Having once worked at a small, rurally-located institution where foreign-born faculty hires often lasted only a year or two before leaving, I thought this was interesting:
https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/08/01/small-college-towns-can-be-unsuited-some-faculty-members-diverse-backgrounds (https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/08/01/small-college-towns-can-be-unsuited-some-faculty-members-diverse-backgrounds).
I agree completely. We struggle with dual career couples especially. We are pretty reasonable about accommodating people who live in Major City about 1.5 hrs away.
That said, I don't consider Champaign-Urbana to be a small, rural town. Last I checked, it had 150k residents. Sometimes "big city" people overlook the opportunities in smaller cities. I grew up in Pittsburgh and have lived in Phoenix, so I have some points of comparison.
Quote from: spork on August 01, 2019, 03:46:56 AM
Having once worked at a small, rurally-located institution where foreign-born faculty hires often lasted only a year or two before leaving, I thought this was interesting:
https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/08/01/small-college-towns-can-be-unsuited-some-faculty-members-diverse-backgrounds (https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/08/01/small-college-towns-can-be-unsuited-some-faculty-members-diverse-backgrounds).
If you come from a mid-sized Chinese city, is Tampa really better than Champaign-Urbana? In either case it is a big adjustment. The latter would provide more opportunity to build the desirable cultural institutions.
Quote from: pgher on August 01, 2019, 04:38:58 AM
That said, I don't consider Champaign-Urbana to be a small, rural town. Last I checked, it had 150k residents. Sometimes "big city" people overlook the opportunities in smaller cities. I grew up in Pittsburgh and have lived in Phoenix, so I have some points of comparison.
If Urbana-Champaign is a small, rural, non-diverse town, then some states have 0 to 2 cities and there are no words left to describe my preferred living conditions where the hour trip to visit the booming metropolis with 10 000 people is done once a month or so for things that are harder to mail order. Urbana and Champaign are listed by Wikipedia as being only 67% Caucasian, which is pretty unusual for Illinois outside of Chicago and the St. Louis suburbs. The engineering student population and faculty contributes to the 10% Asian demographic. I would be very surprised if people from a world-mainstream religious sect were unable to find a religious home there.
Yes, if someone really wants to live in Chicago, NYC, LA, or Boston, then even Albuquerque or Reno is going to feel small and not diverse. I mention them specifically because I've heard that assertion from people who really wanted to go back to Boston, NYC, and LA. I've heard people complain about how small and provincial DC is compared to their preferred NYC or London.
When one is really wedded to a particular type of living, then that's the point at which someone may need to make some tough decisions about what they really want to do with their life. A bigger metropolitan area will have more job options for someone who really prefers that city than a true small, rural college town where the students are half the town when classes are in session and never does the population of the area go above 10 000.
From the article:
Quote
As colleges and universities work to increase diversity in hiring and course offerings, they don't always realize that the small, welcoming communities they believe make up local town life are unsuited to or lack amenities for the faculty members whom they are hiring. Whether Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Baha'i, black, brown, LGBTQ or otherwise, faculty members may not find a place of worship or a community of significant size in a small college town two hours from a larger city.
And they may not find a Starbucks, or a 24 hour grocery store, or a million other things. For anyone who grew up rural, they've heard this same kind of lament from WASP city-dwellers for generations. This has less to do with diversity than with the urban/rural cultural divide. ( I would guess people of diverse backgrounds who grew up in rural areas in other countries would find the adaptation process easier.)
Part of the issue may be the degree of welcome afforded non-WASP-y, multi-racial individuals who profess an other-than(?Judeo)-Christian faith, however poorly that faith system is manifested in local inhabitants' lives, or however concretely/incorrectly they judge the validity of other confessions.
I can't open the article on this phone, will read and check back in if I find myself wrong, but my sense is that it's more likely the (sadly, accurate) perception of racial or religious intolerance in smaller places--they don't have to be so, and not all are--but size alone put you in a fishbowl under the gaze of judgemental others if you're "different)
Having been raised in such a fishbowl, even near a larger, more tolerant larger town, I'm just surmising from an n=1 experience.
M.
Quote from: mamselle on August 01, 2019, 06:34:27 AM
Having been raised in such a fishbowl, even near a larger, more tolerant larger town, I'm just surmising from an n=1 experience.
M.
I just don't like peoples'
unfamiliarity with outsiders to be automatically equated with bigotry, etc. People need a chance to get to know others to realize what they have in common as human beings. Rural people could make similar value judgements about urban people for the "stupid" ideas they have because, for instance, they have never been on a farm, but it's not helpful to see things that way.
Accepting "diversity" needs to go both ways; making stereotypical assumptions about the majority is just as bad as making stereotypical assumptions about the minority.
I wasn't, in fact, making assumptions. I was teased all through school for differences in cultural values, scholastic interests, and the application of what we learned to daily life.
I even happened to be (and remain) a member of the dominant religious confession there, and a WASP by inheritance, but the library (and the large, very liberal church in the town next door) were my only "happy places," really. The school system was excellent, in terms of the teaching, but the way most kids wasted it took it was painful to watch.
When I got to the (very big) university in the larger town on the other side of our town, it was like I'd found my people--of all shapes, sizes, colors, interests, and academic pursuits. Most of what I work on now was spawned there, and I remain grateful.
I couldn't do that goldfish bowl thing again (unless maybe in the small town in France south of Paris where I do my research...and I'm well-aware of how blinkered small French towns can be, as well...) and I'm not saying size is the only determinant.
The issue was, people didn't want to become familiar with others...that's the starting point. Yes, if they were more familiar, there'd probably be fewer barriers.
But if you keep building walls instead of inviting others in, you're going to maintain that blinkered, inhospitable, unknowing mindset that says that "the other" is bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.
And as we see all too often, such issues can escalate--even become mortal. So it's not just a fanciful wish to be closer to the Opera, or something (and for some of us, that's not fanciful, either...it's life-sustaining...). It's about being safe in a neighborhood where all kinds of prejudice can fuel all kinds of responses (and I know that's also possible in large cities, but one can run errands in some other part of town more easily if there are several convenience stores instead of just one or two).
OK, that's me.
Now having been able to read the article, Harris is speaking from her own experience as well. She has commuted to C-U from Florida, and from Chicago. So she's not only talking about safety and the nearness of like-minded, like-souled, like-colored neighbors and friends, but about the issues related to living one place (which can be because of those, or other constraints) and working another place that's not close at all.
Reading her piece made me think, in fact, that she'd scoured the CHE forum archives for material, because a lot of the scenarios she cited sounded very familiar.
But I do think that there's a point there, and maybe even a stronger one to be made about safety and acceptance of differently-gifted, differently-appearing individuals of high academic value to their schools in towns where hostility rather than hospitality towards difference is a likely norm.
M.
I was prepared to be sympathetic, but it comes across as super entitled and many of her suggested accommodations just aren't reasonable for any job. I do agree that faculty shouldn't be expected to be on campus outside of normal working hours for the most part (though I understand that's part of the expectation at some SLACs), but any employer is going to expect employees to generally be available during normal work hours. Trying to schedule committee meetings etc. is hard enough in general, impossible if people insist on only being there a few days a week, or one semester a year (!).
We all make decisions about where we are willing to live and what we are willing to trade off for our careers. There are some places I didn't apply because I couldn't see myself being happy living there, and I think that's true for most people.
Plus, as others have noted, complaining about living in Champaign-Urbana as if it was a non-diverse tiny town is pretty silly. I have colleagues there (including Jewish, Asian American and LGBTQ colleagues) and have visited, and although it is a rather isolated and very flat, it isn't that small and has all the amenities (fancy restaurants, fancy grocery stores, cultural events, their own airport!), and certainly there are diverse communities of all kinds. If that's her version of unlivable she should probably prioritize location over career.
I actually find the bit in the article about 'providing travel stipends' to be kind of offensive. I worked in a department where Mr. Bigshot refused to live in town and flew in every week and stayed in a hotel at the university's expense. The same university "didn't have the funds" to pay adjuncts a living wage, and the rest of us had to beg, grovel and steal to come up with travel funds to go to our one yearly professional conference. If you don't want to live within commuting distance of the place where the job is being offered, it's not the university's job to make up the difference, and doing so should never come at the expense of the other faculty and staff at the university.
For the record, I think there's a difference between some of the examples in this thread and rural mid-SLACs in towns of <5,000 that consider it "unacceptable" for faculty to live 45 minutes away in the nearest major town (I know of at least two schools with such cultural norms).
Many Forum discussions have concerned making students resilient to the everyday challenges that life brings. Maybe universities need similar program for faculty?
In a somewhat related IHE column (https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/07/31/advice-how-deal-microaggressions-opinion), a professor writes about the challenges of fitting in as a hispanic professor in a city where there are only five million Hispanics. I suspect moving to a rural LAC is not one of the potential solutions. But what is a solution?
I think it's also worth considering that a key reason for increasing diversity is to make the campus community more diverse. Having a diverse faculty that isn't regularly on campus... Doesn't have the same impact.
Quotehose of us who work at colleges and universities can, and should, make accommodations to faculty members who chose to commute. We can help by providing travel stipends, arranging faculty schedules in ways that serve travel needs, allowing faculty members to teach online courses and providing flexibility in teaching -- such as overloading one semester and releasing another.
I could have pulled a couple of sentences from the article. I chose this one.
IF the university is making any of the accommodations listed, I wonder, who is filling in the hole that is created by these accommodations? IF one faculty is teaching online then someone else is losing that option and is forced to teach the face to face classes, or the classes that are only at night, or only early in the morning. IF someone has a release for a semester, then someone else has to take the added burden so they have the opposite of a release!
How is diversity served when the person filling the diversity hole is somewhere else?
I feel that there are similar issues of fairness when some faculty use children as an excuse to manipulate the schedule. Should single or childless faculty be required to teach all of the late day or night classes so that those that decided to have children can choose to teach only in the morning or early afternoon? What benefits do the single/childless get so that they are made whole for all of the 'accommodations' that they actually provide?
I dont mean to divert the subject of this thread, but IF someone isnt able to do the full job, they should not be offered it in the first place, and they should not expect that the employer will bend over backwards to support the decisions that they have made about their own life!
Quote from: clean on August 01, 2019, 05:17:24 PM
I dont mean to divert the subject of this thread, but IF someone isnt able to do the full job, they should not be offered it in the first place, and they should not expect that the employer will bend over backwards to support the decisions that they have made about their own life!
Now we are circling back to the thread about the WSJ oped that claims professors don't work very hard (https://thefora.org/index.php?topic=384.30)
A remarkable contrast to the IHE article above is a New Yorker article (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/the-assassin-next-door) about incredible resilience in the face of strong challenges by a different hispanic professor in the same city as the first one. (And about how another's lack of resilience to similar challenges led instead to one of America's most traumatic assassinations.)
This just in, if you don't like living in the country you shouldn't take a job in the country...
This is a ridiculous article. Tonnes of people commute for all sorts of jobs, usually from the country (or burbs) into a city. Many people around here have over an hour (or hours) commute into the nearby major city. If you choose to live far away from work, that is the price you pay.
I don't see why the author thinks it should be different for a university job and there should be accomodations. If you decide to live far from where you will work, you need to accept that there is a cost to that choice and act accordingly.
Personally, I choose to have a 30-45 minute commute so that I can live deep in the countryside outside of my smallish university town.
To a certain degree the author, while trying to point out that SPADFY, fails to recognize that SPADFMe. She's a tenured prof at UIUC, so her teaching is probably 1-1 or 1-2. Her average semester means being in a classroom only one or two days per week, and if it's a 200-student undergraduate lecture course she has GTAs. She's possibly in a department of two dozen other faculty members, with clerical assistance. And it's unlikely that she's expected to show up on Saturdays three times a semester to hep try to sell the university to prospective students.
That said, I think her underlying point is sound: that in many ways academe still reflects the attitude that academic employment is a calling with a particular set of norms, and that these norms correspond less and less to how people actually want to live their lives.
I once was the replacement hire for someone who had been commuting by air to "home" in Washington, DC, every weekend. During the academic year, she would fly out every Friday afternoon and return on Monday in time to teach an afternoon class. This was with a 4-4 teaching load, at a campus an hour's drive from a major airport with direct flights to and from DC. After about five years of it, she threw in the towel and quit.
For the first two years I worked there, I rented an apartment near campus. My wife lived two hours away. We saw each other only on weekends, if that, during the academic year. So a very similar routine to the person I replaced. For the next two years, my wife changed jobs, and we moved to a place that was 45 minutes away from campus. That was the most proximal location we could manage; the town where the campus was located had a population of 4,500 and there were no jobs for my wife. Plus she was from a city with a population of nearly a half million, and an ethnic minority. We did not have children, if we had, there would have been an entirely different set of complications -- trying to find a good school system, for children with a multiracial background.
There are other similar work-life balance complications that exist in my current marriage. None of these complications have been acknowledged at an institutional level at the places that I've worked. I know many faculty members -- e.g., those with small children who desperately need adequate, affordable child care while they are at work -- in similar situations.
Quote from: mamselle on August 01, 2019, 07:34:51 AM
The issue was, people didn't want to become familiar with others...that's the starting point. Yes, if they were more familiar, there'd probably be fewer barriers.
But if you keep building walls instead of inviting others in, you're going to maintain that blinkered, inhospitable, unknowing mindset that says that "the other" is bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.
From the small side, there's a huge frustration with people who also don't want to become one of us, because we're bad, stupid, smelly, whatever. The rest of this post is not aimed at Mamselle, but is my experience as someone who grew up in a small town where I didn't really fit, but has moved several times and found new homes in small towns where I did fit.
It's fine as the new person to town to say, "Oh, have you tried crystallized fruit in water as a refreshing summer beverage? It's one of my favorites and my mail order just came in." It's fine as the new person in town to say, "Oh, I miss my favorite coffeeshop. What's your favorite place to ...?"
It's much less fine to have a very transactional attitude towards fellow humans in town. Yes, there's one grocery store that likely doesn't have some of your favorite items. That one grocery store is staffed by a handful of of unique and valuable individuals whom you will also see around town in the rest of their lives that may include being secretary of the Kiwanis, being a kick ass float builder, being a reliable member of the PTA committee on community programs, and being a devoted moviegoer. Thus, treating them as cogs in a subpar grocery store experience where you can't get lemon grass or kombucha is very annoying when the rest of us are seeing Marge, who is doing the best she can after Joe left her with the three kids under 6 and will never be fast at the register, but has a good heart and led the effort to get a stoplight on that blind corner just as you're coming into town where we were averaging an accident with serious injuries a month and the state would do nothing to fix the situation.
Likewise, we are all watching and judging that you were impatient with Frank, who will never be a good bagger because of the accident that left him with some brain damage, shaky hands, and a limp. But, he's taking care of his aging parents and really needs that job. He's good enough for most aspects of the job. Just keep the eggs and bread way back on the belt so he can't put them in the bag first before the big cans of tomatoes.
It's also fine to start with "What do people do here for fun?" It's much less fine to treat our local culture, traditions, and food as being an interesting touristy thing to try once or twice, but not something Real People do as a matter of course. For example, the community pasty fundraiser is a way to stock up on tasty meat pies; you don't have to participate, but it's a big thing that takes a couple months of planning and then a weekend of devoted effort by a good chunk of the community. Depending where one is, pasty may be instead burgoo, pony shoes, corn boil, brats, or green chili roasting as the big festival. The key is that's what the town is doing and you aren't winning any friends by insisting we don't have any restaurants up to your standards for a weekly visit and thus our festival is a waste of effort.
You're missing out by insisting you aren't X so you're not going to the Friday fish fry during Lent, not going to the Lutheran monthly pot lucks, not going to the Boy Scout euchre party in January, not going to the two-day community softball bonanza in August, or a whole host of other things that rely less on adherence to certain principles and more on being a community member who enjoys interacting with neighbors for something that took a small group of identifiable individuals a lot of effort to organize and is more fun with a broader cross-section of the community participating.
You don't have to be coach/troop leader/Sunday school teacher for kids, volunteer at the library/community center/senior center, or join the Lions/Kiwanis/Eastern Star/Rotary/Optimists/Toastmasters/League of Women Voters/American Legion, but again, we actually like those interactions with our fellow humans as individuals. Many of us are educated individuals who have lived other places and yet chose here for reasons of our own. Yes, Ted is an overbearing know-it-all-jerk on nearly every topic that comes up in normal conversation; Ted also spends his Saturday mornings ensuring that all the 8-10 year olds who want to play soccer can play safely by donating a pretty penny from his local business, wrangling all the coaches and parents, and being a fabulous mentor to the kids. Martha has very definite ideas about that corn boil, but we couldn't successfully pull off a thousand-attendee festival every year without someone wrangling the 20-50 people who do all the related free labor and doing so for free. Marge goes to every town board meeting with a list of concerns, but, at least twice a year, one of the new concerns is something that need to be addressed by the board and it's worth the 10 minutes every meeting to ensure we're not missing something that will bite us as a community.
The questions for the newcomer are what value are you adding to our community as an individual and what are you doing to help make our community more interesting in ways that the rest of us care about? Introducing the Nth-day-of-the-month square dancing may take a little doing, but it might be worth it as long as you make some effort to coordinate timing with the other entertainment options in town.
Organizing a monthly trip to Big City to take in a nice lunch, a matinee/museum, a nice dinner, and then opera/symphony/theatre might be great. However, that means accepting all the individuals who want that experience including Ted and Frank as well as accepting the polite refusal from many of us who would rather be kicked in the leg repeatedly than spend our Saturday that way. We're fine with you going and then telling us all about it when we're in line at the grocery store; in return, you're supposed to listen and nod along as we explain about how the Farmer Appreciation parade planning is going because that's just as interesting and life-affirming as your hobbies.
We're going to be much less receptive to the idea that we're doing it wrong by focusing on diversity as accepting flawed human beings as unique individuals instead of your checkbox areas that rely on stereotypes of various groups. We will resist mightily anything that involves trying to be all things to all possible people instead of focusing our resources on improving the collective lives of people who are already here and already have solid ideas on how their lives could be improved. I still remember one person who wasn't run out of town on a rail, but took on the voting-at-large system for the school board that tended to not have as many skin tones represented as she liked. She lost miserably because the individuals with those skin tones were not interested in having the mayor appoint people with those skin tones based on which block they lived if no one from those blocks chose to run and instead found much more in common with the other parents in town who lived a whole ten minutes away and had the bandwidth to run and then serve on the school board. She left town soon after that and ended up at a much bigger place where she was much happier.
