ann arbor is overrated. » Blog Archive

All In Your Mind

We were going to ask if anyone wanted to sponsor a “historical sign” in the Old Fourth Ward with us, but then we realized that the signs don’t carry the names of the sponsors. Talk About Town says of the signs that, as with so many other aspects of A2, “The payback will be in your mind.”

25 Responses to “All In Your Mind”

How about an adopt-a-highway sign? It sure would be beautiful to see “annarborisoverrated.org” right as you’re rounding one of the curves of the 23/94 interchange.
posted by 29.97 fps on April 6th, 2004 at 4:38 pm
“the payback will be in your mind.”

Is it just me, or is that quote saying that the benefits of living in Ann Arbor are purely hallucinatory?
posted by Murph on April 6th, 2004 at 5:09 pm
Well, the Talk About Town writer was just referring to buying an OFW sign, but I think we can safely extrapolate to other aspects of A2 life.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on April 6th, 2004 at 5:25 pm
Thanks for the offer, Angela! I’ll pass for now, but I appreciate your thinking of me. Now then, as for sign legends, how about “Old Fourth Ward: Nearly As Old and Historically Significant as Ypsilanti (home of the first house built in Washtenaw County)”?
posted by Laura on April 6th, 2004 at 7:58 pm
29.97: Brilliant. Where do I send my check?
posted by Laura on April 6th, 2004 at 7:59 pm
Angela- I’d pay $5 so that you don’t have to have sex on the internet.
Especially after I found out that you did a show with Jon Lamberson (he’s at Harvard, hit him up for cash).
js
posted by js on April 7th, 2004 at 8:30 am
Is there really internet porn, however amateur, being generated in AA? I have a new respect for Tree Town in that case! Porn makes every place better.
posted by Alex on April 7th, 2004 at 8:43 am
I would just like to make sure everybody knows that LEO (Lecturers’ Employee Organization) is staging a walk-out on campus tomorrow. Please respect the picket line. Imagine there’s an invisible circle around campus and crossing it will bring down seriously bad ju-ju on your head. Schedule your classes off campus, work at home instead of the office, don’t go to the library or the computer labs. It’s just for one day.

If you have a problem with unionized labor or strikes/work-stoppages/pickets that’s your business. This is just a public serivce announcement–don’t spam the messenger.
posted by Alex on April 7th, 2004 at 12:39 pm
Can we go on campus if it involves making porn?
posted by Walter Reuther on April 7th, 2004 at 12:43 pm
not tomorrow any other day, be my guest
posted by Alex on April 7th, 2004 at 12:51 pm
Hey Alex,

I probably shouldn’t be quoting the Daily…but:

The are quoted as asking for $40K a year. How many hours of on campus time, or rather, how many classes does a lecuturer have to teach in a year for this $40K?

thanks.
posted by todd on April 8th, 2004 at 10:30 am
Todd, I am going to email you the LEO party program. Or you can go to their website and check out their demands for yourself. From what I know, most lecturers teach at least 2 classes, and usually 3. Teaching one class takes a bit around 10 hours per week if you have a GSI, and probably closer to 25 if you don’t.

http://www.leo.mftsrp.org/index2.html
http://www.umich.edu/~hraa/leo/
posted by Alex on April 8th, 2004 at 11:15 am
Thanks,

I’m always curious to read about faculty salary, and how that translates into real salary….

…in other words, how many weeks are these lecturers actually working out of a calandar year?

It’s one of the biggest errors that people make when they try to make the argument that teachers are underpaid. I would certainly agree that, at a glance, year-round health care isn’t asking too much though.

I am curious as to how much this $40K per year translates into a full year’s work.

Maybe Anna can help me out with this one?
posted by todd on April 8th, 2004 at 11:26 am
Are you actually worried that teachers will be overpaid?
posted by Alex on April 8th, 2004 at 1:26 pm
No, not they are overpaid—-that they don’t understand the real time value of their salaries.

In a previous thread here I told a story about how I asked one of the picketers for the last GEO strike how much out of state tuition was for her….in other words, what she assign the value of her paid in full tuition? She had no idea how much her tuition was. I thought that that was more than a little strange.

I am just curious as to what this $40K represents. Is it year round, two weeks of vacation work? Or is it a three weeks off for Holidays, three months off for summer kinda deal?

