Internship Opportunities at Foundation for Law and International Affairs

I am happy to pass along an internship opportunity at the Foundation for Law and International Affairs (FLIA), with which I am associated. 

The Foundation for Law and International Affairs (FLIA) is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization mandated to promote academic and public discourse at the intersection of law and international affairs. The core vision of FLIA is to promote international cooperation and public dialogue through the development of new ideas and collaboration with various academic, governmental and civil actors. . . . Our mission is to facilitate international scholarly activities, conduct high quality, independent research and policy analysis, engage in public education and awareness-building programs, as well as amplify the voice of the rising generation.

The internship announcement follows.

Diversity at Penn State: Reports of the Joint Diversity Awareness Task Force--US/IL Courses Survey--Legislative Recommendations

 

 (Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)

It has been my great honor to serve as the Chair of the Penn State University Joint Diversity Awareness Task Force (JDATF). JDATF was charged this past April by our Provost and the University Faculty Senate Chair to consider a number of important diversity initiatives at Penn State (Charge (PDF); Members).

Our work over the academic year has produced four reports with recommendations for substantial changes in a number of areas.

Presented March 2016 for consideration by the PSU Faculty Senate April 2016:

1. US/IL Courses Survey--Recommendations (Legislative; and Advisory/Consultative)

2. Diversity Best Practices
3. Moving Forward Embedding Diversity Policy

Presented February 2016 and Approved by the PSU Faculty Senate March 2016

4.  Moving Forward 

Each of the next several posts will provide links and the text of the reports to be considered by the Penn State Faculty Senate on April 19.  An "after action" report will follow Senate action on the 29th--action which I hope will be positive.

This post includes the Report, US/IL Courses Survey--Legislative Recommendations, prepared by our Technical Issues Sub-Committee.

Diversity in Silence--The Joint Diversity Task Force Report at Penn State University Becomes Less Visible

Penn State University, like many other similarly situated institutions of post secondary education, has been struggling with the very hard work of moving from the embrace of flowery statements of solidarity respecting diversity to actually making it a lived reality in the environment in which students, staff, faculty and particularly administrators operate. (Statement From the Penn State University Faculty Senate Chair ).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

Among the most pro active elements of Penn State's conversations about diversity have been our students.  (Student Statement of Solidarity With Duke University Student Body).  Current efforts to bring greater focus on diversity started in January 20'13 when the students addressed the Penn State University Faculty Senate about the issue. (Diversity Awareness Task Force: Statement to the University Faculty Senate January 29, 2013).

Following that intervention a Joint Diversity Awareness Task Force was constituted including elements from the major stakeholders of the University.  Its charge included:

· Bring a diverse group of administrators, faculty and students together to work collaboratively to engage in dialogue and provide recommendations to the University Faculty Senate and Administration to enhance diversity awareness in the University Community.
· Thoroughly investigate practices that will be most effective to increase diversity understanding among the student body.
· Provide recommendations to the Faculty Senate Committee charged with reforming the general education curriculum as a whole.

The JDATF as now produced an informational Report.  It will be delivered to the Senate but in silence. The Penn State University Faculty Senate Council approved the JDATF’s Informational report and it will be included in the March 18th Senate Agenda. But it will not be presented.  It will be posted online only and that there will not be any presentation at the Senate meeting. The JDATF will not be able to present the report or stand for questions.

This response provides an excellent illustration of the approach to diversity at many institutions--engagement and oblivion.  This is all the more important because of it collateral result--Marginalization.  Even as the University devotes a tremendous amount of resources to its reconstruction of General Education, even as it focuses substantial public time to experiential learning and other important elements of a public education--the education and practice of diversity is buried and marginalized.  Consider this:

Our guiding principle in revising General Education is to enable students to acquire the skills, knowledge, and experiences for living and working in interconnected and globalized contexts, so they can contribute to making life better for others, themselves, and the larger world. (Penn State Gen Ed Matters, Vision)

Diversity plays virtually no role in the construction of either experiential learning or general education reform, unless, perhaps, one does some very deep interpretive reading.  The expectations appear simple enough--provide a formally responsive forum for meeting, produce a report well received but avoid robust interconnection to the vital life of the university, and then move on with a sense of satisfaction of having engaged with diversity.

