Moving Across Country

My absence for the blogosphere has ended. Happily.  As of August 1, I started a new position at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as Director of a new PhD program in public health sciences. I'll write more about starting a new job in my next post. This week, I want to reflect on what it means to move across the country.

I had lived in Chicago for 16 years. The longest I had ever lived anywhere. Illinois was the 5th state I had lived in, after Texas, Oregon, Washington, and California. I had a home and a house, and felt settled and, in some ways, living on cruise control. Accepting a new position meant selling my house and buying a new house.  Going through each of those events felt nerve racking for a day or two.  Once I had a new address, the move began in earnest. 

Physically packing and unpacking, making the change of address on innumerable websties, waiting in lines to get new forms and licenses, all heightened my awareness of the federalism that is the United States. Federalism rarely surfaces in our daily lives. I hold a passport from the USA, not from the state I live in. Federalism surfaces in ways  that may be too obvious to actually notice. Consider who is listed on the ballots we mark; local, state and federal candidates.

When I give talks to international audiences, as I did in Italy last year and Ireland last month, I compare the United States to the European Union. Until you have live in more than one state, the comparison may seem peculiar. The reality is that federalism is alive and quite healthy in the United States. Witness the licensure laws. Each state governs my practice as a registered nurse. Yes, there is a national examination, but you are licensed  by the state, not the federal government. Each state has its own driving laws and collects fees for being licensed in that state. Each state dictates drinking age and selling of liquor.  Each state has its separate retirement system for its state employees, which includes me. The national retirement system, Social Security, barely provides income "security."

Federalism has deep, obvious as well as hidden public health implications.The breadth of those implications would take more than a 3 semester hour course to fully address. For me, the tension  between state and federal government, the ways that we as a nation acknowledge and deal with those tensions, and the subsequent range (some might say disparities) in availability of services and supports across this nation can serve an international model. The USA and the EU stand as exemplars as ways to achieve economies of scale while maintaining local autonomies.  Yes, it is a royal pain to get relicensed, but I'll suffer those very transitory inconveniences for the vast benefits of living in a healthy federalism.

In this light, from this perspective, what does it really mean to "move across the country?"

Exam and Questions

On my return from Italy last week, the flight from Rome was full, with physician, scientists, and vendors headed to Chicago for a very large annual radiology conference. This lead to plenty of polite chatter before and after the mid-flight naps. Coming back into the US requires going through both immigration and customs.  A two step process with less than welcoming lines, and a fair bit of confusion for the uninitiated traveler. It really makes the US look a bit unfriendly, compared to entering the EU.

I got put in a line that was not moving. Literally. I could see ahead a couple of people that the white haired immigration official was talking intently at a somewhat cowering middle aged man. From a distance he seemed to be scolding the man, took his photo, took his palm prints, and kept talking at the man. Naturally those of in this line going nowhere watched with irritation as everyone around us whizzed pass their immigration official.

Finally I got close. I could hear the lady ahead of me say that that she had been Italy as a cupcake consultant. Really, that's what I heard. My turn.

The white haired man asked where have you been?
Italy
For how long?
Two weeks.
Business of pleasure?
A little business and a lot of pleasure.
(he smiled, vaguely)
What to do you do?
I'm a professor.
What do you profess?

I burst out laughing. He grinned widely, with that "got ya" look. Then he said that teachers always explain what they teach, but professors always laugh.  I asked what was the best answer he had heard. He replied "as little as possible."  I nodded. He handed me my passport and I moved on.

But, the question dangles. What do I profess? It's one of those questions against which to measure a life and a life's work.  Like the "in this I believe" essays. So rarely do we pause and take stock of where we are and where we are headed.

Some time ago, I decided, after a considerable amount of trying on ideas, that I believe in curiosity. I like that I now have a new question to ponder, to nudge my self-awareness. 

Most people think of teachers as not working during July. So not true for me. Yes, I had a real 2 week vacation in June. So far, some surprises have emerged in July.

A junior faculty (Assistant level with only 3 years of experience) contacted me to be her mentor on a grant. A wonderful surprise. This type of being sought out not only makes the ego feel good, but it also validates my experiences and expertise. Naturally, I told her that I'd be delighted to work with her, which was immediately followed by a flurry of emails and meetings on making her topic doable within the grant budget. Being a mentor tends to be as much about giving support as it is about giving research advise. Only time will tell whether her grant gets funded. Meanwhile, I am blessed with pushing her and myself in new directions.

