Surviving the Workday

If you’re anywhere near Academia, you’ve probably seen a shift away from creating tenure-track positions toward hiring tons and tons of part-time faculty as adjuncts. This is a parallel trend to what goes on in my businesses (and we do know that universities are increasing using a corporate model for management) of hiring “temporary workers” who essentially aren’t that temporary. They could be employed in the same position or even promoted within the company for years.

Looking the other way? Accreditation practices and part-time faculty explores the issue of accrediting institutions ignoring the adjunct phenomenon when they could essentially step up, condemn the practice, and flex a little muscle as most universities do answer in some fashion to accrediting institutions:

As used by some college and university administrations today, the term “part-time faculty” is a misnomer. A large percentage of those designated part-time are actually full-time faculty with part-time pay and few or no benefits. In its glossary definitions of “faculty,” however, the Western senior commission adds an instructive caveat: “Part-time or adjunct faculty [are those] whose major responsibility is not related to the institution in question. These faculty are customarily assigned one or two classes with class-related responsibilities only.” The definition used by the Northwest commission is nearly as limiting and also includes the phrase “one or two classes.”⁵ While we have no evidence that accreditors tally the number of courses taught by individual adjuncts, institutions that regularly employ part-time faculty to teach three or more courses clearly practice outside accepted standards for the Western senior and Northwest commissions.

My neighbor is considered part-time faculty at a local college. She teaches six classes plus labs. That pretty much sums up that part-time misnomer. 

Via Inside Higher Ed

Why your rates are painfully lower than they should be examines why many of us never achieve the hourly rate that we quote a client for a project. Some of the reasons include one of my favorites: endless email contact. I really like email, but every freelancer I know has had someone who has abused email by sending dozens of inquiries and details a day. All of that adds a processing time per email, and has to be included in the rate. More on effective rates here.

Yesterday I attended the Orange County Family Pet Expo by myself, which I consider a friendship failure on all counts, though friends were out of town for Passover and baby showers and some had taxes and some had no excuse at all. Ahem. In any case, my business partner and I are investigating starting a business to sell healthy pet gift baskets, and this is the largest consumer pet fair in the country, so it seemed important to attend.

Highlights:

• It was 93 degrees outside, and finding shade was a competitive sport. I wished I had a hat.
• While on the phone with my business partner and sitting under a tree in the rare shade, a man let his monitor lizard attempt to mount my arm. I did not scream, and this was only because I thought the lizard was fake because it was so big. It was not fake. After a long moment of staring at the lizard, I slowly stood up and backed away.
• Gibson, the world’s largest great dane, comes up past my chest. I’m 5′10”.
• I generally think I’m into my dog, but oh my there were people there wearing dog glitterati t-shirts, dog jewelry, selling dog harem beds, dog lounge chairs, and all sorts of cubic zirconia collars. Also, there were dogs with belted trousers on. That’s really enough to make me stop, stare, and wonder if I’m having a heat-induced delusion.
• There were no products marketed as “green” or “planet-healthy” or “organic” and hardly any marketed as “healthy,” which raises some interesting questions: Are people uninterested in healthy products for pets? Is this really a mostly unidentified niche? Was it too expensive for the smaller green vendors we know to attend? Do we need to focus more on eco-types of trade fairs rather than pet expos? Are healthy products simply too expensive in this economic climate? There were also no gift baskets. Hmm. We know that these products do exist, so where were they?
• There were hardly any free samples. Talk about a sign of the economy. Samples cost $.50 or more.
• No one was buying anything. There were tons and tons of people, but as I retreated to my car, I noticed that no one in the parking lot seemed to have bought anything.

Here’s a Canadian perspective on whether to tell your employer when you’re sick, and how much to reveal: Coping in the workplace with a serious illness. We discussed this issue a few months ago with Disclosing an illness in the workplace in the New York Times. As I recall, we decided it was a choice that really depended on how sick you were and your relationship with your boss and coworkers. General advice didn’t seem particularly helpful.

My favorite quote from the Canadian article is from the labour law attorney:

“Also, workers need to demonstrate they are anxious to work as much as they possibly can,” says VanBuskirk.

“And they should facilitate any accommodations to show that this isn’t just an attempt to stay home.”

