Higher Ed's Obsession of the Week: End of Year Lists, FARs, & Toxic Productivity
Looking back at another year of higher education's accountability regime; or, "Taylorism: Celebrating 100 Years of Making Faculty Miserable."
This is a weekly feature that I like to get out on Fridays, but between the holidays and traveling down to Jacksonville for the Gator Bowl last week, the post got pushed back a few days. Rather than wait until this Friday and try to pretend like nothing happened, I decided to go ahead and get this out today. Enjoy!
Around this time of year—this week, specifically—the internet and social media are awash with end-of-year lists, thoughtful farewells, predictable year-end recaps about how this year is the worst one yet (or, alternatively, how this year may not be as bad as everyone thinks it is), political retrospectives and news recaps, and the inevitable best-of-the-year lists.
This year, I decided to combine my fun and fancy free newsletter habit with a thoroughly hidebound, decidedly un-fun, bureaucratic assemblage: what those of us at Indiana University1 know as the FAR.
To give you a sense of just how deeply enmeshed this thing is in the lives of faculty, I am not even totally sure what FAR stands for, and I can’t seem to find it online either, despite the fact that I’ve been doing one every year for over a decade. It’s either Faculty Annual Report, which makes the most sense, or Faculty Activities Report, which makes less sense but still might be correct, since I have seen the work of faculty described elsewhere in boilerplate IU-speak as “activities,” which makes it sound like we are building stuff with blocks or painting with our fingers.
There is an opaqueness to academic work that makes it difficult for outsiders to see—much less understand—the work products of faculty. Staff complain because we aren’t tethered to our desks Monday through Friday in some kind of Dickensian horror show; conservative politicians complain because they can’t fathom the value of someone teaching six courses per year for $56,214.00 after three degrees and a decade of service; everybody else just sort of shrugs their shoulders because they don’t get it and (most) don’t truly care what professors do anyway.
It reminds me of the old Zen koan: If a faculty member attends a professional development event but doesn’t write about it, does it even count?
There are some benefits to this lack of transparency in faculty work. One benefit is that faculty can more or less structure their work lives (outside of teaching and meetings, which as you will see below are plentiful) to their own tastes and preferences. Another is that faculty can work from just about anywhere in the world, as long as they have an internet connection. (Again, I am not talking about in-person classes or in-person meetings.)
But because of this opaqueness, faculty have to constantly prove their value by reflecting, tabulating, analyzing, summarizing, articulating, metricizing—in a word, justifying—their existence. It’s not enough for faculty to do the work; they also have to talk about it incessantly. Otherwise, it doesn’t count. It reminds me of the old Zen koan: If a faculty member attends a professional development event but doesn’t write about it, does it even count?
Check out all this stuff I did in 2022. Seriously, it’s wild. I can’t believe—and I honestly don’t know how—I found time to do all of this. I got tired and unbelievably bored just writing all this out.
January
“Teaching Writing in the (New) Era of Fake News”—professional development workshop with Ryan Skinnell, part of the Teaching Democracy Series
Safe Zone Training w/ Rosalyn Davis (DEI certified)
American Democracy Project planning meeting and IU regionals ADP meeting (Indiana Humanities Project)
PodFest ‘22 planning meeting (more on PodFest below!)
AAC&U (American Association of Colleges & Universities) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC—presented a paper on deliberative democracy alongside Bill McKinney, Nancy Thomas, Steven Koether, and Kara Lindaman.
Attended two English and Language Studies scheduling meetings
Met twice with Joann Kaiser to work on a professional development workshop we gave in February (more on this below)
Adobe Creative Campus Online Faculty Development Institute (Re)union
MA in English faculty committee meeting
English and Language Studies department meeting (a two-hour meeting that takes place on Fridays)
KEY Coordinators Meeting
Faculty Senate Meeting
Digital Gardener Initiative semester cohort kick-off meeting. DGI is one of my favorite extra-curricular
CLDE (Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement) Planning Committee meeting.
February
Regional Faculty Caucus meeting to prepare for meeting with Deloitte, a well-known player in the higher ed consulting industry. One day in February, I had three meetings of at least one hour each preparing for this meeting with Deloitte. The meeting, which was ostensibly to discuss a report IU had commissioned to study the market viability of the regional campuses in the face of the so-called “enrollment cliff,” turned out to be a fairly massive waste of time. (As I recall, I was not alone in thinking this.)