One of the looming dooming factors in her being able to apply for the funding is the state budget which has cuts to University support. Once again, the state support is scaled back.  It breaks my heart to see the overall economy (local and global) has been affecting higher education. When I started as a faculty, the presence of international graduate students underscored the global prestige and value of the U.S. university system. I always viewed it as a huge national asset which never seems to be counted in import/export estimations. Over my career, especially in the past 7-10 years, it feels like we as a nation have lost so much in terms of higher education.

My concern is how to regain, in an innovative replace and replenish way, what has been lost, dropped or deleted. My concern is for other junior faculty who might become discouraged or disheartened with the state of higher education and seek alternative careers. We need the bright, new thinking represented by this junior faculty. As a society, we need to be willing to re-engineer higher education in ways that will keep the U.S. at the forefront of technology and knowledge generation.

Brave New World Linked to Big Brother

Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter. These, and similar smaller options, have become endemic, ubiquitous and pervasive.

But, what is their relevance to science and to professional development?  It's a lot more than you might imagine. The obvious connection (pun intended) is the connectedness. Through these social media we can connect with students, alumni, colleagues and track our competitors.

The obvious implications of social media for science relate to their role in dissemination of information. Through social media, we can spread the virtual word. In science, this tends to be viewed as a good thing. Letting others know of our achievements and discoveries (loosely defined) ought to make the advancement of science even faster. We do science for the purpose of creating knowledge and are paid to do so.

The less obvious implications of the full range of social media and message exchange platforms relate to assessing the impact of that achievement or discovery. The use of bibliometrics, mostly through the use of journal impact factors (JIF), has become a standard for assessing whether a faculty member deserves promotion.  But, the evolution and development of measuring impact has continued. We now must contend with a future possibility of being evaluated based on the altmetrics of our work. Altmetrics takes into account not just citations, as is done for the JIF, but also the extent to which the article generates conversation and interest, and thus merges the social media with the bibliometrics. Consider that impact might include the number of tweets and re-tweets, as well as the number of Facebook likes and comments and number of times the article is downloaded or bookmarked.

Big Brother, hopefully the good and just one rather than the mean, bullying one, has arrived. As scholars, we need to take as a given that someone will be tracking not only our pebble of knowledge being dropped into the pond of knowledge, but  will also be tracking the size, number and duration of the ripples from that pebble.

Summer begins

The spring graduating students have dispersed and their MPH essays can now gather dust. I had a busy couple of months, reading and editing essays, psychologically supporting students, and a little celebrating their rite of this passage. Now, I am looking beyond tomorrow to the summer. The summer schedule has a full June and a busy July, right up to the start of school.

Just when I thought I was caught up, I realized that I have six presentations and a poster between now and mid-August. Three are for the KRISP project. One is a pre-conference presentation at ACHNE, and it is finished. The poster is for the Public Health Systems and Services Research Interest Group of  AcademyHealth. I now rarely accept doing a poster session, but I will be with good company  of co-poster presenters. I think we will have fun. Lastly, I have two presentations at Academy of Management. Whew, the beginning of school will seem like a breeze.


I have decided to balance my grumbling about this old, increasingly dirty and technologically challenged building with positive thoughts about a donor funding the building of a new SPH building.  Based on the past rates of my grumbling, we ought to find the rich, willing, generous donor in short order. We deserve much better than we have. We are open to receive and are willing to work diligently to make a new SPH building a reality before the end of this decade.  There. I said it. Now, let's make it a reality.

And the other news is that I will be writing a third edition of my textbook. Yikes more work. But, oddly, happily, I have ideas for making improvements. Which is say that I am learning and teaching.

View from Vacation

Some vacations involve less work than others. This past week I was visiting family. But, that did not negate the need to reply to students in need of reassurance, an appointment to work out an issue, or feedback on papers due  in a week. It also did not negate the need to prepare for the public health nursing training workshops that I’ll be giving this coming week. Nor did it negate the need to process manuscripts as the Editor-in-Chief.  Most of all, it did not negate the anxiety about fulfilling all of those responsibilities.  