 Sigh. Bien sur. 

Hafidha is going to be contributing posts to Surviving the Workday as her time and energy allow. Yay!

Why do community service? And what is community service?

I’ve generally thought that we perform community service for the general (or specific) betterment of one of the communities in which we live (local, state, country, world). And community service seems to me to be just about any practice that does this. It’s me volunteering to lead naturalist tours for public school kids at a local county park, but it’s also picking up trash in the vacant lot across the street. It doesn’t necessarily need to be formal, but it does benefit someone and something greater than myself. Community service acknowledges that I receive services from the community, and that I can give back in some fashion. It is broadly reciprocal.

 Noah Zatz has an interesting column in the Washington Post, A War on Community Service, on how the Department of Health and Human Services has changed the “community service” requirement for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), established under the Clinton administration, to define “community service” as “job-training.”

Traditional forms of community service — including many of those that are most beneficial to people in need — don’t count anymore, unless they are “designed to improve the employability” of those performing the services. But enhancing our own job skills is not the primary purpose of ladling soup for the hungry, beautifying our public lands, consoling the sick, bringing joy to the elderly and mentoring the young. Serving others is.

The administration’s interpretation not only mocks the spirit of public service but also mangles the law. The statute has other provisions for training and work experience. The regulations render the separate inclusion of “community service” superfluous.

Zatz explores further how the Bush administration then went on to shrink the definition of community service further to eliminate caregiving work (that is often done by women) and then completing the demolishment of the ethics of community service, which is essentially one of reciprocity, leaving every man for himself.  

Scars in the Classroom is a fascinating article about the experiences of college-level writing instructors with the dramatic material that students often present. I’ve read the article three times, and haven’t quite found the focus (it could be me), though it addresses all sorts of interesting issues, such as the prevalence of “cutting” in student communities, how instructors deal with extremely personal writing that often hints or is explicit about abuse, the use of student essays (with permission) in academic scholarship by professors, and even truthfulnes of narratives created from trauma.

Here’s a thought-provoking discussion between two instructors, Hood and Berman, about the authenticity of the writing created around trauma:

 More broadly, Hood also wonders about the veracity of coherent narratives created out of trauma. Frequently, she says, such written narratives will “be very detailed, be able to tell everything. There are no gaps in the story, there’s no collapsing of history, there’s no remaking of history, remaking a chronology, for instance, which happens frequently in the telling of a traumatic event. There are all sorts of things that characterize the telling of a traumatic event that don’t occur in writing,” Hood says.

“I can tell a perfectly coherent lie about a traumatic event. I’m not sure I can tell a perfectly coherent traumatic narrative about my own trauma.”

Berman writes that he doesn’t question the accuracy of student writing. And when students do acknowledge they weren’t entirely truthful, he writes, “This usually happens not because they wish to portray themselves as victims of trauma but because they are not yet ready to acknowledge the full extent of the trauma they experienced.”

Via Inside Higher Ed

And Ms. Kitty has found your fun for the day in Office Hijinks, a collection of office-related material on Miss Cellania. I particularly like the Best Out of Office Reply:

1. I am currently out of the office at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Please be prepared for my mood.

Indeed.

The Presbyterian Church has an official position on sweatshops, and they’re going sweat-free with their own group Sweat-Free Ts:

Sweat-Free Ts is inspired by our biblical faith and call to discipleship—as well as growing consumer demand within the modern-day garment industry for responsibly sourced products. “Clean clothes” and anti-sweatshop campaigns have also helped shape our work. Advocates in many places are encouraging manufacturers to produce goods in ways that respect the dignity, safety and rights of workers. There are many ways concerned Presbyterians can support our sisters and brothers in Christ who work hard on the production end of the garment chain.

Resources

Sweat-free Ts

Shop with a Conscience Consumer Guide

New American Dream’s Sweatshop Free Clothing

Via Church Marketing Sucks

Here’s an interesting fact or two: In South Dakota, 90% of the men 55-64 work while in West Virginia, only 40% of the men 55-64 work (assuming we’re defining “work” as the paid stuff you do, often outside the home).

Why would this be?

