Field of Broken Dreams - Part III

Responding to Entitlement

I concluded my last entry with these questions:

One, what do such grades actually mean? and,

Two, what can we assume that students actually learn in such courses?

Of course these are questions which are being asked widely in our society today. Sadly, most approaches to these questions begin with negative presumptions that are largely unfounded: the grades mean little, the students are not learning much and it’s all the teacher’s fault. And there may be some truth to these presumptions. But the reality is a lot more complex than that.

The bean counter response to these questions has been to create assessment programs which, based upon snapshots taken from pre- and post-tests or embedded questions within a given course, purport to offer empirical proof of student learning or lack thereof. Clearly such a procedure creates sets of data that permit anxious bureaucrats a good night sleep. 

However, it also provides an incredibly simplistic picture of student performance which ultimately must be observed over time to be fully understood. Think of a single still frame from Gone with the Wind, e.g., the burning of Atlanta or Rhett carrying Scarlett up the stairs. Would we really believe that either of those stills adequately sums up the entire masterpiece by Selznick? As Einstein put it, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

These assessments are ultimately exercises in reductionism which, while proving enormously time consuming for instructors with plates already more than full, ultimately provide them very little worth knowing in the end. Without a standard curriculum, such assessments essentially compare apples to oranges. Instructors could well be taking very different approaches to the same course in adjoining rooms. And when assessments do become tied to standard curricula, pedagogy almost inevitably becomes reduced to teaching the tests and student learning is reduced even further to the perennial question college instructors have endured since the inception of No Child Left Behind: “What’s on the test?”

About two years ago, I began calculating the time expenditures required for every class I taught. I had asked myself, “Is it possible the students are right? Am I giving them too much work?” Realizing that such an open-ended question could turn largely on preference (there are a number of students who regularly call their classmates babies for their whining), I decided to use the only standard in common usage, the Carnegie Unit, as my basis for comparison.

I assessed the actual prep time demanded by each course, calculating required reading times at 2 minutes per page (the average high school speed) while assessing time required for assignments based upon the averages of what students reported spending on them. In all honesty, I was quite liberal in my estimates, erring on the high side for each one.

I began posting the prep time required for each class on the class webcourses site for students to see. One semester I even integrated the estimated undistracted prep times into the class schedule itself (noting that the distracted behavior colloquially referred to as “multi-tasking” by definition adds time to any endeavor undertaken which cannot be counted toward required prep time). This allowed students to see up front how much a give class' worth of reading and assignments would take them.

Perhaps I was naïve in assuming that if students saw how little actual time was being demanded of them, with none of the classes exceeding about 70% of the Carnegie Unit’s 2 hour prep requirement, maybe they’d stop complaining. But I was wrong. Indeed, the complaints increased. Clearly, less time for more grade is increasingly seen as an entitlement among many of our students today.

Giving up but not giving in….

By last summer, I had pretty much given up. I was particularly tired of the whining that resulted from students taking the quizzes adapted from the textbook publisher’s test bank which they inevitably proclaimed as “too hard” or “tricky.” In response, for the intro humanities course surveyed above, I created a new series of content quizzes for my online humanities GEP courses. I give these quizzes strictly to insure that students actually purchase and read the textbook. Remember, when it’s all about the grade, unless there are points attached, it just doesn’t happen.

The new quizzes were based on the lowest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom’s system evaluates questions on the cognitive complexity required to answer them. Level 1 data dump is the lowest level: “What is the structure pictured above? A. The Washington Monument, B. The Pyramids, C. The Parthenon, D. None of the Above.” That was the level I chose for my new quizzes.

I wish I could say this solved the problem. For 27% of the students in the class surveyed above, even Bloom’s Taxonomy Level 1 questions did not insure them at least an A- on their quizzes primarily because many simply failed to take them. Indeed, if the 20 points of extra credit used to induce students to take four extra quizzes were actually added to the possible total points, only four would have managed an A- on the quizzes. Remember, this is the lowest level of cognitive functioning possible. It’s as easy as I can make it.

Results were even worse for my efforts to ease the writing requirement which students regularly rail against as onerous. Gordon Rule courses require students to produce four intensive writing assignments to pass the course. Trying to make this as easy as possible, I created three Discussion assignments, two of them based upon readings linked to the schedule itself. The assignments included a content quiz on the readings (again, to insure students actually read them), an original post at the Discussions site based on a format provided them, and two response posts, one responding to the original post from a member of one’s group and the other to a student outside the group.

The most demanding of these assignments required students to read Elie Wiesel’s Night, a 109 page paperback about the Holocaust (available for .99 online) which would have taken the slowest reader less than three hours total to read. From the scores on the prep quiz, it was clear that few had actually had invested the time to read the book with only four of the 37 students making As and another six scoring a D or failing completely.

