March 30, 2022

The “Weekly” Blab

Volume 15, Issue 15:  March 30, 2022

These Were the Weeks That Were

You’d think that our recent spring break would have given some opportunities for a little R&R, but that didn’t quite prove to be the case.  I took Monday of that week off almost entirely, but I worked on Wednesday and Thursday, with Tuesday, some of Thursday, and Friday set aside for taking my father to various scheduled medical appointments.  This past week included a SUNY presidents meeting: driving to Albany on Monday, meeting all day on Tuesday, attending a reception for legislators on Tuesday evening, and talking to the Assembly’s Higher Education Committee chair on Wednesday morning and then driving home.  Of course, the regular work doesn’t stop, so I had meetings almost back-to-back starting Wednesday evening and all day Thursday and Friday.

This past Saturday was the most fun, with two admitted-student receptions in the morning, both of which were well attended with lots of happy students and their families.  On Saturday afternoon, the College hosted a comic book convention—the first since I became president!  I found out about this a few weeks ago from our student government and was asked if I would be willing to exhibit some of my collection and if I would give a talk.  Needless to say, my answer to both questions was “yes!”  

I didn’t have much time to pull stuff together, so I selected a bunch of comics, books, and related materials that were close at hand for the exhibit.  I thought that the greatest interest would be in seeing some copies from the “golden age”—a Batman #25 (from 1942 or so), and a Flash #68 (also from the 1940s)—and “silver age” copies of Flash #123 (the first comic book story involving a multiverse), and Spider-man #33 (widely viewed as the best Spider-man story of all time), all of which are quite pricey today.  I also had a reproduction of Action #1 on the table, and several people asked me if they could touch it and if it was an original, with me laughing and telling them if it was, it would be worth about $3 million and locked in a vault. While several students were impressed with these key issues, more were interested in an Usagi Yojimbo #1, an anime comic involving a rabbit who is a ronin, since anime is so popular these days.  I also had a copy of the Archie comic that I had appeared in, which several people asked to look at.

The talk I gave was about racism and sexism in comics, which have a long and troubling history.  While some people have tried to excuse the racism and sexism in comics as a “product of the times” between 1938 and 1968, I also showed several examples of comics that were amazingly progressive about these issues that were published during the same period.  The bottom line is that it was always possible to do the right thing, but most publishers/editors/writers/artists didn’t even try and went along with the stereotyping and scapegoating that was all too common then, and to a lesser extent even now.

Congratulations

Some good things have been happening on the campus lately.  Here’s the rundown:

Congratulations to our student Brooke Ayers, who is a Criminal Investigation senior.  Brooke was on a ride-along with Deputy Matthew Merria at 1:42 AM on March 9, when he responded to a domestic violence incident where a man shot his girlfriend in the neck.  Deputy Sheriff Merria subdued, disarmed, and arrested the suspect, while Brooke (wearing a body-cam) helped by providing medical assistance to and consoling the victim, as well as going through a series of questions regarding the incident, until an ambulance arrived 24 minutes later.  The Sheriff’s Department gave an award to Brooke last Thursday at a ceremony held in Dana Hall, and I presented her with the College’s “Roosponding to the Crisis” award.  Congratulations Brooke!

Associate Professor and co-Chief Diversity Officer Emily Hamilton-Honey was featured in the Watertown Daily News this past week about co-authoring a recent book, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven.  Her co-author is Associate Professor Jennifer McFarlane-Harris of Seattle Pacific College.  The anthology was published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis.  You can read more about Prof. Hamilton-Honey’s work here.

• Two members of our Women’s Lacrosse Team won Athlete of the Week honors from our NAC conference this week.  Stephanie Thayer scored six points and five goals, picking up seven ground balls and causing two turnovers in a 14-3 win against SUNY Poly, earning her Player of the Week accolades.  Joining her was Lindsey Wunder who earned Defensive Player of the Week honors, with eight ground balls, four caused turnovers, and three draw controls, while also scoring a goal and getting an assist.  Congratulations ladies!
  
  

More Florida Craziness

As if the University of Florida and other Florida colleges don’t have enough problems, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that the Florida state legislature passed a bill to (among other things) require all public colleges to regularly find a new accrediting body.  The official summary of the legislative bill (# PCB PEL 22-01) says that it:

• Prohibits a state college or state university from being accredited by the same accrediting agency or association for consecutive accreditation cycles and requires state colleges and state universities to seek and obtain accreditation from an accrediting agency or association other than their current accrediting agency or association. 
  
