teaching. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Miller, M. D. (2022). Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. West Virginia University Press.
  • Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. West Virginia University Press.
  • 268. Advancing Inclusivity while Mitigating Burnout. Tea for Teaching podcast. December 21, 2022.
  • Resources developed by Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan for reading groups for Inclusive Teaching

Transcript

John: College teaching is often a very solitary endeavor and can result in feelings of isolation, especially in turbulent times, such as those we’ve experienced recently. In this episode, we discuss the role that a faculty book club can play in building a learning community in which the participants share their successes, concerns, and strategies.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Jessamyn Neuhaus. Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She specializes in the study of pop culture, gender studies, and teaching and learning. Jessamyn is also a recipient of the State University of New York’s Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence and the editor of Teaching History: a Journal of Methods. She’s the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is also the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning, which was released by West Virginia University Press. Welcome back, Jessamyn.

Jessamyn: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: …Jessamyn, are you drinking tea?

Jessamyn: I’m not, I’m drinking sparkling flavored water. The people here at Plattsburgh know that the Center for Teaching Excellence fridge is always fully stocked with flavored seltzer water and today I’m drinking Bubly grapefruit flavor.

Rebecca: Oh, I like that one.

John: And I’m drinking English breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: I have blue sapphire tea.

Jessamyn: Yum.

Rebecca: Very tasty.

John: Is it blue?

Rebecca: It has these little dried flowers in them that are a sapphire color. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what kind of flowers they are, but they’re tasty.

Jessamyn: It sounds like a power blue. Like a powerful blue.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s like a really intense, bright, wonderful blue.

John: So, are you feeling blue today?

Rebecca: I am feeling like the blue that I want to be feeling. I want that intense blue. So I’m channeling the blue.

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss the use of book clubs for professional development. We’ve been jointly running some between our two institutions at SUNY Plattsburgh and SUNY Oswego every spring and fall since fall 2020. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about how the collaboration began?

Jessamyn: Sure. Well, I met you both in 2019 when I came on Tea for Teaching to talk about Geeky Pedagogy. It was actually the first interview I did and I was super nervous and I prepared like 25 pages of notes. [LAUGHTER] And you were so great. It was so much fun. And we just stayed in touch after that. I was working as the interim, really part-time, Director for the teaching center going into the fall of 2020 after, as everybody knows, the semester that changed everything in the spring of 2020. We don’t have a staff here, this is a center of one. So resources and budget concerns were always an issue in trying to develop programming that would work with just this one person in the part-time role, and that faculty would be able to take advantage of during these unprecedented upheavals and challenges. The book club was something that my predecessor, Dr. Becky Kasper had been running that had pretty good attendance. And that semester, since we were all getting used to Zoom for the first time, it occurred to me that maybe we could do the book club via Zoom, which opened up the possibility of collaborating with another teaching center. And that was you. [LAUGHTER]

John: And we had been running book clubs for quite a few years. Our very first one was Michelle Miller’s Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology the semester after that came out. Our’s started in a less planned structure. We had Michelle on campus for a talk. And everyone was so enthused about her talk that they said, maybe we could start a reading group to discuss this. So that’s how our’s got started. And we had been doing it every semester since then. And it had worked really well. But, it’s worked much more effectively with the collaboration between the two institutions. What were some of the things that you saw as being the benefits of doing a book club?

Jessamyn: Well, one of the first things that strikes me about doing a faculty book club, and this is coming from my perspective as somebody who writes and talks about the geekiness and nerdiness of us in academia, is that a book club really builds on something we as academics do very, very well and are very, very, very comfortable with: reading, absorbing content, and then talking about it. Even the introverts among us tend to be pretty comfortable discussing ideas and tossing around concepts and getting a starting place like a book is something, even across various disciplines, people are very skilled at and comfortable at. So I think, in that sense, it’s not a big lift when it comes to faculty development. It’s working with skills and abilities that most people teaching in higher ed are already pretty comfortable with. So I think that’s one advantage, or one benefit.