I remember the one person who was offended at every turn by normal interactions in small towns. She was offended that the Catholic school wanted evidence of her activity with her home parish before giving her kid the tuition break for Catholics, a tuition break that was financially prudent only because of tithing; upon being asked, this person was Catholic but was raising the child in a different religion due to an agreement with the father. This person eventually ended up enrolling the child in a third religion's school and was then mad because they taught religious things as part of daily lessons.
This person was offended at the idea that, as a two-person household consisting of her and a middle-school-aged child, she was considered a single parent by everyone; the offense is she was married when the child was born and thus she was not a single parent. She was offended every time she mentioned being engaged and was asked when was the wedding and when will her future husband be moving to town because that's a very narrow view of being engaged.
She read a big sign in front of a shop that proclaimed "Most Politically Incorrect Store in Town", went inside, and was offended by signs that were indeed politically incorrect; other shops in town carry the items she sought and advertise locally that they do so and yet she continued to walk past that sign and be offended for multiple visits, as we all heard for weeks after every visit.
When this person quit her tenure track position, she flat out told us she was leaving without another job even lined up because we were so unwelcoming to her. Apparently, inviting her to our houses more than monthly to share food and chat, including her child in all the activities we organized for our own children, and going out of our way to ensure she knew about things like the local food festival and community gatherings meant we were unwelcoming because we were small town folks who didn't immediately convert to her big city ways.
Quote from: spork on August 02, 2019, 03:36:59 AM
To a certain degree the author, while trying to point out that SPADFY, fails to recognize that SPADFMe. She's a tenured prof at UIUC, so her teaching is probably 1-1 or 1-2. Her average semester means being in a classroom only one or two days per week, and if it's a 200-student undergraduate lecture course she has GTAs. She's possibly in a department of two dozen other faculty members, with clerical assistance. And it's unlikely that she's expected to show up on Saturdays three times a semester to hep try to sell the university to prospective students.
That said, I think her underlying point is sound: that in many ways academe still reflects the attitude that academic employment is a calling with a particular set of norms, and that these norms correspond less and less to how people actually want to live their lives.
This thread has been interesting to read in the context of the ones about the importance of face-time for one's career and for students to build networks for later success.
How can her graduating juniors and seniors, not to mention grad students, expect to have her do the part of opening doors for them or mentor their research if she isn't even on campus?
What message does it send students when they go to campus and there are nothing but closed doors and empty faculty offices?
How can the college hear faculty voices when they are "working at home" doing research "where it's quiet" and the only people they can get to show up to policy meeting are 30-year-old stooges with EdDs? (interthreaduality)
Quote from: eigen on August 01, 2019, 04:35:59 PM
I think it's also worth considering that a key reason for increasing diversity is to make the campus community more diverse. Having a diverse faculty that isn't regularly on campus... Doesn't have the same impact.
^
This.
Quote from: polly_mer on August 02, 2019, 04:12:45 AM
Quote from: mamselle on August 01, 2019, 07:34:51 AM
The issue was, people didn't want to become familiar with others...that's the starting point. Yes, if they were more familiar, there'd probably be fewer barriers.
But if you keep building walls instead of inviting others in, you're going to maintain that blinkered, inhospitable, unknowing mindset that says that "the other" is bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.
From the small side, there's a huge frustration with people who also don't want to become one of us, because we're bad, stupid, smelly, whatever. The rest of this post is not aimed at Mamselle, but is my experience as someone who grew up in a small town where I didn't really fit, but has moved several times and found new homes in small towns where I did fit.
I would argue that the author of the piece didn't even try. She saw Champaign-Urbana as a podunk little town and assumed that there would not be a place for her in it, so she didn't explore in hopes of finding one. Like any city, the area has lily white enclaves, but it also has very diverse areas. Not so different from Pittsburgh where I grew up--a city of neighborhoods. C-U just has fewer neighborhoods from which to choose.
Quote from: pgher on August 02, 2019, 07:23:15 AM
Quote from: polly_mer on August 02, 2019, 04:12:45 AM
Quote from: mamselle on August 01, 2019, 07:34:51 AM
The issue was, people didn't want to become familiar with others...that's the starting point. Yes, if they were more familiar, there'd probably be fewer barriers.
But if you keep building walls instead of inviting others in, you're going to maintain that blinkered, inhospitable, unknowing mindset that says that "the other" is bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.
From the small side, there's a huge frustration with people who also don't want to become one of us, because we're bad, stupid, smelly, whatever. The rest of this post is not aimed at Mamselle, but is my experience as someone who grew up in a small town where I didn't really fit, but has moved several times and found new homes in small towns where I did fit.
I would argue that the author of the piece didn't even try. She saw Champaign-Urbana as a podunk little town and assumed that there would not be a place for her in it, so she didn't explore in hopes of finding one. Like any city, the area has lily white enclaves, but it also has very diverse areas. Not so different from Pittsburgh where I grew up--a city of neighborhoods. C-U just has fewer neighborhoods from which to choose.
I find pgher's point very interesting -- basically something I agree with. I come at this subject with more history than I mentioned initially. I was raised in a rural town of 1,000 people, where one had to drive an hour to see a movie (until laser disks and then VHS tapes were invented). My current wife is from a foreign city of five million people. As female, an immigrant, non-white, and Muslim, she meets many of the current government's criteria for being someone who should go back to where they came from. But she has chosen not to live in the 25,000-person town where her campus is located not because of any overt or perceived prejudice, but because she found the community boring. The milieu simply did not interest her. So she now has a one-hour commute because we live in a city of 200,000. We made our choice based on our priorities.
Quotebecause she found the community boring.
Let's not downplay that the choice also included the bonus of living with her spouse!
A one hour commute is probably worth the price of having a good job AND living with her spouse!
Quote from: clean on August 02, 2019, 11:29:28 AM
Quotebecause she found the community boring.
Let's not downplay that the choice also included the bonus of living with her spouse!
A one hour commute is probably worth the price of having a good job AND living with her spouse!
Yes. I also forgot to note that we both work at teaching-heavy institutions. A one-hour commute makes participating in campus events much less attractive -- a campus guest speaker in the evening means not getting home until 9:00 pm. There are many small institutions that penalize -- either explicitly or implicitly -- junior faculty who do not establish a "presence" on campus by attending these events.
Would love to know what her colleagues at UICU think about this perspective.
I still can't get over the idea that Champaign Urbana isn't diverse.
Urbana is only 55% non-Hispanic White, while Champaign in 61% non-Hispanic White. Now let us look at her University. Enrollment - fewer than 50% of the enrolled students are non-Hispanic White; of the faculty about 66% are non-Hispanic White, 65% of the Tenure/TT are non-Hispanic White (70% of the tenured faculty and 51% of TT faculty). Not the best, but still pretty diverse.
So, perhaps Dr Harris has this experience from another place in which she worked? Well, she grew up in and did all of her degrees in the UK, and she's worked in London and Oxford, so it's not from there. She's also worked in Albany, another fairly diverse city.
It is not surprising that a person who has made her career pontificating about the experiences of others in countries in which she has not lived would write an article pontificating about the issues which she has not experienced in locations in which she has not lived. She is also going to tell everybody how to solve their problems, without ever having to deal with any of the potential fallout.
Oh, and where did she commute from to the non-diverse town of Urbana-Champaign, IL, pray ask? From Safety Harbor, FL, a community which is 93% White.
She is trying to justify the fact that she wants to work at UIUC but wants to live somewhere more exciting. So she spun some BS story about how faculty commute because the University town isn't diverse.
I think that she gets the Self-Righteous Hypocrite of the Year Award.
PS. She is not commuting form an hour away, since an hour away from UIUC is in the middle of the corn and soy. Chicago is 2.5-3.5 hours away, and Florida is a bit farther.
Re-re-reading the article, and her credentials, I'm wondering if she ran into anti-Semitic issues someplace that made her wary?
Or maybe she's in FL to care for aging parents who settled there?
I was raised maybe 200 miles from CU, and there were pockets of intolerance of various kinds in my smaller suburban town-outside-the-big-town, although there were other abutting areas that were focused around the same cultures ours shut out (literally, as in realtors would not show homes to blacks there until, maybe 10-15 years ago; everyone knew all the synagogues were in the large suburb east of the main town; the Asian families of the science profs seemed to all live in a down-at-heel part of the main town that they kept improving until it started to attract a "different sort of" buyer...then they started moving away and started over elsewhere, apparently (this was just starting to occur a few years ago, don't know the upshot now).
I'm also thinking of Jhumpa Lahiri's novels about town-gown-societal interaction patterns, which I'm pretty sure are closely tied to known individuals' experiences.
Maybe Harris' piece is skewed to certain kinds of reality, and reflective of others, and maybe there are two kinds of issues going on, here--commuting demands of any kind, in the one hand, and new-neighbor settling-in/ethnic receptivity on the other.
Size, proximity to town centers and campuses, and open-mindedness to all kinds of diversity--including the potentials for ageism and ableism that Polly's community has laudably been able to offset among them--affect and are affected by these issues.
Maybe the expressed wish for financial accommodations is a cipher for saying, "Have some compassion, I'm dealing with different levels of difficulty than those who live nearby--for whatever reason--or maybe not.
M.
I think they do intersect,
Quote from: mouseman on August 02, 2019, 12:42:13 PM
It is not surprising that a person who has made her career pontificating about the experiences of others in countries in which she has not lived would write an article pontificating about the issues which she has not experienced in locations in which she has not lived.
I thought this argument was headed towards a charge of cultural appropriation. The article has spawned a surprising rich commentary.
Whoa waitwaitwait. She commutes to Champaign from Tampa?!
Seriously. Tampa? Tampa?
Quote from: mouseman on August 02, 2019, 12:42:13 PM
[. . . ]
It is not surprising that a person who has made her career pontificating about the experiences of others in countries in which she has not lived would write an article pontificating about the issues which she has not experienced in locations in which she has not lived.
[. . . ]
I love this. I wish all academics wrote this well.
In case it's not clear, I'm being serious.
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on August 02, 2019, 02:19:36 PM
Whoa waitwaitwait. She commutes to Champaign from Tampa?!
Seriously. Tampa? Tampa?
What are your perceptions about Tampa? Other than that it's a really long commute to CU :).
Quote from: spork on August 02, 2019, 11:37:35 AM
Yes. I also forgot to note that we both work at teaching-heavy institutions. A one-hour commute makes participating in campus events much less attractive -- a campus guest speaker in the evening means not getting home until 9:00 pm. There are many small institutions that penalize -- either explicitly or implicitly -- junior faculty who do not establish a "presence" on campus by attending these events.
From the institutional side, a fast way to undermine a tiny campus that bills itself as high contact between students and faculty is to have a large number of faculty away from campus except when they are teaching.
A related fast way to undermine the tiny campus that bills itself as having a fabulous, old-school liberal arts experience is to have very few speakers at all and have those speakers on campus mostly when no one is around.
The tipping point at Super Dinky College was when about a third of the faculty were commuting from 2+ hours away, about a third of the faculty were commuting from 0.75-1.5 h away, and about a third of the faculty were under 10 minutes away.
Dependent care can be ameliorated for even a tiny campus when someone takes that as a primary concern. I've been on campuses where planning for evening/weekend events included either planning for paid childcare of a preregistered group or having a valiant family member or two wrangling all the kids of a given age so that one dropped off where the relevant age group was. Super Dinky College had monthly faculty meetings that ended at 5:35 because so many of us had to go pick up kids from the great after-school care program that closed at 6. Similarly, coordinating elder care also can be a thing for those evening/weekend events; with planning, one can run parallel good programming at the college and the nursing home (etc.) so that everyone enjoys the program they are attending and timing rides is convenient.
An additional helpful action was purposely making MWF 11-13 a combination seminar/after-seminar discussion groups in the dining hall. This situation meant that faculty could actively participate in the life-of-the-mind aspects while they already were on campus and thus likely had dependent care. The dining hall was also open to families, so it wasn't all that unusual for some of the evening programs that appeal to all ages (e.g., Lessons and Carols in the chapel, musical acts) to start with a meal in the dining hall and then go to the program. Blocky was far from the only kid who got to attend many fine offerings that were either chaotic outside or community-based-inside and he made a good friend in an octogenarian with Alzheimer's disease who would sit next to him and smile, possibly because he remembered when his child-who-is-older-than-I-am was that age and dragged to these college offerings.