Workplace Communication: Written and Spoken. My colleague Joann Kaiser and I delivered a one-hour workshop to the supervisors and employees at Security Federal bank in Kokomo, Indiana, as part of their 2021-22 Supervisor Series. This was an invited talk.
English and Language Studies Curriculum Revision Retreat (Friday, February 11 from 10:00am to 3:00pm).
Regional Chancellor Leadership Series
Budgetary Affairs meeting. (The president of Faculty Senate at IU Kokomo also de facto chairs the Budgetary Affairs committee.)
University Faculty Council Executive Committee Meeting
Another Budgetary Affairs meeting.
Faculty Senate Agenda meeting.
FACET meeting.
Haircut. I also got a haircut in February.
Digital Gardening Meeting.
English and Language Studies department meeting (a two-hour meeting that takes place on Fridays)
Teaching Democracy Workshop Planning Meeting. Remember the professional development workshop I attended in January on “fake news”? I reached out to the organizer and asked if she would be interested in having us present something on the Mind over Chatter modules we developed after winning the 2018 Misinformation Solutions Forum. Christina Downey, Mark Canada, and I developed these modules and piloted them in sections of ENG-W 131 starting in Fall 2019.
Interviewed by a reporter for the Kokomo Tribune about misinformation and social media (this was fun! I got quoted in the paper).
Meeting with Adam Maksl to work on our EdX course proposal on misinformation. Ultimately, our proposal was not accepted, but it was a good experience.
Another ELS curriculum review meeting.
Review meeting with Cherie Dodd to prepare for my online course development review of ENG-W 365, a course I taught online in Fall 2021.
Budgetary Conference Presentation. As chair of Faculty Senate’s Budgetary Affairs Committee, I prepared a 10-minute presentation for the IU Kokomo Budgetary Conference, which is sort of like TV’s Shark Tank, but with academics and much smaller amounts of money.
March
Personal note: we closed on our house on February 28, 2022 and started moving into our house on March 1.
IssueVoter registration meeting. This was a project that we did in 2022 among the regional campuses to try to increase voter registration ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Second personal note: I got another haircut in March.
PodFest ‘22 kicked off this month, with some pre-festival workshops in February. This was the second year of PodFest, an IU-wide festival devoted to podcasting and sharing stories of survival, overcoming, and renewal. This year’s event featured over 30 submissions from students, staff, and faculty. Winners were announced in six categories. Check out the website for all the submissions and winners in each category. I am unbelievably proud of this particular endeavor and couldn’t have done it without the help of Erin Doss, Dan West, Brandon Chapman, the financial support of Women of the Well House and others. I am bummed that we don’t get to do it this year (if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter you know that I am on sabbatical in Spring 2023), but if I tried, it would totally torch my book writing time.
Speaking of podcasts, Adam Maksl and I also kicked off Digital Gardening this month, a podcast devoted to digital literacy in higher education at IU and beyond. The DG podcast is sort of the “front page” for the Digital Gardening Initiative at IU, a cross-disciplinary initiative that connects faculty from across the disciplines around ways of making, doing, and learning with digital media.
A third personal note: my wife, Kaylin, and I had our marriage ceremony in late March with family and friends in Indianapolis. It snowed that afternoon just as the ceremony started.
Another KEY Coordinators Meeting.
Another MA in English Faculty Meeting.
This month we hosted two Table Talks events, both of which were folded into the PodFest ‘22 festivities. The first panel presentation was entitled “Podcasts I love” and featured a bevy of IU Kokomo faculty, staff, students, and administrators; the second event was entitled “The Survival of Democracy.” Both events were well-attended. The latter Table Talks event was part of “Democracy Week,” a week-long series of events sponsored by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at IU Kokomo.
April
There were several “listening sessions” this month that I was more or less obligated to attend because of my continuing role as president of Faculty Senate. My recollection is that these were part of a plan to boost record-low morale among faculty and staff by listening to them complain but doing little else. There was another round of presentations by the Deloitte folks, too.
Another ELS scheduling meeting.
An all-ADP (American Democracy Project) meeting.
A UFC (University Faculty Council) meeting.
More Faculty Senate stuff (an agenda meeting, a Faculty Senate meeting, a budgetary affairs committee meeting, etc.).
CLDE (Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement) planning meeting. l
Personal note: I got yet another haircut.
