Interestingly, Lombardi was president of UF Gainesville before he went on to U Mass and beyond.  It was during his presidency here (if I recall) that the state university began to be transformed into a business along the corporate model.  He also developed what some refer to as the Lombardi criteria for measuring and ranking the quality of research universities ....  basically produce, produce, and keep producing measurable outcomes that are quantifiable and highly competitive academically. Also, lots of funding and PR for football and competitive sports.  'Go, Gators!' was one of his favorite expressions.  Students loved him and some faculty were appalled.
-- Ofelia

________________________________

From: Feminist ethics and social theory on behalf of Lynne Tirrell
Sent: Sat 5/31/2008 2:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Mentoring: tenure track & adjunct


Dear FEAST folks,

Thank you Shea for pushing for the mentoring program. My life has been made better by my own mentors, Claudia Card and Annette Baier, each of whom taught me (undergrad and grad, respectively) and then stuck with me. To them I am deeply, deeply grateful for my professional life and also all the personal dimensions that my professional life makes possible. Many women in philosophy who I know have had some strong women behind her, but I also know some who never had that fortune. So setting this up through FEAST will create more possibilities, and I applaud the prospect.

There are many different kinds of faculty positions out there, and many ways of being a professor.  I fought for tenure (and got it) at a top-10 grad program and left anyway.  My professional life is much less charmed than it would have been if I stayed, but it is also much more charmed and more secure than many. No one who is supporting the mentoring proposal thinks it is one-size fits all, and make that an elite size please...So we need to start by recognizing that effective mentoring will likely require good match-making. At first any match might be a great improvement, but with fine-tuning this program has the potential to make some matches that would work well. 

Please read the excellent op-ed piece written by John Lombardi, formerly chancellor at U Mass Amherst and now at LSU, which addresses changes in faculty work life. Many of these changes are at the root of some of the comments made here, and they effect everyone, not just adjuncts. He presents his analysis without much commentary, just as the observations of someone who has been around a long time and seen changes in administration during his career. Here is the link:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/blogs/reality_check/deconstructing_faculty_work

My department has a significant number of adjunct faculty, many of whom have been with us for decades. They are dedicated teachers and many make very strong contributions to the curriculum and to the life of the department. Some just teach with us and move on to their next set of classes, at one of the many Boston schools, because they need to do that to make a living. Few do any research, and few do service (such as sitting on the various and often tedious committees that make the school run). Some fell into careers as adjuncts for a variety reasons, and some chose it as a preferred life than the tenure track with its research requirements. At my university, adjuncts are part of the union bargaining unit, get benefits, and have better compensation than at most places. Just the same, their work lives are not the same as the work lives of tenured and tenure track faculty.

Research is a key component of tenured and tenure track faculty life, and I think this is where the major difference lies. Research, particularly peer-reviewed research, is where one's philosophical work comes under the scrutiny of the profession. Professional level scrutiny is very different than the scrutiny of students. We all know this. My students, for example, are a very world-savvy bunch and will not let me get away with theory that tramples their reality. They speak (en masse) over 90 different languages at home, almost half are first generation college students, and only about half are with us straight from high school. 
What they will accept without argument is very different from what my colleagues will accept without argument. I like having these two different sets of interlocutors. But I digress, the point is that writing for peer-review, and the peer-review that assistants must go through at tenure puts a kind of professional scrutiny on their work that many adjuncts avoid. Also, the peer-review of tenure is actually misleading, because the outside referees are people at much more advanced career stages, often at more elite schools. They are people whose CVs will impress deans, provosts, chancellors, presidents, and trustees. They are also doing a very time-consuming and mind-wracking job, for no pay, as a service to the profession. In hard cases, the best of them lose sleep and worry every word.  There is a lot of invisible service that these "elite" faculty are doing.

At my school, tenure decisions are made on the evaluation of the candidate's research, teaching, and service, and she/he must show excellence in two of those three areas and at least strength in the third. These are the rules. What counts as fitting the rules is where judgment steps in, and experience makes a difference. Faculty who are not practicing in all three areas on a regular basis lose track of those areas in significant ways. This can happen post-tenure, of course, but the working lives of adjuncts often (not always!) make teaching the sine qua non and research falls away. The issues adjuncts face in maintaining employment are quite different from the issues assistant professors face. 

Beauvior said that "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of  our life that we must find our strength to live and our reasons for acting." We must start with understanding the genuine conditions of each life. Not all working lives are the same.  It is probably easiest to give and get advice from people who are living working lives similar to your own, but insofar as our lives overlap, there is always room for conversation. In my department, we all talk about teaching, and our adjuncts have some good insights for the assistant professors about how to be efficient and effective. But when it comes to the research that will make or break your claim to tenure, you need a tenured professor for advice. You need someone who has been through the process, has sat on tenure committees, and even better if she has sat on College-wide and University-wide committees, to understand how the next level works.

So my main suggestion is this: the mentoring program should be sensitive to the kinds of places where folks work, and try to pair like-to-like where possible. If resources (mentors) are abundant, then maybe each mentee could have both a like and an unlike mentor. 

Finally, maybe more senior members of the list could share some good and bad advice we got. Here's one:

Their advice:  Several colleagues at my first (grad research U) job told me that it would do me no good and in fact waste my time to get to know faculty in other departments. What I needed to do was concentrate on philosophy. 
My advice: Try to make friends in other departments, and be sure to make friends who are at your career stage and beyond. Network. It gives you a bigger world and your department won't define the university. Don't lose track of your discipline and your own research projects, of course, but getting to know folks in allied fields is a plus. In my case, women's studies, law school, and anthropology faculty were key supports for me.

Please read the Lombardi piece and the comments that are appended by others. 

Best wishes FEASTies,

Lynne Tirrell


________________________________

Lynne Tirrell
Associate Professor of Philosophy
U Mass Boston