Blog LXXXVII (87): Take a Number

This blog has spent a lot of time offering professional advice to individuals—which is its main purpose—but to perform that mission we also need to take a look at the perspective of the institutions.  A lot of essays in this blog have been complaining about the fate of adjuncts and underemployed Ph.D.s but what is happening to colleges and universities?  Particularly in this economic environment?  The following article from the December 19, 2010 issue of The Boston Globe entitled “A Course Correction: UMass Tackles Challenge of Crowded Classes, Smaller Faculty” shows us that they are not having an easy time of it either and puts the adjunct phenomenon into a larger context.  The situation that the University of Massachusetts, Amherst is facing is not so different from those at Ohio State, the University of Texas, and so one.  One of the implications of this article is that the job market is not going to get better anytime soon.  Here is the article: 

AMHERST—Charlie Ciano slipped into a quiet nook in the hallway between classes and nervously flipped open her laptop. With each passing minute, her chances of enrolling in the courses she wanted next semester dwindled.

Fingers crossed, the UMass junior logged onto the university’s online registration system. Just 20 minutes into her assigned enrollment period, the screen was already crowded with blue squares, indicating that half of her choices were full.

“I know that in the end, I’m going to have to take something I’m not interested in just to graduate on time,” Ciano said.

Overbooked classes are among the academic hurdles many undergraduates face at the University of Massachusetts Amherst—a campus struggling to break into the top ranks of public universities after losing nearly a fifth of its tenured and tenure-track professors in the past two decades.

Classes at the flagship campus can be so large that some students sit on the floor in lecture halls, leaning against their backpacks, the walls, or the legs of fellow classmates. Nine percent of all classes have more than 100 students—compared with a national average of 2 percent, according to a College Board analysis of public universities. Faculty lament that they have little choice but to evaluate students in oversize classes by multiple-choice exams and use computers to grade homework.

Some professors have made attendance at lectures optional, offering as an alternative prerecorded lessons over the Internet, which allows the university to serve many more students than would fit into an auditorium. Some students have even received letters from their departmental advisers suggesting that they take classes at other colleges to improve their odds of graduating in four years.

“We’re offering less than we could,” said Sigrid Schmalzer, a history professor. “This is a cheaper way of selling degrees, but I really worry about what’s happening to the quality of our education.”

Relying on adjuncts
The diminished size of the permanent faculty—described in a UMass report as considerably smaller than at top public research universities—presents a serious challenge to Chancellor Robert Holub’s goal of improving UMass’s national reputation.

The number of faculty in the tenure system, the lifeblood of research universities, has dropped from a high of 1,201 in 1987 to 978 today, even as the number of undergraduates has risen slightly, to just over 20,000.

Holub, who wants to have 1,200 tenure-system faculty members and 22,500 students by 2020, said a robust faculty is essential as the university seeks to improve undergraduate education, increase the number of doctorates it awards and the amount of research produced on campus, and boost its overall prestige.

But he also argues that when adjunct lecturers who work on temporary contracts are included, the overall student-faculty ratio at UMass is 18-1, which he says is similar to peer universities. And despite the decline of tenure-system professors, the total number of full-time faculty is about the same size as it was 20 years.

“Nationally, when looking at student outcomes, the key factor is not whether you have tenured or tenure-track faculty, but whether you have full-time faculty,” Holub said.

He said the university is working to improve the ability of students to enroll in the classes of their choice, as well as to add more small classes.

“It is a priority of ours to have students get into the classes that they need to make progress toward their degrees,” Holub said. “We’re dedicating resources to it. You don’t hit it on the nose every semester.”

The number of classes enrolling fewer than 20 students increased by 31 percent over the last year. This year, the university reduced the number of students in each freshman writing section from 24 to 15.

Holub has also instituted freshman seminars of no more than 18 students to expose first-year students to some of the university’s top professors.

And the university recently announced a $182 million investment in its honors college for a small percentage of elite students, who have greater access to smaller classes and meaningful contact with permanent faculty.

“We are really attacking these problems,” said Provost James Staros. “It’s not that they don’t exist, but we’re not sitting back and doing nothing.”

But many professors and students are less sanguine.

For professors, heavier workloads leave them less time for research and hurt their ability to advise students and write letters of recommendation. And while students overwhelmingly reported being satisfied with their college experience in a UMass survey of the last three graduating classes, nearly a third of respondents said they were disappointed by the quality of academic advising, as well as career preparation and guidance.

“UMass right now has the reputation as a decent school, but not the greatest,” said David Robertson, a junior majoring in political science and economics. Robertson said he sees the oversubscribed classes and faculty shortage as significant problems for the university.

“They’re putting effort into becoming one of the front-runner universities, like Michigan and California,” he said. “But if you want better educated students who will go on to do great things and donate to the university down the road, this is detrimental to their own cause."

‘The wrong direction’
Many other public universities facing budget pressures have also replaced tenure-system faculty with adjunct professors and have introduced online options to meet student demand—coping strategies that are expected to increase, according to national higher education experts.

“It’s happening all across the country,” said Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C.

But the cutbacks—and their resulting challenges—are detrimental to UMass’s aspirations to rise into the upper echelon of the nation’s public universities.

“UMass has the very hard job of trying to increase their momentum in quality and recognition at a very tough time,” Broad said.

State funding makes up 25 percent of UMass Amherst’s revenues today, down from 40 percent in 2000. And Holub expects that the state’s budget difficulties will lead to more than $18 million in cuts next year.

To help make up for declining state funds, UMass Amherst has raised tuition and fees to $11,732 a year, one of the highest price tags among the nation’s public universities. It currently ranks 49th out of 598 public four-year universities in cost, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education survey. And the university is considering instituting an additional “flagship fee” that could add hundreds of dollars to the bill for Amherst students.

Only half of UMass Amherst students graduate in four years, and 66 percent do so in six years. The university lags behind its peers, where an average of 73 percent of students make it through in six years, according to a UMass report comparing the university with a group of 10 schools including the University of Connecticut and Rutgers.

Large lectures are common on nearly every college campus. But the experience is the norm for many UMass students, particularly freshmen and sophomores. Some sit through several classes a day in the 469-seat Mahar Auditorium, the largest lecture hall on campus, which is fully booked from 8 in the morning until 5 in the evening.

In the last decade, the number of classes with more than 100 students has risen by more than 20 percent. Basic interaction with faculty that students at other universities take for granted has become nearly impossible for some UMass students.

Mikayla Astor, a sophomore majoring in resource economics and business management, said her accounting professor was so overwhelmed dealing with hundreds of students that she did not have time to answer her questions before a recent exam.

“I tried to see her during office hours but she said she was already booked,” Astor said. “Here I am, trying to learn, and it’s kind of hard. I ended up getting help from a friend.”

Erika Tabur, a junior from Northbridge, said she teaches herself from the textbook instead of relying on professors.