You judge for yourselves.  For those interested, it might be possible to raise questions and issues--especiually about the ways in which diversity has been integrated as an important part of the reform of general education and the formation of premises that support experiential learning during the "New Business" segment of the Senate Meeting or elsewhere.  It might also be time for another forensic on the state of diversity in the University Faculty Senate. 

The Informational report follows:

Managing Perception and Creating Reality Through Data Management--The Battle Over the "Best" Way to Understand MOOCs

I have recently posted about the habits of lazy and perhaps bad management as an impediment to the  development of MOOCs as an important element of university activity (Bad Management and the University Administrator: Giving Up on MOOCs?) and, as well, about the way in which assessment regimes are quickly replacing rule making as a means of governing institutions like universities (and its ill effects on shared governance) (Rulemaking Through the Back Door--Using Assessment Tools to Shape Education).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

These two trends have made an appearance recently in the conceptual battles over the way in which the academy "understands" MOOCs.  Now the academic machinery has appeared to have been put in overdrive as academics begin to deploy strategically chosen premises and the data harvested in the service thereof, to support any number of ways of "definitively" understanding MOOCs.  The stakes are high.  As consensus develops around the "better" way of "understanding" MOOCs, these will be used as the foundation of policy choices by university officials (and the governmental regulators who oversee them) to make policy about the scope and direction of MOOC use within the academy. People love data--they pay less attention to the premises in the service of which it is harvested and deployed to support some conclusion or other.  Both may be altered to strategic good effect.

This is not to mock those efforts or to suggest, necessarily, bad faith, on the part of researchers,  Quite the reverse. It is their good faith that lends these efforts their power, and the willingness to avoid critical engagement--with "data". However, it does suggest both the contingency of these investigations, and the way they are necessarily embedded in the policy  debates around which they are conceived. This post notes one of those efforts,  Ho, Andrew Dean and Reich, Justin and Nesterko, Sergiy O and Seaton, Daniel Thomas and Mullaney, Tommy and Waldo, Jim and Chuang, Isaac, HarvardX and MITx: The First Year of Open Online Courses, Fall 2012-Summer 2013 (January 21, 2014). HarvardX Working Paper Series No. 1. This study is particularly interesting because it explores the effects of changing a core premise of MOOC evaluation, and determines, that changing that premise may have a substantial effect on measuring "value". It starts with an excellent analysis: Jennifer Howard, Completion Rates Aren't the Best Way to Judge MOOCs, Researchers Say, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 22, 2014.  We can only hope that these reports will contribute to a more nuanced and helpful discussion of consequences--especially about the role of MOOCs in the university and the relationship of faculty to these.

Bad Management and the University Administrator: Giving Up on MOOCs?

 (Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

American university administrators, like many of their counterparts in the business world, have begun to embrace a certain culture of managerial laziness and short termism that in the long run will likely be as detrimental to the project of maintaining the superiority of American university education as ti has begun to affect the reputation of American business.

Two characteristics especially appear to contribute to these trends. The first, managerial laziness, tends to evidence itself is the move to over exploitation of bought experts on virtually all aspects of university administration, In some cases one might suspect that administrators would hesitate to move their chairs in the offices without having paid an outside consultant first. The problem is not with consultation, necessarily, but with the way in which administrators now tend to mindlessly use consultation reports and recommendations as both a sword to manage and a a shield against personal responsibility for the consequences of following advice. In a sense this dependence on consultants is the more perverse side of risk aversion evidenced by cultures of mindless use of benchmarking to serve as a cover and excuse for doing or failing to do something without any effort to specific application to the context of the university that the administrator is paid to manage.