John: One of the reasons why we started this and why we’ve been continuing it is that we had given a lot of one-off workshops where people would come in for a session, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour and a half, maybe three hours, perhaps even all day, and then often very little happened following that up. And one of the nice things about doing a book club is that you’re working with a group of faculty for an extended period, discussing the same topics and reflecting on those topics in a way that doesn’t generally happen with short one-day sessions. And that’s been really effective. On a related note, you mentioned bringing together people from different disciplines, we often had trouble bringing in people from other disciplines when someone was presenting on one topic, but when people are discussing any of these books, they find that everyone they’re talking to in this group has been having exactly the same problems and have been struggling with the same issues in ways that they might not have recognized otherwise. So the opportunity to bring people together and discuss it is a great way to remind everyone that we’re all facing the same challenges. And sharing solutions can be really effective.

Rebecca: I think it’s interesting to think about how the one offs are just one offs. But a reading group builds a routine, and a schedule, and regular practice and reflection around these topics. And so having a regularly scheduled time, and we’ve certainly made sure in our collaboration, but also prior to that at our institution, having multiple times for reading groups to meet, you don’t have to come to the same one every time. But earmarking that time during the week for this practice, I think is really helpful. It’s really easy to put it into our schedule.

Jessamyn: Yes, that’s right, it’s hard to make time for our own pedagogical development, it’s hard to always and I’d say it’s probably even harder now, as the world continues to burn… but the group setting, and I never thought of it this way till just now as we’re discussing it, but both those components that you were talking about: the routine of it, and the by default, the multidisciplinary setting, it’s almost like it reduces any disciplinary defensiveness people might have, or sense of resistance, maybe, because we’re there to talk about a book together, we’re not there to lay down the law, this is what you must do to teach effectively, XYZ.

Rebecca: So I think also, the idea of bringing everyone together has that accountability factor. And you see some of the same faces and the same people regularly and you start treating it almost as this little accountability club to make sure that you’re doing your homework and staying engaged with the subject matter. And the other thing that I was hearing in what you were saying, Jessamyn, that I think is useful to think about is that it’s a shared experience… reading the book, it’s a shared thing. So we have a common place to start a conversation, which is what you’re getting at with the academic defensiveness or disciplinary defensiveness that might come out. Just kind of interesting to think about. I had never really thought about that before.

Jessamyn: Well, and here at Plattsburgh, we are still very much in the early stages of building a campus culture of educational development. For us here at Plattsburgh collaborating with Oswego was pretty mind blowing, I’d say, for a lot of people besides just the factor of it’s not the same old faces that you see at every workshop. But even beyond that, I think it’s really expanded a lot of people’s, I will say, maybe view of what educational development is, it’s not just Jessamyn saying, “Hey, try this in your classroom,” that actually it’s out there in the world and lots of people are doing it, and it’s a professional endeavor, maybe chipping away at the sense of isolation that we can feel. Certainly I think it’s true lots of places, but Plattsburgh is geographically very isolated. And there really is a sense sometimes that we’re just out here all alone in the cold North Country. And the Zoom setting just really blew that apart. I think it is helpful that our campuses and our student populations are quite similar… at least there’s a lot of overlap. So when people in the book club share their experiences and their perspectives, there’s a lot of nodding and recognition. Many of our teaching contexts are similar.

Rebecca: And I think what I’m hearing both of you nodding towards is a sense of belonging, like it’s a shared experience where people feel like they belong, in part because they’re sharing experiences that are similar. And in reality, we know there’s a lot of small departments where you might be the only one teaching a particular thing or teaching in a particular way…

John: …or the only one considering teaching in a different way.