The fourth assignment should also have been the easiest, a Summary Reflection Paper which required students to critically reflect on three ideas from the material which had struck them during the term, and to consider how their understanding of being human had been impacted by the course materials. There was no additional reading and the answers came from the student’s personal experience of the course materials.

Clearly, that involves two major presumptions: A) That students actually read the material, and B) That they actually thought about what they’d read, two major - and apparently unfounded - presumptions. A mere four of the 37 made an A on the summary assignment while nine of the 37 ended up with a D or an F, two because they failed to submit anything at all. That’s a pretty disheartening result from a semester’s worth of readings and assignments. Bear in mind the purpose of the Gordon Rule is to assure that our graduates can write at college level.

Of course, GEP courses have a reputation for underachievement by students who see them as irrelevant to their majors and thus unworthy of their time or attention. Perhaps performance by our own majors would be better.

Encountering the Humanities is an entry level course for Humanities majors designed to introduce students to the discipline and to beginning research methods. This past term the requirements for the course were reduced to two components. The first was the four research and writing assignments required by the assessments program. The second was an engagement grade in which students could earn up to five points each class by showing up on time, remaining the full period and having prepared the assigned material for the day. How difficult could that be?

Apparently too difficult for the 79% of the class who missed more than a week of classes. The class average absence rate was 7.5 classes for the term. That translates to two and a half weeks (out of 15 total) missed completely. Bear in mind that this class covers topics ranging from the affirmation of life in the face of death to the use of film as propaganda during the WWII era to the controversies over publicly funded art such as Robert Maplethorpe’s. I incorporate a lot of film, library tours, group activities and personal reflection assignments. This is hardly a deadly lecture series on Prussian generals in an credit hour factory auditorium.

By the end of the term, absences skyrocketed, chronically late arrivals increased and the loud sighing to register boredom from unprepared students grew in velocity. What a joy to teach! (And these are our own majors!) One wonders what careers will permit such spotty attendance records, rudeness and disengagement.

Even so, about a third of this class managed to end up with at least an A-. However,  if the 40 points of extra credit (about one letter grade) had been added into the possible, there would have been a mere two A- and our would-be majors scoring a C or lower would have totaled 11/19 (58%), a far cry from the 0% who come into these classes expecting nothing below a B.

More work than I’ve ever had to do….

Even with all the eased requirements and all the extra credit to bribe students to engage all the material and the inflated final grades to show for it, the whining continues. The most common comment I receive on my student evaluations every semester is one or more variants of “this is more work than I’ve had to do in any of my other classes.” Bear in mind that at most the requirements of any of my classes are 70% of the Carnegie Unit 2 for 1 prep time requirement. I know because I’ve actually measured them.

For a long time, I shrugged off these comments with the assumption that students say this about all their classes. It is the nature of the beast for students to complain about college workloads. I certainly did my share of complaining as an undergrad and law student and I expect my students to do the same. But two events in the past year have made me consider that perhaps they are telling the truth.

The first was the publication of a national ranking by Newsweek of the “least rigorous colleges” in America. Lo and behold, UCF was…. Drumroll, please …. Number 1 in the country!  Of course, it would be easy to attack these rankings on the basis of methodology (students were asked to rank the difficulties of their course demands). But other factors considered such as teacher/student ratio are often seen as causally related to a lack of academic rigor in the scholarship of teaching and learning. UCF has long held the title of the highest student/teacher ratio in the country.  And when the Newsweek ranking is considered together with the fact that UCF has been ranked in Princeton Review’s top 10 twice in the past five years in the category of “Students say they never have to study,” the least rigorous title begins to look more possible than not.

The second was the appearance of the dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at a departmental faculty meeting at the end of the fall term. He reported that the primary concern of the university and thus the college had become student credit hours and student graduation rates. Bottom line: it’s all about numbers and dollars. Concern for quality has become a quaint notion in the corporate university with its consumers formerly known as students.

In a time when students increasingly choose their courses based upon online consumerist rating services (e.g., ratemyprofessor.com) which penalizes demanding instructors with low “easiness” scores and rewards those seen as easy As, the scramble for credit hours becomes a real race to the bottom. And the decision over assigning a student a grade lower than a C in a course, even with an average of two and a half weeks of missed class, becomes a moral dilemma in which any semblance of remaining academic integrity is pitted against pragmatic considerations for the health of one’s job. Being a good (translation: academically rigorous and demanding) teacher is no longer an asset; in this brave new world of academia it’s a liability.

So, where is the moral reward?

(Continued)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Field of Broken Dreams – Part II

Declining Moral Rewards

Of course, few of us in education are here strictly for the money. It is true that concern for money has become more pointed recently as universities have increasingly been defunded by state legislatures, reducing them to grant-grubbing institutional prostitutes selling their very souls for corporate (especially the self-proclaimed “defense industry”) moneys. The name of the research office at my own university is quite telling: Research and Commercialization. Apparently research without the end goal of profit-making is now unworthy of the academy. But for the rank and file teacher, our motivations rarely can be reduced to dollars and cents.