But more pernicious is the embrace of short term thinking within academic administration. Increasingly, programs and other managerial projects rise or fall within a very short time frame.  The judgement neither looks toward a shake out and development period, nor are hard analytics applied to determine  weaknesses and sites for improvement.  More perverse, perhaps, is that this short termism is deepened as the mad obsession with immediate cash rewards for administrative efforts becomes more prominent in programmatic decision making.  Thus, if a new program is rolled out and fails, without any tweaking or modification based on experience, to produce sizable revenues almost immediately, the program tends to be abandoned in search of the next quick fix.  That, over the long term, this may deny the university valuable income and prestige producing programs appears to make little difference.

Nowhere is this sort of emerging managerial culture more in evidence than in the rise and fall of MOOCs. I have been skeptical, myself about the way in which MOOCs have burst onto the scene--but principally because they have been developed haphazardly and supported by administrators with an eye toward easy money rather than toward academic and programmatic integrity (e.g., Do MOOC Faculty Have a Responsibility For How Courses are Used?;  Monitoring University Governance: "Pigs Get Fat; Do MOOC Faculty Have a Responsibility For How Courses are Used?; Debating MOOCs: Shared Governance, Quality Control, Outsourcing, and Control of Curriculum at Harvard, Duke, American, San Jose State; A Better Approach to Faculty Centered Discussion of Technology Enhanced Education ). 

Disseminating Knowledge Broadly--New Offerings From the Digital Commons Network

I have written about the way in which the efforts of the last decade to financially exploit the dissemination of knowledge has produced an increasingly class based system of knowledge dissemination in which the rich or well funded have access to knowledge denied to poorer individuals and institutions.  (E.g.,Open Access at Penn State: Scholarsphere (Dec., 14, 2012);   Between Scholar and University--Sharing Knowledge, Protecting Revenue and Control--Is the UCSF Approach Worth Considering (May 28, 2012); Opening Access: Course Proposals Archive at Penn State (June 1, 2012); Digital Humanities From the CIC (Oct. 6, 2012).

 (Image from Digitial Commons Network)

As a result, academics and academic institutions in developed states, and the wealthy elites in developing states have access to knowledge production denied to poorer individuals and institutions.  Publishers (but generally not the producers of knowledge) profit from this new market regime, and the perpetuation of systems of academic prestige based on publication through these knowledge exploiting and restricting enterprises compounds and deepens the effect, while hiding its financial objectives.Efforts by some publishers to permit the free circulation of older work is to be lauded as a nod in the right direction, but the pricing structures of new knowledge and the unwillingness, especially of certain market dominant publishers to contribute remains troubling.

It is in this environment that efforts like those of the Digitial Commons Network ought to be hailed and supported.  From their website: "The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work." 

This post includes the latest efforts of that Network to spread knowledge freely. Additions are made frequently HERE. Visit often.

The AAUP Issues a Revised Version of "Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications"

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Since the AAUP last issued a report on Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications in 2004, the higher education landscape has been significantly transformed by a number of factors, including: (1) the emergence of social media as vehicles for electronic communication; (2) increased outsourcing of information technology resources; (3) cloud computing; (3) expanded security concerns, and (4) new communications devices.  Moreover, the conception of the classroom has been transformed by technology and de-centered by administrative efforts to move education from a faculty driven effort to a markets driven effort to satisfy the demands of wage labor markets.

These changes have emboldened universities to begin to assert more complete control over the efforts of individuals who are employed as faculty.  I say it in that way because it appears to be a strategic calculation by universities to suggest that the mere entry into an employment relationship with faculty entitle them to "own" everything that comes from the individual.  While some might suggest that this transformation begins to touch on the incidents of slavery (there is no space that the individual may call her own, because it is all owned by the university), the courts have not yet confronted that issue.  Yet the trend is felt strongly as universities have sought to exploit all creative activities of faculty however tenuously tied to the scope of employment (on the theory that the scope of employment includes everything that an individual does, at least to the extent that the university wishes to claim it for itself).

