The Dark Side

It has been a minute. I am back and in the meantime some colleagues have accused me of crossing over to the Dark Side; they have suggested that I might be too understanding of our academic leaders; too sympathetic to our FIU President and Provost. They may be right. I am increasingly sympathetic. I come clean on that.

And, but, and still, maybe there is no Dark Side. You tell me what you think after reading to the end. While I do not think our Top Brass is perfect or handles each day, takes each interview, crafts each memo, as you imagine you might; the pressures are extreme, the ground is almost always shifting and often there is a cliff just beckoning beyond with each and every potential misstep. Likewise, while the pay is great and power is king (and too rarely queen around here), they do have relentless jobs; they are on 24/7/365. The pressures from their above and above, above is unparalleled. Maybe my deep empathy with our leaders means I have crossed over.

Listen, I know the critiques of our leadership, at least some of them. I hear them; I participate in those conversations. I agree that they are flawed, that great decisions are not always made, that compromises are struck daily; I also know, however, that reactive critique, frankly, is easy. It is easy to accuse our leaders of sacrificing quality instruction for better graduation numbers; easy to imagine they do not really care about faculty or value our time because we are asked to do more monitoring of each student in the classroom, to use “the soft touch”, to take a lot of time, to do as they say. It is a no brainer to become upset when extremist politicians are invited on campus or statements about and action toward our DACA students are less than what we might like. I do get that; that students’ lives are at stake; not just rhetoric. I see that. FIU could do so much better.

It is easy to critique our administration for its pushing of on-line or dual enrollment, each of which has major pedagogical disadvantages. Dual enrollment, of course, often means that students – who are taught by high school teachers and given college credit – are less prepared for college and not more once they arrive at FIU, not to mention that often it is a way of never taking an actual college-level course, with a professor and on campus in many of the liberal arts disciplines outside one’s major. It is a kind of eating away at the (I believe incredibly valuable) liberal arts, well-rounded degree. It is easy to rant and to become incensed and to threaten to leave. I understand. I do. “Other universities are doing better,” I have heard tell. Are they? Are they under the same pressures? Is this simply the wave of the future and our leaders are managing and pushing back where able, rather than allowing all of these changes to simply wash over us. Dark side me?

However, the longer I am in this job (and maybe that is why traditionally a Faculty Fellow has moved along after a single two-year term) the more I am able to see multi-layered problems with not-so-easy solutions. Maybe there are legislative pressures about DACA; maybe the hosting of Mike Pence was a way of gaining essential political capital in Washington. Maybe not, but maybe. Regardless, the proverbial deck is stacked against FIU; you must know that. Our leaders certainly know that and operate within those sets of assumptions. And that is not nothing. I turn to an Old Friend to illustrate my point: The Metrics. And challenge each of you to remember these pressures as you craft your critiques.

Our Friends: The Metrics.
Remember the metrics? The numbers and categories that were concocted in Tallahassee with some input from the Provosts and Presidents across our great state. Recall how the Board of Governors (BOG) created categories, assigned points, counted students, their credits, scrutinized their degrees; their life paths; looked into our research labs, the dollars earned; the patents approved; the jobs nailed? Remember the BOG? How they created this predatory system of rewards and – well – draconian punishments?  Remember how each university is ranked and the bottom three are punished as the Bad Kids on the Block? I am sure you are aware of how each of us and every administrator and student worked to help pull ourselves out of that bottom three category this 2016-2017 year and when we did, we all raised our glasses, for a moment, for a second, until the rules once again changed and the around the clock work began again.

Well…I know…I know…there have been a lot of directives from above – the efforts to support students with the “soft touch classroom” has included recording their attendance; asking faculty members to reach out even if they are faltering, maybe even asking about their well-being. I know…I know…many of us do this, by nature, by conviction, by socialization or by sheer force of will. I know others of us think it is utter nonsense, beyond what we must, lowering of quality, demands too much additional labor, labor we neither believe in nor are wired to do or wish to do or have time to pull off; and ultimately will lead to the downfall of our high-quality institutions. What happened to students being adults? Why do they need to be “held” so much…what, are they babies? I understand. I do.

But…guess what? There is new news…and this new news weighs on the place that FIU occupies within the system of Florida universities and thus the nation and world. If you were not convinced by the sheer fact of the metrics as we knew them, which included measures like retention; graduation rates, etc., then get a load of this: the BOG is changing (again!) the rules of the game and openly questioning the efficacy of rewarding universities, which have a high number of students with Pell Grants, which ultimately are the main measure of a university’s commitment to admitting lower-income students, to keeping “access” a value. With over 50% of its students receiving Pell grants, FIU is second in the state, after FAMU. Fewer than 30% of UF’s students are Pell grantees. Under the old system of metrics, institutions were graded on the number of Pell grant recipients; then it was the percentage of the overall student population who had Pell Grants.

One new proposal is for the measurement to be: the percentage of Pell Grant recipients who graduate. In other words, if you have ONE such recipient in the entire university, you would earn FULL SCORE. If you have hundreds of Pell Grant recipients and only 50% graduate, then you get a much lower score. This is an anti-access move.  In other words, the one metric that positively acknowledged and rewarded universities who continued to allow access to lower income students, is being revamped. Revamped how? In part to (again) punish FIU and reward the state’s flagships: UF and FSU…There is no fair play here. We, FIU, are always made to be in a position of profound disadvantage. And it is in that context that all of the rest occurs.

Our leaders are fighting back. I am proud of that fact. Have I crossed over to the Dark Side? Maybe…

What do you think?

Rebecca