Category: faculty evaluation

canada · faculty evaluation · openness · reform · slow academy

Thinking about what I need: Notes on the concept of ‘Slow Academy’

erinewunker7 Comments
About a week ago we as an editorial collective wondered to one another whether or not we should worry about the slowing number of comments. Is this a dark portents? we asked each other, Or is it October? My vote was for October. (Though I did think, lord, just wait for February, that “month with rue at its heart,” as an old mentor of mine once wrote).

On Friday Aimée asked readers to think about what we need now that we’re here in the “trough of the semester” (awesome phrase! I’m co-opting it).

No one answered. Too busy? Too Friday? Too difficult, wishful, naive, hopeful, fearful, to write a list of needs?

So today I find myself reflecting on what I need, and especially what I need from this blog.

When Heather and I first spoke about her idea for a feminist academic blog based in the Canadian context she mentioned ‘slow academy.’
“As in Carlo Petrini?!” I exclaimed
Now I have to admit that my memory for exact details starts to falter here, but I’m fairly certain her reply was in the affirmative.

If you’re not familiar with Petrini, your might be familiar with his Slow Food movement. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
“Slow food seeks to catalyze a broad cultural shift away from the destructive efforts of an industrial food system and fast life; toward the regenerative cultural, ecological, social, and economic benefits of a sustainable food system, regional food traditions, the pleasures of the table, and a slower and more harmonious rhythm of life.”

When my co-conspirator mentioned slow academy I immediately started to imagine what that might mean, and I have to admit, I didn’t really get very far. But as I return to Petrini’s book in an attempt at nighttime reading that has nothing to do with last minute lecture prep (the result of which, for me, is almost always anxiety dreams involving missing class or showing up without some item of clothing or some equally transparent-yet-unnerving scenario) I find myself reinvigorated by the movement’s aim.

Notice that while the lynchpin is food, the aim is cultural change. While I would like to believe that those of us working in the academy at all levels are doing so because we want to effect some kind of positive cultural change, the fact is that is really, really difficult to feel, see, and…maybe…accomplish. You’ll notice that one of the most oft-used tags in our posts is ‘turgid institution.’ Le sigh.

So, using Petrini’s text as inspiration, here’s my attempt to start imagining what a slow academy might be trying to do; I’ve replaced ‘food’ (& a few others) with ‘academy’ (or the like):

Slow Academy seeks to catalyze a broad cultural shift away from the destructive effects of an industrial education system and fast life; toward a regenerative cultural, ecological, social, and economic benefits of a sustainable education system, regional education traditions, the pleasures of the university environment, and a slower and more harmonious rhythm of discourse.

Hmm. Not bad. What would ‘sustainable education systems’ that are built on both ‘regional education traditions’ and the ‘pleasures of the university environment’ (which I read as a site of potential multiplicitous engagement) look like?

They would certainly need reflect the people that make up this country. To do this they would also need to take into account various kinds of epistemologies, languages, learning practices, and traditions. Sustainable education systems would need to think through how the classroom is constructed, how work is evaluated, how labour is valued and remunerated. They would have to rethink hiring practices and curriculum…

In case you’re wondering, here’s how my musing about Slow Academy fits into my opening observations: despite being busy and in spite of the potential of being branded a Pollyanna writing for this blog has become a way of opening space, of creating the possibility of engaged encounter without expecting that invitation will be accepted (or, if accepted, that it will be accepted in good spirit).

Which is to say: I need the possibility of change, and a place to imagine how to effect that change (however slow, however wishful).

I need the possibility of a Slow Academy.
bad academics · best laid plans · faculty evaluation

Why is peer review so slow?

aimeemorrison5 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, an article of mine was rejected by a journal, and that was pretty depressing. But what was shocking about it was that the rejection only took eight weeks. I have never before had anything at all come back to me, positive or negative, in fewer than six months.

Why?

Most of the journals I submit to and review for have web interfaces that manage the submission, review assignment and tracking, communication of decisions, and editing of manuscripts. There’s no lag for postal service, no random piles of papers on desks into which an article might fatally fall. Hell, these tools even create sorted pools of potential reviewers in their databases. My experience might not be the literary norm–I am, I admit, a new media and digital humanities scholar and we always have nicer toys.

However! It does not take six months (or eight, or eighteen) to competently review a paper. It probably takes some time (a week? Two weeks?) for a submissions editor to find and secure an appropriate reviewer or two for a paper. It certainly must take a little bit of time (a week? Two weeks?) for the journal editor or editors to read the reports and settle on a decision. The papers I review take me anywhere from an afternoon to a day to read and report on a submission, and I can fit this into the week or two after it is assigned to me.

By my count, peer review is a process that should take, generously, about eight weeks to do.

