dagblog - Comments for "Rachel Dolezal and the de-Professionalized University"

I want to be clear that I don

Doctor Cleveland — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 16:12:00 +0000

In reply to That's so haphazard and so

I want to be clear that I don't know if the chair at EWU supervised Dolezal a lot or a little. It was probably left up to him. But the problem is that there usually aren't rules, and supervision is just left to the chair's discretion.

There are lots of people like me who complain loudly about adjunctification in higher-education publication, but that hasn't done anything. And lots of faculty leaders (department chairs, faculty senators, faculty union reps) grumble about the number of adjuncts without getting much traction. At this point, the administrators expect that grumbling and seem to take it as the price of doing business.

There is an emerging adjunct-unionization movement, which is probably the best chance to do some good. They aren't demanding closer supervision or more training of course. They're asking for more money and more job security. But if they get those things, inevitably schools will pay more attention to what's actually happening in their classrooms.

Administrators, I think, think this is a problem but feel their hands are tied. And they won't call it a problem because they know they can't fix it. I think, or maybe just like to think, that almost every college administrator would rather have a fully full-time teaching staff. They just don't have the budget to do that.

The people who control the purse strings, meaning the trustees and, for public schools, the state legislators, aren't interested in this problem at all. They are overwhelmingly focused on cost containment. They virtually always want the cost of instruction to be as low as possible. And when they want to spend money, they want to spend it on flashier, high-ticket things. They sometimes want to start an expensive new professional program, but they always want the cost of teaching 100- and 200-level classes to be cheaper. The drawbacks of relying on so much part-time underpaid labor aren't necessarily clear to them.

Good link, barefooted. Thanks

Doctor Cleveland — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 15:59:05 +0000

In reply to This is an interesting

Good link, barefooted. Thanks.

What I would take away from this is:

1. The department chair was happy with Dolezal's performance, and she was likely popular with students. (In fact, she was scheduled to speak at a student award ceremony the day everything blew up.)

2. That department chair, the person who was responsible for hiring her quarter by quarter, had an existing out-of-the-classroom relationship with her, most likely related to local activism. (I think the "local events" are probably community events about race, policing, and so forth.) That's all to the good.

What I can't tell from this is:

1. How the chair evaluated her teaching. Maybe he visited her classroom every semester. Maybe he just read her teaching evaluations. Maybe somewhere in between. We don't know, and most places don't have rules about this. It's up to the chair decide how much to oversee.

2. How much, if anything, Finnie did in the initial hiring beyond a resume and an interview.

Finnie, the chair, would be the person at EWU who knew most about Dolezal; the deans probably didn't really know who she is. There isn't any institutional involvement beyond the chair's level.

Things that surprised me, and not especially in a good way:

1. The references to Dolezal's "scholarship" and "credentials" seem odd to me. Dolezal doesn't seem to have published any scholarship, and her graduate degree seems to be an odd match for some of the classes she apparently taught.

Dolezal is a community activist and organizer rather than a scholar per se. And that in itself is fine; one of the good reasons to have adjunct professors is to bring real-world practitioners into the classroom for specific tasks. If I could hire, say, the editor of a literary magazine to teach English majors a class about the publishing business, Or you know, the University of Chicago hiring a state senator to teach a law class. That all makes sense. That's what adjunct professors should be doing.

But it's weird to call one of those local practitioners a "scholar." For me that sets off, maybe not an alarm bell, but a yellow warning light.

As far as Dolezal's credentials: she doesn't have a PhD. What she has is a studio-arts degree, an MFA, which is basically a credential for teaching people how to make art. She went to grad school as a painter, and is qualified to teach other people painting. But it's pretty clear that she wasn't just teaching classes in visual art. So talking about her credentials is a little weird. I'm not putting down MFAs; I have one myself. But having a degree in one thing isn't a credential to do another thing; I have a PhD in English, and I study English Renaissance literature. If I went over to the History Department to teach a course on the history of 16th-century England, talking about my "credentials" would be a mistake.

This is an interesting

barefooted — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:44:21 +0000

In reply to Thanks, Mona, How she teaches

This is an interesting article that, in part, addresses her history with the University and performance as an instructor of Africana studies.