I attended and presented a paper at AERA (American Educational Research Association) in San Diego, California. I spent just enough time in Southern California that Kaylin started to worry I wasn’t going to come home.
The end of April also brought the in-person Digital Gardener Faculty Fellows Retreat at the Idea Garden at IUPUI. I am one of the Grounding Gardeners for the DGI at IU and a member since the DGI’s inception in 2020.
This month Adam Maksl and I also recorded, edited, and dropped two more podcast interviews for Digital Gardening—available wherever you get your podcasts.
May
Another RFC (Regional Faculty Caucus) meeting.
Another CLDE ‘22 planning committee pre-con meeting.
Automotive note: I got my tires rotated.
Another two-hour ELS scheduling meeting. (Scheduling in ELS takes a lot of time, apparently.)
IU Kokomo commencement: This was a super cool experience for me because I was able to sit on the dais for the first time in my three years as president of Faculty Senate, right between the mayor of Kokomo and our district’s state representative. (The first two years our commencement exercises were significantly curtailed by the pandemic.) I was also (briefly) recognized by the chancellor. The weather was great, too.
Medical note: I went to the dentist and had my yearly physical this month.
CLDE ‘22 is right around the corner, so we had several more rounds of CLDE planning meetings. I was also working really hard on my invited pre-conference workshop for CLDE, which I will talk about below in much more detail.
June
June kicked off with an interview with the man who would become our chancellor, Mark Canada. It was already a done deal at this point, but they wanted to give everyone a chance to weigh in on Mark’s candidacy and ask questions, so they invited the executive committee of Faculty Senate to an interview on June 2.
Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement '22 in Minneapolis, Minnesota (June 21-24, 2022): I was invited by Cathy Copeland, Director of AASCU’s American Democracy Project (ADP), to deliver a morning session workshop at this year’s CLDE on “How to Combat Racism and Misinformation Using Digital Literacy.” This project was such a thrill to work on, and the workshop was well-attended with nearly 30 registered attendees from colleges and universities all over the country. Moreover, while the majority of those in attendance were faculty, there was also a healthy contingent of student affairs professionals, administrators, and students who attended the workshop as well.
I helped ideate a new initiative with some colleagues from around the IU system that we are calling “Future IU.” The idea is that it would be a working group of interested faculty, staff, and administrators from around Indiana University who would meet regularly to discuss trends in higher education.
Summers are when most faculty get the bulk of their research and writing done, too. So this summer—mostly in June and July—I knocked out a couple of manuscripts. One has already been accepted for publication. It’s entitled “Beyond ‘Fake News’: Misinformation Studies for a Postdigital Era” and will appear in early 2023 in an edited collection on Education in the Age of Misinformation (Palgrave MacMillan). I also finished up a manuscript for another edited collection that I have been working on for the last couple of years: an historical genealogy of failure for an edited collection called If at First You Don’t Succeed: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Question of Failure (WAC Clearinghouse). My contribution is entitled “A Genealogy of Failure.”
July
I forgot to mention above that I applied for promotion to full professor in the fall of 2021, and I found out in April that I was getting promoted effective July 1. (Things move very slowly and deliberately in higher ed, in case you haven’t noticed.)
I won an IU-wide teaching award from FACET for community-engaged teaching. The award is the FACET Innovate award and I won it alongside my colleague Christina Romero-Ivanova for our research on digital storytelling.
In mid-July, I attended the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy (SIDL) in Chicago. (I called it “Digital Literacy Summer Camp” for kicks.) I wrote about it in a long-ish newsletter. This is a terrific workshop run by Renee Hobbs and colleagues out of the University of Rhode Island. I would highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in learning more about how digital literacy skills can be used in teaching and learning.
August
I got another haircut in early August.
There was an ELS department retreat at a park in Kokomo.
I was invited to be an ADP Civic Fellow in August.
Lots of one-off meetings, a few more Future IU meetings, stuff like that.
September
I was asked to present on PodFest to a group of donors at a Women of the Well House event at the Kelley House. As I recall, I made a joke about how the pandemic was something “you might have read about; it’s been in all the papers.” Regardless of the taste of the joke, it did get a few laughs.
