From the Corner... Comments on Academic Life

First China Conference on Communication and Public Health

October 13th and 14th 2006 in Beijing... The conference was hosted on the campus of Tsinghua University... most of us (foreigners) were staying at the Friendship Hotel about a 20 minute ride away from campus... it would have been about a ten minute ride if Beijing's traffic was not worse every day... 30,000 additional cars per month on Beijing's highways... they reached the saturation point in 2003... seven years ahead of schedule. I understand the government will take care of the traffic during the Olympic Games in 2008 through mandatory vacations... my friends call it "the Chinese solution." Apparently it worked in Shanghai a few years ago and they think it will work again, mandatory vacations and shut down the nearby factories a week or two in advance and you may even be able to see the sky in the summer... got to love em.

The conference as originally envisioned was to be 44 people, invitation-only... as things developed (Chinese Ministry of Health got involved and Dean Li from Tsinghua's School of Journalism and Communication recruited more sponsors) it got bigger and by kick off there were about 130 attendees. The program was pretty eclectic with academics, CDC China reps, others from the CDC Foundation in the U.S. and still others from industry like Bayer and Webber Shandwick. The meeting began with the usual formalities and welcome speeches... then Tsinghua presented awards for outstanding reporting in health and HIV/AIDS and a documentary film on AIDS in China received a special award... for me, what distinguished this from similar events was the response from the Chinese journalism community... in the U.S. it would have been hard to get the journalists to attend... I don't think one of those honored was missing... I think this says several things...

I was impressed by the sincerity of these journalists... you hear a lot about censorship in China and restrictions on reporting on health crises but these reporters seem determined to "get out their story" and in this regard it really added value to this conference... kudos to these folks and to Dean Li from Tsinghua for organizing this aspect of the conference...

I will make available a copy of the conference program in pdf format very soon. If you want to consider another aspect of communication and public health in China (images from NIH's collection of Chinese Public Health posters) you might look at a recent post on the Technology, Health and Development Blog. Click here for more pictures of this conference.

Day two of our trip was a visit to You'An Hospital in Beijing which is a well known infectious disease hospital and a workshop for the CEOs of several Beijing hospitals. After this workshop a group of Purdue faculty and graduate students visited HIV/AIDS patients at You'An and toured the facilities.

Personal observations... the You'An staff are very proud of their work with HIV\AIDS patients. There seems to be a high degree of professionalism and quality of care seems high. This hospital has hosted a number of high profile visitors including former US President Clinton and Chinese President Hu Jintao.


Notes on Academic Life... (Dec. 29, 2006)

You know you are an academic if…

1. You insist on wearing black and spending at least a month in Europe each summer.
2. Your children think daddy/mommy is “always playing on the computer.”
3. You don’t know anyone who watches the Fox network.
4. Your mother was always asking about when you were going to finish “that long paper” (aka…dissertation).
5. Everyone you know is “the world’s leading expert” on something.
6. You have never traveled business class.
7. The kids think “research,” “vacation,” and “convention” are synonyms.
8. You have a hard time explaining to your relatives what you do when you are not teaching “only two classes a week.”
9. You’ve repeatedly gone out of the house with mismatched shoes… and didn’t realize it until walking to your last class of the day.
10. Your office looks like it’s been burglarized… but it hasn’t.
11. The only time you go out for a good meal is when “the dean is paying for it.”
12. You have a hard time explaining to your relatives about why you write books that don’t make any money.
13. You resent anyone who has a “reserved” parking place.
14. Half your friends are vegans.
15. You know that Foucault is not that new restaurant downtown.
16. You know how to spell “Foucault”.

Notes on Academic Life (January 7, 2007)

I just clean up after the elephants…

Last year I was hiding in one of our local coffee shops working on a “soon to be due” instructional equipment grant. I had been hard at it for about 2 hours when I looked up and noticed one of our graduate students pull up a chair at a nearby table. I paused, saved a copy of the file, took advantage of the wireless connection, attached the file to an email and sent the proposal to our College IT director. Then I closed my notebook, gathered my materials and got up to leave. On my way out I stopped by his table nodded a greeting and introduced myself to his companion who ended up being his wife. He smiled and said to his spouse, “this is the man who keeps the show on the road.” I smiled and departed… as I left I thought a lot about his statement and wondered… do I really keep the show on the road?