Another helpful action was to plan more of the open houses during the week when the local high schools were not in session. Again, people likely would have already been on campus with planned dependent care because we were generally open with classes in session when the HSs were having some kind of break for a minor holiday, teacher prep day, or extended parent-teacher conferences that spread over three days.
However, even with these accommodations, the provost's office had to go speak with certain individuals about how they were not doing the job we had that was 4/4, high contact with students, and actively participating in aspiring-to-be-life-of-the-mind community. For this conversation, interestingly, the people who were fabulous faculty and who felt very strongly about ensuring students had a diverse campus that supported life-of-the-mind activities tended to live in town and be very active in all the activities, even when those activities were evenings and weekends. Those folks made weekend/holiday trips to the big city for their own reasons, but truly lived with us and became part of the community.
The people who lived farther away and tried to minimize their time on campus generally were not nearly as devoted to supporting a diverse student population and were more likely to be people who visually fit into the local community, but wanted an urban experience instead of our person-to-person, unique-individuals-interacting experience. Those people tended to focus on research productivity that might get them the next job somewhere "good" instead of succeeding at the job we had that was heavy on teaching and service.
It was pretty clear early on who had a devotion to the idea of checkbox diversity being good and who put skin in the game to support the unique individuals enrolled in the campus with an inclusive, welcoming community helping everyone succeed based on their unique needs and backgrounds.
Quote from: spork on August 02, 2019, 03:36:59 AM
And it's unlikely that she's expected to show up on Saturdays three times a semester to hep try to sell the university to prospective students.
Though at UIUC she is likely expected to show up on Saturdays maybe twice a year to help give Prelims and Quals, or do defenses. In my department, Prelims and Quals were Saturday experiences.
Quote from: spork on August 02, 2019, 11:37:35 AM
Quote from: clean on August 02, 2019, 11:29:28 AM
Quotebecause she found the community boring.
Let's not downplay that the choice also included the bonus of living with her spouse!
A one hour commute is probably worth the price of having a good job AND living with her spouse!
Yes. I also forgot to note that we both work at teaching-heavy institutions. A one-hour commute makes participating in campus events much less attractive -- a campus guest speaker in the evening means not getting home until 9:00 pm. There are many small institutions that penalize -- either explicitly or implicitly -- junior faculty who do not establish a "presence" on campus by attending these events.
See, that's even a problem at my little town, where my spouse and I live 10 minutes drive away. As a result, we haven't gone to an on-campus play, concert, or game for years.
Quote from: backatit on August 03, 2019, 05:08:32 AM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on August 02, 2019, 02:19:36 PM
Whoa waitwaitwait. She commutes to Champaign from Tampa?!
Seriously. Tampa? Tampa?
What are your perceptions about Tampa? Other than that it's a really long commute to CU :).
Mostly that it's a very long commute. But also that, apart from warm weather and beaches, it doesn't really offer much more than Champaign does, or any other closer commute, like St. Louis or Cincinnati--let alone Chicago! It just doesn't seem worth the commute at all.
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on August 03, 2019, 01:41:16 PM
Quote from: backatit on August 03, 2019, 05:08:32 AM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on August 02, 2019, 02:19:36 PM
Whoa waitwaitwait. She commutes to Champaign from Tampa?!
Seriously. Tampa? Tampa?
What are your perceptions about Tampa? Other than that it's a really long commute to CU :).
Mostly that it's a very long commute. But also that, apart from warm weather and beaches, it doesn't really offer much more than Champaign does, or any other closer commute, like St. Louis or Cincinnati--let alone Chicago! It just doesn't seem worth the commute at all.
I would have to think it is somehow family related. I used to live there, which is why I was curious. It's a nice small city; pretty diverse, with a lot to do (although the beaches have no surf, which sucks). Nicer in the winter, maybe, but miserable in summer.
Quote from: backatit on August 03, 2019, 02:35:24 PM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on August 03, 2019, 01:41:16 PM
Quote from: backatit on August 03, 2019, 05:08:32 AM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on August 02, 2019, 02:19:36 PM
Whoa waitwaitwait. She commutes to Champaign from Tampa?!
Seriously. Tampa? Tampa?
What are your perceptions about Tampa? Other than that it's a really long commute to CU :).
Mostly that it's a very long commute. But also that, apart from warm weather and beaches, it doesn't really offer much more than Champaign does, or any other closer commute, like St. Louis or Cincinnati--let alone Chicago! It just doesn't seem worth the commute at all.
I would have to think it is somehow family related. I used to live there, which is why I was curious. It's a nice small city; pretty diverse, with a lot to do (although the beaches have no surf, which sucks). Nicer in the winter, maybe, but miserable in summer.
It's funny for me to hear Tampa referred to as a small city. I was there recently and while it is not a massive city it is pretty big by my standards, but I guess this is all relative.
I remember when I started my undergrad it was in a city of about 100 000. Coming from a town of a few thousand this was moving to the city for me, but I clearly remember other students referring to it as a town etc. Funny how much perspective plus into this.
I'm glad Polly reports that people in her small town were welcoming to outsiders. But that's not the case in a lot of places. I know that in my experience at small failing liberal arts college, both much of the town and much of the faculty had a "you're not from here, so you can't understand and won't ever be included" attitude. And we presented as pretty similar in race and religion to the dominant group except for not having the regional accent and did some of the local stuff. The author is way over the top. But its also important to acknowledge that some of these small towns are pretty closed shops, sometimes even within the university.
I also wonder if "face time" is often used as a metric for faculty utility because other things are harder to measure. I'm not in my office that much beyond my office hours, but I am very responsive. If the soccer coach wants me to meet with a recruit interested in basket-weaving, I'll make it happen. If a student needs feedback or advice or a letter of reference etc, it happens quickly. Need to schedule a committee meeting on a day I'm not on campus-- I'll change my schedule or teleconference. On the other hand, some of the most useless faculty I've ever dealt with, both as a student and a professional were always in their office and on campus but couldn't produce anything (leading me to get panicked email from a student needing a letter of reference the next day). Certainly the faculty member an hour away may need to work hard to be accessible, but ultimately what we need is faculty to produce as teachers and advisers, and I've had very good support from faculty doing the commuter model, and some of my best colleagues do this too. I also think that the face time model has people looking for all kinds of ways to game the system and figure out what "counts."
