Claire Campbell speaks about … academic entrepreneurship
Posted by dfa.ns.ca@gmail.com on August 26, 2011
Every year we’re required to complete an annual report: classes taught, publications – uh – published, that sort of thing. In the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, there’s a final section titled “Workload” that asks us to calculate the “Approximate per cent of year’s activity working time (eleven months)” for teaching, research, and service. That should be easy: we’re hired for 40/40/20, right? Well, this year I refused to complete this section of the report.
For the past two years, I’ve served as coordinator of the Canadian Studies program, a multidisciplinary program created in the College of Arts and Sciences over twenty years ago. The coordinator’s role is described in quaintly archaic terms of reference that predate by over a decade the creation of a Canadian Studies degree (even predating my graduation from high school). The university appears to have created the program – in an admirably prescient recognition of the turn toward multidisciplinarity – but then promptly forgotten about it, leaving it to faculty volunteer effort to sustain.
On paper, the program requires managing a budget and office staff, finding faculty to teach courses, and advising students. But it has been treated less as a site of multidisciplinary intersection and teaching innovation than as a way of offering a degree on the cheap. It’s been made clear that funds will come not from the Faculty, but from wherever I can find them. So over the past two years I have sunk endless hours into, well, finding them. This has dramatically reshaped the nature of my workday; the other week a colleague referred to my work as “entrepreneurial.” I’ve flown to Toronto to meet with foundations, alongside the Faculty’s external relations liaison. I’ve chatted (winningly?) with alumni at Christmas parties. I’ve driven my office administrator crazy redesigning posters, websites, and other promotional material. I’ve gratefully signed grant applications from cross-appointed CANA faculty wanting to bring in speakers. I’ve sought out allies at international universities (where funding for Canadian Studies is, ironically, available from the federal government). I’ve agreed to speak anywhere to anyone on and off campus, to try to raise the profile of the program. I’ve forced my executive to consider taking the program places it may not go naturally or well, if it meant getting us funds or a position. I’ve wanted to quit, because none of this would fit in either 20% workload for service or the ¼ course release I’m given. And from what I’ve seen from other departmental chairs and program coordinators, I know I’m not alone in this trend.
The irony is that I would talk to people about Canadian Studies every day anyway: telling people – especially potential students – about what we do here is a joy. But that’s partly because of what my job actually is. I’m a teacher, who believes with every fibre of her being in the academic value of the study of Canada and the benefit of our CANA courses. And I’m a scholar, whose research tries to speak to the public about the nature of citizenship and environment. What I’m not is someone who feels comfortable asking total strangers for money. Or someone who can sustain this kind of supra-administrative activity without asking what exactly is going on.
I see such entrepreneurial exhaustion affecting colleagues who step out of the 40/40/20, whether in the name of innovation or collegiality, whether in teaching or research. I am distressed that in a year’s time I will have to ask another colleague to take on this ballooning set of responsibilities as unrecognized overload, or let the program deflate entirely. We do seem to have a burgeoning administrative umbrella at Dalhousie, but it feels disconnected from much of the work faculty are doing on the ground.
I’m alluding to a couple of problems here. There is the jaw-dropping contradiction that we profess to recognize that our students want to learn multidisciplinary approaches to current issues, yet we have a history of leaving our multidisciplinary programs undernourished for fear of treading on departmental toes. (Witness the longstanding struggles of Environmental Programs and International Development Studies, two of the most popular areas of student demand in the Faculties of Science and Arts & Social Sciences, respectively.) There is the problematic implication that innovation is to be funded by extra-university means, such as younger female faculty chatting up alumni at parties. And there is the very concept of service, a term that implies selfless giving for the sake of the larger whole, which is inequitably distributed and which has taken on an unmanageably broad cast.
The message to us in Canadian Studies and similar programs has been “If you care about this program, you make it work.” And we do. But that’s why I refuse to fill out the form that says that caring about what we do counts for 20%, no more and no less.
The percentage doesn’t work anyway, because some work 4 hours per day and others 12 hours a day plus weekends.
In this case you seem to have a particular problem with your Chair and Dean not recognising your work(load).
Congratulations on your hard, hard work in keeping this invaluable programme afloat. At a time of an increase in the size of the central administration, it is sad that the number-crunchers there cannot step outside the (self-imposed) bureaucratic limitations and make a meaningful contribution to these badly-needed interdisciplinary programmes. In part I think that academic structures per se are also partly to blame, since “interdisciplinary” approaches to learning are often interpreted as a challenge to the traditional (and rather limited) ways of studying/teaching/researching. Hopefully an enlightened administration (oxymoron alert) will see the light of day…
Keep up the excellent work.
I’m not aware that 40/40/20 is a fixed rule for faculty workload. In my experience the division of time varies from year to year, depending on my responsibilities. When I was a department chair, my administration percentage was much higher than it is now, higher than 20%, and I indicated that on my annual report. Is the annual report one possible way to register what Clair is talking about?
Claire Campbell raises some interesting points in her piece and the topic she addresses is certainly one that preoccupies many faculty members at Dalhousie: Canadian Studies is one of several programmes at the university that suffers from lack of adequate funding and genuine commitment. I remain, however, unclear about which aspect of the administration’s sexist and/or ageist practices my colleague finds most regrettable. If the most offensive of the administration’s actions is to ask ‘younger female faculty’ to ‘chat up alumni’, would she be happier if the president and the deans called on ‘younger male faculty’ to do this? Or if it’s the youth of the sacrificial faculty members that she finds deplorable, would she be happier to have older, more experienced female colleagues asked to pick up the burden?