This post includes the press release announcing the revised version and the executive summary of the revised version. The revised version may be accessed here:  Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications; Download:

Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications.pdf

The University of the Future--Leveraging Teaching to Reshape the Faculty for the 21st Century

I have been considering the way technology, and especially on-line teaching, may reshape the faculty for this century.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

It is increasingly likely that these changes will be seen first in the smaller and non-so-called elite sectors of education.  While the public and private university will differ to some extent, changes in the public university are likely to serve as the touchstone from which other institutions will measure their willingness to change and the costs of engaging in specific approaches. Universities are increasingly redefining efficiency and "product" around a short term market-satisfaction model.  This requires substantial flexibility in the creation and modification of programs of instruction, tremendous resoices devoted to the monitoring of labor market trends in which the students they graduate participate, and a minimal requirement for service or research--just enough to provide sufficient value in prestige markets to justify the charges universities assess against student tuition (a function of teaching programs mostly, but leveraged by the value added of a just sufficiently research productive faculty to keep the university's reputation as an authentic and legitimate center of "higher education"). To this end, faculty governance is neither necessary nor convenient--and speaks to an older model the replacement of which is a necessary step in the successful imposition of a flexible made to market university teaching system.

San Francisco State has been at the forefront of these movements and Steve Kolowich has done an able job of chronicling these efforts.  In a recent article, Steve Kolowich, Angered by MOOC Deals, San Jose State Faculty Senate Considers Rebuff,  Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 18, 2013, the strategic moves of both administration and faculty around these efforts to reframe the faculty function (and its form and role within the university) is highlighted.

Rethinking the Economics of On-Line Education; Considering Three Different Models of Faculty Involvement in Emerging On-Line Education

One of the most interesting aspects of the move toward on-line education is its financial aspects. Universities are buying in certainly because they tend to like to follow demand and they perceive student comfort with this form of knowledge delivery.  But what makes accommodation to taste more compelling is the financial aspects--on-line education provides  a means of substantially increasing income margins for universities as they leverage their teaching staffs per student.

 

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Yet it may be that the leveraging potential of on-line education may be far smaller than theory might suggest.  The reason is simple--while synchronous knowledge delivery has great leverage potential, the move toward student centered and assessment/outcomes based education methodologies cuts deeply in the opposite direction.  These models are grounded int he idea of constant supervision and management of student involvement in course work.  That requires a greater rather than a lesser involvement of faculty in the conduct of classes.  Where on line classes can leverage lecture contact hours per faculty members, the requirements of surveillance and assessment/outcomes based  education requires substantially greater numbers of faculty to mind the students enrolled in these on-line courses. 

This post considers three distinct "approaches" to this problem that have been proposed or that will likely be influential in determining the emerging structures and expectations of on-line education and the reconstruction of the role of faculty within universities.  

Adding Fuel to the Transformational Fire: Moody's Report and Trending Public University Operational Frameworks

One of the most interesting and well known trend for public universities has been the movement form academic program and faculty centered governance to one in which the center of operational gravity shifts toward the Vice President of Finance and the general counsel.  What once were viewed as issues of program and instructional advances driving university operations, subject to concerns of sustainability and economic viability has been turned upside down.  Today, public universities and especially publicly assisted universities,  start with the objective of revenue enhancement and then drive program and operations to achieve this objective,  

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

This post suggests the role of credit agencies in disciplining universities toward an embrace of this model of operations. Eric Kelderman,  Moody’s Report Forecasts a Gloomy Future for Public Universities, Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 14, 2013.

A Better Approach to Faculty Centered Discussion of Technology Enhanced Education

Cash strapped universities, including many in the CIC, have used their claims of desperation to do two things: first they have increasingly ceded authority over education programs and methods to their Finance Vice Presidents.  Then they have tended to make decisions, driven my the need to generate cash, which they then impose on their institutions with only the barest formal appearance of faculty and staff engagement. Though they tend to fool themselves  into believing that all is well, this sort of ham and high handed approach to programmatic innovation will tend to erode faculty buy in, promote the move to contract faculty (much more docile and cheaper) and ultimately produce a crisis of reputation.