Over the last fifteen years I’ve been a department head at three different universities with an associate dean stint in between head appointments but I’ve never really thought about “the show.” Obviously, there are many different “shows” but for some reason my thoughts were drawn on that day to the notion of "the show" we get when we go to the circus... the “the big show”.

I’ve found over the years that Department Heads are often introduced with some degree of formality by graduate students… so perhaps he envisioned me as a kind of circus ring master… busy directing a complex array of acts, basking in the spotlight, orchestrating change, encouraging excitement from an audience of alumni, undergraduates, administrators and an adoring public. There are certainly times when you have a good week, support a successful tenure case, learn that one of your colleagues received that teaching award you had worked hard to get her, etc… One can have heady periods, successes, triumphs….

But you know there are other circus roles to consider… "lion tamer" comes to mind… sometimes your colleagues expect you to do battle with the dean… but more often it’s a tougher opponent, a tenured full professor with an ego the size of Rhode Island. That’s a tough one… should you use the whip? Maybe the gun? Or, can you just get away with the chair? Obviously, this is dangerous work… and you hope there is only one lion… what if there is a pride? In any case, it’s likely your colleagues will linger around, there is always a chance of some blood… and then you realize what’s going on. This is not a modern circus. In fact things seem to have taken on aspects of a Roman circus and the audience expects to be entertained in an entirely different way. If at this point you go for a win-win decision, you strike a compromise, shake hands; the crowd gets bored and moves back to their offices… some mumble that even working on that journal review or reading The Chronicle on the Internet is better than this.

Of course there are other jobs in the circus, on occasion I’ve thought that being a department head was a lot like performing a high wire act… walking by yourself on that wire. Often working without a net. One misstep and you’re history. Your plunge would be swift and probably inelegant. Get angry on a Friday afternoon… put your true feelings in an email, send it and you get your packing orders from the dean on Monday… “Perhaps it’s best if you return to the faculty” the memo reads…

On the other hand I often think I’m just one of the clowns… I'm there to entertain the audience. I drive up by myself or with a group of companions, we stumble out of our fire truck spraying each other and generally fumbling around. We are the comic relief. We have been elected by our peers to play this role… after all we get summer salary… we should be good for some entertainment.

But the truth of the matter is that the role of department head is often even less glamorous. It’s true that occasionally we bask in the spotlight, sometimes we take on the dangerous role of lion tamer and on occasion we act like clowns but more often than not we are in the trenches getting our hands dirty. We are working on those grant proposals to update our computer lab, to get that new video camera. We are writing letters of support for everyone and everything. We are talking to other deans on campus to find travel funds so that new assistant professor can get to the important conference in Italy this summer. Sometimes we bring in our tools and put up the tents, assemble the conference tables and desks on the weekend because the university no longer has the staff to do it. We paint offices, shop for and put down carpeting, hang prints, move furniture, clean out the microwave and sometimes even sweep the floors. We work with graduate students after a social gathering to clean up the dean’s house. We drive job candidates to the airport and carry luggage.

Let’s face it… most of the time, a department head is not in the center ring. Our job is to spotlight others. Effective department heads make sure the light shines elsewhere. If you really analyze it, most of our job is to do the little thing that ensure that the big show continues to run smoothly… putting out fires, soothing over troubled egos, looking over student evaluations, listening to and acting on complaints, finding support funds, writing letters to parents, alumni, etc... We are more likely to be circus ticket takers, run the booths, make sure each ride is in good working order… But in truth, a good amount of our time is spent cleaning up after the elephants.


Notes on Academic Life (January 15, 2007)

Random thoughts on Engagement...

In academics we worry about how to distribute our “load”… how do we balance, “teaching, research and service”… or what we prefer to call “learning, discovery and engagement” at Purdue.