Rebecca: And being a part of a community where there’s other people doing some similar things, or experimenting in the same way, can really be helpful in just feeling a sense of community, and ways that you can bounce things off of one another. I know from my own experience, as a designer teaching studio classes, I’ve done a lot of exchange with folks that are teaching lab-based things or a lot of hands-on-learning, whatever that is, in whatever discipline, there’s a lot in common about doing hands-on-learning. Or you could talk about how that might apply. And you can learn a lot from something that’s happening in a different discipline and I’ve always really loved that about our book clubs.

John: Going back to a point Rebecca had mentioned earlier about the commitment of time to this, many people will see a speaker who they think is interesting, and will decide to pick up a copy of the book, they’ll buy that book and put it on a shelf, and it will stay there with the expectation that someday they’ll look at it. But having the meetings every other week, or however they’re scheduled, does serve as a commitment device that people, if they haven’t done the reading, will apologize often at the start of the meeting, and say “I wasn’t able to get this finished.” But just the implicit pressure of having these meetings, encourages people to do more reading on the topics than they would have done otherwise. And that’s as true for me as it is for all the participants in the group.

Jessamyn: I will say that I try not to inflict guilt on people, I took a page from my colleague Jessica Tinklenberg, who’s the Director of the teaching center out at the University of the Pacific, she ran a no-guilt book club. So that’s what she called it, No-Guilt Book Club. And I definitely emphasize that to people as well, encouraging people to Zoom in, even if you haven’t done the reading that week, or whenever you can, to just emphasize that. But you’re right, people will still say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get to it.” Although as academics, they always still have a lot to say.

John: Yes, that’s never stopped anyone from participating. [LAUGHTER] We also have encouraged people to attend, even if they weren’t able to complete the readings, because they’re going to get something useful out of the conversation and often will contribute something useful as the topics are discussed.

Jessamyn: In fact, that was something I did want to touch on, that I’ve been really surprised by, I guess, as the club has continued, is how the book is definitely the starting point, but it’s these conversations, which I don’t know why it surprised me, because the same was true at every teaching conference I’ve ever gone to. The workshops are great, the speakers are great. But then, often, the thing that I do when I get home is the thing I talked about with somebody at lunch, or while I was talking to them before the session or there was an example on the slide and I was talking to so and so about it. That’s, in the long run, what ends up actually changing my teaching. And I see that happening with the book club at times, that the content is this great springboard, and it’s definitely a key part, but sometimes it’s the talking that really seems to make an impact.

John: And we’ll talk about this more in just a few minutes. But one of the things we’ve been doing is we’ve been having multiple sessions for each chapter or set of chapters that we discuss, and both Jessamyn and I have been attending all of those sessions, or nearly all of them and Rebecca had attended most of those when she was a co-director of the teaching center here. But what happens is every day’s meeting, the discussions are very, very different and they’ve all been really valuable. And I’ve enjoyed the diversity of discussions. So it’s just not repeating the same things every day, that would get kind of tedious. [LAUGHTER] And we’ve encouraged participants to consider coming back for other group meetings if they wanted to. We haven’t had a lot of people take us up on that, but the variety of topics and the richness of those discussions has been really an important part of the benefit of this, for those of us who do attend multiple sessions.

Jessamyn: Yeah, it is. It really is.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s been interesting is a lot of the books that have been chosen work well if you can’t read the whole thing, because many of them have nice little summaries at the end, too, to give people a little bit of a chance or some insight into what was in the chapter. And maybe that’s some good book selection on both your parts.

Jessamyn: Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking, John, that maybe we can pat ourselves on the back a little bit here about the book choices we’ve made. Although, then again, there are so many great books about teaching. It’s not too hard to reach your hand out and find an incredible book to talk about. But I totally agree that every meeting, even when it raises very different points, has a valuable take away. But I do think that part of that is the book selection that we’ve made.

John: Yeah, we’ve had some really superb books, maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the benefits of the collaboration. One of those is that if we tried to do three group meetings at my institution alone, we’d probably only have two or three people at some of those sessions, and the sessions wouldn’t be as rich. By doing the collaboration, it allows us to get a full group of people there on more days, which opens up more opportunities for people to attend at times that’s convenient for them. And that I think, has been really beneficial.