I don’t think of myself as being “on call” but the reality is otherwise. I, like most of my faculty colleagues, seem to have taken to heart the implicit expectations of students that we are available 24-7. It’s our own fault for answering emails on both Saturday and Sunday. It’s our own fault for carrying a smart phone, reading and replying to their work related emails. I’m not sure how much of it is our conscious choice versus our natural adaptation to the insidious wiredness of today’s world.

Admittedly, most of us don’t mind and would rather stay on top of the work than let a mess build up. A proverb about prevention comes to mind.

Traveling is always a good reminder that most of the world has no or very little notion of what we do in public health. The infamous 30 second introduction explanation gets a lot refinement in a plane or the gate waiting area.  Being as this was National Public Health Week, I guess I ought to have worked harder to explain and brag. But, I didn’t. I did suggest to my niece who will be starting at UC Berkeley in a master’s program in land management that she might find kindred souls in the School of Public Health. For me it was a good reminder of how broadly the social justice foundation of public health reaches. It was also a reminder how the principles that weave together the variety of disciplines composing public health also are part of the fabric of other disciplines concerned, ultimately, with the health of the people and the planet.

Are Professors Really like Chefs?

One of the school-wide faculty governance committees that I sit on has more students attending than faculty. Student input and insights are good to have. But, this committee is the curriculum committee. The committee that reviews new courses, reviews new and revised degree program proposals, makes suggestions for improving curriculum and reviewing the evaluation of courses. Given this list of responsibilities, having so many students has always seemed out of balance to me. But, when I bring it up, no, we need student involvement. Sure, but this is a FACULTY governance committee.

At the last meeting, the last agenda item was "course evaluations."  Things got weird. The students started telling horror stories about this course and that course and how the current course evaluation forms don't permit them to describe the problems. Okay, we can fix the form. Then, the conversation turned to students wanting to know which courses are good.  They want to see each others evaluations of a course. Here, I started to get queasy. I've seen how a class of student can gang up on a professor and turn the evaluations really sour. This experience and possibility wasn't holding any sway with this group of students.

Next a student said that he thought there ought to be transparency in the course evaluations. Okay. There ought to be 360 degree feedback.  I see a huge problem with this because faculty, especially tenured faculty, have no vested interest beyond the non-existent cost of living raise and ego to do good teaching.  This went over the heads of the students. He went on to say that if he is going to a resturant he wants to see how others have rated the chef and the service.

What?! Comparing faculty teaching and choosing classes to choosing a restaurant!  Needless to say, I went ballistic.These millennial students have such a profoundly different world view. From his point of view, he was buying my service. Never mind that the portion of my salary that actually comes from tuition is probably somewhere between 0% and 10%. I don't call that buying my service. 

It's a hard sell. They want to be entertained. I suspect they also want to feel like they are getting their money's worth. But, how can they really know if that's the case? What criteria do they have as a guide? They have grown up relying on the opinions of others as a frame of reference for their own assessments. How can they have enough knowledge of a topic before and while taking a course to know if they are receiving the right information? They can't; they can only know that the professor is funny and smart and makes them feel good about their work.

I dread the continuation of this agenda item. I dread the distance between the generations. I dread the gap in understanding the context of teaching and of learning.  I dread the lack of a one best path to make us all happy. I dread the continuation of this agenda item.

State and University

Increasingly, the "state" and the "university" feel like a nightmare mix of oil and water.  Perhaps because I'm currently working at a university in a state with a $13 BILLION deficit and previous governors in prison, I have gotten cynical. On the other hand, there's the evidence....

The union that represents the civil servant employees of the state has begun to scrutinize every position to determine whether the position is a civil servant job. Sounds good and well. But, because of that huge budget deficit, nearly all employees who have been hired in the past 10 years are funded by grant dollars, not state dollars. The job descriptions are based on the needs of the grant. Faculty who would have been hiring staff to fill these grant funded positions are now being required to rewrite the job description to fit existing civil servant jobs. Okay. But, that means any, ANY, civil servant can apply for the job. That wouldn't be too bad, but these are employees who never get fired, just move from position to position. The attitude of entitlement is antithetical to the attitude of grant investigators who want THE best, not whoever has stayed in the system. Faculty with grants are now having to spend their valuable time crafting and recrafting job descriptions. This is not even remotely why I got a PhD nor why I joined up to be faculty. But, dealing with this type of issue is now part of my reality.