It makes a big difference if you are to figure out what is fair.
posted by todd on April 8th, 2004 at 1:36 pm
I guess I’m not quite clear on why you think that you are better able to assess the “real time value” of their salaries and “what is fair” than they are?

Most of us grad students don’t actually know what out of state tuition costs because we never pay it–it’s a paper transaction pegged to an amount that is set by the university admin. There’s no “market value” of tuition, so they say it’s worth a certain amount but it could easily be “worth” 1/3 of that. But, for argument’s sake, I remember from my last financial aid statement that out of state tuition is $13,000 for the term. So two semesters of that plus either GSI pay or fellowship comes to roughly $40K. I’ve only been here one year, so I don’t know if they change you to “in state” after your first year. Although they really should. Anyway, the primary gripes/complaints/grievances whatever you want to call them for both the GEO and LEO seem to have more to do with 1)job security, 2)fair working conditions, and 3)benefits as opposed to pay. GSIs and Lecturers are responsible for about 80% of undergraduate instruction, which is in turn responsible for over half of UM’s revenue. If the U cares about undergrad education and the quality of pedagogy, then they should pay attention to employee demands that they make their teaching environment a less exploitative and more attractive one.
posted by Alex on April 9th, 2004 at 8:39 am
Alex,

I’m specifically NOT able to personally assess what is fair and what is not…that’s why I asked the question. All I am trying to gauge is how much they are getting paid, and what work they are doing for that pay.

I’m simply curious. There’s a big difference between getting paid $40K for three traditional business quarters, and getting paid $40K for working for four traditional business quarters.

I would just like to know, that’s all.
posted by todd on April 9th, 2004 at 9:50 am
Alex,

We had the tuition figures in one of the threads this past winter. I believe it was in the neighborhood of $8K for the semester, until candidacy (NOT after your first year) when it drops to half that. Grad students really need to educate themselves about this, because not knowing the figures makes them lose credibility in these sorts of discussions.

Second: Graduate students and lecturers are not responsible for 80% of the teaching at UM. Many GSIs (I would venture to say most) and many Lecturers are teaching under supervision. In some departments they do teach largely on their own (like English comp for the most part, and foreign language, for the lecturers), but in most cases, the people “responsible” for the teaching are faculty. They design the courses, they design the syllabi, they design the assignments, they write and deliver the lectures, etc. etc. etc. Furthermore, they supervise the GSIs, which may not seem like a lot of work to you, but is surprisingly time-consuming and difficult. Do not underestimate how much work all of this is. I’ve been both faculty and a GSI, and the faculty job is the harder one vis a vis teaching. Although I certainly agree that GSIs perform a valuable service and provide much of the individual instruction to the undergraduates (having been one), GEO’s constant downplaying of faculty work makes the faculty much less inclined to support the union. And the undergraduates see this, too (also having been an undergrad at UM).

A final point that I’ve been pondering for quite a while about the “casualization” of teaching, which is a big complaint around here (Casualization refers to non-tenure-track faculty positions): It used to be that you graduated from grad school and either got a job — or not. If you didn’t, that was it, you were finished, done, had to leave the field. These lecturer positions at UM offfer opportunities to people who otherwise would be unable to get faculty positions right away in many cases, so I wouldn’t really move to make them harder to offer, or remove them altogether. In my old department, the lecturer position was often used as a way to support a former graduate student who needed another year on the job market. These positions have their place, and making them too expensive for the university will result in fewer opportunities.

Just my two cents.

-Anna
posted by Anna on April 9th, 2004 at 9:58 am
No time for a full response, but I checked my tuition bill before I posted this morning. My out-of-state tuition is $13,000 pre-candidate. Maybe $8,000 is in-state? Either that or they totally screwed up on my bills from both last and this semester.
posted by Alex on April 9th, 2004 at 11:57 am
I could easily have been misremembering. Maybe I was remembering the in-state tuition.
posted by Anna on April 9th, 2004 at 12:04 pm
One of the things to remember is that LEOs are not GEOs. Lecturers aren’t in there for tuition money. And they do design their own curriculum, Anna, at least in the art department.
Unfortunately, one of the things that has happened (again, in the art department) is that lecturers with masters and doctorates are being dismissed so that people with bachelors and WCC teaching experience can be brought in more cheaply, and that degrades the overall quality of the instruction.
But hey, most of the people I know working as lecturers in the art department do so to supplement notoriously uneven studio art careers with a steady paycheck and health insurance. Selling $25,000 in art is nice if it happens on a regular basis, not so nice if it happens every other year.
js
posted by js on April 9th, 2004 at 3:29 pm
The art department/school is not typical; what I said holds for a lot of lecturers in most departments. That’s of course a generalization and there are exceptions, but the other thing is that a lot of adjunct appointments (included in LEO) are essentially made as professional courtesies. The other thing is, there is nothing stopping people with lecturer or adjunct appointments from looking for jobs as ladder faculty elsewhere — a fact of life in academe is that you have to be willing to move around if you want a good job.