I returned to Florida in 1995 with the stated goal of serving the people of Florida, to give  back to the state that had raised me and largely educated me the gifts I had been given. My sense of obligation to my home state and its people arose out of my own largely positive experience in Florida’s educational system as well as what I saw as a crying need for dedicated teachers at all levels.

But lately, I have begun to wonder when that debt can be considered paid. With all vocations, there is a calling, a response to that calling, an affirmation by a community, the willingness to grow and change to meet the calling and an opportunity to live out the vocation once the respondent is ready. That last part, the opportunity to live out the vocation, is more often than not the key to its success. And as conditions continue to degenerate at the university, more and more I wonder if it is still possible to live out my vocation under these circumstances.

Where the selfless, service-driven aspects of education break down is when they begin to be taken for granted and thus devalued. From there it is only a short distance down a slippery slope to outright exploitation. In a culture that largely reduces itself to superficial values measured in economic terms, respect afforded human beings often mirrors the amount of money that society is willing to pay them for their professional services. Professional service-providers who are consistently underpaid and overworked are clearly not respected by the society they serve and their service is not valued.

Doris Santaro, an associate professor of education at Bowdoin College, recently published an article in the American Journal of Education. Its subtitle is telling: Demoralization in the Pursuit of Good Work. Santaro begins her article with this statement:

What happens when experienced teachers who are fueled by the moral dimension of teaching find that they can no longer access the moral rewards of the work? Consistent and persistent frustrations in accessing the moral rewards of teaching requires a new concept to describe teachers who feel they no longer can do good work or teach “right.” Too often, this phenomenon of frustration in the pursuit of good teaching is described as burnout. Although the terms “burnout” and “demoralization” have been used synonymously, it is better to consider the two phenomena as related but conceptually distinct.

Burnout may be an appropriate diagnosis in some cases where individual teachers’ personal resources cannot meet the challenge of the difficulties presented by the work. However, the burnout explanation fails to account for situations where the conditions of teaching change so dramatically that moral rewards, previously available in ever-challenging work, are now inaccessible. In this instance, the phenomenon is better termed demoralization.

The moral rewards of teaching have always been the joys of helping people achieve their potentials as human beings. A bumper sticker long popular among educators states it well: “I touch the future. I teach.” And in years past, that may well have been true. Increasingly, it seems that is less and less true.

The Whine Cellar

My philosophy of teaching has always been based on the notion of engaged education. The idea of going to college to “receive an education” commonly used in our society is oxymoronic on a good day.

A passive approach to college may result in a number of things but becoming an educated human being is unlikely to be among them. Colleges can offer only the opportunity to become educated. Students who take that opportunity seriously stand a good chance of actually becoming educated, i.e., capable of thinking critically, creative problem solving, effective communication and ethically responsible citizenship, all of this in addition to being basically trained in a given vocation.

Those who become bottom liners, merely seeking credits in individual classes and a degree to show for them at the end, can certainly attain that bottom line and do so all the time. Indeed, they may well represent the majority of graduates from academia today. But they will have little to show for their minimal efforts at the end of the five years when the average currently required work skills become obsolete. And they will have little by which to commend themselves as human beings because they have failed to engage in the hard work required to fully develop their own potentials.

After years of resisting, about three years ago I finally began to respond to the chorus arising from the student whine cellar about my courses’ workloads by strategically reducing the same. In a day of consumerist online rating sites that increasingly play a role in determining whether one’s classes actually get enough enrollment to make, such a strategy is less a response of laziness or cowardice than a pragmatism born of desperation. But, sadly, what I have realized is that one can never reduce the workload enough. The whining will continue regardless. Indeed, in some cases it has actually increased in those classes where workload was reduced.

Survey says….

About the same time I began cutting back course requirements, I also began surveying students about their study habits and their attitudes toward the same using the online webcourses sites to conduct the surveys. The webcourses technology allows students to respond to surveys in complete anonymity. Students were asked to take the survey to provide feedback to be considered in the revision of the general education program. No extra credit was provided for participation nor were grades affected in any way. Student participation was about 70%. And the responses were troubling.

The Carnegie Unit was established a century ago to provide a common means of assessing the credit hours – and thus the credibility - awarded to college courses. Built into its calculations is a prescribed study time to class time equivalent of two hours of preparation prior to class for every hour spent in class. Without this preparation, seen as the average any given student might need to engage, the credit hours awarded alone would themselves be meaningless. But to the average student in my classes, expectations that students spend that prep time are more often than not seen as excessive.