Jessamyn: Yeah, I’ll add that, in a very practical way, it lessens the workload for us as facilitators, it’s like co-teaching… that knowing “Okay, so it’s the Wednesday book group, I woke up with a headache. I don’t really feel like talking too much, but John’s facilitating it today.” But even more than that, is the sense of… Rebecca, you said belonging for our faculty. But for us, as teaching center directors, small, small, small centers with not an overabundance of resources, it’s easy to feel alone. And certainly when we began, it was especially isolating, really overwhelming, with having coped with the emergency pivot and faculty’s needs at that time and our own classes as well. It’s very easy for educational developers to start feeling isolated while often we’re in this sort of weird in between place where we advocate for students, but we advocate for faculty, but we advocate for the administrators too and we’re supposed to be everything to everyone. So making this kind of collaborative connection has been sustaining to me in my teaching practice, for sure, but also just as the teaching center director as well.

John: And it really helps having multiple perspectives approaching these books, because we’re from different disciplines, and we bring different perspectives. And that’s been an important part of it, I think, too.

Rebecca: I’m wondering if folks are interested in starting book clubs, if both of you can talk about some of the logistics behind how running the book club and each individual session might work?

Jessamyn: Well, it’s been an evolution in how we’ve run it. And when we started, I think I should take credit for being like overly anally retentively prepared, [LAUGHTER], and I think maybe especially like, right at the beginning, when we were still really like in the grips of the worst pandemic era changes and upheavals, that maybe it was helpful to have some very specific discussion questions ahead of time. And as we were getting used to Zooming, but now, at least in the past book, and we’ll see what the spring brings as well, it seems like it’s worked a little bit better to be a little more hands-off and let whoever happens to come in that day, those faculty, lead the discussion, maybe have a few questions in your back pocket, in case there’s quiet, but I don’t know, John, what do you think?

John: I agree. When I put slides together, they were pretty plain. They didn’t look as nice as your slides did. Mine were kind of ugly but when Rebecca did them, they looked nice, [LAUGHTER] given her background in graphic design. But I think it was important to have a little bit more structure, because the very first book that we used was Small Teaching Online by Flower Darby and Jim Lang. And everyone was kind of panicking at that time. And having that focus, I think, was probably really helpful. But we’ve moved away from that, in general, with all the sessions we’ve been doing. And partly though, I think it’s because we’ve got a lot of repeat participants. Many of the people we have come back term after term. And they’re very comfortable at leading much of the discussion, and I think that’s been really valuable.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that maybe there was a need for some trust building early on, in understanding that everyone was equally panicking. I remember using a lot of Jamboard and stuff in some of those very early sessions just to get some shared ideas in a base. But I think that also helped people feel connected, because they realized they had some of the same ideas, and then felt more willing to talk later on. And then I think John’s right, some of the same people help with that nice welcoming atmosphere.

Jessamyn: Sometimes things take on a momentum or life of their own. And I don’t think community is too strong a word. I think that is what’s being built in this collaboration. And it’s funny, I haven’t reflected on it until just right this moment, but that’s something that really came out of a panic, like flat out and out pants-dropping panic, [LAUGHTER] has led to something so productive. And it’s only because of Zoom. I mean, it’s only enabled because of the comfort level of Zoom and the convenience it offers people, enabling people to participate and enabling them to collaborate, like we are across a pretty major distance.

Rebecca: I think it’s important to remember that in either of our institutions, we already had issues getting people in the same space at the same time. And obviously, to collaborate between institutions, we would need some way of doing that. But I think it’s afforded people the opportunity to join the call from home after they get their kids off the bus or whatever thing is happening in their lives that might cause them to have to participate remotely, anyways, whether or not we were all at the same institution.