How much “service” should we expect from our junior colleagues? This is a question that I hear weekly in various forms. Many of my colleagues talk about “protecting” assistant professors from “harsh” service expectations. I’m advised by everyone to avoid “loading them up”… “they need to concentrate on their research”… “they need time to prepare for that new class they are teaching in the Spring.”. It’s a balancing act and many of my colleagues (and deans and provosts) will tell you that we need to “protect these folks”… but I’ve become concerned… when everyone chants the same mantra isn’t it time to take a close look at a practice and perhaps worry about the effects of such a policy.

I’ve spent most of my career at R1 universities and I understand that what really counts in this environment is research productivity and to a somewhat lesser extent, teaching. Service or “engagement” as we now refer to this part of our job is weighted less heavily although it does play a role in promotion and is clearly critical for the success of departments, schools, colleges and universities. Teaching and service are important but publications in good journals, major grants, and university press books are the currency of the realm. This is not a new development… in an era “national rankings” and “metrics” where we measure article “impacts” from citation indices we can all understand why the light shines so much more brightly in one area. If it’s easy to count, it will be counted and these counts will be published and compared.

Each institution competes for fans and funds and in the end there will only be so many “nationally ranked” athletic or academic programs. Almost everyone aspires to “move to the next level” and very few are happy being second tier in academics or athletics (when they know they should be at the top). The students don’t like it, the alumni don’t like it and the state legislators don’t like it… Rankings attract attention in any area and we are in an era of rankings. Research dollars can be counted, publications can be counted, the metrics of teaching excellence and service/engagement are a bit fuzzier. Teaching however is still at the core of what we do and so that relegates service to last place… and who likes all those committees anyway? Read The Chronicle of Higher Education… people are always whining about how much time they spend on committees and how everyone else is avoiding committee work… it’s pretty depressing to read this stuff but you find these complaints in almost every issue.

So, part of the job of any department head worth his or her salt is to find ways to reduce their junior colleagues' “service/engagement” burden… but since someone has to “man the walls” that means you go to “the regulars”… the “department citizens”… more often than not, associate or full professors who you can count on to show up for meetings, provide a good report, serve on that special “ad hoc” committee, do those all too frequent evaluations, etc… I guess to some extent it’s always been this way.

However, with the increased pressure of “rankings”, the “professionalization” of undergraduate advising and with the creation of new categories of “teaching” or “clinical” faculty, I think we are in danger of “overprotecting” and “under socializing” a whole academic generation of tenure-track faculty and that we are furthermore failing to develop important values of “participation,” “teamwork,” and “service” in these folks.

What might be the results? Perhaps we will see fewer individuals willing to step up to the plate and “serve” our departments in the future since they will have little or no prior experience or sense of obligation. I don’t have good data in front of me but I think we might already seeing decreased participation in faculty governance… “working on that paper” is more important than voting on curriculum changes or talking with colleagues about new internship opportunities for students… we see more teleconferences as many of our colleagues are “out of town for that grant meeting” and for no reason anyone can explain more of our colleagues just couldn’t get out of their offices and to that faculty meeting yesterday afternoon…

I’m also concerned about what this says to our graduate students… many of us have large graduate programs and most of our PhD students take faculty jobs at universities… when they look at their faculty graduate advisors will they have role models of an “engaged scholar” who takes all of her responsibilities seriously?…Will they understand that “faculty governance” takes a lot of sweat equity? In my view, we want our junior colleagues to know it’s critical to be involved in the day-to-day life of our organization, to participate in academic governance and if they have no experience in their early years what makes us think that on the day they are promoted a light will go off and they will say… “OK, now it’s time for me to start going to more meetings and do more service duties.” Somehow, I doubt it…

I’m not ready to suggest an “attendance policy” or that we start weighting committee assignments equally with refereed publications but it seems important to me that we find ways to reward service in our units and that we make sure that our engagement mission is part of the promotion and tenure process. Frankly, service can be a burden but if it’s shared by many the burden is lighter and the community as a whole benefits. But that’s my view… any volunteers? I have an ad-hoc committee I’m appointing next week…

Copyright: Howard Sypher (2007)