November 11, 2021

The Weekly Blab

Volume 15, Issue 9:  November 11, 2021

Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day, and we celebrate all veterans, active military personnel and reservists, as well as their families.      

Please take the time to remember the many sacrifices our veterans and their families have made for this country, and if you have the opportunity to do so, thank them for their service.  You may also wish to donate to a veteran’s support organization (such as the Disabled American Veterans, the U.S.O., or the Wounded Warrior Project), visit a VA hospital, or send a card of thanks to a military installation near you.  In the name of the College, I’d like to thank every veteran and family member who is part of our SUNY Canton family for their service.

Our veterans have done a lot for us—let’s not forget their service!

What’s New

I got a very nice “thank you” card in the mail this week from a family that attended our most recent Open House event.  I love these events because it gives me a chance to meet and interact with prospective students and their families, talk about their hopes and dreams, tell them about the College, and swap stories.  Anyway, the card began “President Z!  From one pannapictagraphist to another, I have to thank you for your time with speaking with my family.”  I had no idea what a pannapictagraphist was, so I googled it and it turns out that it means “comic book collector”.  OK—I’ve been collecting comics since I was 10 years old (that’s 56 years now!) and I have one of the largest collections anywhere (don’t judge me!), and yet—I had never run into this word before, despite there being a fair number of websites with it in their names.   

That’s actually the second time this past week that this happened to me.  We were talking about things we might do at this year’s Holiday Party at the College and one of the folks at the President’s Cabinet meeting suggested possibly having a charcuterie board at each table.  From the context, I knew pretty much what it meant, but again, I had never run into that word before.  When I said so, I got a lot of ribbing from everyone else because apparently, it’s a pretty common term.  

The ribbing was probably a bit of revenge for when I correct people for using a word in an expression that sounds like the right word but has a different (though sometimes related) meaning.  The one that’s turned up the most here in the North Country is the incorrect expression “chomping at the bit”, the correct version of which “champing at the bit”.  To champ means to chew on something—what a horse does on its bit—which is the source of the expression, which means “waiting impatiently or with anticipation”.  To chomp, of course, means to take a big bite out of something.  So, the two have similar sounds, similar spellings, and related meanings, so it’s not surprising that people have come to use them interchangeably.  Another pair of this sort is moot and mute, where the correct expression is “a moot point”.   A moot point is one that is either debatable or of no real/practical value.  Mute means “silent” or “refraining from speech”, which is what you might do if you realize that what you’re saying has no real value.  So again, moot is the correct one, but mute sounds like it, is spelled somewhat similarly, and has a related meeting.  

While there are other such pairs in English (and probably in other languages too), and there’s probably a word for such pairs (“homophone” doesn’t quite capture the idea), I have no idea what that word is either.  Perhaps someone reading this can help me out.

Winter Season Start and Fall Athletics Honors

The winter sports season has started pretty well, with several recent SUNY Canton wins.  In men’s hockey, Canton defeated Castleton University (Vermont) by 4-2, after previously tying Stevenson University 4-4 and losing the second day’s game 4-1.  Canton’s women’s ice hockey team fared even better, beating King’s College (Pennsylvania) 4-0 and then 14-1 (!) in the next day’s game, in which Iida Laitinen scored four goals and Verity Lewis scored three.  Our women’s basketball team beat SUNY Plattsburgh by 65-52, with Chelsey Raven being chosen as NAC player of the week with 23 points and 15 rebounds.  Men’s basketball plays its first game on away on the 12^th.  Our Esports teams have an ongoing record of 105-86 at the moment.  Guilty Gear Strive yielded a pair of 3-0 wins against Buffalo State and Niagara County Community College in the SUNY playoffs on November 8.

Several SUNY Canton students were named to Fall season All-Conference Teams or earned All-Conference Honors.  

• Men’s Soccer: Ellis Sanchez (First Team), Jacob Deuel (Second Team), Augustin Nunez (Honorable Mention), and Connor Kelly (Sportsmanship) 
• Women’s Soccer: Rachel Merica (Sportsmanship), 
• Volleyball:  Peyton Nadeau (Senior Scholar Athlete and Honorable Mention Team), Gabrielle Durant (Sportsmanship Team).
• Golf:  SUNY Canton came in 4^th in the NAC championship, with Adam Szlamcynski with the best score of 155 over both rounds.
• Cross Country: Katlynn Allen (First Team), Lailah Emad (Sportsmanship Team), Benjamin York (Sportsmanship Team)

 Please join me in congratulating them all for their great accomplishments!