It seems that choosing to work often has to do with replacement rate, strength of the labor market, and amount of retirement benefits v. pre-retirement income. It’s not quite as simple as just needing the money.

Via the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College

When the DC Metro put together a commercial involving a bobblehead Pope riding the Green Line and advising people to ride the train during the papal visit next week, a lot of people thought it was funny, and a great plug.

The Catholic Church? Not so much. Not only was the BobblePope unauthorized merchandize, but he was wearing the wrong color skull cap and cape. It was, in their words, a “misdressed Pope.” The Church didn’t ask them to pull it from YouTube distribution, but the Metro line pulled it anyway.

I would insert some sort of snide joke here, but frankly, I’m scared of the new Pope. And BobblePope manages to look like a cross between Satan and Jimmy Carter. I’m not messing with that.

As I recall, posting cartoons on the door of your faculty office is an important pasttime of faculty when they were granted their own office space. But as an earth science major, most of the cartoons I saw were a variety of plate tectonics jokes. Apparently in other departments, it’s a bit more contentious a practice:

The first complaints date back to 2005, and the professor, Richard Crandall, was ordered to remove the materials from his door in 2007 (he eventually complied). Items included a photo of Ronald Reagan, pictures mocking Hillary Clinton, a sign posting a “Notice of the Weekly Meeting of the White, Male, Heterosexual Faculty and Staff Association (WMHFSA),” and various cartoons about abortion, Islamic terrorism and other topics. One depicts two hooded women looking over a photo album. One says, “And that’s my youngest son, Hakim. He’ll be martyring in the fall.” The other replies, “They blow up so fast.”

The university argues that the postings contribute to a hostile environment and therefore do not fall under First Amendment protections, although such arguments have not fared well historically in the courts. No lawsuit has been filed, but in the past some professors whose cases have been publicized by FIRE have pursued legal action….

According to the article, the university says it is not the political nature of the cartoons, but the denigration of the religious beliefs of others.

It is a great day when I can write a post involving both employment law and painting with your butt. Basically, an art teacher in Virginia paints with his butt cheeks, and made a video of himself doing that in a thong, and with a Groucho Marx mask, and school officials saw it and fired him (wrongfully so, and they’ve now settled for $65,000) The larger concern here is that your workplace can often try to control your free time to some degree, or at least hold you responsible for advertising your butt painting.

But I so want to try.

Within the last couple of months, I’ve developed an elaborate fantasy in which I return to college for the sole purpose of eating. Yes, the eating in college was good. At Smith, it was on China, and customized for my vegetarian tastes (as I was friends with Chef Glenn), and at Wesleyan, the food came in an enormous cafeteria where I could graze at my leisure, including from the longest salad bar in Connecticut.

That was then. This is now. I cannot afford to go to Smith or Wesleyan in my adult life (actually, I couldn’t afford it then either). Instead I simply have this elaborate fantasy made worse by an article in the New York Times, Menus with Pho and Lobster, that implies the food at private colleges, including Wesleyan, has simply become much better as they compete for top tier students by offering pumpkin chocolate muffins and everything else under the sun. A slideshow of upscale college food here here.  

Ah, regression. And, yes, there’s room for a whole deconstruction of my middle class childhood against the upper class education and food. So tasty though just to consider the food. Students, count your blessings, and pass the pumpkin chocolate muffins.

How many times have you had to deal with a customer “service” rep only to find yourself getting the hard-sell on a host of products you don’t want? Sadly, this is not merely becoming common practice, it is now the status quo.

Look, I don’t mind a company trying to make money. If they don’t make money, they go out of business and I lose my internet, and that would seriously piss me off.

But in these days of behemoth companies, it seems that they have learned that they can take advantage of our dependence on them to the point where they ignore a customer’s needs  and instead force their reps to try to sell all sorts of worthless crap, enforcing this policy with everything from Walmart gift cards to threats and Office Space-like forms.

All of this can be very debilitating to the customer service reps as well. It is very difficult to take pride in your work when it is systematically stripped of all that is noble and just–namely, helping someone in need and making them happy.

I can’t help but think that the time is getting ripe for a large, powerful company to finally say “Screw the money. All we need is love.” I think they’d be surprised at how much more profitable they become.