From the survey results of an online GEP Humanistic Traditions section of 55 students last summer, students offered the following responses:

Q. The Carnegie Unit established a century ago for the means of counting college credit hours allots one hour of college credit per hour spent in class and presumes that students will spend an average of two hours of preparation outside of class for each classroom hour. I think this expectation is: 

A. Less than Necessary 4.8%, About right  71.4%, More than Necessary 28.6%, Much more than Necessary  4.8% (All More than Necessary, 33.4%) 

(NOTE: Students could select more than one response)

In the following open-ended question which asked students to explain their response, most offered responses suggesting the Carnegie Unit’s two for one requirement was what was necessary to actually learn the material and “not just temporarily memorizing and forgetting” as one student put it. For students who saw the Carnegie prep time requirement as excessive, the common explanation was to compare it to how much time students have typically been required to spend elsewhere. To wit:

Q. My opinion of the Carnegie Unit prep time requirement is based upon:

·         The time I actuall (sic) find myself working on college assignments

·         Honestly, the classes I have taken thus far do not require two extra hours per class hour for adequate test preparation.

·         experience and in comparison to the demands put upon students nowadays.

·         my personal experience taking college courses.

·         I don't think that any student spends 2 hours per 1 hour spent in the classroom.

Perhaps more importantly, while a substantial majority of these students admit that the Carnegie Unit 2 hour prep requirement is a reasonable expectation, about right or perhaps not enough prep time, few of these students report actually meeting that requirement in their classes.

When asked “On the average, I have prepared for each class meeting of all the classes I have taken for…”  the responses were decidedly on the low side of the Carnegie requirement:

1. at least 15 minutes but not more than 30 minutes per hour of class - (0%)

2. at least 30 minutes but not more than 1 hour per hour of class - (19%)

3. at least 1 hour but not more than 1.5 hours per hour of class - (19%)

4. at least 1 hour 1.5 but not more than 2 hours per hour of class - (42.9%)

5. at least 2 hours per hour of class - (19%)

6. More than two hours per hour of class - (0%)

Moreover, when asked what they see as fair to require of them, the results are very similar. To wit:

Q. “I think that in the average college course I should be required to spend how much time in preparation for that class “

1. at least 15 minutes but not more than 30 minutes per hour of class - (0%)

2. at least 30 minutes but not more than 1 hour per hour of class - (14.3%)

3. at least 1 hour but not more than 1.5 hours per hour of class - (28.6%)

4. at least 1 hour 1.5 but not more than 2 hours per hour of class - (42.9%)

5. at least 2 hours per hour of class -  (14.3%)

6. More than two hours per hour of class - (0%)

Not only are students not spending the time preparing for classes they recognize as reasonable, 86% of students do not think the Carnegie Unit’s 2 hour prep requirement should be required of them.

But here’s the kicker. When asked what grade these students thought they should make in the class where they were surveyed, the results were overwhelmingly on the high side:

Q. “Coming into this course, the grade I thought I should be able to make was…” 

1. A  (42.9%)

 2. A- (38.1%) - All As (81%)          

3. B-, B or B+  (23.8%) – A or B (95%)

 4. C-, C or C+  (0%)

 5. Below C-(0%)

 6. I didn’t know what grade I would make (4.8%)

(NOTE: Students could select more than one answer)

So while better than 8 out of 10 of these students are not spending at least the required Carnegie Unit 2 hour prep time and an even greater number think they should not be required to do so, about the same number came into this college course presuming they should depart from it with at least an A-. 

Clearly, this limited glimpse should not be generalized too widely. This small of a sample may or may not reflect all UCF students generally. And it is even more tenuous to extrapolate these findings to American college students as a whole. However, these findings are fairly consistent with a number of studies of student attitudes and behaviors over the past decade, most notably the work of Arum and Roska in Academically Adrift. And they are consistent with both attitudes and behaviors observed by this instructor as well as some less than flattering rankings of the university which I discuss below. Sadly, I fear this may well be an accurate snapshot of the phenomenon of entitlement among entering college students which is increasingly documented in the scholarship of teaching and learning today

Of course, if students are not actually spending the time required by the Carnegie Unit and still attaining As, in all honesty, why should they? We human beings tend to seek the path of least resistance to our goals. But assuming that it’s true that less work can still result in high grades, that raises two troubling questions about the integrity of higher education:

One, what do such grades actually mean? and,

Two, what can we assume that students actually learn in such courses?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Field of Broken Dreams – Part I

Field of Broken Dreams – Part I

Those of us with Idealist temperaments (ENFP here) often tend to think out loud in working through our problems. We need to verbalize our thoughts, to put them into some form of expression, and, for us extraverted types, to interact with others, On New Year’s Eve, I sat down to work through the crisis I am facing in my career. It comes at the end of a long year of disappointments, reflection, talks with trusted others and hours of research and reading. This is a work in progress. But I share with you where I am this day. And I am grateful for your indulgence in this process and any feedback you would afford me.