Faculty Issues in Georgia

As promised in last week’s BLAB, here’s a discussion of an article that appeared in the Chronicle a few weeks ago entitled Georgia Regents Approve Changes in Post-Tenure Review.  These changes have raised some significant faculty concerns.  Up until now, all tenured faculty were required to undergo post-tenure review every five years, in addition to the usual annual review.  What this basically meant was that faculty were required to create a document more or less similar to a tenure package, showing how they had met the normal expectations of teaching quality, scholarly work, and service.  During the review, if a problem was identified, the process was that (1) the department chair, dean, and/or provost would indicate what was wrong, (2) state what the expectations would be for fixing it, and (3) possibly set up a remediation plan that would have to be successfully addressed.  If the faculty member didn’t respond or carry out the plan successfully, (4) consequences ranging up to termination could follow, depending on the seriousness of the problem.  While it’s certainly true that a lot of faculty didn’t like having to go through post-tenure review at all, it was highly unusual for any faculty to run into a problem because of it, since almost all faculty successfully met its requirements and were doing their jobs appropriately.  

In the new policy, if a tenured faculty member is found to not meet expectations two years in a row in their annual evaluations, the faculty member would need to (at that point) go through a corrective post-tenure review.  A remediation plan would be set up, but if the chair and dean (after considering feedback from a committee of faculty colleagues) felt that progress hadn’t been made, consequences such as pay suspension, revocation of tenure, or termination could follow, with the college president making the final call.  Each college in the USG is required to create its own version of this plan, which needs to include “appropriate due-process mechanisms” and to be approved by the chancellor.  More specific guidelines would be provided in the future.

Why the change?  The previous Chancellor established a working group (which included faculty) to make recommendations with a goal to “support career development for all faculty, as well as ensure accountability and continued strong performance from faculty members after they have achieved tenure.”  This working group found that 96% of post-tenure reviews conducted in the past five years were positive.  Of the negative ones that required a remediation plan, 39% were successful (not including plans still in progress).  They concluded that “very few low-performing faculty members are identified and remediated during the PTR process.”  The president of the Georgia section of the AAUP had an assumption as to why the changes were made, namely that the Board of Regents felt that tenure is too easy to get and too easy to keep.  The new policy also notes that the Regents can now take tenure granting authority back from the college president if the tenure process is not being carried out “in a sufficient rigorous manner” until the process is fixed.  

The main reason for the faculty outcry seems to be that the old system followed a specific system-wide discipline policy that mirrored national AAUP recommendations.  Faculty had due process rights, which essentially means that they could appeal any termination to a body of faculty peers, with the burden of proof being on the administration to prove that termination (or other sanction) was justified.  The new policy would follow yet-unwritten guidelines from the chancellor.  It also isn’t system-wide—different campuses might have different policies.  The article concluded with the president of the Georgia section of the AAUP saying that the removal of post-tenure review from the previous due process “is where tenure dies”.  

So, who is right here?  In my own experience, people have a lot of misperceptions about tenure.  It’s certainly not easy to get, as anyone who has gone through the process can attest.  In colleges that have good administrative practices, probationary faculty who aren’t going to meet the requirements for tenure are turned off the path well before they come up for tenure.  If, indeed, a college needs to turn someone down for tenure, that’s an indication that their prior evaluation process is flawed—the person should never get that far.  

A lot of people also believe that it is impossible to terminate a tenured individual.  That’s also not true.  The key point is that to terminate someone in an ethical way, you need to have cause.  Reasonably, you need to have documented and informed the person that there’s a problem in how they’re carrying out their job responsibilities, told them what needed to be done to fix it (if a fix is possible), and give them a reasonable time and necessary resources to do it.  If they don’t respond or ultimately aren’t able to perform their job, and if the matter is serious enough, tenure is not a defense against termination.  This may not seem very different than the Georgia BoR’s changes, but there are a few points that should be considered that add up to a big difference.

First, the Working Group seemed to be proposing the change because “very few low-performing faculty members are identified and remediated during the PTR process.”  How did they conclude this?  I don’t know if the Working Group’s paper addressed this point, and the article certainly didn’t.  The change may be based on a false premise.  Did the Working Group simply think that the fact that 96% of faculty succeeded in their Post Tenure review spoke for itself in “proving” that cases of underperforming faculty must have been missed?  Again, we don’t know.   The 96% figure may well be true—perhaps only 4% of tenured faculty have a significant deficiency.  I certainly wouldn’t expect it to be much higher than that.