Jessamyn: Yeah, it kind of acknowledges and recognizes the fact that people are burdened, that they have a lot to do in their own personal lives, at work, teaching. So the Zoom format, it really kind of sets a tone for the book group. We know that you have many, many demands on your time, like, it seems like it’s a very concrete way of respecting people’s time. We are offering the three different meeting times and having them via zoom. I’m not sure that I would even go back to just in-person book clubs after this experience.

John: Well, we had actually been offering things with video conference ability, going back to 2008.

Jessamyn: You are an early adopter, John, let’s clarify this.

John: I was…

Rebecca: He’s a very early adopter.

John: …but most of our faculty were not.

Jessamyn: That’s right. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, there would be a screen up with potential participants. But it was rare that we’d have more than one person coming in online. [LAUGHTER] But, the pandemic certainly made people much more comfortable with Zoom and gave them access to web cameras, or at least let them know that they had a web camera that they could use for this type of thing. So that it became really comfortable in ways that we had the ability to do that before, but it was very rarely used by most faculty.

Rebecca: Even if we’re thinking about faculty computer replacements and things institutionally, the institution is moving towards using laptops to make sure that people do have these tools. And so I think that’s really helpful because it does help with collaboration, not only within our own institution, but across institutions.

John: One of the things we’ve been very fortunate is that our administration has been very supportive of this and has been buying the books for faculty. And when faculty get a book delivered to them, they’re much more likely to actually participate because they feel guilty if they didn’t read it and if they didn’t show up, I think that’s really been helpful in doing it.

Rebecca: Does that also come with a commitment device of some sort?

John: In a sense, yeah, [LAUGHTER] there’s a little bit of guilt associated with not showing up. But the other thing that we had often done, it hasn’t worked this way for the last several book groups… we have an academic affairs retreat before the fall semester and we had often had the reading group focus on a book written by the keynote speaker at that event. And one of the things that happened when we’ve done that is that we keep the signups open through that academic affairs retreat and the number of participants normally almost exactly doubled every time when we had that keynote speaker because they tended to inspire people. We had some issues where we were hoping to have keynote speakers, but their books were delayed because there was this pandemic going on.

Jessamyn: Yeah [LAUGHTER].

John: … or other things come up that interfered with it. But that was something that, when we could make that connection, it was really effective in getting more people joining in, because we’d normally have a couple hundred people at the academic affairs retreat. And it was a nice way of marketing that.

Jessamyn: Yeah, and if I’m remembering correctly, you gave Plattsburgh Zoom access to one of those for when we read Relationship-Rich Education, Peter Felton came and spoke, and I noticed something very similar with this faculty group as well, as attracting a wider range of people.

John: I’m hoping we can get back to that at some point. But again, things have been a little bit more hectic. [LAUGHTER] And it’s been harder to plan for the contingencies of what is most appropriate next year in the environment we’ve had for the last two and a half to three years.

Jessamyn: And that also raises the point that selecting the book, we have had to think really carefully like, who will this appeal to most? What do people really need and want right now? And we try to vary it a little bit thinking about well, this book will be really appealing to XYZ, so then the next semester looking for something that might be a little bit different and mostly, I think, we’ve guessed very well.

John: I think so. Maybe we should mention some of the books that we’ve used.

Jessamyn: In fall 2020 in direct response to what was happening, we did Small Teaching Online by Flower Darby and Jim Lang. And then in the spring of 2021, we read Distracted by James Lang. In fall 2021, we read What Inclusive Instructors Do, by Tracie Addy and co-authors. Last spring, 2022, we did Relationship-Rich Education by Peter Felton and Leo Lambert. This semester, fall 2022, we read Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology by Michelle Miller. And we are excited to be reading next semester Inclusive Teaching by Kelly Hogan, and Viji Sathy..

John: And even if you are not able to arrange for the authors to visit on campus, many authors have been willing to come in over Zoom to give a talk to the reading group, either at the beginning of the session, or at the end. And I think that’s also been really helpful.

Jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, many people are willing to do, at no cost, an informal question and answer session with book clubs. Many scholars of teaching and learning are willing and able to do that.

Rebecca: So it’s probably not fair to have a conversation about logistics without asking about some challenges you might have faced during this time, or during the collaboration, or just in running reading groups generally.

Jessamyn: This is not a challenge that we had, but maybe people should be aware that, as human beings, [LAUGHTER] some people don’t like other people, and collaborating with someone that you haven’t worked with before is an unknown in terms of your strengths and weaknesses together. Are you going to complement each other? As luck would have it, John and Rebecca and I worked very well together and our strengths complement each other, John mentioned too, all three of us come from very different backgrounds and training. But that’s seen as a benefit, I do think scholars of teaching and learning, generally, are more open to collaboration than some academics might be. So it may be less of an issue than other kinds of intellectual projects, but that’s maybe something to keep in mind.

John: One practical problem is that pretty much all colleges have classes that meet at different times. And trying to find times that work for both institutions can be a challenge. If we want to get faculty involved, we have to find times that don’t overlap with too many class schedules. So we’ve been fortunate to be able to do that. And once we found times, we’ve been keeping them at the same times each semester, because there’s enough of an overlap there that each session will overlap at most one class time period at each institution, making it possible for more people to attend.

Jessamyn: John, you mentioned it as a benefit, but it can also be a challenge that we have returning members participating, because we also have new people every book as well, every session as well. And it’s sometimes can be challenging when someone’s like, “Oh, we read all about that two books ago, I totally get it.” Okay, but the person Zooming in next to you has never read a book on this before. But that’s part of community generally, the issue for developing any kind of community is trying to balance the needs of the ongoing longer term members with the needs of the new members. How do you make it meaningful to everyone? It really reminds me of a class in a lot of ways, where you have one student sitting in the last row who’s never gonna get anything out of the class, they’ve decided you are stupid, and they hate the whole class, and they’re never gonna be there. Then right next to them is a student who’s ready to have their whole life transformed and they’re about to declare a major, they love it so much. You’ve got such a range in any group of students. And similarly, you’ve got a wide range with faculty, especially everybody’s context changes all the time. And some people Zoom in for our book club. And they’re in the midst of a semester from hell… everything going wrong, their department is toxic, and they are just burned out, next to someone who’s on top of the world and the book is speaking to their heart because everything’s falling into place. And they’re in the same Zoom call, talking about the same book.

John: And we actually did have someone on our campus who gave that sort of feedback, that there was nothing new that they hadn’t learned from previous books that we’ve read. And that kind of shocked me because there was a lot in this book that I had not read before, and I was part of all those other groups, but that can happen. And I think we’ve been able to choose books that no matter what you had read before, will bring something new to everyone. Because each of the books has brought in a lot of new research findings and some new things that we hadn’t covered, even though some of the basic principles are the same. I only remember hearing that from one person, maybe other people felt that, but I didn’t feel that way unless maybe I just forgot all the other things we had read before.

Jessamyn: I don’t think that people participating in the book club are as necessarily as hyper aware as we are of the benefits of just having the conversation. And of course, they can’t see like, over the semesters, the bird’s eye view. They might have a general sense that… and this is actually now that I’m talking like maybe we should have done more rigorous assessments [LAUGHTER] now that I’m talking and getting feedback. But my feeling is that, often, they are enjoying the benefits of having the conversations about teaching with not necessarily that facilitator view of “Oh, I see where we are talking about the book, but now people… they’re moving into more of these strategies or ideas or just moral support, like at certain times, in certain meetings, just Zooming in with other people who care about teaching, and are thinking about teaching” like you can tell that this is uplifting and encouraging. And that has less to do with the book content than being there in that call together.

John: And I think some of the people you mentioned, who were having just this horrible semester, and lots of people have been feeling that recently, especially the last few semesters, often get the most benefit out of those discussions and that sense of community, as you said, is really valuable.