An Endurance Test on a Good Day

“Choose a job you love, and you will never

have to work a day in your life.” Confucius

Over the past year, I have devoted the majority of my waking life energies to a job I once loved. Today I increasingly see my job as it has devolved over the past several years as an endurance test on a good day. On bad days, I experience it as a psychic black hole draining more and more of my very soul into an abyss. And then there are the rare days when I have a lively lunch discussion with a fine student or colleague or when students suddenly emerge from their zombie states without notice, coming to life in class. On those rare days I remember how much joy teaching used to bring me.

In the past 12 months, I have taught nine college courses at the university. Four of them were taught completely online including two summer courses. One was taught at the honors college. Four were sections of introductory humanities courses by which students meet general education requirements. Of the nine courses, all but one required four intensive research or writing assignments.

In these nine classes I taught 236 students, an average of 26 students per class. Subtracting the 19 students from the single course with no required writing, that comes out to 856 research and/or writing assignments minimum graded over the past year.

In no semester did I teach the same course twice thus relieving me of additional planning (and keeping up with the different material and assignments in each class). In Spring semester, I had three different plannings for three different courses, in Fall semester I had four. Over the past year I have taught in two of the four disciplines which the department offers, Humanities and Philosophy. Most years I teach in Religious Studies as well.

In addition to my classroom duties, both virtual and actual, I served as the pre-law advisor for the College of Arts and Humanities and offered students considering a career in law offering 43 sessions of at least one half hour over the spring semester. In the fall, I became the advisor for the Humanities program. I average about 1.5 advising sessions of one half hour or more during my days on campus. My advising sessions regularly exceed my designated office hours but they also allow me one class release per year.

I currently serve as faculty advisor for two campus organizations and agreed to sponsor a third organization devoted to international justice issues which formed this fall. I became the student at the three day winter faculty development conference on campus between fall and spring semesters last Christmas. And I continue to operate an assessment program (of highly questionable pedagogical utility) of the humanities introductory courses, a program dictated by state bureaucrats under the rubric of “accountability.”

Over the past 12 months I have written 65 letters of recommendations for students for everything from jobs to law schools to seminaries. Two out of three actually said thank you.

Just before Christmas I discovered two of my students had plagiarized big chunks of an easy, open-book and note final exam. One appeared to have been a case of thoughtless neglect and, upon confrontation, was profusely apologetic. The zero on the exam brought that student’s grade down to a C for the term. The other student engaged in a blatant copy and paste of web materials with no attribution which constituted half of the final exam. The student then failed to make the appointment to talk with me about the incident after agreeing to do so. That student will be attending the academic integrity course as a condition of graduation.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Little wonder I have spent a good part of this Christmas break in bed. In all honesty, I feel tired just reading this work history. But when I consider the monetary compensation I will receive for this effort expended and the declining moral rewards this job has come to embody, it becomes decidedly painful.

I need to preface the following data with the recognition that much of what I am going to discuss here is already public record. Governor Rick Scott, one of the glazed over Teapot ideologues swept into office in the 2010 elections, has conducted a campaign against public employees, particularly in education, since his inauguration in 2011. This is the same private enterprise crusader who was more than happy to defraud the Medicare program of millions of dollars until forced to repay the overbilling under threat of criminal prosecution. While his crusade to destroy the social sciences and humanities has been injurious to the field of higher education where I work, it was the posting of our salaries under the rubric of overpaid public employees that added the insult to the many injuries inflicted by this myopic zealot. Seems the guv thinks folks like me are being overcompensated.

So most of what I’m about to tell you is already online at http://www.ucfsalaries.com/. If you feel compelled to go to that site you can marvel over the generous administrative salaries (minus any data for the athletics staff which somehow failed to be included) and the slave labor wages for most everyone else that make those generous administrative salaries possible. You’ll find my base salary listed at 2639 (out of 6282 total employees listed). For all of the services I list above and, no doubt, some I simply am too tired to remember, I am guaranteed a grand total of $43,759 per year base salary. That ranks me just below the tech who works in the computer services division responsible for the PIN numbers on campus computer accounts. I rank just ahead of a senior superintendent of payroll for housekeeping services on campus.

What these mere numbers don’t tell you is the rest of the story. My guess is that the employee in charge of PINs on campus and the employee responsible for payroll in housekeeping were not required to hold graduate degrees as a condition of employment, much less three. They have also likely not had to repay the graduate student loans that made those degrees possible. (I graduated in 2000 with $60,000 outstanding principle and will make my last payment next year thanks to some generous help from my Dad). This is hardly to devalue the work these folks do without which the university could probably not function, just to try to place it in some kind of perspective. 

Indeed, I am hardly the most miserly compensated instructor in our own department. That dubious honor goes to my next door neighbor in the department who brings a Ph.D., several years of teaching experience and several publications to his full-time teaching and duties as assessment coordinator for a whopping sum of $30,000 a year. Not surprisingly, he has recently found a new job with a starting salary nearly twice that amount at a private college in Alabama. We are uncertain if the university will allow us to refill his position.