That said, the author lost pretty much everyone's sympathy with the absurd suggestions and general tone. Suffering from exclusion in a small town of 5,000 is pretty different from the author's plight, as is teaching a 1-1.
Quote from: Kron3007 on August 03, 2019, 03:24:46 PM
Quote from: backatit on August 03, 2019, 02:35:24 PM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on August 03, 2019, 01:41:16 PM
Quote from: backatit on August 03, 2019, 05:08:32 AM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on August 02, 2019, 02:19:36 PM
Whoa waitwaitwait. She commutes to Champaign from Tampa?!
Seriously. Tampa? Tampa?
What are your perceptions about Tampa? Other than that it's a really long commute to CU :).
Mostly that it's a very long commute. But also that, apart from warm weather and beaches, it doesn't really offer much more than Champaign does, or any other closer commute, like St. Louis or Cincinnati--let alone Chicago! It just doesn't seem worth the commute at all.
I would have to think it is somehow family related. I used to live there, which is why I was curious. It's a nice small city; pretty diverse, with a lot to do (although the beaches have no surf, which sucks). Nicer in the winter, maybe, but miserable in summer.
It's funny for me to hear Tampa referred to as a small city. I was there recently and while it is not a massive city it is pretty big by my standards, but I guess this is all relative.
I remember when I started my undergrad it was in a city of about 100 000. Coming from a town of a few thousand this was moving to the city for me, but I clearly remember other students referring to it as a town etc. Funny how much perspective plus into this.
Well, considering that my other city is London... :D It's all relative. I much prefer cities the size of Tampa, but the heat in summer will do you in. And the hurricane risk is real - I lost my home somewhere else a few of years ago to another hurricane, hence the partial relocation.
Quote from: Golazo on August 03, 2019, 07:29:57 PM
But its also important to acknowledge that some of these small towns are pretty closed shops, sometimes even within the university.
For the sake of example, I'll do the flip side reality of seeming unwelcoming in a very sparsely populated, isolated place. None of this is aimed at Golazo as an individual; I am very interested in rural education and thus have some observations backed by data on the realities of why perhaps someone who comes from outside might be better off taking some other job than trying to join a closed community both for the aspiring faculty member's benefit and the students' benefits.
I grew up in very small town with no college, but definitely closed to newcomers in the most friendly way. In that situation, we don't decide to accept or reject based on whether another outsider would indicate the outsider visually fits in a group photo. Instead, we run everything based on personal relationships that were formed in early childhood, possibly our parents' or grandparents' early childhoods. We know literally everyone we encounter at the grocery store, library, movie theatre, and school and how that person fits into the social structures (personal, family, and professional). I've been away almost 30 years at this point, but when I look at various town and regional public boards or do a quick skim of the newspapers, I know nearly all the names still for the adults and can see who had kids/grandkids.
The relevant analogy is having someone unknown sitting at a table in one's home; even if one is hosting the family reunion outside for 50 people, one is going to notice the stranger when one has been interacting with the other 49 people multiple times monthly for one's entire life and one is now middle-aged. The statement of "you'll never truly fit in here" may be a polite and friendly statement of that reality.
Revelant for the person moving for a faculty job at the small college in the small town, nationally, most college students enroll at institutions within 50 miles of home (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/03/when-students-enroll-college-geography-matters-more-policy-makers-think). At a small, undistinguished college, your classes will be almost entirely students who came up through the local public schools. The highly motivated students who value education tend to go to much better postsecondary institutions much farther away and never come back because there's nothing here for them. The people who remain are self-selected as those who either like their lives as they are or lack the imagination/will/ability to work hard enough to get something else.
It's entirely possible to have a town/gown split even when the vast majority of the individuals in town value education because the concrete daily activities differ so much from the expectations of the handful of outsider professors. In a small enough, isolated enough place, good enough middle-class jobs that span a solid portion of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook just don't exist in the same way they do even in modest urban populations of 50k-100k. The lack of jobs for a college-educated trailing spouse is the same lack of jobs that the new college graduate will face if they want to stay locally. Thus, choosing education, nursing, criminal justice, social work, general business that includes some accounting, or something broadly applicable to human services like psychology that has good local internships is evidence of good critical thinking skills based on the adult lives around them.
The middle-aged returning students may be focused on expanding their minds; many of the local students who have enrolled and will participate as good students likely are more thinking about the value of curated knowledge from a professional educator in a formal experience than many of the individual pieces of knowledge or processes being taught in the general education program in a purposeful effort to have an educated citizenry. General education may be interesting to individuals, but when disconnected enough from daily life, those tidbits remain intellectual curiosities that are possibly useful for conversation starters or Jeopardy! answers, but not really affecting anyone's lives in a deep and meaningful way. This is true for STEM general education every bit as any other general education requirement and isn't necessarily limited to the very small town if enough students from those small towns with no college go to the regional public in the bigger city (10k-30k) still within the fifty mile drive.
Thus, even among people who value literature, music, and art in their lives and want to have deep meaningful conversations about the purpose of life, the life that the outsider professor keeps holding up as normal doesn't fit with lived local experience or may be very undesirable. For example, the lack of professional, high quality childcare in town may be a strong reflection of how few people in town truly have single-field professional careers outside the home for most of their adult lives. Living in a system of personal favors with integrated lives across various boundaries instead of formal, monetary exchanges in an impersonal economic sphere that is separate from a social sphere tends to produce a very different mindset and daily activities to ensure that one is successful enough in the predominant system.
I can remember one career services person at Super Dinky who repeatedly told students that their families would still love them if they moved a couple hours away to the city where jobs exist. The problem isn't a lack of love so much as the mover-awayer losing the known barter system without earning enough income to make up for that support through paid interactions. Let's not forget that if the capable young people leave for the city, then pretty soon we don't have enough contributing young people for the barter system to continue to be vibrant or at least sustainable. One way to kill a town is to have the young people leaving in droves (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/the-graying-of-rural-america/485159/ ). The educated people who read the papers, draw lessons from literature, and can in general apply critical thinking out in the wild know that sad fact.