Rebecca: Well, there’s a lot of shared brainstorming and troubleshooting. When someone has identified a need, or has just expressed some anxiety or stress around what they’re experiencing, people are there to say “it’s not just you,” or “I’ve tried this and it’s been successful,” or “I tried that that you’re thinking about and these are the barriers that I faced” … that just makes all of us more aware of what to be thinking about as we implement new things.

Jessamyn: Yeah, the last book we read. Michelle Miller’s book about Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology, it’s only a small part of her book when she’s talking about specific classroom phone policies, but we had extended conversations about classroom phone policies, and for good reason, it’s on a lot of people’s minds and there’s a lot of experiences and issues to unpack with that. So I think that’s a good example of how it wasn’t a huge part of her book, she does address it and address it very well but it was less about going through point by point her argument and her evidence, and more about: “So, she’s saying this, alright, so what happened in class last week with the phones, with the devices? So then this happened, then this happened…” and people were just sharing that: “What went on? And what did you do and what worked, what didn’t work?” And in fact, it gave me the idea. I’m creating a new workshop starting next semester, it’s just called “Classroom phone policies.” And it’s basically going to be, let’s talk about your classroom phone policies. What do you think?

Rebecca: I think one thing that we might want to talk about as we’re thinking about challenges is not one that we faced, but one that collaborators could face if they’re not similar kinds of institutions. I want to just underscore that, again, that that’s, I think in part, why the collaboration has been so successful.

Jessamyn: I think so too. I think it would maybe raise people’s hackles if the teaching context was really different, the student populations were really different. Well, you can’t really understand if it could work, but you’d have to be aware.

John: It might be harder to find common ground between a university center where faculty’s focus is often on research and a community college where the focus is primarily on teaching and lots of classes and lots of students. It would be really hard to get topics that would work well in both contexts, I would think. But again, as you both said, we’re very similar institutions,

Jessamyn: Yeah, it’s sort of the basis for the trust you were mentioning, Rebecca, because there have been big differences. John, you teach very large classes, larger than even the largest classes here at Plattsburgh. So there are big differences that have come up. But there’s this starting place of trust, this is another SUNY institution, similar student population, some general similar challenges with teaching centers that have some similar approaches. That starting ground of trust for faculty to talk honestly about this.

Rebecca: Sometimes in the books too, there’s examples that don’t feel relevant to our institutions, like a med school example, for example, but then we can take that and as a conversation point to say, “I didn’t find this relevant,” but then someone else might chime in. “Oh, but I’ve done something similar in this other context,” and that can be incredibly helpful in helping people think through how different concepts or strategies might apply in their own context.

Jessamyn: That makes me think, though, that another challenge to keep in mind, for other people looking to start faculty reading groups, is that it might be hard to measure or assess the long-term impact of some of this community building and the connections that I’m seeing happen. It would be hard to pin it down and show a direct systemic correlation between this and improved teaching. I think we might be able to, if we were to find the perfect moment, get people to say it or write it down: “We did this in the reading group, and I applied it this way in my classroom,” but I’m not sure how you would measure just like… I know, for myself, this past semester, just knowing I was going to Zoom in with people, like looking forward to a Zoom call, like how do you assess that? But that is… I mean, what? …that never happens. So I know it’s good, but I’m not quite sure how I’m going to document it for my annual activities report.

John: Yeah, we haven’t been able to do randomized controlled experiments [LAUGHTER] where we assign some people to reading groups and other people not to participate. We don’t have so many applicants to participate that we’re able to do a lottery and then evaluate the impact on student learning. It might be nice if we were in that position, but the people who participate tend to be some of the best teachers on campus, or the people who are most concerned about their teaching, and I’ve seen that the people who attend are also much more likely to attend other workshops and get involved in other professional development. So it does lead to a little bit of a contagion effect, in that it spreads to other aspects, when they see that this is something they find valuable, they’re much more likely to engage in other professional development.

