I originally wrote this piece on "white-blindness" back in the mid-1990s when I was a grad student—and it shows—but it's strangely relevant once again! (Both in answer to those down on all those "[insert affinity group here] for Harris" fundraising zooms and as advice for those organizing any future ones.)
Citizen of Somewhere Else
chiefly about Hawthorne governance academic public higher ed matters
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
My Valentine's Day Message to Senators
...can be found here! Topics covered:
- Spring 2024 Senate Calendar and Program Deactivation Review Process Timeline Update
- Academic Program Health and Financial Sustainability and Stewardship
- State Budget Advocacy
- Public Forums and Third Party Events Policy
- Student Affairs Divisional Review Committee Update
- True Blue Transformation Update
New SUNY Economic Impact Study from the Rockefeller Institute of Government Is Out!!
I've been waiting for this for a long time. It's Happy Valen-data Day over here in this little corner of Blogaramaville!
Thursday, February 08, 2024
CitizenSE News Roundup
Quick-hit post tonight:
- The Fiscal Policy Institute has a released a new report by Andrew Perry entitled SUNY: An Economic Engine of New York (February 2024) focusing on direct and indirect jobs created and wages and wage shares of those jobs, by location of each SUNY campus.
- New York State United Teachers President Melinda Person, United University Professions President Fred Kowal, Professional Staff Congress/CUNY President James Davis, SUNY Chancellor John B. King, Jr., and CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez presented testimony on the 2024-2025 Executive Budget before Liz Krueger, Senate Finance Committee Chair, Helene Weinstein, Assembly Ways and Means Committee Chair, and other lawmakers in Albany today.
- SUNY announced an engagement and visioning process for building SUNY Downstate's future.
- Robert Kuttner asks, "Can Progressive New York Revive?" in the American Prospect (February 2024).
Saturday, February 03, 2024
On the Work of Public Higher Education: Putting JoAnn Niebel and John B. King, Jr., in Dialogue
- keeping up with the reading load that I've assigned in my Fantasy Fiction and Critical Reading classes;
- getting to know my new students and adjusting my teaching plans accordingly;
- holding a minimum of ten office hours per week (to be available to the nearly 60 students in my classes, about a dozen advisees, and colleagues I represent and work most closely with as chair of the Fredonia University Senate, immediate past chair of the English Department, member of the United University Professions Chapter Executive Board, and English Committee member who's part of a team currently shepherding a revision to the English B.A. through the SUNY approval process);
- supporting the planning of campus events, including Fredonia's Writers @ Work, which is fast approaching the hosting of its 50th alumni writer-in-residence (from multiple majors and on many career paths);
- attending campus events (including a powerful call to action from Dr. Shaun Nelms as part of Fredonia's Martin Luther King, Jr., celebration and a moving memorial to Dr. Shannon Jonas, the only poet in the Fredonia English department, who died far too young, suddenly and unexpectedly, just before Christmas, but who lives on in his family, friends, and students);
- speaking at the campus kickoff event (which was delayed by more than a week due to the mid-January double blizzard);
- contributing to the UFS Executive Committee's work as its Immediate Past Vice President/Secretary (which includes planning the Public Good U conference this November, and more I touch on below);
- leading the SUNY University Faculty Senate Governance Committee (we're putting the finishing touches on a toolkit on campus free speech that builds on UFS resolution 196-01-1 [Ensuring Non-Discrimination, Enhancing Campus Inclusivity, and Supporting All SUNY Students, Faculty, and Staff], which began as a suggestion and draft from us, among many projects this academic year);
- leading the Fredonia Senate (our first meeting of the spring semester is this coming Monday), Senate Executive Committee (on which more below), and informal Senate leadership team (which includes everyone with an expectation of confidentiality [Executive Committee members and co-chairs of the Planning and Budget Committee]).
Why is it that everyone involved in designing and running the marathon of the last two decades—from New York State Governors and legislative leaders to SUNY Chancellors and SUNY Fredonia Presidents—has been complicit in kicking the financial sustainability and stewardship can down the road? That longstanding efforts by United University Professions and the SUNY University Faculty Senate, among many others, to point to the unsustainability and inequities of New York State’s funding model for SUNY—and to offer alternatives and solutions—repeatedly get dismissed, delayed, deferred?What seems to be happening across New York State is a realization that this situation is untenable, that kicking the can down the road is becoming an ever-riskier option as the marathon’s course rises and narrows—and as that cliff on the other side of those increasingly rusty guardrails with the concerning number of rusted-out sections becomes deeper, steeper, and more jagged with every kick.What remains to be seen is what follows from this realization.
I would submit today that New York State's elected and appointed leaders are no closer to taking responsibility for their own financial decision-making regarding public higher education than they were when I wrote this nearly four months ago.