• Provides a cause of action against an accrediting agency or association by a postsecondary education institution that has been negatively impacted by retaliatory action taken against the postsecondary education institution by an accrediting agency or association.”

I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my 40 years in higher education, but this is about the most bizarre one yet.

For those who don’t know, all good colleges are accredited by what were formerly known as a regional accrediting bodies, ours being MSCHE, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. There was one for each part of the country—Middle States covering NY, NJ, PA, DE, and MD.  The accrediting body that covers Florida and other southern states is called SACS, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.  The accreditation world changed a bit in 2019 during the Trump administration, which instituted a rule allowing the regional agencies to become national.  The change would allow a college in New York, for example, to be accredited by SACS if for some reason they wanted to do that, and if SACS would allow them to go into candidacy.  The rationale for this change was to provide more competition among accreditors.  Whether this is a good or bad idea is debatable and an even-handed look at the question can be found here.

Since I worked at a Georgia university between 2005 and 2014, I am intimately familiar with SACS, which (like most things) has its own good and not so good aspects.  They were widely viewed as the pickiest of the regional accrediting agencies, but they were also a regional body that was willing to challenge governors and legislators who tried to exercise undue influence on higher education.  A big example of this happened in 1941, when Georgia’s Governor Eugene Talmadge, an avowed racist, moved to fire Walter Cocking, the Dean of the College of Education at the University of Georgia.  Cocking’s crime?  The Governor accused him of wanting to racially integrate a demonstration school and said he would remove any faculty member who supported “communism or racial equality”.  The Georgia Board of Regents fired Cocking, but the President of the University of Georgia argued Cocking hadn’t been given due process.  A hearing was held, and Cocking was reinstated.  This angered the governor, and Talmadge proceeded to stack the Board of Regents with three of his cronies and fired Cocking and several other faculty and administrators.  SACS responded by removing the accreditation of all of Georgia’s whites-only state colleges due to undue influence.  Talmadge lost the 1942 election in part due to the blowback from this but won again a few years later.

Jumping back to the present, it turns out that SACS questioned the University of Florida about reports that they had prevented several faculty members from testifying in a voting-rights case (which I wrote about in a previous BLAB). Further, SACS asked for information about the presidential search at Florida State University, at which the state’s education commissioner was not only a candidate, but a member of its board.  Was this new legislation a warning to SACS, telling them to back off?  You be the judge.

As everyone should know, going through accreditation is a big deal and the process requires lots of time and effort, not to mention expense.  Changing accreditation bodies each cycle would require even more work, since each agency is different.  What’s more, only one of the formerly regional accreditation bodies (the Western Association, WASC) has expressed any interest in taking colleges in other regions as candidates, and (I believe) has not yet voted to do so.  So, there’s pretty much no place for any southern college to go at this point. A provision was added to the legislation saying that colleges could stay with SACS if they couldn’t find another accreditor, adding to the likelihood that the legislators knew that the bill would be impossible for most Florida colleges to follow, and that the legislation was a political warning.

Since the legislation was passed, the federal Department of Education has warned Florida that the law would put its colleges’ access to federal financial aid in jeopardy.  Under Secretary for Education James Kvaal wrote that changing accreditors each cycle could “compromise institutional accountability and quality because it would not allow for a full review of institutional practices and demonstrated continuous improvement brought forward in the prior accreditor review, which is one of the core purposes of accreditation.”  

Higher education used to enjoy bipartisan support in most state legislatures and in congress.  Today, it has become much more common for politicians to try to advance their own political agendas by attacking higher education.  Fortunately, this does not seem to be an issue in New York and we’re grateful to our own elected officials from both political parties for their support.  We’re certainly not perfect, but many of the attacks are based on caricatures of reality or outright fabrications that are also spread by partisan media.  While some might argue that this is just a “product of the times”, it’s also dangerous in that higher education is still the best path for people to gain upward mobility and move ahead.  Legislation and demagoguery of this kind poisons the well and makes it harder for us to do our job. 

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with Superman.  The first correct answers came from Greg Kie, Megan Riedl, and Alan Gabrielli.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall.   