Jessamyn: I wonder too, if there’s something to be said for… sorry to use the “u”word… but it’s unprecedented, the times we live in. Our unprecedented challenges in higher education are really things we’ve never faced before. And a collaborative Zoom-based faculty reading group, I mean, it’s new. We’re like, “oh, it’s old hat.” We’ve only been doing it like two years or something. But we’re like, “oh, yeah, our book club” and people around like, “Oh, of course, that’s just how it is,” but it’s a radical major change. It’s an innovation. And we’re kind of still in the midst of it, we’re still figuring out what it might be able to do or how this might work. I’m still framing Zoom, not as an emergency measure, but something that could actually add support and encouragement to our teaching life.

Rebecca: I’m hopeful for the opportunity in the future, maybe, to continue connecting faculty across institutions, maybe with similar disciplines or ways where they may not feel connected at their own institution, but have ways to connect with others at another institution where they might feel some alignment and feel a sense of belonging. I think there’s opportunity to continue scaling up, which is kind of interesting.

Jessamyn: Yeah, I think as the question of how do we mitigate teaching burnout, not only is that not going away, but that’s probably going to really slam into us big time in the next few years. And that seems to be more and more that’s what I hear. What could we possibly do? I just came back from the POD Network Conference. And there was a lot about what can we do? How can we chunk out faculty development? How can we support and encourage faculty? And collaborations like this, these kinds of connections, they’ve gotta be away, I think.

John: We’d both came back from the OLC conference where we ran a session on this, which was in the episode that we just released last week. Yeah, that was a concept we heard a lot about at other sessions, too, that everyone is feeling burned out. And it’s going to be a challenge, as we deal with issues of student motivation, student engagement, in a world in which there are so many problems that make it a little bit harder for students and for us to focus on developing a more productive learning environment.

Jessamyn: Yeah, our next book on inclusive teaching, I think, is a good example of that. It’s something so many people care about so much, but it can start to feel overwhelming. It’s something you’re always having to keep revisiting and learning about. That’s by its nature. That’s what inclusive pedagogical practices require, that you continue to build your pedagogical skills over and over and over and without a place like a book club that kind of just is there to reinforce and support your growth mindset about teaching. Yes, everybody’s really tired this semester. It’s not easy to do, but we’re here together.

Rebecca: And it’s scheduled reflective practice.

Jessamyn: That’s right, exactly.

Rebecca: It’s already on the calendar.

Jessamyn: And it is a big benefit, John, like you said that we’ve been able to do it at the same times, the same three times three days a week is like sometimes I say my superpower is consistency. This is a good example.

John: And at Oswego, most faculty either teach Tuesday/Thursday or Monday/Wednesday/Friday, so by scheduling our meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it makes it pretty easy for people to find a time to participate. They don’t always participate at the same time every week. And again, they get the benefit of meeting and working with a different group of people if they show up at different times.

Rebecca: And minimally, even if they can’t come to a meeting, there’s a schedule for how to read the book.

Jessamyn: And now that I’m thinking about it, we do have quite a few people who Zoom from home or other places working around their childcare. So it definitely increases people’s ability to attend.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking what’s next?

John: Well, what’s next, I think is our next reading group, which will be starting up in February 2023.

Jessamyn: We are very, very excited to be reading Inclusive Teaching. It’s one of the latest books out from the West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series. We’re super excited that the authors, Dr. Viji Sathy and Dr. Kelly Hogan, are going to be Zooming in for a Q&A with our book club when we’re done. They provide everyone a book club guide, some discussion questions, through their website. So we’re really really looking forward to that discussion.

John: If you’d like to consider a reading group on your campus and if you’d have any questions about how this operates, feel free to contact any of us. We’ll put our email addresses in the show notes.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us, Jessamyn. It’s always great to talk to you.

Jessamyn: Thanks for having me.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC]