By's Musings

B. Baylis

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The Recovery of Aphasia and Epilepsy patients can be helped through the application of appropriate challenges with proper scaffolding

Aphasia and epilepsy patients recovering through the application of appropriate challenges with proper scaffolding
By Baylis
This past week I suggested that I would report on my experiences with my computer, cell phone and PDA. Unfortunately I am not much farther along than I was last week. My computer is not completely recovered. My PDA is not syncing and I can only use the cell phone for voice calls, and not any of the cute applications that the wireless companies keep trying to sell by advertising on television. My conquering of the computer, cell phone and PDA will have to wait for another time. Paraphrasing Chicago Cub baseball fans, there is always next week.

This past week I also reported on a comment that my physical therapist made about my progress. I had been seeing a physical therapist for balance issues that increased dramatically immediately after my seizures. Are they are a result of seizures? No one has been able to tell me definitively yes or no. Circumstantial evidence suggests they might be, since the Increase intensity of the issues happened in the same time frame. Whether they are or not, they are a constant reminder of the ugly specter of seizures hanging over my head.

The therapist’s statement to which I am referring was the one she made related to the fact that I needed to be pushing and stretching myself but doing it safely. When I suggested I was getting ready to use a step stool to change a light bulb, she quite forcefully told me that I was not ready to use a ladder. As I pondered her statements about pushing and stretching safely, several additional thoughts came to mind. One was the fact that in higher education a foundational principle of student development theory is that students should be challenged in an environment that provides proper and sufficient scaffolding. Over ten years ago, I designed and directed a critically acclaimed assessment project that involved fifty Christian colleges and universities. The project was a six-year longitudinal study looking at values development in students. One of the key results of the study was that students were more likely to reach the point of owning their values if they were forced to challenge or to examine their values in a safe environment, instead of being isolated in environments with no challenges, or being challenged with no support.

I also remembered that this principle is a foundational principle in athletics, where coaches hover over their athletes in practice to make sure they are exercising but doing the exercises correctly. As I reviewed the literature from the aphasia and epilepsy associations and organizations, they kept repeating this same idea to caregivers and patients. Patients need to push and stretch themselves to try to regain as much of their former capabilities as they can. These organizations also pointed out that one of the main responsibilities of caregivers was to make sure that the patient was pushing and stretching safely.
My physical therapist was suggesting that pushing myself to do more was important, but not enough. She also was suggesting that I should be stretching myself to do something different. If I just repeated what I could do well, I really would not be recovering my former capabilities. In athletics this principle takes the form of “no pain, no gain.”

This reminded me of what my speech therapist did with me. Prior to the removal of the brain tumor, I had been delivering the Sunday evening sermons in our church. My speech therapist kept pushing me to try to do that again. It took me five months to get up the courage and will to prepare a sermon. That first sermon I delivered in the safe environment of an audience of two, my wife and my therapist. After several suggestions for improvement and several weeks of practice, I felt ready to try an evening service. The congregation was quite gracious in their reception and encouragement. I did a second sermon the next week. After those two weeks I was mentally beat and needed a break. I could not keep up the pace of a new sermon each week. Thanksgiving was fast approaching and because my wife and I wanted to visit our family 10 hours away, I had an easy excuse for a two-week break. After that two-week break, it was the Advent season and the evening services were dedicated to Christmas preparation, so I was not scheduled again until after the New Year. However, I didn’t get a chance to deliver another sermon because on December 30, I had four seizures and spent a week in the hospital.

In preparation for the annual congregational meeting, the congregation finally came to realize that they were asking the senior pastor to do too much and he really did need help. Thus, they took the long needed step of adding an assistant pastor to the church staff. One of the primary duties of that assistant is Sunday evening services. Now after several months of healing, I am feeling the itch to start teaching again. I think I will volunteer to do some occasional adult Sunday school classes to get back into the swing. That will be pushing and stretching me but it will be in a safe environment. I know I am not ready to get back on the ladder of academic presentations. I need more practice first.

I want to go on record as thanking my wonderful therapists for pushing me to stretch myself to try to recover as much of the former me as possible. Without their intervention I don’t know where I would be in my recovery.

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Comparison of American Higher Education with American Automotive Industry

 

Comparison of U.S. Higher Education and the U.S. Automotive Industry

Bayard (“By”) Baylis, retired

Former Provost of Cornerstone University, Grand Rapids, MI

Recently as I watched a major league baseball game on television, the play-by-play announcer commented on the large number of Japanese players that were on the rosters of the U.S. major league teams. The color commentator pointed out that one of the up and coming star pitchers in Japan asked the Japanese pro teams not to draft him because he was going to go to America to play in the best league in the world. That phrase “best in the world” rattled around in my brain. Where had I heard that before? Twenty years ago, U.S. automotive manufacturers were throwing that phrase around in talking about their cars. The engineering and the construction was “the best in the world.” German and Japanese manufacturers were watching U.S. firms to see “how to do it so that they could emulate them.” But automotive manufacturers were not the only group throwing that expression around. For forty years, I have heard that same expression in higher education. U.S. higher education is the best in the world. People from all over the world are coming to America to take advantage of the myriad of opportunities and to see how it should be done.

What’s the problem? Look at the American automotive industry today. To investigate the health of the automotive industry, I did what almost every student of the 21st century does, I went to the internet.  I found a Wall Street Journal Article from November 22, 2005, entitled, “A Tale of Two Industries.” The article began by stating that General Motors had just announced that it would close nine plants and cut some 30,000 jobs. I did not remember that exact article. However, I remembered the announcement. We had just moved from a small Indiana county that was rocked by that announcement. The largest employer in the county was GM. Buried in that announcement was the fact that GM was closing one of its two plants in the county and cutting almost 2,000 jobs. Later that week we found out that this included the job of one of our former neighbors. These cuts took a huge toll on a county that already had an unemployment rate hovering at around 10% at the time.  The article continued by stating “There’s no doubt that GM and Ford especially are in a big hole thanks to high fixed costs and shrinking market share.” The article went on to outline the rise of a second American auto industry; one centered more in the South than the Upper Midwest. This new competitor was paying its employees well and as of November 2005 accounted for 26% of all cars made in America.  The article suggested that the decline in the Big Three companies represented a failure to provide products for which people were willing to pay a premium. What’s this got to do with U.S. higher education?

I believe a 2002 research piece by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education entitled “The Iron Triangle” explains the connection. The report begins with the premise that “parents and students…are starting to question whether higher tuition costs-and the debt families shoulder to pay them are always warranted.” How many students and parents are willing to pay a premium to go to a residential liberal arts college or a state flagship university?

Plant after automotive plant in the Upper Midwest has closed, wreaking economic disaster on family after family and town after town. Will we see the same thing in higher education? I don’t know but we have been led to believe that the rate at which colleges are closing is increasing. To check out this assumption, I did a little research on the matter.  Using the best list of closed colleges that I could find, which is maintained by Mr. Ray Brown from Westminster College in Fulton, MO. Mr. Brown maintains this list on a personal webpage <http://www2.westminster-mo.edu/wc_users/homepages/staff/brownr/ClosedCollegeIndex.htm> to help displaced alumni find out how they can get transcripts from defunct schools. In Mr. Brown’s list I found 1385 U.S. colleges that have closed since 1850. As I compiled Brown’s data I found counter to general public opinion and my intuition, which may have been biased by current publicity, the worst decade for school closing was the 1970’s with 183 school closings, compared to 46 so far this decade. The second worst decade was the 1930’s with 134. The next worst decade was the 19-teens with 126 closings. The 1990’s was the fourth worst with 100 school closings. I should have remembered the 1970’s. I was working at a struggling college at the time. It was just barely getting enough students to hang on. It did eke out an existence until the 1990’s when it finally closed, a victim of its own lack of foresight and planning during the good times. It lost students to colleges with better facilities and more programs.  Are there any patterns to the schools that closed? A quick look indicated that a higher percentage of the closed schools were smaller schools in agricultural areas west of the Mississippi River or South of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Data compiled from a list of closed institutions maintained by Mr. Ray Brown on a personal webpage

Why do college personnel have the opinion that we are in bad times? I think it is due to the fact that generally many of us in higher education administration experienced the good times and growing enrollments during the golden ages of the 1980’s and first half of the 1990’s. During these years, we grew comfortable in our kettle. We are like the crab or lobster that grew comfortable in the pot that was slowing coming to a boil. When we finally realized that the water was hot, we started clawing frantically to find a way out of the kettle.  Compared to the 1980’s, the last several years have been a famine. Given the actual number of college closings so far this decade, it appears that we are surviving the famine and the hot water. However, before we get too cocky, we need to remember that for every year of small entering classes, it takes four years of plenty to fill up the store house again; plus the conditions that brought about the famine have not improved and may even be getting worse. If we think about the dust-bowl conditions in Middle America during the 1930’s, some of those areas are still not fertile enough to yield significant crops. Am I suggesting that we are heading into an educational dust bowl? Not if we are cognizant of the dangers and act appropriately.

We can analyze school closings. What we don’t have is good data on the number of individual programs or degree offerings that have been shut down. I think it would be an interesting study to analyze program closings. Even for colleges that do not close, college administrators and faculty members are very worried about flat enrollment or enrollment declines. Without enrollment increases, the new buildings, the new programs and new equipment, and salary increases are not going to happen. I believe that the reason for this is the fact that U.S. higher education is using a revenue plan that is doomed to failure. To my brothers and sisters in the academy, I don’t apologize for thinking of higher education as a business. For forty years, I have been very thankful that the paycheck at the end of the month cleared the bank. I was also very thankful when I saw that the medical insurance premiums had been paid for another month. To provide the revenue for these items, colleges have to act as if they are businesses that provide a service in exchange for revenue. They have to sell something. What do colleges sell? I am pleased to say that most colleges do not sell degrees. What they sell are credit hours. Credit hours are the pricing mechanism used by most colleges. Credit hours are also the base for faculty wages. What’s the problem with this? How do you increase revenue? There are essentially five ways to increase revenues in this format.

  1. Sell more credit hours by increasing enrollment
  2. Sell more credit hours by making the current students take more credit hours
  3. Charge more per credit hour
  4. Pay faculty less by reducing wages per credit hour
  5. Pay faculty less by becoming more efficient in offering more credit hours for the same pay as now.

 

In the current climate, it is highly unlikely that the general public will take kindly to options 1 through 3. Options 4 and 5 will be fought by faculty members that believe they are already underpaid and overworked.

In the face of these prospects, there has been the growth of a second educational industry (sound familiar?). The Sloan Consortium which conducts an annual survey of online education in the U.S. reported in their 2008 report entitled, “Staying the Course,” that more than two-thirds of all U.S. accredited institutions offered some online education in 2007, with almost 4 million students taking at least one online course. This is more than twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students, eerily similar to the automotive industry numbers. It also represented more than a 12 percent increase over the number taking online courses in the fall of 2006. This rate of growth is more than 10 times the growth rate of the number of students taking on-ground courses in U.S. higher education institutions. Many proprietary institutions are prospering, as well as the online educational operations of public flagship universities and many residential liberal arts colleges. Why? They are providing a product at a reasonable price in a fairly convenient format for a public that does not believe the premium that the residential liberal arts colleges and flagship universities are charging is worth the difference in price. I think we should be taking seriously the question raised by Joseph Marr Cronin and Howard E. Horton in their May 22, 2009 Commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?”

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What does higher education have in common with the watch industry, the chocolate industry and toilet paper manufacturers?

What Can Higher Education Learn From the Watch Industry, the Chocolate Industry and the Toilet Paper Industry?

Bayard Baylis

Many in higher education do not believe that higher education can’t learn anything from any industry since they do not believe that education is an industry. I believe higher education is a very special industry that focuses on knowledge and learning. As such we in higher education have a responsibility to learn as much as we can from any source. We can learn much from these industries and endeavors. Recently, there have been a number of comparisons made between higher education and the automotive industry and the housing boom. I have written one comparing higher education and the automotive industry that is available as another part of this blog.

From the appearance of the first clock in Sumeria around 5000 BC, clock development appeared to be proceeding at a snail’s pace until the 14th century, when large mechanical clocks started to appear in Europe. For the next 300 years clock development slowed to a crawl again until the beginning of the 17th century when Peter Henlein, a scientist from Nuremberg, came up with a design for clocks based upon the use of wound springs, which oscillated at a precise rate. Henlein’s design of a wound spring allowed for small clocks that could be carried by individuals, thus by 1680 people were carrying pocket watches. Over the next century better materials and better production methodologies, driven by the needs of soldiers for a hands-free time device, lead to the creation of the wrist watch. Over the next two centuries, without any major changes in design, the accuracy of clocks was increased to one second per day.  The next major change in clock design occurred in the 1920s when oscillation of quartz crystals was used to generate an electric signal and operate an electronic clock display. Scientific advances of the 1930s and 1940s made possible clocks built on the vibrations of atoms excited by electromagnetic waves.

From 1950 to 1980, there were two competing camps in wrist watch production. The first was the mechanical wrist watch design. The second was the electronic watch. Several manufacturers decided to stay with the centuries old design and manufacturing pattern. They believed that  they had a loyal customer base who were willing to pay the higher price for a high quality, hand-crafted time piece that could also be considered a piece of fine jewelry. Doesn’t this sound like higher education, particularly residential, liberal arts colleges? What customer would want a digital display? Didn’t watches have to have a face with hands? Why would people want to change? So the manufacturers didn’t. Their market share held up for a while, but eventually the electronic watches, even with those strange digital displays, overtook the traditional watches with faces and hands. In order to stay viable, many of the older, established watch companies had to start making both kinds of watches.  Even today, there are still people who appreciate and want a prestige watch piece and are willing to pay the price for such a hand-crafted watch. The customers who choose this option can’t say it is for accuracy because the electronic models are more accurate. It is a decision that is based on other factors.

What lessons can we learn from the watch manufacturers? The first lesson is that we need to be open to and continually looking for new ways of doing what we do, particularly ways that are very different from the current way of doing it. Incremental design changes will most likely only make incremental changes in results. To make large changes we have to look for significant design changes. Why is this important for higher education? I would propose that many people inside and most outside of higher education believe that we can do much better in the education of college students. Having done the same thing for a hundred years with the same results, why should we expect a different result if we continue to follow this pattern with only small changes?

The second lesson from the watch manufacturers is that if we are not willing to change we may not have the opportunity to continue to do it the old way. What the traditional watch manufacturers were doing was making art. The product was a piece of art. However, the new design watches and new manufacturers were challenging the market share and viability of the traditional companies. A number of traditional companies decided to go with dual processes and dual products so that they could continue the work of the artisans within the company and still supply the loyal, traditional customers with the traditional product that they wanted.

The third lesson is that we can’t always dictate what the public will want and what the public will purchase. Another way of stating this third lesson is that it is just not all about us. We do need to consider the needs and desires of the individuals we are or should be serving. IS higher education ready to accept this? What did the public want from watches? The traditionalists in the watch manufacturers could not understand how the general public would want or buy the strange new watches. Some of them didn’t even have hands. They had digital displays. They were not works of art. What was the general public telling the watch manufacturers? Art was not the most important thing in the minds of the public. They wanted an inexpensive instrument that would provide them with the time of day. An inexpensive digital display was more than sufficient to do that. What is the general public telling higher education? I believe they are telling us that they want an inexpensive credential that will open the doors to new or better jobs. We had not convinced them that knowing how to think would be important to them and to society as a whole.

What’s so special about chocolate? Almost everyone remembers the famous line from Forrest Gump, “My Mama always said that, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.’” Is Education like a box of chocolates? It is fairly obvious that we can’t predict exactly what is going to happen to each student as he or she goes through the educational process.

What can higher education learn from the chocolate industry? Have you ever walked down Bay Street in San Francisco, CA toward Ghirardelli Square and the Ghirardelli Ice Cream and Chocolate Manufactory? Several blocks from Ghirardelli Square, you can smell a sweet aroma that you can almost taste. Have you ever walked down Chocolate Avenue in Hershey, PA? You can smell a sweet aroma that is similar to but still different from the aroma in San Francisco. The difference in aromas is not the biggest difference between Ghirardelli and Hershey chocolate. The two companies use different marketing approaches and different pricing structures. They use different recipes and different processes to manufacture their chocolate. However, to truly appreciate the difference you have to taste it.  The difference in flavors from the chocolate of the two companies is easily detected. The two companies represent a truly bifurcated industry. Ghirardelli can be taken as a representative of companies like Dove, Cadbury, Godiva and other gourmet chocolate makers. Hershey can be taken as a representative of companies like Mars, Nestle and other chocolate candy makers. The gourmet chocolate makers do not attempt to infiltrate the customer base of the chocolate candy makers. The gourmet chocolate makers know they can’t compete on price and with some people in terms of the taste. The chocolate candy makers for the most part do not attempt to produce gourmet chocolate. It is not what they are known for. Production of gourmet chocolate would be too expensive. Their customer base would not pay for gourmet chocolate. For example, I greatly enjoy a Cadbury cream filled chocolate egg; however, one of my daughters when she was growing up would not touch a Cadbury egg. She much preferred a Nestle chocolate egg in her Easter basket. Our other daughter was turned onto Dove chocolate at an early age and would turn up her nose to regular chocolate candy in favor of the smooth taste and consistency of the Dove chocolate. To her the difference in taste was well-worth the difference in price, even when she was spending her own money.

Higher education is a bifurcated industry. Prestigious, residential liberal arts colleges are expensive and almost universally considered high quality. As suggested by Charles Murray in his book “Real Education” and a number of other higher education writers in a November 8, 2009, Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled, “Are Too Many Students Going to College?”, the residential liberal arts colleges are beyond the academic reach of 85% or more of American high school graduates. These authors are not suggesting that these students give up on college altogether. They are suggesting that the residential liberal arts college model is not the most appropriate model for them. What models are appropriate? The authors are suggesting the local community colleges and smaller comprehensive colleges and universities with technical and developmental programs are less costly and more appropriate options. These authors are not suggesting a decrease of access to quality academic programs for qualified students, but to use academic intelligence and not economic status as a guide to opening the door to higher education. This seems to be consistent with the historical record from ancient Greece. No students, regardless of economic status, were excluded from the educational process. However, the ancient Greeks were academic elitists and seemed to be very strict in their use of academic ability as a measuring stick. Students at a very early age were evaluated. For those who didn’t have the ability to meet minimum requirements were sent off to the guilds to learn a trade. At about age 17, only students with the highest academic qualifications were permitted to continue to the highest form of academic pursuits, the reflective pursuit of theoretical knowledge. Students who did not meet these standards were sent off to military or public service options.

If we look at the chocolate candy industry, we would conclude that the residential, liberal arts colleges and the comprehensive institutions need to “stick to their knitting” and not try to interject themselves into the other’s prime market. Comprehensive institutions, particularly commuter-based institutions, are not well set up to engage in residential liberal arts education in terms of curricula and pedagogy. To switch would be very expensive and time-consuming, with no guarantee of positive results. For these institutions, many of their students are not ready for or open to the different type of education.

So far in this essay I have tried to use common industries and products to help us learn what’s happening in higher education. For my third common product, I wanted to find a product that was a universal product. It had to be available everywhere. I wanted a product that had a distribution system that was effective, efficient and economical. I also wanted a product for which the distribution system had changed drastically from its original form because, in its original form, the distribution system could not keep up with the demand for the product. One obvious choice is toilet paper.

What is the history of toilet paper? Toilet paper seems to have originated in China in the 15th century. Large 2 feet by 3 feet sheets of scented paper were produced for the use of the emperor to clean himself. Sheets of this size are obviously not practical for mass production or wide-spread distribution of the product. By the end of the 16th century, the invention of the flushing toilet and the improvements in community sewers and private septic systems sparked the need for more practical disposable paper cleaners. It was not uncommon for people  to use newspapers and other written material. By the middle of the 19th century perforated rolls of soft paper became available in the USA.  Paper in this form is now universally available and consistent throughout all of the USA and much of the world.

What’s this got to do with education? What are many students seeking from education? I believe that for many students their most important desire is to obtain credentials. How do students obtain credentials? They accumulate the credit hours that colleges are selling. Many students have questions about the cost, convenience and quality of the credentials that are available to them in the current format.

If colleges and universities do not address the concerns of students who wish to obtain credentials, then students will go to other vendors where they can get credentials more conveniently and more economically. If colleges and universities are to be a force in providing credentials to students, they must find ways to distribute appropriate credentials in ways that are effective, efficient and economical. The current means of credential distribution do not seem to be doing this. Colleges and universities must look to possibly new and very different distribution means, just like the toilet paper industry had to come up with a very different approach, going from individual sheets of paper to rolls of perforated paper. What will be the paper roll equivalent in college credentialing?

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Living with Aphasia and Epilepsy –

Living with Epilepsy and Aphasia – June 13
This has been a good week and a bad week. Oops, I think someone has already started a story something like that (What was it? “These are the best of times and the worst of times.”)
I won’t say the best of times, but it started out as a good week. I have been getting around so well recently without many balance problems that my wife decided that she could trust me at home alone for an hour while she went out to run an errand. (Oops, home alone; again didn’t someone else use that phrase first? Are all the good phrases already used? Isn’t there anything new under the sun? But didn’t Solomon already ask that question?). My maiden solo voyage started out wonderfully. I stayed upstairs at my computer and didn’t try to go downstairs.
Then came the bad part. (“Not the worst of times, not the season of darkness, not the winter of despair” but more like a thunder-storm at the end of a sunny day.) When I am sitting at my computer, I have a tendency to revert to my pre-incident days of fiddling with the computer and changing settings. This time I was having trouble reading the small print in emails and web articles, so I thought I will just enlarge the images on the screen. Well, I found the instructions on how to do that and after several attempts of trying to follow those instructions, WHOA, I got larger images. Be careful what you ask for! (Did someone beat me to that one, too?) The images were now so large that pages such as my email list or calendar spilled off the page. Even my desktop was too big for one screen. I thought, if I did this, I can undo it. Wrong. Trying to follow the instructions to change the size of images didn’t work this time. And somewhere in the fray, some short cuts to programs disappeared from my desktop. I even tried using the program listing format of desktop, and as far as I can tell the programs are gone from my computer. They were nowhere to be found. I was able to find Outlook, Internet Explorer, Word, Excel and Debrief, so I thought I can at least continue working on my email correspondence, diary, educational essays, blog and twitter accounts. Not so fast. Because the screen images are now supersized, the save button is no longer visible at the bottom of the screen. That meant that I had to work around and through the two “Save” options available within the task bar at the top of the screen, since I like to save redrafts with a different name than the original. I can’t use a straight forward “Save.” I need to use “Save as.” The help function was of no help because the help button got supersized off the right-hand edge of the screen. I usually keep several copies of essays so that I can go back to previous editions or drafts to see the progression of thought in the essays or email drafts. I find this very helpful in my journey of learning how to write again.
I have to remember that my ability to follow directions (my wife will tell you that it was never great) is now less than spectacular. I need someone behind me or right along beside me, slapping my hand and saying you shouldn’t do that when I try to do something with a very involved set of directions. I don’t seem to have the willpower to monitor and control myself in that way. This reminds me of what my physical therapist kept trying to pound into my head as we worked through my balance tests and exercises. The whole time standing next to me, she would say, “To improve, you need to stretch the envelope safely.” I told her that a light bulb was burnt out in my office and I was thinking about stretching the envelope by getting out a step stool and changing the bulb. She quickly injected, “No, you are not. You are not ready for ladders yet.”
Next week I will relate my travails with my cell phone and PDA, but that will have to wait. Maybe by next week, I will have the computer and the cell phone figured out or I will have found someone who can help me. From what I have found so far, it appears that the PDA is going to be a whole different can of worms (or is it kettle of fish?).
Each year, congress passes a resolution that designates June as National Aphasia Awareness Month to support efforts to increase the awareness of aphasia. June 2010 is National Aphasia Awareness Month. Check the National Aphasia Association http://www.aphasia.org/ website for information about events in your area.

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Full-TIme Faculty as a Minority

Full-Time Faculty as a Minority
“By” Baylis
I am very surprised that I have not seen the avalanche of typical articles that appear each year decrying the decline in the percentage of full-time faculty within the academy. This past week beginning June 3, a conference entitled, “Reinventing the American University, The Promise of Innovation in Higher Education,” was held without much fanfare in Washington, DC. When I looked at the proposed agenda (available at http://www.aei.org/event/100218#doc), I thought to myself this could be a great conference. Speakers were addressing the topic of the American University from many different directions. Some speakers and sessions proposed returning to the era of full-time, tenured faculty as the norm. Some speakers and sessions proposed other models as normative. I think the conference planners intentionally tried to present all sides of the story.
Every time I see a headline or an article about full-time faculty becoming a minority, as a statistician and administrator, I want to yell, “How are you counting faculty and what is the most important thing in education?” Aren’t we supposed to be concerned the most about student learning? Most of the arguments that I have seen about full-time faculty becoming a minority are based strictly on head counts of faculty. How many people are employed as full-time faculty and how many people are employed as part-time faculty? What would happen if, instead of looking at this from the faculty perspective, we looked at this from the students’ perspective? Who are the students actually seeing in the front of their classes? What do I mean?
All of my 40 years in higher education have been spent in private small to medium size institutions, where the average annual credit load for faculty was 24 credits. Courses were predominantly 3 credits. The data from one school in particular illustrates what I am trying to say. Because courses did not all have the same number of credits assigned to them, the average number of sections per semester taught by full-time faculty was 4.2 but still with an average credit load per semester of 12. We did employ adjunct faculty with the average number of sections taught by adjuncts at 1.2 sections per semester, and an average credit load of 2.8 credits per semester.
There are two ways to measure how much teaching faculty members are doing. These are the number of sections taught and the number of credit hours generated. Neither of these really gets at the question of how much students are learning. To get at the answer to this question, we will have to dig deeper into the assessment of student learning. This is something that the academy as a whole has been reluctant to do, whether because of cost or difficulty.
Returning to the question of who are students actually seeing in front of their classes, two different years at the same institution will illustrate what I am trying to say. The first year, we had 107 full-time faculty members and 125 adjuncts. That’s a 46% to 54% ratio. Thus the full-time faculty was in the minority according to headcount. However, at an average load of 4.2 sections per semester, the full-time faculty taught 75% of the sections, while the adjuncts taught 25% of the sections. The typical student on average would see a full-time faculty member in front of his or her class 75% of the time. The next year, we were able to hire another 7 full-time faculty. We offered the same number of sections the second year. By maintaining the same average load of 4.2 sections per semester, we covered 80% of the sections by full-time faculty. Under these circumstances, we were able to eliminate 25 adjuncts and still cover everything we needed to cover. With 25 fewer adjuncts and 7 more full-time faculty members, the ratio of full-time faculty to adjuncts was reversed to 53% to 47%. Under these conditions we had 20% of the sections covered by adjuncts. Thus, a typical student had a full-time faculty member in front of his or her class 80% of the time. If we looked at this question from the perspective of credits generated, this particular year the full-time faculty generated 78% of the credits earned by students. The primary reason this percentage was so high was that we intentionally kept adjuncts out of the large entry-level course sections. Adjuncts did teach some entry-level courses, but these courses had smaller section size.
At the same school, when it adopted a slightly more generous course release policy for full-time faculty, the average number of sections covered by full-time faculty dropped to 3.8 per semester. Under these conditions, we found that we needed to hire 19 more full-time faculty members to maintain the suggested guideline that we adopted of having 80% of sections covered by full-time faculty. It also meant that, to maintain the same 20% of the sections covered by adjuncts, we found that we had to maintain the same adjunct count as we had the year before. These changes meant that the ratio of full-time faculty to adjuncts was 60% to 40%. This change increased the faculty salary budget by $1,400,000 per year which the school was able to afford that one year only because admissions had a great year and brought in 100 more students than the budget was based on. But these 100 more students had a ramification in the number of students faculty had in each class. Keeping the same number of sections offered as the previous year, the average class size increased by 6, so the typical full-time faculty member was teaching almost 24 more students per semester than he or she had done before. Because of this increase the full-time faculty generated 85% of the credits generated that year.
I was asked what it would cost to have all full-time faculty members with the same average sectional load of 3.8 per semester. I calculated that this would require the hiring of an additional 32 full-time faculty members in order to eliminate all adjuncts. When I calculated the cost of this proposal, it turned out it would add more than an additional $1,600,000 per year to the budget, which was more than this school could afford since you cannot count on great admission years, year after year.
Having achieved one round of increased release time, the faculty pushed for another round of increased release time that would have made the average semester sectional load for a full-time faculty member, 3.2 sections per semester. If we held to the suggested guideline that 80% of sections taught were to be taught by full-time faculty, it would require an additional 24 full-time faculty and no additional adjuncts. This would have resulted in a 56% to 44% full-time faculty to part-time faculty ratio. The budget impact of this decision would have been an increase of $1,800,000 per year. Since that cost estimate was so great, the faculty did not push for an all full-time faculty with average semester load of 3.2 sections. This would have required an additional 38 full-time faculty with an increase of more than $2,000,000 per year to the salary budget.
When somebody decries the fact that full-time faculty members are in the minority, they almost always appear to be talking about absolute head counts and not the number of sections taught by full-time faculty versus the number of sections taught by adjuncts. There is a big difference. However, I will admit that teaching is not the only contractual contact that faculty members have with students. What happens to advising loads when the number of adjuncts grows above 50%? It depends upon how the advising system is configured. At the above school we had an advising office with specialists for all first-year students and for second-year undecided students. Students beyond their first year that declared a major, which represented 67% of the student body, were assigned a full-time faculty member in that area. Under the 46% to 54% full-time to adjunct ratio, we had an average advising load of 18 students per faculty member. The next year when the ratio switched to 53% to 47% of full-time to adjuncts, the average advising load dropped to 16 students per faculty member. The following year, when the ratio of full-time to adjunct faculty was 60% to 40%, the average advising load dropped to 14 students per faculty member. There is no straight linear function between the average advising load and the number of full-time faculty because the number of first-year and undecided second-year students changes each year. If the institution had adopted the all full-time faculty policy and maintain the advising center for all first-year students and undeclared second-year students, the average advising load per faculty member would have been approximately 10 students. However, since advisors were assigned by discipline, some faculty would have been assigned fewer than 5 advisees and some faculty would have been assigned more than 25 advisees. Individual faculty members would have seen very little reduction in the number of advisees assigned to them. Because of all the variables involved, such as the number of students, the number of majors, and the disciplines in which the students major and the disciplines in which adjuncts are used, the average advising load numbers will vary from institution to institution and from year to year at a given institution.
Some programs are helped by having adjuncts instead of all full-time faculty members. Music is a program with so many sub-disciplines and instruments in which students can study or concentrate that an institution can’t afford a full-time faculty member for each instrument. Even at a large institution, there may only be three or four oboists enrolled at one time. Teaching these three or four students will not be a full-time load. At a smaller institution, there may be only one or two oboists, enrolled at one time. Nursing is another area where adjuncts are very useful, and for smaller institutions, a necessity. Clinical instructors must be active nurses, so unless the institution has its own hospital, it must hire practicing nurses as adjuncts to cover the hospital clinical that nurses must complete.
In conclusion, when the cry goes up from full-time faculty about the decline in their numbers, let’s ask, “What is the real complaint?”

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Living with Aphasia: Words Are More Like Cats Than Dogs

Words are more like Cats than Dogs

A Commentary on Aphasia

Bayard (“By”) Baylis

Aphasia is an acquired communications disorder usually as a result of a stroke or a brain injury.  It strikes approximately 100,000 Americans each year. It is more prevalent than Parkinson’s disease, but fewer people are aware of it, and fewer still familiar with it. It affects different people differently. In my case, I have difficulty in remembering words on call, and in following arguments and directions, especially verbally. I need to see something in writing to be able to digest it slowly. For someone whose life revolved around the use of words and arguments this has been difficult. The following essay is my attempt to describe what it’s like trying to work with words and arguments suffering with a mild case of aphasia.

Due to a medical episode in March, 2009 and the onset of a mild case of aphasia, I have come to the realization that words are more like cats than they are like dogs. Cats are independent and dogs are dependent. One wag put it this way: “Dogs think they are people. Cats know they are better than people.” Dogs come to you when you call them. Cats come to you when they want to come to you. That is a perfect description of words to someone who is suffering with aphasia. Words come to you when they want to come. They don’t come to you necessarily when you call them.

Aphasia can be an insidious condition. Neurologists call it a deficit. People suffering from it lack the ability to find or remember the right words on demand. Much of the time the only person that recognizes that you are suffering from it is yourself.  You know what you are thinking and trying to say, but you just can’t find the right word to express your thoughts. You go ahead and say something that still makes sense but it is not quite exactly what you wanted to say. Because you are carrying on a rational conversation, the person to whom you are talking has no idea about the battle that is going on in your mind. It is a battle of wills. It is a battle of your will against the will of the words that are locked in the recesses of your mind. Words are acting like cats and are not coming to you when you call them. Hours or days later the right word comes to you, but it is too late to put a perfect end on that argument in which you were engaged.

Arguments are like geometric solids. You should be able to pick them up and look at the various facets of an argument, just like you can pick up a geometric solid and look at the various sides of the solid.  The person who is suffering from aphasia has difficulty in doing that, at least that is what I have found in my case. In addition to not being able to find the right word to use in a particular setting, I have had difficulty in understanding how particular words used by others fit into the argument that they are trying to establish.

The human brain is a marvelous entity. Now, there is an example of what I have been trying to say. “Entity” is not quite the word that I want to use, but I can’t find the right word so it will have to do.  How do words get into the storehouse of the brain? How do we learn new words? That question has been around in one form or another for more than 2500 years. Confucius answered this way: “What I read, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.” Words become part of our usable vocabulary as we use them repeatedly. What is happening in the brain? Every time we use a word, either a new synaptic connection is built, or an existing one is strengthened. What appears to be happening with aphasia is that something is interfering with those synaptic connections. Part of what is marvelous about the brain is that when one route is broken, the brain constructs another route. For dog lovers among the readers of this, “There is always more than one way to skin a cat.”

How am I learning to cope with aphasia? I remember an old joke, the throw-in line from a television commercial, and a piece of advice that my Babe Ruth baseball coach kept repeating and repeating. The old joke is the one about a young musician standing on a street corner in New York City with a violin case in hand. He asks an elderly gentlemen seated in the bus stop pavilion, “Excuse me, sir. How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The elderly gentlemen seeing the violin case, replies wryly, “Practice, practice, practice.”  You may have seen the television commercial in which an amateur softball shortstop makes a few attempts at fielding ground balls and flipping the ball to second base to start a double play.  The amateur shortstop gets it right once and an announcer says, “Amateur athletes practice till they get it right.” The scene fades out and in fades the scene of a very recognizable professional shortstop.  He is taking ground balls and throwing them toward second base to start a double play. The announcer then says, “Professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.”

In music, and athletics, it is universally accepted that to succeed, you must practice. In education, there is a debate about how much practice and repetition is good for students. However, research in cognitive science clearly shows that for new skills and knowledge to become second nature, sustained practice beyond the point of mastery is imperative. There are three keys to remember in this statement. The first key is that to obtain mastery in a new skill or knowledge it is necessary that we must learn through practice. One undeniable aspect of practice is time on task. We must spend time doing it. How long does the professional musician spend practicing? How long do the top college basketball teams practice? Coach Izzo, from Michigan State University, is known for his foul shooting prowess and the demands on his players to be able to shoot free throws. Coach Izzo has been known to make more than 100 consecutive foul shots. How did he get to be that proficient? When he was a high school player, he missed a foul shot that could have propelled his team to a state title. He vowed that he would never be in that position again. In his spare time, he began shooting foul shots and would not quit until he made 25 in a row consistently. When he reached that plateau, he upped the number to 50, and so on. When he became a coach, he “challenged” his players to do the same. Practice, practice, practice!

So, practice makes perfect. Not exactly. The second key is that through our practice, we must reach the point of mastery. It is not enough to just practice. I don’t think that I will ever forget my Babe Ruth League baseball coach. We practiced twice a week for several hours each. He would spend the first 30 minutes of each practice session teaching us skills. The next 30 minutes were spent going over skills that we learned in previous practices. The remaining 60 to 90 minutes of practice were spent in batting practice or in running through game situations. However, no matter where we were in the practice, if one of us made either a physical or mental mistake, Coach would stop practice right then. If the mistake was mental, he would ask the involved individual what he did and what should he have done. If the mistake was physical, Coach would stop practice and have us repeat the action. We would repeat it until we got it right several times in a row. I don’t think I can count the number of times that we heard Coach say, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.”

The third key for new knowledge or skills to become second nature is sustained practice beyond the point of mastery. The concert pianist practices a piece until she can play it without thinking. The fingers just go to the right keys by themselves. She’s done with that piece, right? No! If she wants to maintain that piece in her repertoire, she must continue to practice it. I remember very well a conversation I had with a concert pianist that I had asked to become chair of a music department. After three years in the job, the individual asked to be relieved of the position. This individual was doing a great job as chair, so I asked why give it up. The answer was very quick and to the point. Not enough practice time. Instead of eight hours a day, the pianist could now only find two to four hours per day to practice. That was not enough to maintain perfection in the pianist’s repertoire. Sustained practice beyond the point of mastery is the key to success in the concert arena.

Time on task! Perfect practice makes perfect! Am I just talking about music or athletics? No. I am also not just talking about those disciplines that are considered practical or skill-oriented. I am talking about learning in general. Richard Light, a Harvard professor, in his book Making the Most of College, asks the question, “What is the difference between the typical Harvard student and the typical community college student?” His answer may not agree with your intuition. He said that the primary difference is not innate ability. He suggested that there were two significant differences. The first was the expectation of necessary study time. Most Harvard students come to college expecting to study many hours a week. The second difference was that most Harvard students spent the number of hours studying that they had expected to spend. Learning is important to typical Harvard students. They spend the time necessary to learn.

In terms of my aphasia, I must spend time with words. I must use them over and over again. I must find new words or forgotten words and use them correctly.  Perfect practice makes perfect!  What kind of practice? I find cross-word puzzles helpful. I find reading helpful. However, the most helpful exercise is writing. In writing, I have to find that right word by digging around in the cluttered closets of my mind.  I must use words until I am comfortable with them and they are comfortable with me. Just like cats, they must want to come to me and stay with me.