“It’s really frustrating,” Tabur said. “That’s how I got through calculus, and that’s how I’ve made it through chemistry.”

History professor Audrey Altstadt recently received an e-mail from a student asking her to write a recommendation for graduate school. Altstadt has only spoken to the student three times.

“Students will say, ‘I know you don’t know me very well, but the people I know are gone or too busy,’” she said.

The history department last year stopped requiring students to consult with their advisers before registering for classes. Instead, it recently started training students to mentor one another.

In the kinesiology department, hundreds of majors received an e-mail last spring with an unusual recommendation: Consider picking up courses at other universities.

“We’ve just had a large number of students not being able to get into classes,” said Frank Rife, who advises the 700 students majoring in kinesiology, the science of human movement. “So I suggested that if they were trying to stay on some sort of four-year pace, they should take some of their classes over the summer online, or at Salem State, Framingham State, UMass Boston, wherever it works for them.”

Biology professor Randall Phillis recalls that when he arrived at UMass in 1989, the biology department was home to 43 tenure-system faculty and about 250 students majoring in the subject. Today, 26 permanent faculty serve the needs of close to 1,000 biology majors. As a result, he said, some advanced or specialty courses, such as cancer genetics and invertebrate biology, are simply not taught.

On a recent afternoon, about 400 students squeezed into Mahar for Phillis’s introductory biology class. An overhead screen flanked by two smaller flat-screen televisions displayed a diagram of fatty acid chains.

Every few minutes, students were asked to answer multiple-choice questions displayed on the screens by pressing a button on a handheld device that resembled a remote control. It is the only way for Phillis to gauge how much of the material students understand when many are too intimidated to speak up in such a large class.

“The size of the class challenges my ability to ramp up the difficulty and slows my ability to move forward,” said Phillis, who also teaches a more intimate version of the class to 48 honor students, every one of whom he knows by name.

“Great education can be available here, but certainly not with a student-faculty ratio that keeps slipping in the wrong direction,” said Phillis, president of the faculty union.

Quantity and quality
Five years ago, UMass instituted a plan to hire 250 additional tenure-track professors by 2010. So far, it has only managed to increase the total by 61.

Many of the tenured faculty who have retired or resigned have been replaced by adjunct instructors, who now make up nearly a fifth of full-time faculty, compared with 7 percent two decades ago.

UMass students today, particularly underclassmen, are less likely to be taught by a permanent faculty member. Last academic year, tenure-system faculty taught just 45 percent of undergraduate courses; adjuncts taught 35 percent, and graduate teaching assistants taught the remaining 20 percent, according to university data.

UMass this year also increased the number of credits per class for some courses that satisfy graduation requirements, reducing the number of courses students need to graduate. The higher-credit classes are supposed to be more rigorous, but some faculty say the additional work often takes the form of online discussions or computer-graded homework.

“It is clearly driven, even if they don’t say so, as an effort to reduce the number of faculty you need to teach the same number of students,” said Robert Zussman, a sociology professor. “The expectation has cheapened.”

Professors say they are trying their best to cope. Many routinely allow more students into a class than the maximum occupancy posted in a room, banking on the fact that not everyone will show up.

Classics professor Debbie Felton has allowed upwards of 490 students into a 469-person Greek mythology class, and still had to turn away dozens who came the first weeks of class, hoping for a break.

“I get a number of e-mails from students saying, ‘Please, I’m a senior. Let me into your class,’ “ Felton said. “But I just can’t. It’s already overenrolled.”

The opening of a new science complex has allowed some teachers, like chemistry professor Paul Lahti, to use technology to teach as many students as needed, though not in the same room.

“Our goal in chemistry remains a seat for every student,” Lahti said, even if that means watching a piped-in lecture occurring in an adjoining room, a method Lahti employed last year for an organic chemistry class.

“We’ve struggled philosophically,” Lahti said. “Is it critical that every student have a seat in every lecture section?”

An online option
At 9:45 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, senior Ellen Trapp settled into her dorm room bed to watch one of her favorite professors on her computer. The class—Communications 288: Gender, Sex and Representation—was recorded last year.

The professor, Sut Jhally, leaned on a lectern and spoke about the representation of gays on television. An 1 hour, 15 minute lecture will often take Trapp more than two hours to watch because she frequently pauses to take notes and rewinds to make sure she understands the points Jhally is making.

“I feel like I’m in a lecture hall because this is exactly what I would see—the board and the teacher at the front,” Trapp said. “But all from the comfort of my own bed.”

Jhally began taping his lectures six years ago so more students would have access to his courses. The lecture hall he teaches in is limited to 230 students. Online, with lessons re-recorded every three to four years, he said he can reach 1,300.

Students perform just as well in online courses as they do in traditional classes, university officials said, and more than 1,000 undergraduates are enrolled in online courses this fall. In addition, many are taking new hybrid courses in computer science, biology, calculus, and physics, which combine traditional lectures with online instruction.

“I tell kids on the first day to come to class only if they want to,” said Robert Moll, a computer science professor. Fewer than half show up to his introduction to Java programming class.

Students who attend his lectures say they come to get their questions answered. Moll is so busy he has to delegate the answering of many e-mailed questions.

“If I can answer it in 15 seconds, what the hell, I’ll get back to you,” he said. “But if they say, ‘I’m lost. I don’t understand a concept,’ I say, ‘Go see a TA.’”

Moll has written an interactive online textbook for students to teach themselves computer science concepts. Practice programming problems are embedded throughout the text. Students submit their solutions, which are automatically graded on a remote server that also tracks each individual’s performance.

“The more cynical view from faculty, not without some merit, is that this is a way for the university to live with diminished faculty numbers,” he said. “There is some truth to it. But as an educator, I sort of believe in this do-it-yourself approach.”

Blog LXXXVI (86): Summer Seminars

WEST POINT, NEW YORK—Many different institutions around the country sponsor Summer programs for scholars and writers. One of the best of these programs is the West Point Summer Seminar in Military History. It is a hidden gem and I cannot recommend it enough.

The Seminar was at one time a program that the U.S. Army official sponsored to help faculty at other institutions to develop enough expertise to teach the military history that was required for ROTC programs. That requirement was phased out and the department of history at West Point decided to run the program with private money as a way of bolstering professional interest in military history. I participated in the first Seminar with this new focus back in 1999 and returned to West Point to give a talk to on June 30, 2011.

The Summer Seminar is wonderful in that it is a number of things all at the same time: it is a graduate seminar in military history, it is a research seminar, it is a teaching workshop, it is a distinguished speakers series, and it is an opportunity to develop a professional network of like-minded peers. For me it was like taking a new Ph.D. field in military history two years after I graduated.

I found the teaching workshop element to be the most unexpected reward. I have to admit in my arrogance, I expected that the civilian academics would do far better in this regard than the military officers. The history department at West Point has a mix of civilian and military faculty. The military officers were fantastic at sharing their approaches towards teaching. They were far better teachers than the civilians. They had many ideas that I incorporated immediately afterwards and others that I still plan to use. (Like having students take the same exam twice; once on their own and once with a partner. The higher grade is the one they keep. Taking the exam a second time forces a student to figure out what they got wrong the first time and they usually learn a bit in the process.) I could go on, but there point is there is a lot of teaching ideas the Seminar offers.

One of the major features of the seminar was a series of “staff rides” that the group takes. (A staff ride is an educational tool that the Royal Prussian Army developed in the 1830s-1850s. It is basically a tour of the battlefield itself, supplemented with a series of historical readings before hand and a discussion of ethics and decision making at the location itself). The east coast of the United States is littered with battlefields from the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the U.S. Civil War. (The seminar mixes up which battlefields it visits from year to year.) When I was a Fellow the seminar visited spent eight days on the road visiting mostly Civil War sites; this year the group had fewer but were more mixed.

A difference between my Seminar and this year’s version is that the 2011 group had several panels of experts discuss and/or debate the historiographical nature of the field. I sat in on one on the Vietnam War before giving my talk about the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The panel was quite informative, entertaining and drew a small group of visitors—faculty from other West Point departments and historians at a few other universities in the nearby area. (I am afraid my talk based on a chapter from my book on the boycott of the 1980 Olympics kept in line with the tradition of military officers doing better than the civilians; my contribution was part of a speakers series rather than a distinguished speakers series.) The Seminar also spent a day at the Roosevelt Presidential Library touring the museum part of the complex and learning about the archives.

The cadre for the program are very good about looking at major military developments across the globe. In this sense, the military history they teach is world history. A shortcoming of the West Point program when I attended and that still remains ten years later is that it focuses on ground power. The program pretty much ignores naval and air power. Of course, that omission reflects the major focus of military history. Few historians in the United States or in any other country focus on the other mediums in which militaries project force. The majority write about armies rather than navies or air forces.

Another unexpected benefit of the Seminar was that I developed a network of friends and peers that I have relied on time and time again. More than 10 years later the group as a whole is still in touch with one another. Having a group of friends and peers in your area of expertise is an amazing asset. To give you just one example, since 1999 I have attended a number of conferences and at least one other person from my seminar has been there; a number of us have put together conference panels. I should add that I dedicated my third book to the Fellows in my year group.)

I would strongly recommend people consider attending a summer program be it the West Point Summer Seminar or another one while they can. These modules are often three to six weeks in length and it is difficult to take that much time if you are married or have children of a certain age. A number of different institutions sponsor them. The best known are the Summer Seminars and Summer Institutes that the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsor. (Every year the number, topics, and locations change. Go to the NEH website to see if they are sponsoring a program you would like to participate in). These types of endeavors often provide house and/or stipends for their participants.

I would also recommend that you attend a program that allows you to build on your expertise but also stretch a little. For example, if you are a historian of Victorian England attending a seminar that focuses on the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century is not going to give much, nor is attending a program on modern Latin America, but perhaps one that focuses on British Imperial history in the 19th and 20th Centuries would be right. I attended three other summer institutes: one that examined security studies and was geared more towards political science, a weekend long program that focused on teaching security studies, and a six week long NEH seminar on sport history. These all helped this diplomatic historian develop expertise in strategy—which I know teach—and military and sport history, which was very important in helping him write a book about the 1980 Olympic boycott.

Administrative Note 15

There was no posting last week because of professional and personal travel.  There will be another one this week, which will actually be a report on that travel.  But more on that in a bit.

While there was no posting to the blog last week, a number of small changes have been taking place.  I have been going through various postings, correcting silently a few typographical errors.  I have also been adding Arabic numerals to the Roman numbers in each essay title, since most people are not familiar with the expression of higher numbers in that system.

Blog LXXXV (85): A Session for All Conferences

It should be fairly obvious to most observers of the history profession that the majority of new Ph.D.s are not going to get tenure track jobs in history department, at least not at first. Realizing that the Society for Military History—the main scholarly organization in the field—held a special session at its 2011 meeting for those seeking employment outside of a traditional history department. The session was entitled “Careers for Military Historians: The Federal Government (A Discussion for Graduate Students and Others in the Job Market).” The session was held on June 10, the first day of the conference in the third time slot. The speakers included:

• Stephen A. Bourque , School of Advanced Military Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College
• Janet Valentine, Department of Military History, Command and General Staff College
• Clayton Laurie, Central Intelligence Agency
• Timothy Nenninger, National Archives and Record Administration
• Geoffrey P. Megargee, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Mike Pavkovic, U.S. Naval War College
• James Herson, U. S. Special Operations Command

A lot of people at the conference were looking for jobs. The career paths that these speakers represented were quite varied. None of them were in a traditional tenure track position in a history department, but some of them hold positions that are quite close like the teaching jobs that Bourque, Valentine and Pavkovic have at their schools. Others ranged from being historians for specific agencies and commands (Laurie and Herson), which basically require that the historian compile and preserve historically significant documents and conduct oral histories to museum work (Megargee) and archivists (Nenninger).

The session was a hit. Every chair in the room was full and there were many people lining the walls. The question and answer session went well past the scheduled end of the session and at least some panelists were sought out by eager job candidates thoughout the remainder of the conference with questions. My session at the AHA back in June had similar results.

Some of the important points that came out of this session

• look for internships, even if unpaid, if you can do it—they get your foot in the door
• many positions require security clearances
• you may not get to work on exactly what you'd like to do, but the work will be interesting, and the pay and benefits are good
• it can take a long time (up to a year, in some cases) for a hiring decision to be made
• every agency is different; read the job description carefully and learn all you can from other sources
• once you have a Federal job, it can be a lot easier to switch over laterally to one you like better

I want to urge the people reading this blog to organize other sessions like these at the annual meetings of other learned societies like the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, or the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to name just three. It is time that we beginning thinking as a profession of other forms of employment for the history Ph.D. Show this entry to historians in other sub-fields or your mentoring professors to get them thinking about how to deal with the huge surplus of historians.

Blog LXXXIV (84): A Twist at the End

Today’s blog is extremely long. The bulk of it is an article “Professor of Desperation: Bad Pay, Zero Job Security, No Benefits, Endless Commutes. Is this any way to treat PhDs Responsible for Teaching a Generation of College Students?” that originally appeared in the Sunday, July 21, 2002 issue of The Washington Post Magazine. The author is Eric L. Wee, a freelance writer who is a former reporter for the Post. My commentary appears at the end of this article:

As dreams go, Larissa Tracy's is simple. She'd get up and head to work at Georgetown University. She'd stroll to her wood-paneled office lined with her medieval literature books. Light would stream in through the windows as she'd wait to teach one of her classes later in the day. But before that she'd have time to chat with colleagues about work and teaching and life. Maybe she'd get lunch with one of them. Or maybe she'd work on an article about the lives of female saints in the Middle Ages, her specialty. In the summers, she'd travel and attend conferences. Life would be good.

She often thinks about that dream on days like this. On this chilly October morning she's merging onto Interstate 395, near her Shirlington apartment, and heading south on her daily 50-mile trek to Fredericksburg. It's 7 o'clock as her black Mazda Protege slides into the fast lane at 80 mph. She pushes hard on the accelerator and begins eating her toast. She needs to pass her first marker, the Quantico Marine Base, by 7:30—otherwise, she'll be late for her first English composition class at Mary Washington College. The clock doesn't stop ticking after that: She'll teach four classes at three different colleges today. And those are just some of the six classes she's teaching this fall term, double the normal load of a college professor. Or what used to be normal.

Tracy's itinerary today has the precision of a train schedule: English 101 at Mary Washington from 8 a.m. till 8:50 a.m. Office hours from 9 till 10 a.m. Another English class from 10 until 10:50 a.m. Back in the car by 11 a.m. Up I-95 to George Mason University. Another class from 12:30 p.m. till 1:20 p.m. Talk to students for a few minutes. Back in the car by 1:45 p.m. and race to Georgetown University. Grade papers and prepare for class while eating lunch. Class on Shakespeare and film from 3:15 p.m. to 4:05 p.m. Back in the car before the meter expires and head home. Then she grades more papers until midnight. Six hours later it all begins again.

It's not what she hoped her life would be like, but it's what she's gotten used to since finishing her PhD in medieval literature two years ago at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Since then she's become an academic nomad. Unable to find a full-time job in one place, she needs to do this if she wants to teach and pay her bills. She tells herself that it's temporary. But in the new academic job world, she's running out of time. If she doesn't find that increasingly elusive full-time job soon, she could live this transient life for the rest of her academic career.

There once was an unwritten deal. If you were smart and willing to devote up to 10 of your most productive years studying for a doctorate, certain things would likely happen. A college or university somewhere would hire you. And if you did well there, there was a full-time tenured job in your future. The money wouldn't be great, but you'd be part of an academic community. You'd do research in your field. You'd live a life of the mind.

Then the deal changed.

States started to cut their higher education budgets. Costs at all universities began to rise. And as a growing percentage of the population began attending college over the past few decades, universities changed the way they operated. Critics call it the corporatization of higher ed. Colleges prefer to call it a shift toward greater efficiency. Either way, colleges started looking for places to make budget cuts. With personnel costs consuming a huge chunk of a university's budget, administrators across the country found their money problems solved by a type of teacher few people have heard of: the adjunct professor.

Adjuncts originally were local professionals who would teach an occasional college class on a part-time basis. The journalist would teach a course on news writing, a retired judge would speak about jurisprudence. Then colleges saw them as something else: cheap labor. Many had doctorates and were willing to teach a class for as little as $1,500. Often they'd accept less. They got no health benefits, and they were hired by the term. Colleges could let them go at any time. And they taught the general education courses the full-time faculty largely dreaded. Colleges across the country, primarily in urban areas, hired them in droves. Outsourcing and higher education teaching had finally met.

At the same time, universities have been cutting back on the percentage of full-time tenure-track professors on their faculties. With each one often costing more than $1.5 million over a career, colleges began to balk. Why pay a full professor $80,000 a year with retirement and health benefits when you could hire a part-timer at a fraction of that? Many universities concluded there was no reason. In 1970, part-timers made up 22 percent of higher education teaching staffs in the United States. By 1999, they were 43 percent, as their numbers swelled to 437,000. And one recent national survey of humanities departments found that about one-third made less than $2,000 a class. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, the number of new humanities, language and literature PhD graduates flooding an already saturated market grew by more than 50 percent. The result: Too many PhDs and not enough real jobs.

A new underclass of college teachers emerged. The "freeway flyers," like Tracy, turned their cars into mobile offices. Since each college offers them only a few classes, they cobble together four, five or even nine courses a term at two, three or even five campuses. They might be classified as part-timers, but their teaching loads are very full time.

The new deal is a crapshoot. You might make it to academic nirvana, but you could end up trapped as a permanent adjunct forever fighting traffic before the next class. Still, each year new graduates like Tracy come onto the market, thinking they're the ones who'll get lucky. "I ultimately believe that I will get a job when I'm meant to," says Tracy. "If I felt that this was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life, I'd probably go crazy."

She once imagined she'd land a full-time job as soon as she graduated. Along the way, she did everything she could to improve her chances. She focused on the more marketable Anglo-Saxon rather than Irish medieval literature. She made women saints her specialty, an added bonus in a field that currently prizes all things female. She applied to 20 colleges for teaching jobs as graduation neared. They all rejected her. The next year she applied to seven more places. Seven more rejections. After a while, all the letters started to sound the same. They wrote about having to make difficult decisions. They wrote about how it wasn't a reflection on her qualifications. But, in the end, they all said no.

"I have a degree from Trinity College Dublin, and my supervisor is one of the most well-known people in my field," she says. "I'm 28. I have an article published already, and my first book is coming out this year. What more do they want from me?"

Two years ago she showed up in person at Mary Washington and started knocking on doors like a cold-call saleswoman. The approach paid off—sort of. The college hired her as an adjunct professor. Georgetown and George Mason did the same. So she hit the road.

The wheels haven't stopped spinning since. Each day she drives at least three hours. In fact, she frequently spends more time in the car than in the classroom. This past academic year she taught 11 courses, memorized 250 students' names and graded a thousand papers.

At Mary Washington, she's grateful to have her own desk in a small, shared office with no window. But after teaching there for a year and a half, she still doesn't have a clue where the campus library is. There's no time. When she's done teaching, she's off to George Mason, where more than 20 adjuncts share a communal room with a few desks. Or to Georgetown, where she squats in other people's offices, often working on the edge of a desk because she's afraid she'll disturb a faculty member's papers.

As Tracy finishes her classes and office hours at Mary Washington today, she's running behind schedule. She tears out of the parking lot at 11:20 a.m. and soon merges onto I-95. But at Quantico she sees her nightmare unfolding before her: cars at a dead stop and a backup for miles. Slowly the traffic starts inching along. It's 13 agonizing miles before she finally veers onto Route 123. She checks her watch. It's already 12:15 p.m., 15 minutes before class at George Mason. She weaves along the two-lane road as fast as she can but still arrives 15 minutes late. She parks, then runs across campus. When she arrives at her classroom door, panting, she sees half her students at the board scribbling their names before they leave. The others have already gone.

"I'm here! Sit down," she says as she tries to compose herself. Somehow she gets the remnants of her class to take their seats as she begins her lesson.

A few students linger afterward to talk about an upcoming paper. One student seeks her advice about transferring to another college. When she finally gets back on the road it's 2:30 p.m. In 45 minutes, she needs to start her next lecture at Georgetown. But the bad dream won't stop. In front of her on I-66 she sees more cars backed up bumper to bumper.