This ties to the reason I gave SUNY's Report on Long-Term Enrollment and Financial Sustainability only a B+ just over a month ago, despite writing that "it may well be the best piece of research, analysis, and writing to come out of SUNY System Administration in my 25-year-plus career at Fredonia." To be frank, it's A-level work all the way up until the Financial Sustainability section, where it barely rises to a C and may actually be incomplete. After nearly two years to put together this report, where is the analysis of costs of instruction and total non-instructional costs—including breakdowns such as costs of academic support, other student services, Management/Confidential administrators, UUP professionals, and CSEA workers—on every campus, over time? Where is the response to the SUNY UFS's April 2022 Costs of Administration Study resolution 191-02-1? Where is even the acknowledgment of receipt of the Fredonia University Senate's October 2023 Public Good Index resolution? Where is the system-wide data on section sizes, faculty FTE/student credit hour ratios, costs and revenues per credit hour, student progress toward degree, and other measures that would help chairs and deans build efficient schedules, identify obstacles and chokepoints on the path toward graduation, and response to Sandy Baum's and Michael McPherson's call to examine "spending patterns, attempting to analyze which programs [instructional and non-instructional] are particularly important for student success" (Campus Economics [2023], 102). There is so much data that SUNY System Administration should be collecting, using to create dashboards, and providing to campuses to help them make the difficult financial decisions that Chancellor King is calling for.
I've been looking at budget books and listening to campus Presidents and Chief Financial Officers for a very long time. And I can think of fewer than five years out of my 25+ at Fredonia that we weren't facing some kind of deficit, including many years when our enrollments were much higher than they are now. So if Chancellor King is committed to the long-term sustainability of campuses like Fredonia's, at some point he's going to have to make it clear what balance of public and private revenues he expects us to arrive at. Which means making it clear what SUNY System is willing to invest in recurring direct state operating aid to Fredonia to get us to that equilibrium. At some point this year, he's going to have to put his cards on the table.
Children from different racial and ethnic groups, at different levels of income and wealth, and with parents with different educational backgrounds grow up in vastly different circumstances[.] These differences are associated with how well prepared they are for college, how well they can navigate the enrollment process, and what kinds of external support—financial, academic, and social—they need to succeed in college.... As campuses strive for greater diversity and inclusion, they need to accept the need to invest in creating a culturally responsive environment that will encourage all students to see themselves as full members of the campus community. These efforts involve costs that must be factored into the finances of the institutions.... There is strong evidence suggesting that reductions in expenditures resulting from the failure of state appropriations to keep up with rising enrollments have contributed measurably to increases in time to degree and declines in completions rates, particularly at institutions educating less well-prepared students. (11, 17, 20)
Their footnote points us to a 2007 study on "cohort crowding" by Bound and Turner and a 2017 study on "the impact of price and spending subsidies on U.S. postsecondary attainment" by Deming and Walters. Zachary Bleecher, Mukul Kumar, Aashish Mehta, Chris Muellerleile, and Christopher Newfield make a similar point in Metrics That Matter: Counting What's Really Important to College Students (2023):
[In Crossing the Finish Line (2009),] Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson found that the less students actually pay, the more likely they are to graduate.... A student with more grants, fewer loans, and less financial "self-help expectation" (an amount the student must find a way to pay themselves) can work less while in college and therefore study more. A student who studies more and who has more flexibility in their schedules to pour extra effort into courses that are hard for them is more likely to do well academically and to graduate. (46-47)
Think their sources are too old to be relevant? Check out this May 2021 report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO). Check out Jonathan Turk's essay in Unlocking Opportunity through Broadly Accessible Institutions, ed. Gloria Crisp, Kevin McClure, and Cecilia Orphan (2022), which concludes that "Greater financial and human resources will be needed in order for many B[roadly]A[ccesible]I[nstitution]s to be able to provide the comprehensive student support services that many of their students require in order to graduate" (195) and ends on this note:
Federal and state need-based grant aid programs should be expanded—e.g., in increasing the maximum Pell Grant award—and should receive, at minimum, yearly inflationary increases. State governments should reinvest in higher education by restoring appropriations to colleges and universities to help lower their reliance on tuition and fees. Furthermore, states should provide additional funding to support the expansion of student support programs and services at broadly accessible and open-access institutions. Finally, colleges and universities must take into account the full costs of college when putting together financial aid packages. This includes addressing housing costs and food insecurity. BAIs are routinely tasked with doing more, with significantly fewer resources than their more selective counterparts. More resources must be made available to these institutions so that they may better support student success and greater equity in society through higher education. (196)
I could do this all day, but I have other things to do this weekend. The work of making public higher education a true public good is ongoing, but not perpetual for any individual!
Monday, January 29, 2024
Syllabi Alert!
It's been a while since I shared my syllabi here, so without further ado, here are my syllabi since my sabbatical in AY 2021-2022:
- American Identities (Fall 2023)
- Critical Reading (Spring 2024)
- Fantasy Fiction (Spring 2024)
- Introduction to Literary Studies (Fall 2022 and Spring 2023)
- Major Authors: Hawthorne after Morrison (Fall 2023)
- Science Fiction (Fall 2022)
- Survey of American Literature (Spring 2023)
My Mid-Academic Year Plenary Address
Here's the link to my kickoff talk for the Spring 2024 semester (delayed about nine days by the double blizzard). What you won't find in it is my reference to The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want"—the last song to play on my commute—which I used at the beginning and end of the talk as you'd expect (and which set off a blizzard of Stones references by later speakers)!
Trying to Make "White-Blindness" a Thing (Again)
I originally wrote this piece on "white-blindness" back in the mid-1990s when I was a grad student—and it shows—but it's stra...
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