I wish there was good available data on how many lecturers teach courses that were already designed, versus ones they have designed themselves, but I do believe that the number is smaller than LEO would have one believe. I also think that the percentage of undergrad course-hours taught outside of regular ladder faculty supervision is much, much smaller than 80%.
posted by Anna on April 9th, 2004 at 4:04 pm
But another difference between LEO and GEO is that grad students in most departments are there primarily to do research, so their hours can’t even begin to be estimated in terms of how many hours they teach.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on April 9th, 2004 at 6:59 pm
It’s also important to remember that many LEOs contribute substantially to research activities at the university as well.

The simple fact (at least in the social sciences) is that tenure-track jobs are pretty rare relative to the numbers of PhDs that get turned out every year, and it’s not like money-strapped state universities are able to expand the sizes of their departments to meet the supply. Lecturer positions allow people with (a) teaching and scholarship work preferences facing tight academic job markets, or (b) limited non-academic job opportunities, to pursue the work they want.

My only problem with the LEO-related rhetoric yesterday is the “people-not-profits” tone in it. It reminds me of conservative rhetoric about waste in government - if you can’t show me the waste, I’m skeptical about what you want to eliminate. Similarly, unless it can be demonstrated to me that the U-M has the resources to do any better viz., the lecturers than they do now, I’m not sure that tons of multi-year lecturer positions are the best use of those resources. Just my thoughts.
posted by Nick on April 9th, 2004 at 11:15 pm
Oh, if only I was capable of coherent narrative this morning! Since I’m not, I’m going to bullet point a few items:

1)Anna, you make an excellent point about giving faculty short shrift. I certainly don’t mean to denigrate faculty–they are totally over-worked, pedagogically crucial, do lots of hard work. This is not a zero-sum game of effort and responsibility.

2)I just looked at the Fall time schedule for my department’s undergraduate offerings. 26 of the 34 undergrad courses are being taught by either Lecturers or GSIs. That’s 76.5% and doesn’t include whatever percentage you want to attribute to GSIs who are assisting with undergrad classes taught by tenured faculty. Now perhaps what is par for the course in my department is unusual in other departments. I am willing to concede that.

3)Many tenured faculty teach the same classes over and over again. Therefore the “cost” of developing their course materials is ammortized over increasingly long stretches of time. Whereas if lecturers have high turn-over, the “cost” of developing materials is ammortized over a much shorter period of time and therefore become more expensive to produce. From what I have heard, the Lecturers in my department are responsible for developing their own syllabi and course materials–profs don’t just hand them some pre-fab class. And faculty certainly don’t hand lesson plans to GSIs for their sections. Again this might be department-specific, or at least more typical of the social sciences over the natural sciences or something.

4)I guess I just have a difficult time buying into the notion of University as benign papa, helping a brother or sister out by hooking him/her up with a Lecturer position while they’re on the job market. That does happen, but that does not explain the situation of most Lecturers. Plus my cynicism runs far deeper than that. The rejiggering of the university labor market, away from tenured faculty and towards contracted labor, has me terrified. The whole point of tenure is to create spaces and opportunities for intellectual freedom–where people have the ability to pursue unpopular or unorthodox research agendas without fearing for their careers–and to create a stable pedagogical environment for students. High teacher turn-over and no job security, in my opinion, is *NOT* in the public good.

Anwyay, there was some other point I wanted to make but I lost it in the ether fog that’s clouding my head right now. Maybe I’m way off base on all of this, and I certainly can’t make sophisticated arguments about the university’s financial situation. The reality of academic labor is changing, there’s no two ways about that, but I don’t think we need to accept it’s current trajectory as a fait accompli.
posted by Alex on April 10th, 2004 at 10:19 am