When she finally gets to Georgetown, she circles frantically for a parking spot. Maybe they waited, she thinks as she dashes to her building. Maybe they waited. She pushes out of the elevator and into the classroom. This time, the chairs are empty. On the chalkboard she sees the only message her students left her: WE WERE HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?

She picks up the eraser and clears the board, then heads out the door to get ready for another day.

The growing reliance on adjuncts, critics say, cheats the most vulnerable of students: freshmen. They're the most likely to wash out of college from a bad experience, the detractors argue. They're also the ones most likely to have a harried part-timer teaching them History 10 or English 101.

Even though there are some excellent adjuncts, people worry that the overall quality of teaching suffers. Can someone like Tracy, they ask, teach five, six or more classes a day consistently, spending hours a day in a car, and not cut corners eventually? Tracy says she hasn't, but those who've seen overworked teachers like her before say youthful diligence lasts only so long. Eventually adjuncts with such loads might start replacing essays with multiple-choice tests. Or start assigning books they haven't had time to read themselves. And then there's the dislocation and disorganization that comes from lecturing minutes after fighting traffic.

"The system is created to exploit people just like this," Richard Moser says about Tracy's situation. As a representative with the American Association of University Professors, he's focused on the plight of adjuncts. "You get some young PhD that's all eager and up to date and strong. You get to use them for a few years, and then sooner or later they'll get frustrated and angry. Then they get another fresh piece of meat to fill the slot and then use them for a few years and then they get burned out. You get rid of them, then you get another one. Is this the way to run a university?"

Many in teaching circles worry this is just the beginning. At some point, they fear, entire departments will be made up of part-timers hired by the term or by the year. The result, they say, would be the end of the traditional college faculty. Many of those same educators think that outcome ultimately may be decided by parents, who could revolt against paying $30,000 a year to have their kids taught by someone who's also toiling at the local community college. Students, meanwhile, seem largely oblivious to the difference between full- and part-timers.

"Someone had to explain what an adjunct was," says Valerie Sprague, a freshman who had Tracy for two classes at Mary Washington this year. "It's not even an issue . . . Do they get paid less?"

She wouldn't need to ask that if she'd seen a documentary called "Degrees of Shame." The film, by Barbara Wolf, came out five years ago, comparing adjuncts to migrant farm workers. There's also a book, Ghosts in the Classroom, that compiled essays from adjuncts with titles like "Adjunct Apartheid," "Adjuncts Are Not People" and "Adjunct Misery."

Despite all their angst, adjuncts are notoriously fearful about speaking out. They're afraid that one wrong word, in or out of the classroom, will mean that they won't be hired back. And they know they're particularly vulnerable when it comes to student evaluations. If they receive too many low marks, they'll be gone. It's a frequent adjunct dilemma: Be an easier grader and likely get better reviews, or stick to your standards and risk not teaching at that college again.

It's not all bad news for adjuncts, however. John Hammang of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which represents 435 institutions and systems, points out that many are happy with their part-time status. They have families and can't work full time. Or they're retired or have full-time jobs elsewhere and are uninterested in tenure. Adjuncts, he says, can improve the educational experience for students if used in the right way. They can bring real-world expertise into the classroom that's hard to replicate. Colleges can also react to student curriculum demands quickly with adjunct teachers even when they aren't sure if future students will be interested.

The harsh truth, says Hammang, is that not all adjuncts are good enough to be full-time faculty. At least being an adjunct allows them to teach. A number of college administrators also argue that this is the trade-off in the era of mass higher education. If you want to keep tuition down so more people can afford it and not increase public spending, you need adjuncts.

Take the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where 34 percent of the staff is adjuncts. The enrollment in computer technology-related courses has mushroomed by 60 percent in the past few years. The university can't find enough new full-time teachers to keep pace with the growth. Even if it could, it couldn't afford to hire them all. Adjuncts fill the gaps. Part-timers also allow the school to react on short notice to changing enrollment. This fall UMBC needs teachers for 40 additional classes. The administrators don't have time to do a nationwide search, so they'll turn to adjuncts. The alternatives, according to Provost Arthur Johnson: Raise tuition or cap enrollment. He likes neither choice. He points out that UMBC produces a large portion of the information technology graduates that Maryland's high-tech industry needs. "We're fulfilling an important economic role here," he says. Adjuncts make that happen.

The quality of education, Johnson argues, doesn't suffer. If anything, he says, students benefit from adjuncts who bring cutting-edge experience into the classroom in fields like computer science. And the salary, ranging from $2,000 to $5,000 a course, is fair, he says. Remember, he says, adjuncts don't have to advise students or do research. They make less, but they also do less. Their pay is determined by the open market, he says, as with most other jobs. "No one is forcing anyone to be an adjunct."

Still, Hammang's organization, which includes UMBC, thinks many of its members are overly reliant on adjuncts as states continue to tighten budgets. The late 1990s was a "missed opportunity," says Hammang. That's when colleges could have afforded to cut back on their adjunct dependency. He thinks there'll be another chance in a few years. The question is how much desire there will be to change.

Many adjuncts have decided they don't want to wait to find out. In the last few years, adjunct unionization movements have sprouted up around the country, and they're getting results. California has been one of the leaders, setting aside $57 million last year to increase part-time salaries at community colleges and an additional $7.1 million to pay adjuncts for office hours. Similarly, the state of Washington allocated an extra $17.5 million recently to raise adjunct pay at two-year colleges. More battles are raging from Pennsylvania and New York to Illinois and Wisconsin in both public and private colleges. This momentum hasn't hit the Washington area, but that could change soon. Look inside this fifth-floor conference room at UMBC, where six professors have gathered on this Monday afternoon. Some are adjuncts. Others have one-year renewable contracts. All are unhappy.

"The very fact that we are here means that we mean business," labor union organizer Scot Hamilton says to the group. "It's ironic. Universities are supposed to be the bastions of freedom, but when you look behind the scenes, they're very exploitative."

His colleague Cathleen McCann tells those assembled they can't rely on the university to treat them fairly. Only collective bargaining will do that. She's told faculty on six other Maryland campuses the same thing. As the lead organizer for the American Federation of Teachers in Maryland, McCann is scrambling to organize faculty members at the state's public four-year college campuses, where 38 percent of the faculty, systemwide, is part time.

By next year, she hopes, legislation will pass to force the system to bargain. If that happens, McCann could be sitting down with administrators by next summer to demand higher pay, longer contracts and benefits for all adjuncts.

Some places are changing on their own. The president of American University, where a quarter of the faculty is part time, last fall declared that the university will significantly cut back its reliance on adjuncts. The remaining part-timers will teach more, make more and have more responsibilities.

But some in academia, like Jonathan Loesberg, until recently chair of AU's literature department, think the use of adjuncts needs to stop altogether.