Second, even if there is some reasonable basis for believing that the current process is missing too many underperforming faculty, how does the new process fix what’s wrong?  Nothing in the current procedure says that problems can only be identified during post-tenure review.  If significant problems are found in two annual evaluations in a row (or in some other way), nothing currently stops the institution from calling for remediation and taking appropriate action based on its results then.  Thus, the colleges can already do what the new procedure is calling on them to do.  Also, in any sensible system, the annual reviews are part of the post-tenure review report.  Even if the annual review problems were ignored up until the post-tenure review for some reason, the post-tenure review gives a second opportunity to recognize the problem and call on the faculty member to fix it.  So, what really changed here?  As the Georgia section AAUP president said, it’s the due process. 

Here at Canton and in SUNY overall, faculty and staff have due process rights and the unions are part of the process that makes sure that the burden of proof (that’s the cause part) has been documented and that the employee has had an appropriate opportunity to address the problem (if that’s possible) but failed to do so.  It is only then that serious consequences can follow.  And that’s how it should be.

Update on Last Issue

As reported in last week’s BLAB, the University of Florida had blocked three faculty members from being able to testify on various public issues, saying it was a conflict of interest for the university, since it was part of the state government of Florida.  This led to large protests, alleging that this was an abridgement of academic freedom.  The university backed off a bit a few days later, saying that their objection was that the faculty were to be paid for their testimony.  A fourth faculty member then reported he had been blocked for testimony that didn’t involve pay.  The University of Florida has now completely reversed its former decision, saying that faculty are free to testify, and that a committee is being set up to investigate the university’s conflict of interest policy.

In other news about higher education in Florida, the state’s legislators are also apparently interested in Post-Tenure Reviews for all tenured faculty.  The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Ralph Wilcox, provost at the University of South Florida (USF), wrote in an October 3 email: “There appears to be renewed interest in tenure on the part of some of our elected officials as we approach the 2022 State Legislative Session … Specifically, questions have been raised about continuing performance accountability among State University System (SUS) faculty members who have earned tenure.” 

The article goes on to say that the SUS provosts have “recognized the importance of fully and regularly informing our boards of trustees, members of the Florida [Board] of Governors, and elected officials of the nature, importance and rigor of process associated with granting tenure in assuring the national competitiveness of Florida’s public higher education institutions … We have also discussed the essential need of framing a systematic and rigorous periodic review of faculty members who have successfully earned tenure at our universities.”  

Timothy Boaz, the Faculty Senate president at USF, felt “the proposal seems unnecessary. Tenured faculty are already amply reviewed under existing procedures, he said in an interview. A group of South Florida faculty leaders looked over the draft, and they wrote up their feedback for Wilcox.  “What,” they asked, “is the problem that is being solved?” If legislators think that tenure itself is a bad idea,” they wrote, “then offering to spend a lot of time, effort and money doing more evaluation of all tenured faculty seems unlikely to change that view.””

Jazz with the Prez

This week’s session of Jazz with the Prez will be about Sarah Vaughan, one of the greatest singers ever.  As always, the session is at 8:00 PM on Saturday night (November 13) on zoom.  The link is:  https://zoom.us/j/92049417499?pwd=QVV0eENuU2Y3OUJCazhQY3dNbkUyUT09.

Find out why she was known as “The Divine One” by joining us!

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with St. Lawrence County.  Our best answers came from Chelsea Chase, Bruce Hanson, and Melinda Miller.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall.  

Here are the correct answers:

1. County seat of St. Lawrence County.  Canton.
2. Largest (and only) city in St. Lawrence County—it was also the original county seat.  Ogdensburg.
3. Distinction that St. Lawrence County has compared to other New York counties.  It is the largest county in terms of land area.
4. There are four major rivers that drain into the St. Lawrence River.  Name at least two of them.  Raquette, Grasse, St. Regis, Oswegatchie.
5. Why did Jacques Cartier, the French explorer, name the St. Lawrence River for Saint Lawrence?  He first came to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River on the feast day of the Catholic Saint Lawrence.

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Since Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching, today’s challenge has to do with Thanksgiving.  The first five entries with the most correct answers win a CD from the vast Szafran repository, as well as the admiration of their peers. No looking up the answers now!  

SEND ALL ENTRIES BY EMAIL to answers@canton.edu since if you put them as a response on the BLOG, everyone will be able to see them.

1. How is the date for Thanksgiving currently determined?
2. Who celebrated the first Thanksgiving back in 1621?
3. What department store is associated with the biggest Thanksgiving Day Parade?
4. For shoppers, what is the day after Thanksgiving commonly called?
5.  “The New England Boy’s Song About Thanksgiving” is the original title for what song?  One line of it goes “The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh…”.  The song actually dates back to 1844 and was written by Lydia Maria Child.