I have just now learned that I possess a Secret Power. Read on from Dear Cary to see my Secret Power: 

My mother-in-law put a curse on my husband and me — I believe she couldn’t get through to me and so she attacked him. She cursed that he would never make any money in his life, that he would lose his business, lose his wife, me, and the kids, and be completely destroyed. And to seal the curse, she spat in his face twice.

I’m a very superstitious person and I truly believe that she sealed this curse on him. The reason is that they are Greek and I am not.

And to think no one told me of the power of My Greekness. God, who to spit on first? I’m really a bad spitter; I should probably practice first. Cary’s response is far more compassionate than my own.

Copy editors generally stop writers from looking dumb in print, so it should now be much more interesting to read the LA Daily Journal, which laid-off its entire copy editing staff. The whole thing. No copy editors at the paper. Good luck with that.

 If you’re feeling that you never have time for your own writing, read 4 Tips for Making Time to Write.  I think I actually do all of these steps, though I’m always working on the 80/20 principle.

1. Make writing the first thing you do.

2. Adhere to the 80/20 principle

3. Track your writing time.

4. Don’t ask for time; just take the time.

More details in the actual article, 4 Tips for Making Time to Write, worthy of a read.

Again, I abuse my blog for free market research.

I’m continuing on the journey to discover more about what people want in dog gift baskets (though they aren’t in baskets): Pet Contents Survey

I’m watching the first part of 3-part ideas for Growth, which addressing welcoming guests to church (or repelling fewer visitors). Oddly enough one of the hospitality exercises suggested is similar to one that I suggested, which is simply to visit a church you don’t know and see how you are received (they suggest pretending to be a visitor in your own church). This is something I’ve done a lot, and mostly experienced being ignored, but occasionally welcomed so heartily I become convinced that they think I’m someone else. So take a view at the video on welcoming, because I’d love to discuss it.

Part of what strikes me is how important it is to welcome the visitor in a way that she is comfortable with. For example, according to the video, if I visit this church, I first greet the minister outside, and then a volunteer table coordinator, and possibly another greeter or two, before sitting down (possibly accompanied by one of these volunteers), and then I get to introduce myself outloud to the whole church (I could provide an entire commentary on this practice, but it simply won’t die), make small talk with my seat neighbors in a formal time during the service, and then there’s coffee hour (Please no red cups). These folks are trying very hard, and believe what they’re doing is really important hospitality ministry and have experienced real growth, but I have to say that as it’s described, it would be too much for me. Jim and I’ve been welcomed this way, and it feels overbearing to us. Greet us once or twice, and we’re good; just don’t ignore us completely or try to become our new best friend. I’m not sure we’re that unusual.

Now there is a lengthy disclaimer at the beginning of the video that these are things that worked for this church, and may not work for your church. But how to reconcile the welcoming church model presented in the video, the important thinking behind it, and its success with the research that suggests that an overwhelming number of people surveyed prefer to slip in anonymously to a church the first time? Do they not know what’s good for them!? Do the survey results misrepresent their real wishes? I wonder what’s going on here. Thoughts?

Your True Calling Could Suit a Non-profit is a good introduction to the issues of shifting from a corporate job to a non-profit job. I’ve worked for three non-profit agencies, time that included a lot more work for much less money than in the corporate world, and a very convoluted decision making process compared to corporate bottom lines. Is it better or worse? It depends. I’ve found I like both in equal amounts, which is ideal for consulting, but not for full-time employment.

Here’s a Q & A that summarize some misconceptions about non-profit work:

Q. What are the biggest misconceptions about switching from the corporate world to the nonprofit world?

A. Many people are surprised to find the hours longer and stress greater than in the corporate world. Brian Olson, who left the private sector for a nonprofit in 2006, found the decision-making process to be unfocused.

“No matter how good a volunteer board is, it’s not the same as a corporate board, because everyone has a different agenda,” said Mr. Olson, who returned to the private sector a year later to be vice president for public affairs at Video Professor Inc., a company in Lakewood, Colo., that sells self-tutorial programs. “There was a purity to corporate life I missed,” he said.

There is value, he said, to “a company just getting the job done based on the needs of the marketplace.”