Here are the correct answers:

1. Planet on which Superman was born.  Krypton.
2. Superman’s secret identity.  Clark Kent.
3. Superman’s girlfriend, now his wife.  Lois Lane.
4. City and State where Superman was raised, after coming to Earth.  Smallville, Kansas.
5. The three ideals that Superman stands for, according to the 1950s television show.  Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Our contest this week has to do with the month that’s about to end, March.  Every answer has the word “march” in it somewhere.  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. The college basketball playoffs that have reached the final four at this date.
2. What Julius Caesar had to beware.
3. One of the guests at Alice in Wonderland’s tea party.
4. It and the fourth planet from the sun are named after the Roman god of war.
5. Civil war song with the lyrics “We’ll give him a hearty welcome then, Hurrah, Hurrah; The men will cheer, the boys will shout, The ladies, they will all turn out.” 

March 2, 2022

The Weekly Blab

Volume 15, Issue 14:  March 2, 2022

Staying Busy

Things have stayed busy the past two weeks.  Part of the reason is that I’m chairing a visiting committee for Middle States (our accrediting body) for another college’s reaffirmation.  While I’ve done this kind of thing before while at my previous campuses and therefore familiar in general about these kinds of visits, each accrediting body is different.  While I’ve done them for NEASC (the New England body), SACS (the Southern body), ABET (the Engineering body), and for the Department of Education of New Hampshire, I’ve never led one and I’ve never done one for Middle States.   I presented the Exit Report today, so that work is now mostly finished. Speaking of accreditation, we were also just visited by ACEN (the accreditation body for Nursing) last week, and of course, the campus is busy preparing for our own Middle States reaffirmation next year.

There have been some fun activities on campus too.  Valentine’s Day was also Love Your Library Day, so I went over to see the nice spread of food they had and hear a little about what was new in our library.  Tuesday of that week was the Carnival of Clubs and I had the pleasure of meeting the leaders and members of many of our student organizations.  Some of the clubs were playing some cool music and occasionally breaking out into dance routines and everyone was having fun.  It’s great to see students out and about on campus, especially after so much taking place online due to COVID.

On the home front, my father was having some eye problems so we were able to get him into the specialist right away.  The issue turned out to be macular degeneration of the wet kind in one eye.  These days, it’s treatable with medication (that’s the good news), but the way that the medicine is delivered is through an injection into the eyeball (that’s the not so good news).  It sounds worse than it was—they applied a numbing agent around the eye, and the actual injection took less than a second, with my father feeling no pain whatsoever.  His vision is already improving, but he has to do this twice more, a month apart.  

On the collecting mania front, I’ve purchased a few more of the gigantic box sets of classical music cds that are available.  Recent ones focus on some of the greatest symphony conductors, including Eugene Ormandy’s mono recordings (at the Philadelphia Orchestra—120 discs, a stereo recordings box is sure to follow in a year or two); Sir John Barbirolli (New York Philharmonic pre-Bernstein and the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, UK–109 discs); André Previn (London Symphony Orchestra, also known as a great pianist—96 discs) and Bruno Walter (New York Philharmonic and Columbia Symphony Orchestra—the baby of the group with only 77 discs).  I have quite a few other such giant sets.

It’s a great time to be a lover of classical music, with so many of these sets available, and being able to stream concerts both live and recorded into your home on platforms like Medici and the Berlin Philharmonic.  I get most of the CD sets on Amazon and eBay, and only rarely run into any problems, though when I ordered the Barbirolli box, it showed up without a shipping box and totally mangled.  Fortunately, Amazon is good about these things and I got a quick replacement only a few day later, with them taking the return of the mangled one without even me having to box it.

I’ll answer the obvious question: No, I haven’t listened to all these CDs.  I only get things I’m potentially going to listen to because of their quality or an interesting review, but sometimes I’ll get so far into a set and decide I’ve had enough—maybe forever, or maybe I’ll come back to it someday.  In all cases, though, the collector in me enjoys having them.

Congratulations

Some good things have been happening on the campus lately.  Here’s the rundown:

• Congratulations to Dr. Marcella K. Chiromo (a faculty member in our Applied Psychology program), on her publication of a book chapter titled “Navigating Academia as a Third Culture Child” in the book Global South Scholars in the Western Academy.  Dr. Chiromo joined SUNY Canton in 2021.  The chapter talks about her experiences as a child born in the United States whose family moved back to Zimbabwe when she was four or five years old, trying to navigate cultural expectations between being an American and a Zimbabwean.  When she moved back to the U.S. to go to college, she wasn’t seen as an international student even though she was one, due to her having been born here.  The cultural code-switching she learned to do led to her interest in how psychology is influenced by culture.  She will be presenting her research at the Comparative and International Education Conference in April.  A nice article about her that also appeared in the Watertown Daily Times can be found here.

• Two of our students recently won weekly honors in the NAC athletic conference.  Senior Hunter Olsen was named Men’s Lacrosse Player of the Week, with freshman Alex Jacobs named as Rookie of the Week.  Congratulations!  The next Men’s Lacrosse game is on March 5 at 1 PM, vs. Castleton University.

• SUNY Canton’s microcredential offerings were featured in a trifecta of the top three SUNY News Clip Articles on February 16.  The first was an article from a press release about Governor Hochul announcing an expansion of SUNY microcredentials for in-demand job fields, that came from Niagara Frontier Publications.  SUNY Canton was prominently featured in the article.  The second, entitled “SUNY Canton Offering ‘Microcredentials’ in Health Care, Cybersecurity Programs”, appeared in NNY 360.  The third, entitled “SUNY Canton Adds Microcredentials to Professional Course Offerings” appeared in North Country Now.  In my eight years at SUNY Canton, this is the first time we were featured in all top three articles distributed by SUNY—it’s the proverbial hat trick!

Public Protest Flippage

There was an annoyingly even-handed editorial in the Watertown Daily Times by Jerry Moore entitled “Anarchy is in the Eye of the Beholder”.  In it, he argued that most of us look at protests through the lens of the issue being protested, and if we agree with the issue, tend to disregard (at least in part) the disruptions the protests cause.  On the other hand, if we disagree with the issue being protested, we tend to care a lot more about the disruptions the protests cause.  He compared the responses to the recent trucker protest in Canada and the George Floyd protests this past summer as a case in point.  Since these two protests tended to be supported by opposite ends of the political spectrum, many people who thought that the protesters in one should be arrested flipped sides when it came to the other, praising the protesters and believing that police actions taken were overdone.

Moore ultimately concluded “Promoting one right doesn’t afford us the luxury of ignoring another right. Make the case for your cause, but don’t claim that pursuing it makes those advocated by others less important.  The civil order we all enjoy requires us to respect the laws that makes this social balance possible.”

My first reaction as I read the article was to say “It’s an unfair comparison.  The two events being compared are so different.”  And they are different.  But here’s the hard part: who gets to decide which protest is so important that we excuse (at least in part) that the law was broken?  It’s so easy to believe that your side is always right and the other always wrong, and there are always examples you can point to that “prove it”.  My conclusion in the end was “Darn it—he’s right, and I’ve sometimes been guilty of doing this.”  It made me think, and that’s the mark of a good editorial.

This isn’t an argument that all sides are equally right and wrong.  On any given issue, they’re not.  Some things are more important than others, and we need to remember that key reforms throughout history often didn’t just happen—many took significant protests to make them happen. Sometimes, these key protests were accompanied by violence—sometimes carried out by the protesters, sometimes carried out by those who were against the protest, and sometimes carried out by third parties taking advantage of the disruptions created by the protests.  

This is, however, an argument from me that the rhetoric around protests is usually too heated, often dishonest, and always too one-sided.  We need to take the time to look at each instance, without the lens of what we WANT to be true.  As observers, we need to take the time and effort to see what ACTUALLY happened, have an open enough mind to consider if there is something worthwhile to what the protesters want, and think about what the effects of the protest are on both the protesters and the public.  And if we are part of a protest, take steps to make sure that the protests don’t harm innocent people, and have a plan to deal with people who may want to take advantage of your cause for their own gain.  If enough people were to do this, we might actually have a chance to come together and properly address a few issues.

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with the month of February.  The first correct answers came from Edmund Smith, Betsy Rohr Adams, Greg Kie, and Kyle Fennell.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall.   

Here are the correct answers:

1. Distinction in length February has relative to other months.  It is the shortest month, and also the only one that has a variable number of days (due to leap year).
2. Major sports event held until this year on the first Sunday of February.  The Super Bowl.
3. Traditional gifts for this February holiday are flowers and candy.  Valentine’s Day.
4. There used to be two separate holidays in February honoring these, but they’ve been combined into only one, celebrated on the third Monday of February.  Presidents of the United States.
5. Celebration held the week of February 22, it’s very important to the folks in our Canino School.  Engineering Week.