"I'm authorized to pay an adjunct here to teach a course something like around $2,000," says Loesberg. "That seems to me on the face of it exploitative. If such a person taught the standard full load at AU, which would be five courses, they would be making $10,000 a year without health benefits, without any type of retirement benefit, with no benefits at all—I feel terrible about it. But these are crocodile tears. I feel terrible about it, then I offer them the money. And yet the people are always happy to get the jobs because their alternative is not getting anything."

Tracy wants one of those adjunct jobs this fall. She sent an application letter to his department and received a terse e-mail reply saying someone would contact her later. She hasn't heard anything back. She's thought about showing up at his office and lobbying for the course in person—looming bills have made her bold. First, there's the $46,000 in student loans from graduate school. Then, there's the $10,000 in credit card debt. The only way she can make ends meet is by teaching four to six courses a term, with pay ranging from $2,385 a class at George Mason to the relatively lavish $4,695 a course at Georgetown. But the biggest financial crunch comes during the summer, when the teaching dries up.

Last summer Tracy didn't have any classes to teach, so she applied to 15 temporary agencies. After a month of waiting, only one found her regular work at $12 to $15 an hour doing proofreading. But at least that was better than the endless word-processing tests that the secretarial agencies had her do. "I have a PhD. I can't believe I'm doing this!" she would think. Then she'd put her head down and start typing.

She also tries not to think about her car breaking down, even though it has more than 100,000 miles on it. But one day in January she couldn't ignore the orange "check engine" light on her dashboard any longer. After a morning class, she pulled into a small repair shop in a desolate part of Fredericksburg. Half an hour later, a chatty mechanic explained that her catalytic converter was dead. That—plus a new battery and an oil change—well, that'll cost her $768. She grimaced, leaned an elbow on the counter and cradled her face in her hands as she tried to figure out how to pay for it. Her credit card was maxed out.

"That's it. Prostitution. Adjunct turned prostitute to pay for car repairs," she moaned to no one in particular.

Patrick O'Malley finished his PhD at Harvard a year before Tracy. Both started teaching in Georgetown's English department two years ago. The difference: O'Malley is a tenure-track assistant professor.

On this day when Tracy hustles between Fredericksburg and Fairfax, he sits in his office. Light is streaming in through a window. He looks relaxed with no classes to teach this term. He's on a full-paid leave from the university to work on his first book, which should help him gain tenure when the time comes. Whereas Tracy worked on her own book between jaunts on the freeway, Patrick spends his days in Massachusetts studying at Harvard's libraries. Even when he is teaching, his load is much lighter. When Tracy had six classes, he had three. Last year, he taught a reduced load of two classes a term so he could adjust to Washington and to his new university.

He walks from the Dupont Circle apartment he owns and takes a shuttle to campus, where he stays all day. While Tracy is scurrying between campuses, he's rapidly becoming an integral part of Georgetown's. He has time to go out to lunch with professors who can help him with his career later. He goes to faculty parties that Tracy rarely attends. The English department is filled mostly with strangers to Tracy; to O'Malley, they're friends and colleagues.

O'Malley knows about adjuncts like Tracy. He knows about the lives they lead and knows he couldn't do it. "It would be too exhausting."

Talk to veteran adjuncts about Tracy and they tell you they were once like her. They, too, thought being an adjunct was just a way station en route to their real lives. But then the years passed and at some point they began to realize they were stuck. They'd been tainted by the adjunct label and were never going to get full-time jobs.

"You're used goods now and you are going to have to face it," a colleague told one adjunct after he'd been teaching for five years.

Those who hire full-time faculty say that's not far from the truth. When they get 375 applicants for a single job, they need some way to weed people out. If someone's been an adjunct for a while, a search committee starts wondering what's wrong with them. It may not be fair, but it's how things work.

After a while, longtime adjuncts begin to resign themselves to their fate. Year after year, they teach out of cardboard boxes. They often give up on doing original research. Mostly they have time only to drive and teach. And they don't cross the invisible line separating adjuncts from full-time members. It's a line that makes one adjunct of 15 years, a winner of several teaching awards, wait till everyone else has eaten when there's food laid out for a department event. He sneaks in later to eat what's left.

On an early January morning, the sun is rising as Tracy tailgates a silver pickup in the fast lane. It's the first day of the spring semester, and she'll lead two classes today at Mary Washington. Then this afternoon she'll go to Georgetown, where she'll tell her class she's an adjunct professor, "which means I'm pond scum."

But at this very moment as she cruises down I-95, she's thinking about the lletter she got just yesterday from the University of California at San Diego. It's the sixth rejection she's gotten in this round. She still hopes one of five more applications, to Bucknell, Duke, Fordham, Spelman or Toronto, will come through. But she has more immediate worries. She doesn't know if she'll have any classes to teach this summer. That's still weighing on her mind that afternoon as she sits at the Tombs, a bar in Georgetown. "Maybe I could work here this summer?" she says to the bartender. He nods, not sure if she's joking.

She makes another push. "So if I need a job for this summer, can I hit you up?"

As she eats, she thinks about what it would be like being a professor and serving burgers and beer to students. She decides she could handle that. At least it's a job.

"I've waited tables before in Dublin," she says. "I'm not above working in a bar."

The last application responses eventually trickle in. By March they've all told her no. She tries to stay positive, but she can't help but wonder sometimes if maybe, just maybe, she's not good enough to make the cut. It's been nearly two years since she graduated, and 38 places have said they don't want her.

"It's frustrating because I would have thought at this point in my career, I would have at least gotten an interview."

Over the next month, a new hope arises. George Mason has a one-year position open in the English department. The money would be better and the course load lighter. It would be a good launching pad for a full-time job somewhere else. Once more she puts her name in, and once more she lets herself hope.

On a bright May morning, Tracy heads to her car in hurry. She weaves through the back roads toward Alexandria. Her classes are over for the summer break. Today is her first day of work in a different capacity: as a temp. She managed to get two classes to teach during this break, but she still needs clerical work like this.

She heard back about the one-year George Mason job. She didn't get it. So, when next term comes, she'll have four adjunct classes between Georgetown and George Mason. She told Mary Washington that she isn't going to work there anymore. The drive was killing her. Instead, she's going to see if she can drum up one more class in this area. And in a few months, she'll send out more resumes for more full-time jobs. Meanwhile, she's coming out with a book and another paper. Her chances of landing a real job this year, she tells herself, are better than ever. She isn't about to give up her quest anytime soon, she says. She's put too much of herself into academia to do that. "I'll keep applying. There's not much more I can do."

She pulls into a parking lot, grabs her lunch and hurries toward a marble-and-chrome office building, where she'll spend the next eight hours looking for typos and spelling mistakes. She steps inside and waits for the elevator. Sometimes there is nothing she can do but wait.