In a public statement issued to a local TV news station Friday, Eastern Washington University distanced itself from Dolezal, saying she’s been hired since 2010 on a “quarter by quarter basis as an instructor in the Africana education program. This is a part-time position to address program needs. Dolezal is not a professor. The university does not feel it is appropriate to comment on issues involving her personal life. The university does not publicly discuss personnel issues."
The university did not immediately respond to Inside Higher Ed 's request for comment, but Scott Finnie, professor and director of Africana studies, said Dolezal was an effective teacher and researcher with a strong grounding in her field. He said he’d presented with her several times at local events, and that she’d been hired consistently, quarter after quarter, for at least three years.
“Those decisions are based on her effectiveness in the classroom setting, and because of her passion and mind-set and research, and because of her credentials and her ability to lead her students into critical analysis,” Finnie said. “We found her services valuable to our goals.”

That's so haphazard and so

Ramona — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 18:37:01 +0000

In reply to Thanks, Mona, How she teaches

That's so haphazard and so dishonest, I hardly know how to react to it. I might even overlook it if those schools weren't charging such outrageous rates to give our students "the quality education they deserve". More hypocrisy, made even more egregious by the fact that it's all about the money. Is there a chance for these kids if this is the way they're being taught? And if all of academia knows it, why is it okay? I see you railing against it. Are you alone, or is there a concerted effort to clean this up?

Thanks, Oxy. For the record,

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 15:38:26 +0000

In reply to To my mind academia is the

Thanks, Oxy. For the record, I don't think either the tenure process or the job-search process are perfect. Far from it. It's clear that some tenure decisions are mistaken, and it's certainly the case that the tenure-track job market doesn't always return the best results. Most things written about both processes focus on the problems.

But that's worlds better than NO process at all.

Thanks, Mona, How she teaches

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 15:33:40 +0000

In reply to Interesting take on this, Doc

Thanks, Mona, How she teaches is a key question, although I don't actually doubt her teaching. I think all the questions are about her weird identity politics.

I would hesitate before making the question of her teaching just about student ratings. Those are notoriously unreliable, and reflect how much teachers are liked (including, often, often how easy they are) instead of how much students learn.

One of the many problems with the adjunct model is that often there is NO review of their teaching except through those student evaluation forms. Maybe Dolezal has had other faculty in her classroom to observe. It it's more likely that she's never been observed at all, and that EWU only vaguely knows what goes on in that classroom.

You are the optimist

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 15:33:06 +0000

In reply to To my mind academia is the

You are the optimist

From what I can tell, the name comes from Czech, Doležal without the diacritics, meaning something like "runs into, creeps in, abuts, fits, break out/take place..." and various idiomatic meanings.

Interesting take on this, Doc

Ramona — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 15:14:20 +0000

In reply to Rachel Dolezal and the de-Professionalized University

Interesting take on this, Doc. I guess I would want to know how her students rated her. Did she teach the course well? Seems to me that would be pretty important information, since everyone is speculating on her worth.

They are absolutely

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 14:02:31 +0000

In reply to This has been true in the

They are absolutely transferring risk to the professors. And that's not good for anyone or anything except the narrow interest of avoiding liability.

The one difference from The New Yorker is that schools aren't going to hire fewer adjuncts when they get burned. EWU is just gong to replace Dolezal with another adjunct, or maybe with two.

To my mind academia is the

Oxy Mora — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 13:29:47 +0000

In reply to Rachel Dolezal and the de-Professionalized University

To my mind academia is the only sphere left in this society which has a prayer of being objective and that the reasons for this are high standards of faculty selection and a certain rigor in, eventually, awarding some faculty tenure. The positive value of vetting and peer review is, I think, largely lost on the citizenry but to my mind it is an important process ---one which should not be threatened by the practice of loosely hiring and supervising a separate "class" of adjunct faculty.

I'm glad to see your piece because my suspicion is that the market and corporate forces trying to invade academia will be quick to use the publicity of the Dolezal case (I keep wanting to call her Dozeall ) to justify better oversight in the practice of using adjunct professors rather than curtailing the practice itself.