I do about five peer reviews a year. Maybe that’s too many. Maybe I get asked more frequently because I’m fast and thorough, and write good reports. Maybe everyone else sits on their reviews for six months because they are prioritizing their own research at the expense of service in ways I should be emulating. Maybe they are cannily doing just enough peer review to get some kind of merit credit for it, and no more (and certainly, no faster.) Maybe I’m falling into gendered Mommy-to-the-profession behaviour by taking my reviewing so seriously and doing it so assiduously.

Nevertheless, peer review has to get done by someone, and so I beg of you, colleagues at large: if you agree to do a peer review, just get it done. Don’t put it off until the end of the month, the end of term, the end of time. Don’t wait until you get an email from the submissions editor telling you it’s already late, and then ask for a six week extension. Your colleagues are counting on your feedback to help them advance in their thinking and in their careers. Because I don’t want to get stuck doing the reviews you flaked out on, and I also don’t want to get stuck in ‘under review’ limbo for a year when my tenure committee is evaluating my research effectiveness.

* * * * * * *

I wrote up this post as a draft in August, and I’m just coming back to it now. And do you know what? I’ve got two late peer reviews on my desk right now. Yeah, karma’s a bitch, and now that the shoe of righteousness is on the other foot, I guess I’m the bad academic. My high horse has thrown me into the mud. How did that happen?

Oh man. How do you tackle peer review–the deadlines or the waiting or the procrastinating or the report-writing? And how do you handle both yourself and the review when you find yourself, like me, failing so spectacularly to live up to your own standards?

faculty evaluation · reform · turgid institution

Guest Post: Annual Faculty Evaluation

Lily Cho2 Comments

In addition to being the time of new school-year resolutions, September is also the time for preparing the materials relevant to our evaluation by our department and faculty. I work at a University where faculty members are evaluated on a yearly basis; the result of the evaluation process is the award of a merit increment, which translates to some monetary increment to one’s salary.

During my tenure at my University, I have had a range of feelings for this process. Sometimes it was dread, resulting from uncertainty about whether I have been “good enough” to deserve the merit increment award that would place me, at least, in the “you are doing OK” category. Yet other times, it was hope and excitement, when after a particularly good (in my opinion) year, I was confident that I deserved to be recognized as “above OK” or even, in days of particular optimism, “excellent”. And sometimes, especially after tenure and promotion, it was just bored with the process, when the toil of remembering every “contribution bit” seemed disproportionate to the meaning of the anticipated merit award and much more so to the corresponding monetary award it would imply.

So I have tried to think about how this process might be rehabilitated to be constructive and productive as opposed to a waste of time for the faculty members, who feel like they have to pad their reports with every possible “good deed” that might place them above the bar to the next increment, and for the evaluation committee, who have to pore over these materials in an effort to fairly recognize their colleagues’ contributions, as they divide the pie and doll out the necessarily meager increments.

It seems to me that this process has potentially the opportunity to do two things.

The first is to give faculty members the impetus to reflect on their agenda and to consolidate the past year’s work in an overall coherent vision. Personally, I have found this process to be “cathartic” every time I had to go through it, namely at tenure and promotion and when I had to write a substantial proposal. After each of these times, I felt a new sense of purpose in my research activities as they all were more weighty, building on a longer past work and laying the foundation for a longer term contribution, which, goes without saying, should have a higher impact potential. I think, as faculty members, we all need to believe that our work matters in that it actually contributes to our collective knowledge and it is hard to hold on to that belief if we cannot see a long line of contribution from our past, through the present, towards a future. Academy is a long-term process, not so much slow, but rather “for the long haul,” an endurance race with some sprints intertwined.

The other objective of the faculty-evaluation process should be to give the University administration the opportunity to communicate to the faculty the values for which the University stands. This is the time to recognize the contributions that the University has identified as desirable in its vision and mission statements. I do not think that there is any University that stands for “the most number of publications” and “the best teaching-evaluation scores.” Instead, most Universities profess a vision of high-impact research, high-quality productive teaching and learning, involvement with the scientific community at large, and civic engagement.

The evaluation process and its products, including any associated awards of merit increments, should be intelligent, broad and flexible enough to somehow believably reflect these values. When the process degenerates to a zero-sum game, where a money pile has to be divided in a way that corresponds to each individual faculty contributions, it becomes easier to simply come up with a quantitative formula translating the numerical entries in the individual’s submitted report (papers, grants, money, students, course evaluations) into a merit increment. But there is no vision worth envisioning simply involving the maximization of these numbers. And this oversimplification of the process leaves faculty (especially more senior ones who have invested themselves in the institution and have bought into this vision) feeling cheated when during the year they attempt to make the vision happen and, at evaluation time, what matters boils down to a few numbers.

I wish I had some practical proposal on how the process should work. I don’t. However, it seems to me that part of any reform should consider stripping the process from most (all?) numbers (that lead into oversimplification temptation), infusing it with more memory (looking at a longer time span than a year) and leaving room for more reflection (looking at the faculty members’ perceptions of their contributions).

(The writer of this post wishes to remain anonymous.)