As if that were not enough, the state legislature passed a law that went into effect January 1. The law is meant to address the "pay to play" problem. For those of you not in Illinois, this refers to the bribery system that developed and refers to paying favors to get contracts to do work for the state. The University never-repeat, never-had this problem. Yet, the University must now abide by the law that requires us to report every time we talk to some one about buying something. Yes, just talk and get a quote. If we need lab equipment and get a quote, there will be paperwork. If we call in advance to find out how much a lunch function will cost, that must be reported.  As faculty, we must now comply with this state law. The truly laughable part is that the offices that will be managing all of these reports doesn't know the basic details  for actual implementation nor is the reporting system functional. As all of this was discussed at the all faculty meeting today, there was more than a little agitated head shaking and groaning. Again, I did not get a PhD so that I could justify every interaction needed to make a smart purchase for my grant.

These problems are symptoms. The world in which the University has functioned for centuries seems to no longer value the uniqueness of the University. Higher education and the organizations that provide it are just part of the Illinois state bureaucracy.  I feel like it's time for either a funeral or separation from the state. I wish I had better news for this week's post. I'm only sharing and revealing the realities for which one can not ever be prepared.

Productivity comes to Academe

I don't normally think about my work in terms of productivity. I don't make widgets, gadgets or anything else. Productivity of faculty has historically been counted in the form of number of publications, number of grants submissions, and number of advisees. But, a recent Wall Street Journal article has pulled back the lid on Pandora's box.

As the operating budgets of universities have grown much tighter and tuition has risen, a focus on productivity of faculty (as well as of their colleges and universities) is a natural consequence. Natural, but not. Productivity is implicitly, as well as explicitly, linked to profit margins, organizational viability, and supply/demand curves. None of these concepts applies naturally, organically, or ideologically to the provision of higher education.  The capitalist mind-set now exists globally (with the exception of a few notable hold-outs). That mindset has seeped into the corridors and mortar of our universities. What was once viewed a a public good, namely college education, has been turned into a commonplace, sometimes stock traded commodity.

I don't know if this change will turn out be good or not for society as a whole. I only know that it is the current reality to which faculty are having a challenging time adjusting.  If we accept this change as de facto, then we would be wise to proactively say "here's the productivity metrics which we know to distinguish the good from the bad..." For my part, the metrics mentioned in the WSJ article are the predictable metrics, some of which reflect a naive grasp of the realities of our work. (Hence this blog.)

One stand I would take, as I feel are worth some advocacy effort, is to have metrics that take into account all or a combination of the following: (a) not all students will succeed, so allow at least a x% product failure rate; (b) the production of grants, manuscripts and graduating students does not occur on a regularly scheduled basis, so allow for smoothing over time of the rates (at least a 2 year rolling average); and (c) monetize the passion and enthusiasm for knowledge creation generated among peers and students, as a minor adjustment for the less than glamorous monetary rewards, as well as a necessary prerequisite to innovation.

To this last point, I refer the readers to the new report from the National Academy of Sciences,

"Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5." I doubt, but could be wrong, that a focus on productivity will not get this country out of the Category 5 storm they describe.

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Blog Impetus

Blogs have an impetus for being. The impetus for this blog was a conversation during the doctoral seminar yesterday morning. The seminar is designed for PhD students as a means for them to get to know each other, aka create cohort cohesion, and foster professional development. We hold class in the lounge area on the 6th floor of the School of Public Health, mostly because I did not feel like having a classroom atmosphere and knew that with a small number of students a casual environment would be a good fit with the intent of the course.

The 8 women, first and second year PhD students in Community Health Sciences, had lots of questions about "academic life". I found myself acknowledging that the general public, or even my family, does not have an accurate idea of what professors do, their full set of activities. Then, I found myself saying that it's our fault for not explaining our job. Maybe a blog would help. Their faces lit up and gave a resounding "yes, you ought to do that." It's one of those ideas that sounds good as it travels across the air, but gains weight as it passes through the gray matter.

As I drove home on the slow freeway, 7 hours after class let out, I resolved to blog. Not as an act of arrogance that my academic life is special, but as a humble act to rectify the gap we had identified hours ago.

For those who don't know me, there's my Community of Science profile with all the academic credentials and products. For a peak at the slightly more personal, I'm on Facebook, but be sure to mention that you are a blog follower in your friend request. But neither of those virtual presentations of self convey why I work 50 hours a week or what I do during those 50 hours. For that information, I blog.