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Our contest this week has to do with Superman.  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. Planet on which Superman was born.
2. Superman’s secret identity.
3. Superman’s girlfriend, now his wife.  
4. City and State where Superman was raised, after coming to Earth.
5. The three ideals that Superman stands for, according to the 1950s television show.

February 11, 2022

The Weekly Blab

Volume 15, Issue 13:  February 11, 2022

A New Year

It’s been a while since the previous issue of the BLAB, but things have been busy for me and this is the first chance I’ve had to put pen to a new one.  I hope everyone’s classes are going well and that your students are engaged and responsive.

We had a relatively mild winter in December and early January, with not too much snow and mild temperatures.  January turned on us in the middle, with multiple days with low temperatures well below zero and a few even below -20.  February has been kinder so far, and the temperature for the past few days rising as high as 40, a trend I hope will continue.

Back at the homestead, my father Daniel (who lives with us) reached the ripe old age of 95 on February 8.  He’s doing well and enjoying life as we argue about politics and binge watch a number of TV shows.  The current one (which we’re almost done with) is Arrest and Trial, an early version of Law & Order.  This was the first starring role for Ben Gazzara, who went on to star in Run for Your Life and in a bunch of movies in the 1970s, who plays the arresting detective.  The other lead role is played by Chuck Connors as the defense attorney.  Arrest and Trial only lasted one season (1963-1964), which immediately followed Connor’s breakout role as The Rifleman (1958-1963), and just before his leads in Branded (1965-1966) and Cowboy in Africa (1967-1968).  The show was unusual for a number of reasons—it was a weekly 90 minute show that often focused on the psychological aspects of crime, and tackled issues like racism, abortion, and drug abuse in sensitive ways that were highly unusual at the time.  It also featured lots of Black and other ethnic actors as extras, bit roles, and occasionally larger roles, at a time when no other show was doing that.  It only lasted one season, but most episodes are quite good.

February 9 would have been my son Mark’s 38^th birthday.  As many of you know, I’ve been writing a weekly “Mark’s Memory Monday” where I tell another “episode” in his life story.  I haven’t missed a Monday since he passed away (the current one is #67), and I’ve only reached when he was thirteen, so there’s a long way to go.  

I’ve promised my father that as soon as I finish Mark’s story, I’ll start telling his.  He’s led an unbelievable life filled with tragedy and triumph, and I’m sure I’ll learn a few things about him that I’ve never known when I do.

Shout Out

I promised I’d give Prof. Charles Fenner (who teaches business and entrepreneurship) a shout out about his Roopreneur program, which he’s done for several years now.  In it, he engages students in working with a company that they learn about and then help develop plans for the future.  This year, its sixth iteration, they are working with Day and Nite/All Services, an HVAC company, to help them transition from a standard transactional model (you hire them and they do the job) to a membership business model.  Do you want to know more about Day and Nite/All Services (a great company with great leadership) or about what the difference is between these two business models?  We’ve got you covered—all you have to do is look here or here.  The Roopreneur session runs from February 4-20, with prizes going to the students who develop the best plans just before Spring Break.

Cis and Trans

Don’t judge me, but whenever I have a little time to kill, I’ll often look at the Quora app on my phone and see what questions people are asking and what the proffered answers are.  The arguments can be interesting but also maddening, since many questions are asked by trolls and are pushing an agenda rather than seeking information, and many others are filled with answers from people reply who don’t have even a basic understanding of the question.  Even then, you can sometimes see where misunderstandings come from or what the arguments are from people you agree or disagree with.

Anyway, I was reading a question on Quora about the term “cisgender”, where lots of the responders objected to being called that for basically two reasons: (1) they found the term offensive, and/or (2) they found both the term “cisgender” and the concept of being nonbinary gender to be made up or delusional.  These responses fell into the maddening category for me, since there was so much misinformation and downright hate in so many of them.

Let’s start with the meaning and use of the prefixes cis- and trans-.  From my own field of chemistry, cis- means “together” and trans- means “apart/across from each other” in a chemical structure.  There are many chemicals that have the exact same formula as other chemicals, but have the atoms arranged differently.  These are called isomers, from the Greek isos-equal and meros-parts.  