To put this into perspective, beginning teachers here in Orange County with just a bachelor’s degree and no experience make $36,000 annually. And they have no graduate education loans to repay. My base salary of $43,759 is about what I could expect from the local public schools with one of my graduate degrees and no experience. My current UCF salary is based upon nearly 10 years of full-time service at UCF alone, (I have 25 years of experience teaching at six different colleges altogether) the last eight of which have included small raises each year based upon outstanding annual evaluations by my chair.

In years past, I have been able to supplement my base income by teaching up to two summer courses which have provided up to ¼ of my base salary, a provision which only came into being three years ago through the insistence of the faculty union of which I am a member. Such a provision is certainly fair in that the base salary is based upon a 9 month contract thus a full summer’s work amounts to the remaining ¼ of the year.

When I have had two summer classes (and thus taught all summer), my university salary has been as high as the $55,050 I earned this past year, my highest income ever from the university. But from that total is deducted involuntary “contributions” such as the $1627 I was required to pay into my own retirement fund last year, the $600 deducted to pay for my health insurance and the $323.31 I must pay to park at my place of employment.

Except for the parking rip-off which I have endured since beginning at UCF along with everyone else, the other two deductions from gross income are little more than pay cuts imposed by the state legislature over the past two sessions.  This would be the same legislature that has cut funding at our university 49% over the past six years even as enrollment has increased 30% over the same period.

But, wait! There’s more…..

It is frequently at the point where one might imagine things could not get much worse that they do. Just before Christmas we were informed that the regional campus budgets which had funded our summer teaching have been cut from 14 sections offered to 5. Undoubtedly that means that those of us who have depended upon summer teaching to even begin to approximate salaries commensurate with our qualifications and the work we do are going to lose at least half if not all of that salary supplement.

I had hoped to make up for some of that loss this year by being the Humanities instructor in a team taught program focused on the culture of Brasil, the last two weeks of which would have been taught on-site in Sao Paulo this summer. The program is largely funded by an international satellite communications company which wants to test new equipment in the field so the university’s share of the cost was negligible.

The catch was that the two UCF instructors (Psychology would provide the other) would have to have their salaries paid by the university (in my case, about $5500 for Summer A). Two days before Christmas I was informed that the university would not pay our salaries, this in retribution for the union’s grievance of the university’s failure to pay a number of salaries of faculty in study abroad programs over the past several years. Somehow actually paying faculty for their instructional services in overseas settings is seen as unreasonable by our university.

What may not be apparent here immediately is the long range impacts such decisions can have on individual employees. As my dissatisfaction with my work at UCF had grown over the past year, I had begun to look at the possibilities of early retirement. The state retirement system bases final pensions on the top five years of an employee’s salary.

Should I continue in state employment until I am 62, my monthly payment from the FRS would be a modest $1500/month ($18,000/year). Of course, that calculation is based upon ongoing salaries at the current level with a presumption of a 2% annual increase. If I lose my summer employment, my salary will plunge back down to my base salary level. And my five years base will shrink as a result. Retirement services at the university informed me today that if I no longer include my summer salaries, my monthly benefits will decrease to $1388/month.

In short, I will actually lose money by remaining at the university in my current status.

I have attempted to supplement my income from the university through a number of outside activities. The Florida Humanities Council has paid me to produce several public scholarship events around the state as well as ongoing involvement with the Prime Time Literacy program with low income families in Orange County. I also attempted to compensate for my second denial of the Teaching Incentive Program award at UCF (on some very arbitrary and political grounds) by teaching as an adjunct at my previous place of employment, Valencia College. That brought in an additional $1800 for the fall semester but no guarantee of ongoing adjunct opportunities. My class this semester at Valencia did not make. 

Truth be told, I engage in these outside activities as more for the joy they provide me as for the modest income I gain there. It’s such a nice change to work in situations where your efforts are appreciated, where you are respected as a professional and as a human being. Sadly, none of these things are consistently a part of my experience of UCF anymore. But even with all of these part-time gigs plus my full-time work at UCF, I have yet to hit the $60,000 I made my last year of practicing law in 1990. And as things stand, that record will probably go unshattered before I retire.

(Continued)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Monsters, Demons and School Children

Exploiting Tragedy for Political Gain

I have to admit I did not make it all the way through Wayne LaPierre’s statement Friday. The head of NRA spoke for about 15 minutes from a prepared text and was twice interrupted by angry demonstrators who demanded the head of the National Rifle Association “Stop killing our children!” From LaPierre’s statement, it appears he is both a very good strategist but, sadly, a man who is either incapable of or simply unwilling to engage in an honest, critical examination of the crisis in America arising from the guns his organization would protect.

What was apparent from the beginning in his statement was that any discussion of a failed public policy surrounding guns was off the table. LaPierre began by decrying those who would “exploit tragedy for political gain,” assuring America that his organization’s primary concern was “the safety of our nation's children.” So far, so good.

However, the focus on children was short-lived.

The pattern of NRA response historically in the wake of mass-shootings has been to initially issue a statement of condolences to those who have lost family members but to quickly follow that with an assertion that “now is not the time” to discuss the policy implications of that carnage. Of course, as in the popular song from the 1940s, Mañana, somehow the time for that discussion never seems to come, thus revealing this as a thinly disguised defense strategy to protect privilege through utilizing delay.

A second defense strategy the NRA has used historically has been the use of diversionary tactics often involving scapegoats. And one didn’t have to wait long Friday to hear that number warming up.

Monsters Driven by Demons

LaPierre identified his targets in striking terms:

“The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day.”

Indeed, they do, Mr. LaPierre. One wonders what kind of demons drive the vision of gun advocates like yourself who appear incapable of even considering the possibility that it might be their own attitudes and behaviors which create the carnage we all abhor. One wonders what kind of monster would take a podium in the face of the mass murders of 20 children and six of their teachers and argue that the unlimited privilege which gun owners have enjoyed and presume to be their right, rooted in a public policy which has clearly failed with catastrophic results, does not urgently require reconsideration. 

At the point LaPierre made that statement I found myself angrily screaming at my television, “YOU are the monster!” And yet it’s precisely at times like these that I realize that all of us have the potential to kill another human being out of anger. As Alexander Solzhenitzyn has so aptly observed, “[T]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.” Had Mr. LaPierre been present in my living room I no doubt would have attempted to strangle him myself.

And that was the point I stopped listening.

Anthropologies of Depravity

In all fairness I did come back to read the rest of his statement. It is infinitely easier to deal with the words themselves without having to watch them being delivered by a smug, angry white man observably fearful of losing his unearned privilege. It seems clear to me that the policies he advocates are, indeed, monstrous in their deadly results. But I also believe there is more to this man than that. It’s not terribly credible to presume that Wayne LaPierre gets up every morning and asks himself, “What monstrous things can I say and do today?” even as that might be the end result of what he ends up saying and doing.

His comments about being “possessed by voices and driven by demons” are very telling. Many gun owners operate out of a negative philosophical anthropology which presumes human beings to be dangerous, untrustworthy, perhaps even demonic. It is not a coincidence that many of these folks are also members of sectarian-spirited evangelical Protestant traditions, descendants of John Calvin and company. This religious vision has long focused on the radical individual before an angry, punishing deity and a human nature rendered utterly depraved by archetypal events in the Garden of Eden. When one begins from such a negative starting place, it’s not terribly surprising that everyone can and, from this theological perspective, should be seen as a potential enemy.

But fear tends to immobilize rational thinking. It also tends to neutralize the human heart, immobilizing any semblance of empathy for others. In all honesty, I saw little genuine concern for the children of Newtown in LaPierre’s words or affect Friday. Instead, what I observed was a white hot rage over the withering attacks his organization had sustained this past week and an overpowering fear. That rage was only slightly cooler but still palpable in the text itself as I read it this morning. The fear absolutely leaps from the pages.

Fear, False Dichotomies and Sophomoric Thinking

Mr. LaPierre has proved himself to be a master strategist in defending an organization that represents just over 1 out every 100 Americans but successfully advances its interests at the expense of the rest of the population at large. For that, he must be duly credited if for nothing else than the efficaciousness of his methods.

But his thinking evidences a pronounced myopia that appears to make it difficult – perhaps impossible - for him to even consider the possibility that the interests he advances might ultimately prove destructive to others. Such a reality would thus reveal himself as the actual monster driven by demons of fear and his statement Friday an unconscious - and no doubt unintentional - revelation of his own frightened inner state. Projection always tends to be at least as revelatory of the projector as his targets.

There is also a decided brittleness in LaPierre’s thinking which is readily revealed in statements like these:

“The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. ”

In introductory logic courses we teach our students about a wide range of logical fallacies. A very common fallacy is the false dichotomy: Either X or Y. Such arguments often reveal either limitations of conceptual awareness of other possibilities or, more often, the simple refusal to consider them. They also evidence a tendency toward simplistic thinking. We all want things to be as simple as possible, as Einstein noted. But as he also insisted, our considerations should not require a subject to be seen in a simpler manner than is possible. Beyond simple lies simplistic.

We expect some level of simplistic thinking from college undergrads, hence the description of such fallacious thinking as sophomoric. But when we begin to see an ongoing pattern of such thought in adults, stubbornly resistant to all attempts to consider other possibilities than one’s foregone conclusion and willing to actively ignore all evidence or arguments to the contrary, we begin to suspect this might be a deeper problem.