I originally included this article for three reasons. First, one of the things that I have learned since I started this blog is that the surplus of Ph.D.s is not limited to the field of history. Tracy has a Ph.D. in literature and had problems getting a job. Her situation is pretty typical. The second reason I decided to post this article is that it was published nine years ago. It shows us that this massive glut of Ph.D.s is nothing new, and since programs are overproducing every year, the glut just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The third reason is I feel it captures the desperation and frustration of being on the adjunct circuit.

Then, I got curious. What happened to Larissa Tracy in the last nine years? How much longer did she continue to adjunct? What did she do instead? A quick search on google found her and a quick exchange of e-mails resulted in a phone interview.

Turns out this story ends on a happy note. She is now teaching in a tenure track position at Longwood University in central Virginia. She published a book Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of Middle English Saints’ Lives (2003), and recently received tenure.

It was not easy getting to this place in her career, though. She continued to adjunct for another year. She made ends meet in the summer by working as a proofreader and copyeditor. Then, she received a visiting appointment at American University where she worked full-time for two years. This position was salaried, which means her income increased significantly and she had health benefits. She obtained the position at Longwood two years later.

She is not, though, a fan of “Professor of Desperation.” She feels Wee exaggerated the story. The only time she missed a class in the three years she was adjuncting was the one time mentioned in the story. She noted that it happened in September of 2001 when she encountered a rolling roadblock. It was one of those security things that happened in the D.C. area after September 11, 2001. She also added that the article made Patrick O'Malley look entitled. What Wee failed to mention was that O'Malley spent three years looking for work himself before landing his position at Georgetown, which he still holds.

When asked if the article helped or hurt her, she replied, “A little bit of both.” The people at American University recognized her name from the article when she applied for a position. In that sense, “it was very helpful.” No one on the search committee at Longwood, though, had never read it. She also adds that sometimes people think she is a troublemaker because of the feature.

That reading seems a bit unfair. She struck me in the article and more so in talking with her as someone who was dealt a bad hand and handled it well. Other readers had very different takes. Wee took part in an on-line discussion the day after it appeared in print. Go to http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/02/magazine_wee072202.htm to see an archive of the discussion and some of those reactions.

When asked if she would do it again, Tracy quickly replied: “Absolutely.” She feels she got a world class education. She was taking part in academic conferences and presenting papers as a grad student long before she would have if she were going to school in the United States. “I had an extraordinary experience in Ireland.”

She also feels she gained from her three years doing part-time work. “I felt having been an adjunct prepared me a lot better than being a TA.” She feels it made her a “better teacher and a more humble scholar” than otherwise would have been the case.

In retrospect, she feels that graduate school did not prepare her enough for the work of job hunting. You might be applying for a job in your subject of expertise, but the people on the search committee might have very little idea about the major issues in that area even if they are in the same discipline. “Be prepared to explain your field to people who don’t understand it.”

Larissa Tracy had to wait and wait and wait for full time professional employment. It is a tough thing to do, but it is something a lot more people in academia have to do these days.

Blog LXXXIII (83): Stuffing the Ballot Box

Back in Blog LX (60), I said students vote with their feet. Now some people ignore that fact at their own peril. The attitude is “I know what they need to know.” And there is a lot of truth in that statement. The problem is the students still vote with their feet. Sometimes that vote is because the instructor has a reputation as a poor teacher. At other times, it is because the course is offered at an inconvenient time. Most troubling is when the topic is important, but difficult.

You can make an argument—and it is a good one—that as a nation we have a crucial need to have more people study Arabic and several other foreign languages. The problem is they are not popular classes, even if they are important. This article “Should Class Popularity Determine Its Success?” that appeared in the January 23, 2011 issue of the Albuquerque Journal raises some real questions about important classes that fail to garner strong enrollments. The article focuses on language instruction at the University of New Mexico, but it raises important issues that historians need to consider. The reporter was James Monteleone, a staff writer for the Journal. At the end of the article, I offer some observations on what you can do to stuff the ballot box:

You won't hear many sitting around the University of New Mexico's Student Union Building chatting in Chinese. Or Arabic, or Russian, or Greek, for that matter.

That's because few students are studying them.

Although each language is taught at UNM, along with eight others, the courses are consistently among the university's lowest enrollments.

Students at UNM last year enrolled in more than 631,000 credit hours, excluding health sciences courses.

Popular subjects, such as English, mathematics, psychology and communications/journalism, each attracted more than 36,000 student credit hours for the 2009-10 academic year. At an average of three credit hours per course, those departments each hosted at least 12,000 students.

While some of those courses' popularity is because the departments teach classes required by a variety of majors, UNM's technical fields have also drawn high enrollments as students increasingly pursue high-tech careers.

However, 18 UNM programs enrolled fewer than 1,250 credit hours last year, according to university data compiled by the Journal. At that rate, a department would host no more than seven, 30-student classes each semester.

Nine of the 12 foreign languages UNM teaches are among the university's lowest enrollments. Two additional low-enrolling programs - modern languages and comparative literature - are included in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Classes in Arabic, for example, drew just 180 credit hours last year, equal to about 30 students each semester; the Greek program taught 258 credit hours, totaling fewer than 50 students each term.

Recognizing that even the least attended courses bear a fixed cost, UNM has said everything is on the table when it comes to cuts.

UNM employs 13 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department. While that total includes two professors who teach Russian, which had only 513 enrolled credit hours last year, most tenured faculty teach the more popular French and German courses.

Unless tenured faculty can be cut by UNM, cutting programs will not save significant instructional funds, said Curtis Porter, the provost's associate vice president for planning, budget and analysis.

And, so far, UNM has said tenured faculty are off limits.

Other low-enrolling language courses, like Greek and Chinese, are taught by adjuncts, who can be cut at any time but work for lower wages and limited benefits.

Struggling Languages
Although language study was once the focal point of university studies, some language courses now enroll students each year by the dozen rather than the thousands.

"Areas that have been traditional mainstays of education, going back to the original (university) foundation in languages, it was fundamental to the way we thought about education for hundreds of years," said Wynn Goering, a vice provost. "As those enrollments fall off, those are where the really hard choices come now."

It is particularly difficult to measure the success of languages based on enrollment, said Natasha Kolchevska, chair of the foreign language and literatures department. Classes must be smaller than many college courses to ensure students can be part of a dialogue with their teacher.

She believes studying language is a critical piece of a college education and cutting that curricula because too few students enroll defeats the purpose of an academic institution.

"It is part of being an educated person, to have some languages and cultural skills or knowledge that goes beyond your own little corner of the world," she said.

Critics, however, question whether it's necessary to offer a dozen languages when most draw few students. While courses in Spanish, French and German report strong enrollments, Arabic, Navajo, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Russian, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese don't.

Among those are languages deemed more difficult to learn for English speakers, such as Arabic and Chinese, meaning the dropout rate is high, Kolchevska said.

UNM is the only university in the state that offers more than one semester in most of the low-enrolling languages courses, and the diverse offering is critical to UNM's identity as a state flagship university, she said.

For most of its foreign languages, UNM offers at least five semesters of instruction.