Top tier public institutions appear to be adopting a different approach, one that other public and publicly assisted institutions, increasingly managing from behind the high walls of their academic Versailles, might do well to consider.  This post reports on the way in which the University of Texas has chosen to approach the issue of technology enhanced education.

MOOCs International Organizations Expand the Supplier Base While MOOC Supplier Competition Goes Global

MOOCs have been understood as the creature of academics and the institutions they serve.  Universities, along with their business partners, or when joint ventures of universities are created to develop and profit from this form, appear to have a lock on the form.  That is useful, especially where MOOCs are viewed as a revenue generating and labor leveraging device.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Two interesting developments may change the planning horizons of American universities in the  MOOCs market.  Both may represent potentially substantial market competitors to universities.  Yet at least of them offers the possibility of reaching market's for learners beyond those that universities may view as potentially available for revenue harvesting. One shows how international organizations may be turning to MOOCs in their capacity building and knowledge dissemination objectives.  The second suggests that MOOCs (and revenue competition ) may be going global.  

"Pigs Get Fat; Hogs Get Slaughtered"--On Strategies for Getting Money Out of MOOCs

The idiom, "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered"  reminds us that being too greedy can ruin even the best laid plans or ambitions.  And so it appears to be the case with university administration and MOOCs.  

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Like children with little sense of control--and no accountability to anyone with the sense to remind officials with far too much unconstrained power of the dangers of obsessive behavior translated into policies affecting the university, University administrations have been falling all over themselves to squeeze money out of MOOCs.  This post considers some of the ways in which universities may slaughter MOOCs and one example of the way in which administrators will change the landscape of MOOC development that will impede rather than facilitate its development as the price of a short term search for money. A pity but when the finance side of the house grows far too influential, academic quality assumes an entirely different character. 

Engaged Scholarship--De-Centering Faculty From Research and Teaching in a Relentless March Toward a Training Model for Middle Tier Universities?

The financial crises of the first two decades of the 21st century has forced innovation on universities.  Forced to compete for decreasing numbers of students less able to afford increasing costs of traditional education and more likely to encounter university education instrumentally a factor in strategic entry into labor markets, universities have proceeded with profound changes the effects of which will not be apparent to most for years to come.  (A great student perspective on the crisis of university education may be accessed here).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Most of these changes have been well veiled by a combination of well developed rhetoric of passivity ("we can only respond to the market" rhetoric, whose falsity is only augmented by the profound effect on markets that responses produce especially by the largest university players) and by restructuring that increasingly re characterizes most important aspects of university operations as administrative and financial and thus beyond the reach of the traditional governance mechanics of academic governance. These changes have found ready acceptance and the culture of university governance has been affected so that faculty, trustees, administrators and students have begun to understand the university as cultural object in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

At middle tier universities the changes have been evidenced in a  number of ways.  One of the most interesting is what has been euphemistically pushed by senior administrators as "pedagogical efficacy" (see here). In the form of a movement toward "engaged scholarship" some aspects of this drive involve the active complicity of well placed faculty.  The ways in which influential faculty have rushed to rework their academic cultures to more comfortably conform within new markets driven operational cultures at universities provides a useful basis for understanding the nature and direction of changes to the "business" of the academy. In the process of being "helpful", these faculty efforts that mean to change the culture of the academic enterprise, may transform the nature of the academic enterprise, from an autonomous production model driven by its own objectives to one that becomes a secondary element of wage labor markets and the enterprises that drive them. This essay considers whether recent movements to compel academic conformity to so-called "engaged scholarship" might provide a good example of the profound and perhaps profoundly disturbing example of faculty complicity in movements from education to training models, models in which the academic enterprise may lose its autonomy and thus transformed, more explicitly serve other masters. 