William Perry, a scholar of cognitive function, observed a pattern of developmental tendencies in human thinking capacities. He noted that the structure of arguments advanced often revealed the given developmental point from which they were being made. Perry found that the tendency to engage in black and white, dualistic thinking is common to all human beings at very early stages of our cognitive development. But as human beings mature and become better educated, our thinking tends to become more complex, nuanced, attentive to contextual considerations.

While confronting black and white choices offered in simple terms remains comforting to all of us, most of recognize fairly early on that most things in life just aren’t that simple, particularly hotly debated issues of policy. We also know deep in the back of our minds that even as we would reduce complex issues to simplistic terms, we tend to sacrifice intellectual honesty and ethical integrity for the comfort of an artificial certainty. This, in turn, necessitates the operation of repression to push such awareness from our conscious minds. The first person we lie to is our self. 

Complexity and Intellectual Courage

To his credit, LaPierre did point toward some of the complexity in this crisis yesterday when he spoke of the lack of mental health treatment in America (thank you, Mr. Reagan). He also pinpointed the feeding frenzy surrounding these issues practiced by a mass media which has learned that stimulating fear also stimulates viewership and thus exposure to the consumer advertising of corporate sponsors. And he noted the normalization of violence which feeds into this problem through entertainment media from video games to the carnage which nightly presents itself as regular television programming.

These are all aspects of the problem America must solve. And LaPierre is correct when he points to them as facets of a deep-seated problem. But where his arguments fail is the reduction of the options available to address our national crisis to either providing armed guards in schools or not. Not only is this a false dichotomy, it also evidences the intellectual dishonesty of refusing to identify the elephant in the room – the failure of the very gun policies which LaPierre is defending.

The reality is that we simply cannot deal with this crisis until we recognize all the factors which have given rise to it. And in our discussions of them, all the bluster of self-righteous indignation in the world cannot overcome fundamental problems of intellectual dishonesty and intellectual cowardice. If Wayne LaPierre wants to have any real intellectual or ethical credibility, he will have to come clean with his fellow Americans about the role that unlimited access to guns and the failure of a policy which has put them into the hands of two out of three Americans plays in this crisis. Until then, he is relegated to seeing the monsters driven by demons  in the other that so clearly appear to haunt his own soul.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Things that make you go Hmmmm (Dec. 24, 2012)

A couple of weekends ago I was invited to go to Seaworld along with my husband and our niece. Our friend, Bill,  receives day passes to the theme park as a result of participation in the VA equivalent of the United Way. It’s a yearly event and I look forward to what is inevitably a long but enjoyable day at the park.

Truth be told, my favorite attraction is the underwater dolphin viewing room, complete with its plate glass windows providing front row seats to the dolphins swimming and playing in the artificial lagoon above it. Every time we go there I tell Andy that I want to live there though I’d guess that I’d find that space pretty confining after awhile.

At some level I feel the entire premise of Seaworld is cruel, cramming all those wild animals into confined spaces for the purposes of entertainment of the human animals. No doubt, the dolphins are simply biding their time before they are transported up to the waiting space ships and will tell us "So long. Thanks for the fish" enroute to their new homes. But I am always thankful for the opportunity to see animals up close that I would probably not have a chance to see otherwise and to engage in an intentional appreciation of the beauty of the good Creation for a day. And I assuage my guilty conscience with the belief that Seaworld generally has a reputation of taking good care of their animals and occasionally rescuing injured or sick animals as well.

My 13 year old niece, Grace, is quite the marine biologist. She has two 55 gallon tanks in her bedroom and is a walking Wikipedia when it comes to these fish. As we were walking through the Shark Encounter, the long plexiglass tube which allows people to observe a wide variety of sharks and other large fish, the father of the family ahead of us pointed to a given shark and identified it as a Mako Shark. Misidentified it, actually. Grace immediately piped up and said, “No, that’s not a Mako Shark, it’s a Blue Shark. And there’s a Hammerhead. And over there’s a Tiger Shark.”

Suddenly I realized that it had gotten pretty quiet in the Shark Encounter. Everyone in the tube had stopped talking and had turned around to listen to my little niece who had outed herself as a bit of an expert on marine biology at 13 years of age. That’s my niece, I thought, as I smiled to myself.

Then I noticed that not everyone had been taken in by Grace’s spell. A boy who appeared to be about 16 was with the family in front of us whose comments had set off the impromptu marine biology lesson. He held an iPhone and was furiously texting away. At first I thought perhaps he was texting a friend to share what he was seeing and hearing. But as I watched him move through the remainder of the tunnel and out into the park, I realized he wasn’t seeing or hearing much of anything, he was simply glued to his iPhone.

So here’s this family, all the way from Kalamazoo (or wherever else they had travelled from) here to see one of the world’s greatest marine life parks, surrounded by sharks and other sea animals that most of us will probably never get another opportunity to see. And their kid, whom they’ve paid $91 to get into the park this day, is so busy playing with his electronic toys, his weapons of mass distraction, that he cannot even benefit from being there.

Hmmmmm.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++