"I would certainly want to say that it makes sense for us to be investing money in things like Arabic, given the importance of Arabic today. ... I just think any good university ought to be teaching Arabic, and probably more students ought to be taking it," said Richard Wood, president of the Faculty Senate. "I'd say the same thing about other languages and some cultural studies programs."

Also, some of the offerings support academic goals, while others are necessary for UNM's long-term development, Goering said.

For example, Portuguese is critical to the goal of emphasizing Latin American studies, he said.

Given New Mexico's connection with the Navajo Nation, offering that language is important, despite the fact Navajo courses have fewer than 525 credit hour enrollments, he said.

"Shouldn't somebody be teaching this critical heritage language for our state? We keep coming back to, 'Yes. We should,' " Goering said.

For now, the University of New Mexico is committed to teaching these classes. Good for them, but that commitment might not be there at another university where you are teaching—so what do you do?

My answer stuff: the ballot box. There are ways to make sure students take your classes. This approach is something that can be really helpful if you have no reputation on campus; perhaps it is your first or second semester teaching. It can also be useful if you do not have a great reputation. Student recommendations and gossip only goes so far.

What does stuffing the ballot box look like? Create flyers advertising your class and put them on the trees, bulletin boards and kiosks. I created about half a dozen for a class I was teaching on World War II and plastered them all over campus. These flyers had images of the book covers, and had provocative questions like: “Pearl Harbor: What were the Japanese Thinking?” At the University of Texas at Austin, the history department had a systematic approach. There was a bulletin board in one of the main hallways where professors put short descriptions of their courses. Of course, that was before the internet, today the department has a section of their web page with these descriptions. Here is one for a class on the Civil War:

OVERVIEW. This course investigates the political, military, constitutional, diplomatic, and social aspects the American Civil War and its aftermath. It seeks to provide students with an understanding of the background and purposes of the war, the strengths and strategies of the combatants, and the reasons why the war took the course that it did. The destruction of slavery is a central focus of the course. The last third of the course takes up the history of Reconstruction, concentrating on how the various plans of the victors affected and were affected by the lives and aspirations of the vanquished and the freed slaves.

EXAMINATIONS AND GRADING: In addition to the final examination (which will be comprehensive) on Friday, May 14, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m., there will be two midterm exams--on Monday, March 2, and Wednesday, April 8, at the class period. Each of the midterms will count 25% of the course grade. The final examination will count 50% of the course grade. The exams will consist of short-answer and essay questions on the material from the classes and readings (including any handouts that may come your way from the instructor). Enrollment in this course constitutes a commitment on your part to be present at all of these examinations. Exams will not be given ahead of schedule, nor will any make-ups be given, for any reason.

BOOKS: The following paperbacks should be purchased:

James McPherson and James K. Hogue, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (4th edition)

Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America

Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War

Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

Albion Tourgée, A Fool's Errand: A Novel of the South during Reconstruction

 CLASSES: Each class will consist of a lecture of 50-60 minutes, followed by discussion among those students who wish to stay. You may record the classes if you wish, but no laptop computers may be used or open during the lecture.

Another thing to do is to pitch your classes to your existing students. That was a popular approach at the University of Southern Mississippi, where everyone in the department used the same textbook for the two courses on world history. The pitch was also quite simple: you need to take both courses and we use the same book for both, so take the second half next semester and get more bang for your buck. Another tactic, is to make yourself available to student groups that have a like interest. For example, if you are going to teach a class on Japanese history, you might want to visit one of the weekly meetings of Anime Club (Japanese-style animated films) and see if you can give a five minute talk, or even incorporate some anime into your class.

Blog LXXXII (82): Adjusting

I found this article in the April 19, 2010 issue of Maclean's magazine.   It is an interesting piece on some of the adjustments academics need to make if they are going to go out into the non-academic world.  Actually, I think it might be a good process even for some people going into academia.  The article is entitled: "You're an Elephant. On a Job Hunt: Improv Exercises Help Ph.D. Students Learn to be 'Less Cerebral.'"  The author of the article is Alexandra Shimo:

It's difficult to know exactly what Lisa Byers, 36, does wrong in her job interviews. Perhaps she's just not what potential employers were looking for, but it could also be that sometimes she forgets to breathe or she speeds through her answers when she's nervous. "I've not gotten a lot of jobs, so I must have been doing something not so well."

That's why, on a recent drizzly evening in Hamilton, Byers, a Ph.D. student in sociology at McMaster University, finds herself pretending to be an elephant. She's also swearing like a trooper, and vibrating her arms like a pneumatic drill. The exercises were designed to help people like Byers learn how to be "less cerebral" under pressure.

The brainchild of Allison Sekuler, dean of graduate studies at McMaster University and a professor in the department of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour, the improvisation program paired about 45 students (graduate and post-doc) with actors working out of Hamilton's Theatre Aquarius. The course is one of a series of programs the university introduced this year to prepare students for life outside the ivory towers. Peter Self, assistant dean for graduate student life and research training, helped organize the improvisation workshop. "People often say, 'Well, now you've got to enter the real world,'" he explains. "And how do you do that? We're attempting to help them with that transition."

Learning how to cope outside of academia has become particularly pressing as cash-strapped universities have sharply curtailed hiring new professors in the last few years. For example, the University of Calgary and the University of Waterloo are only hiring in "mission-critical areas." Some scholarship money is down this year, as many funds are linked to the stock market, so there is greater need to find outside work, says Sekuler. Universities have seen their budgets fall with smaller endowments, explains Roslyn Kunin, a Vancouver-based economist and job market analyst. "The tenure-track positions just aren't there and so there's a greater urgency to consider the private sector or part-time work."

Competition is fierce, and graduate students can be unaware of the demands of the business world, says Self. After years of not having to deal with the outside world, social skills may have suffered. Consider Alison Bonny-man, a 48-year-old mother of three currently doing her master's at McMaster in rehabilitation science. Since starting her degree, she's become a "social recluse," she says. The improv class taught her the importance of eye contact, which she usually tries to avoid. "You get intense, and trapped in your own world."

Eugenie Roudaia, 26, in the third year of a Ph.D. program in psychology, neuroscience and behaviour, believes improvisation takes people out of their comfort zone and teaches them how to think on their feet. Or to think a lot less. Several times, the improv instructors warned the students not to analyze, just "do," because over-thinking was constricting their movements. And it was true that some students had a unique gift for making any action, whether batting a ball or digging a hole, look like they were focusing a microscope in the lab. Others would pause mid-movement, as if they'd had a sudden change of heart ("what am I doing here?"), and their arms would go from enacting something with gusto to falling limp by their sides. "It might not look difficult to sing a rhyming song in front of 200 people," Sekuler says, before the Maclean's interviewer interrupts to say that it certainly does. Still, the performances can be entertaining. "It can be like watching a train wreck," Sekuler explains. "You never know when it's going to go off the rails."