Working with my colleague Erin O’Hanlon at Stockton University in New Jersey, I also launched what will become my ADP Civic Fellow project, something rather ambitious that we are calling Lonely Classroom. I plan to write a complete newsletter on this later, but here’s a quick overview from the official vision statement:
Lonely Classroom (LC) is a curated compendium of online digital and media literacy resources sponsored by the American Democracy Project (ADP) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and created by Paul Cook, of Indiana University Kokomo, and Erin O’Hanlon, of Stockton University. LC also has additional support from the Misinformation Solutions Forum, a project of the Rita Allen Foundation, RTI International, and the Aspen Institute. LC seeks to provide users with a dynamic, routinely updated, and expertly curated panoply of teaching tools to help forward conversations in the classroom about digital literacy, digital media, mis- and disinformation, media literacy, online news literacy, algorithmic literacy, and more.
October
I served on a promotion committee for a colleague in ELS going up for promotion to Teaching Professor, which is a third rank for non-tenure track faculty (beyond lecturer and senior lecturer, that is).
Erin Doss and I had another Table Talks event in October that focused on the upcoming midterm elections. We called it “Why Midterms Matter,” and we ended up with something like 50 students. We put together a panel of faculty who presented on a wide variety of issues related to voting and the historical importance of midterm elections, including the uber-historical importance of this particular election.
I also attended a fascinating student presentation on voting rights and voting discrimination both past and present that was sponsored by the IU Kokomo Multicultural Center. This event delved into the history of voting rights discrimination in the US and included some terrific hands on activities to show just how crooked and corrupt some of these measures were (and are to this day). (DEI certified event)
November
I had another dentist appointment this month. (We get two per year on IU’s health insurance.)
I attended an event sponsored by the LGBTQ+ Center at IU Kokomo that featured two speakers who grew up in the Evangelical church in Tennessee: April Ajoy and Beecher Reuning. When they met in college they both identified as straight, cisgendered people, but now they are married and April identifies as a “non-straight, recovering conservative,” while Beecher identifies as non-binary. They have two daughters and are active on social media. April is a content creator. (DEI certified event)
December
Did I mention yet that I taught three courses this semester? One was a graduate course on misinformation (ENG-W 600), one was a course in professional writing skills (ENG-W 231), and the other was a course in writing for the web/digital writing (ENG-W 315).
We also had several end-of-term meetings and an in-person retreat for Digital Gardening. Adam and I continue to publish our podcast semi-regularly (at least once a month), which of course you can listen to at Anchor.FM and wherever you get your podcasts. We did a very special Christmas episode that included ChatGPT and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Holy mackerel this is a lot of stuff!
After writing all this out, I have come to the unmistakable conclusion that I need to do a better job of focusing my efforts. This is a ridiculous amount of stuff for one person to do in a single calendar year. I need to focus on writing a book, which is really what I want to be doing anyway. I think I have been subconsciously focusing on all of these externals as a way to prevent or self-sabotage myself from getting real work done on the book. It’s strange. It’s not like I’m not writing. I wrote three complete manuscripts this year—two of which are already accepted and one of which is currently out for review (for a total of nearly 50,000 words of published or soon-to-be-published writing)—so it’s not like I am somehow hiding from writing. I think it’s that I am shrinking from the prospect of writing this book in misinformation and the university, for some reason. Case in point: I am spending all this time writing out this post rather than writing this book. LOL.
I had hope to have a bit more time to write more about the nature of toxic productivity in higher education, because I think it’s a real problem. I will have to save that for another post; this one is already well over 3,000 words, which seems pretty toxic to me.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this long laundry list of stuff I’ve done this year. Here’s to a more streamlined, focused 2023. And here’s to getting this book done!
Just to clear something up that may be a source of confusion for some folks: I teach, research, and serve at Indiana University Kokomo, a regional comprehensive university/campus of Indiana University. IU tends to think of itself as “One IU”—that is, a singular, statewide university (not a system!) with one flagship campus (IUB), one “urban research campus” (the campus formerly known as “IUPUI”), five regional campuses (IU East, IU Kokomo, IU Southeast, IU South Bend, and IU Northwest), and two regional centers (IU Fort Wayne and IUPUC)—the habit when referring to university-wide practices like the FAR is to refer to the singular IU or “Indiana University.” From a purely internal, bureaucratic perspective, this is the most correct way to write this sentence. For campus-specific practices, like teaching a particular course on a particular campus, it would be correct to specify the campus in question (e.g., “I taught ENG-W 131 last semester at IU East until a wild monkey infestation forced them to close campus for three weeks in mid-April.”)