There are, for example, three ways that the atoms in a compound as simple as ethylene dichloride, C₂H₂Cl₂, can be arranged.  Note that carbon nearly always forms four bonds, and chlorine and hydrogen usually form only one.  In each of the three isomers, the pair of carbons have two bonds to each other and one each to the two hydrogens and the two chlorines.  The three possibilities are: 

(1) The chlorines can be together, with one on each carbon, on one side of the double bond (cis-); 

(2) The chlorines can be apart, one on each carbon, on opposite sides of the double bond (trans-); and

(3) The chlorines can both be on one of the carbons, with both hydrogens being on the other (gem-).  The gem- prefix comes from the Latin word gemini, meaning twins.  

While the three isomers have exactly the same formula C₂H₂Cl_2­­, they have entirely different properties.  Their melting points, boiling points, reactivities, etc. are all different because of the different arrangements of their atoms.  Isomers can also be wildly different in terms of their stability, ease of preparation, commonness, and price.  The terms cis-, trans-, and gem- are very useful in being a simple and succinct way of distinguishing which isomer we are talking about, which is very important in terms of stuff that chemists work on.  There are other kinds of isomers as well, but we’ll stop with this one.

This cis/trans usage doesn’t only show up in chemistry.  The prefixes cis- and trans- also show up in geography: when the Palestine mandate to the British was split in two in 1922, the easternmost part was named Trans-Jordan, meaning “across the Jordan river”.  Cisalpine means two places on the same side of the Alps mountains.  The Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 was a world’s fair that took place in Omaha, across the Mississippi from where most Americans lived at the time.  Lots of common trans- words refer to moving things across something—transport, transship, translate, transpose, transact, etc.  Cis- words are much less common, with cissing (a film of liquid coming together to form droplets) being an example.  None of these words are “made up” any more than any other word is made up—they express an idea that is useful in terms of differentiating between similar things.  That’s probably the reason that the cis- prefix is much less commonly used than trans-.  After all, if every one of a particular group of things is identical, there’s no need for prefixes to tell them apart.  If there was only one type of ethylene dichloride, saying “ethylene dichloride” would be enough, and no chemist would ever ask “which one?”

When it comes to the more modern meaning of “gender”, the cis/trans prefixes are used in pretty much the same way as in chemistry.  The term “cisgender” means that the person’s biological sex and their personal gender identity are together—their biological and mental identities are the same.  The term “transgender” means that their biological and mental identities are apart from each other.  This can be as “simple” as one being male and the other female, but can also be other ways of being apart, including people who identify as gender nonconforming, nonbinary, or transgender who have chosen not to medically transition.  Historically, the word “sex” was considered vulgar by many since it also referred to the sex act, so the word “gender” was coined.  Also, most people weren’t aware that one’s biological sex and one’s gender identity could be different in earlier times.  The word gender started as a euphemism for “sex”, so the words “sex” and “gender” were often used interchangeably. 

Whether it is useful to use any of these terms depends on context.  You don’t often hear that Utah is a trans-Mississippian state these days, though it is, since it’s west of the Mississippi river.  Since most people are aware that Utah is one of the western states, they leave it at that, and the term “trans-Mississippian” has fallen out of use.  On the other hand, the idea that gender is different than sex has become more common, so the use of cisgender and transgender have become more useful to clear communication.  

So why was there so much consternation on Quora about the word cisgender?  As a chemist, it makes no sense to me, since it has a clear meaning that is consistent with how chemists use the cis/trans prefixes, and it succinctly describes people the way they are with respect to gender.  Of course, we all know what the real reason was for some people taking offense or responding with hate.  Words are powerful things, and people who are against an idea sometimes go to great lengths to quash anyone even talking about it, even going so far as to hate the very words that accurately describe it.

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with Christmas Songs.  The first five answers came from Megan Reidl, Janel Smith, Alan Gabrielli (from Southern Poly), Carmela Young, and Terri Clemmo.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall.   

Here are the correct answers:

1. Gene Autry was responsible for two Christmas children’s classics.  Name one of them.  Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Here Comes Santa Claus.
2. Best-selling song of all time, from the 1942 Bing Crosby movie Holiday Inn.  White Christmas. 
3. Nat King Cole classic that starts “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”.  The Christmas Song.
4. Song from the musical Meet Me in St. Louis with the lyrics “Let your heart be light; From now on; Your troubles will be out of sight.” Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
5. Eartha Kitt song with lyrics “Just slip a sable under the tree for me; Been an awful good girl; …So Hurry down the chimney tonight.”  Santa Baby.