For the leaver, the costs don't end at the loss of the supportive community. Living among strangers who could do anything based on what television and the newspapers indicate can be very stressful for someone who is used to being surrounded by very predictable people even if Ted is a know-it-all jerk and Marge won't shut up about how the roundabout put in 10 years ago ruined that other intersection that started with a traffic light when built.
The converse of the small town nothing to do is the big city nothing I want to do. I've been in situations with four newspaper pages of weekend activities and nothing worth the time or energy more than my weekly visit to the library and possible weekday night trip to the smallish theatre with a sale that night. Everything I want to do depends on unique people who may pass through the group on a longer timescale, but people I know as individuals, so I look forward to seeing them. When one's entertainment has always been specific individuals doing specific activities usually at someone's house, the entertainments available in the city even for free may be emotionally unsatisfying. The point wasn't, say, playing cards; the point was being with other humans who accept one as one is with something that doesn't rely on personal drama for emotional swings between highs (shot that moon!) and lows (I had three trump; how did you end up with all the slightly higher cards?).
For the college experience that should focus on the life-of-the-mind activities, if anything, the local people who are writers, artists, and performers are more likely to be here because the cost-of-living is so cheap that a part-time job to supplement irregular income is reasonable to maintain a comfortable home with adequate supplies and possibly raise a family. Generally, if those folks wanted to be in the city, then they would be in the city because they are still categorized as outsiders, even after 20 years here. Thus, students and even faculty/staff derived from the local region are unlikely to be swayed by an argument for studying certain subjects that relies on the soft job skills that may help one get a job other than teacher, nurse, police officer, or social worker. Yes, literate enough, numerate enough people who know how to work the barter system and the paid transactional system will succeed here; it's not clear what additional benefits accrue to majoring in a liberal arts fields when being hired for a local job is mostly the result of what a specific person at the potential employer thinks of you, your family, and your friends rather than relying on the impersonal process that involves review of transcripts and resumes.
Even for many of the folks who treasure their college years for the valuable liberal arts education, book clubs, community theatre/music, and a couple trips a year to the Big City for museums, opera, and fine dining are sufficient. Those folks live here for a reason or else they would live elsewhere because they know about the outside world. Therefore, whatever the outsider faculty member is trying to model for students as normal for middle-class lives that conflicts with observed reality or casually mentions to colleagues as lacking in town will be met with puzzlement because life is satisfactory here for those of us who are here and fit, even as the long-term outsider.
For example, I lived in small college town A for about 5 years, moved around the US for 3 years including three additional cities, and moved back. A newcomer welcomed me as a fellow newcomer just recently from a big enough city with an internationally renowned university* and immediately started in on what she had discovered during her similar transition. I managed to refrain from saying more than once, "I've never had that food item. Thus, I don't feel the lack of it in the grocery store and local restaurants". I managed to refrain from saying, "I don't feel the lack of that particular type of entertainment because I went once as part of a school trip when I was a child".
I managed to refrain from saying, "You're talking about shopping as entertainment; I make a list for when we go to the city twice a year and buy then. If it's more urgent than that, I go to the desk in town where Shirley will help make a Sears-Roebuck catalog order that I can pick up on Thursdays." I did invite the newcomer to Saturday board games at my house and Thursday dollar night at the movie theatre (motto: if you haven't seen it, then it's new to you, even if it came out six months ago). I told her about the upcoming twice-per-year book sale at the library and that being a paid-up Friends of the Library member meant one can look through the selection on Friday night before it opens to the public.
Literature can help understand such situations, but only if people really grasp that SPADFY and those folks enjoy their "normal" because of their values, ethics, and experiences. Failing to do so as the outsider, even in the absence of racism, anti-Semitism, or other systematic discrimination against bad, stupid, smelly, whatever outsiders, makes that outsider's life harder than it has to be.
Under that situation where most college graduates will remain in the area, it's not clear what value checkbox diversity brings to the campus, let alone why the campus should be paying extra for travel, subsidizing child/elder care, or otherwise making huge accommodations for faculty who need to move from elsewhere. This is especially true in fields where the regional comprehensive is awarding graduate degrees to people who have the relevant content knowledge, want to live in the area, and know how to blend that content knowledge with the realities of life as the students know it. Knowledge of this reality is why I really want to know how people spent the years between earning their own college degrees and the present; people who have lived as our students do and value that lifestyle will be better fits here and do better at the non-classroom parts of the job than folks who view our students as other who are thinking wrong about their own lives and values.
*Otherwise known as top 5 graduate program that I briefly attended for doctoral studies and we left because we hated the city and I had attempted to change fields to work with a particular big name. The research was great; the classes to be credentialed as someone with the world-class background in this field were not worth the effort to me.
All this conversation reminds me of the tech buses. The cool kids want to live in San Francisco but their jobs are in Silicon Valley. So there are these giant buses to schlep them an hour down the freeway. The buses clog the streets. The rents go up like crazy.
Now I lived in Silicon Valley and it was great - bars, restaurants, nightlife, plenty of diversity even back when we rode our dinosaurs to work. Yeah San Francisco was a bit more glamorous, but not worth an hour on the freeway.
These days to suggest to my neighbors that they live there - my goodness, you'd think SV was a cornfield with the theme from Deliverance playing from speakers hidden in the scarecrows! And the buses "keep all those cars off the freeway" so they are better for the environment.
You know what else keeps the cars off the freeway? LIVING CLOSE TO WHERE YOU WORK!
Don't get me started about the fact that we live across the street from a Whole Foods and a Safeway and they still have their groceries delivered. Remind me again how that is green? Oh, they recycle the cardboard boxes after removing all the plastic wrap. SMDH.
I also find this discussion interesting in terms of the other discussion on here about face time and its importance to career trajectory. I teach fully online, and my face time is somewhat minimal, but that helps my commute (not really due to any of the choices on this thread - I COULD technically move closer to work now, but the choice remains - WHOSE work - my partners in London or mine in the US?). We both work remotely and spend time at the other's job site (we're in similar areas) when we have meetings. I am sure my career has probably suffered somewhat, as has his, but the tradeoff has been pretty good so far in our quality of life and work/family balance.