Godzilla Versus the Swamp Creature: MOOCs, the Control of Online Education and the Move From Education to Training for Labor Markets

While much attention has been drawn to MOOCs from the perspective of large institutions and those charged with increasing the productivity of teacher-workers to deliver high margin education enhancing capacity, I have been considering some of the side effects of MOOCs.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

These include the way in which MOOC development has managed to weaken shared governance, and the way in which MOOC operations has deepened recent movements to move education and course/program policy making from the academic side of the university administration to its finance (and non-academic) side. More important, perhaps, have been two additional side effects.  The first is the way in which university administrations have used MOOCs to extend their control over faculty creativity--seeking in effect to capture all individual work whenever produced on the basis of the fact of an individual's hire.  While this has the feel of extraction without compensation, the issue remains unexplored.  The second is the way in which MOOCs may make it possible to leverage teaching by aggregating teaching capacity across universities and using that aggregation and leveraged delivery of education products to reduce the size of expensive staff.

It is with this later point in mind that it may be worth reading carefully the intervention of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) provosts in the contests for the control of MOOCs and their revenue generating and faculty cost generating potential. CIC Ad Hoc Committee for Online Learning, CIC Online Learning Collaboration: A Vision and Framework (June 15, 2013) (The CIC Provost Report).  This post includes the bulk of that report along with the way in which the COIC action was reported in the academic trade press, the Chronicle of Higher Education, in Steve Kolowich, "Universities in Consortium Talk of Taking Back Control of Online Offerings," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2013.  While the trade press characterizes this story as one of a battle between institutional giants for control of a revenue generating new form of student training (and thus the title of this post); a closer reading suggests a more potent theme, the way in which innovation is being used to continue to strip faculty of control of any meaningful role in setting the direction fo courses, course content and educational programs.

Designing General Education for the Future: Penn State Report on General Education

It s my great pleasure to circulate A Report based on an Invitation from the President, the Provost and the Chair of the University Faculty Senate to Examine General Education – August 2012.  It is the product of the work of a Committee, headed by Jeremy Cohen and including Cynthia Brewer, Cary Eckhardt, Tanya Furman, Cynthia Lightfoot, Tom Litzinger, Mark Munn and Mary Beth Williams.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2012)

 I hope that all members of the Penn State community will vigorously participate in the conversations that we hope to initiate on the future of general education at the university.The Report will be presented to the Penn State University Faculty Senate at its October 16, 2012 meeting to be held in the Kern Building at 1:30 P.M. The presentation will be led by Associate Vice President and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeremy Cohen.

On-Line Courseware--A Faculty Governance Issue? Take the Poll!

Like many universities, Penn State is constantly under pressure to manage its computing capacities..  This involves not merely hardware, but also software.  While much of this is substantially administrative in character, there are times when it may be possible to see in decision making a substantial faculty interest, and thus a greater interest in being sensitive to the shared governance aspects of decision making.

(From Dennis Carter, Open Courseware on Every Campus by 2016?: UC Irvine Official Makes a Bold Prediction During Meeting of Open Courseware Advocates From Across the Country,  e-Campus News, Feb. 14, 2011; "Nine in 10 MIT undergraduates say they use open courseware.")

One of my colleagues recently reminded us of the implications of technological decisions on faculty teaching. It also serves as a reminder that old labels and customary divisions of authority do not always serve as a guide to shared governance decisions. The issue is an important one, at its most basic level touching on the extent to which the scope of shared governance must adjust to changes in technology and academic practices and culture.

Please take the informal POLL located at the top RIGHT HAND SIDE of this WEB PAGE to tell us what you think!

Better Leveraging On-Line Teaching--A Call for Support from Admintrative Units

The financial and reputation values and costs of on-line and distance learning are becoming better known.  Some universities use these principally to leverage their faculty's ability to produce tuition.  This is a worthy goal in financially dynamic times.  But other, more forward thinking institutions, are also considering the way in which these efforts could be used to enhance institutional and professorial reputation and influence within academia and in broader circles where the production of knowledge and its dissemination is valued. 

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2012)

Penn State certainly falls within the former category.  It ought to seriously consider moving into the other.  One way to do that might be to encourage its faculty along the lines already much in evidence at Yale and similar institutions; and by encourage I do not mean merely with words and best wishes.  Consider a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.