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Our contest this week has to do with the month of February.  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. Distinction in length February has relative to other months.
2. Major sports event that used to be held on the first Sunday of February, this year it’s the second Sunday.
3. Traditional gifts for this February holiday are flowers and candy.
4. There used to be two separate holidays in February honoring these, but they’ve been combined into only one, celebrated on the third Monday of February.
5. Celebration held the week of February 22, it’s very important to the folks in our Canino School.

December 17, 2021

The Weekly Blab

Volume 15, Issue 12:  December 17, 2021

The Term’s Almost Over

This will probably be the last issue of the BLAB until after New Year’s Day, so I’d like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a happy holiday season, full of family, fun, food, and joy.  

Our annual holiday card and tree ornaments are nearly all mailed and you should have received them already or be about to.  You can see the design below.  The tree ornament is #3 in a series of 12 corresponding to the 12 days of Christmas, which should take us out to the year 2030.  I love the designs and colors, and have a set hanging in our sun room at home.

Another surprise is going out to each person who volunteered to help with the testing in 2020-21.  What is it?  I’ll keep it a surprise for now, but you’ll see when you get it, and I hope you all will like it.

It’s final exam week at SUNY Canton and of our students will soon be leaving for home.  The semester has been an unusually complex one, starting off with high hopes that the pandemic was finally behind us and moving back to in-person modality for most of our courses.  Due to the Delta variant, we required that all students be vaccinated (or have a medical or religious exemption) and have the non-vaccinated weekly and the vaccinated twice a month.  Things were relatively quiet case-wise for most of the semester, with between 10 and 15 students isolating at any given moment, mostly at home.  There was a small uptick the week before Thanksgiving, but things have been quiet and back to “normal” since students returned from break, and we’ll clearly end the semester that way.  I have to give a lot of credit to both our students for following the rules and to our Health Center personnel, volunteers, staff, and faculty who do the testing, contact-tracing, helping of students, and the dozens of other tasks associated with keeping our campus safe and operating.  You may have read about an outbreak at Cornell University that’s happening now, with many of the cases being the omicron variant.  They’ve gone fully remote to help stop the spread.  That’s an obvious reminder that we still have to be careful.  From all the current data, being fully vaccinated (including the booster shot) is still the best protection, as is taking common-sense precautions such as wearing a mask indoors, social distancing, and not being part of crowds.

This past weekend was a bit challenging, due to a low-pressure system bringing high temperatures and high winds to the area starting on Friday night.  On Sunday afternoon, we noticed that one of our trees had been split off its trunk and was now precariously leaning on an adjacent tree’s branch.  We were fortunate that we were able to get a tree crew to take the tree down that evening, before anything worse happened. 

Aside from that, Jill and I have been binge-watching Doc Martin, a British TV show about a doctor who has a blood phobia and the worst bedside manner of all time, practicing in a small village in Cornwall where almost everyone else is nuts in some way.  Watching Season 7 and up  required us to subscribe to Acorn TV on the ROKU, which made Jill happy because they also stream all sorts of the British detective shows that she loves.  We’re starting Season 9 now, the last available, but I’ve read that they’re going to do a Season 10 in 2022, which will be the final one.

Congratulations!

It is always great when there’s wider recognition for the great job that SUNY Canton faculty and staff are doing and we have three recent examples of just that.

First, congratulations to our Dean for the School of Business and Liberal Arts, Phil Neisser, who has just been appointed the Officer in Charge at SUNY Potsdam.  Phil joined SUNY Canton in 2018 and under his leadership, the school added the four-year Esports Management program and earned the International Accreditation Council for Business Education’s initial accreditation for all the business and management programs. As Co-Chair of the Enrollment Management Working Group, he led strategic initiatives to help bolster enrollment. As part of the executive leadership team, he has helped shepherd the College through the difficult times of the COVID-19 pandemic.  I’m looking forward to working with Phil in his new capacity.

Next, congratulations to our colleague, Dennis Tuper, who has just won a prestigious national award—the Technician of the Year Award from the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence (ASE)!  Dennis is the Instructional Support Associate for SUNY Canton’s Automotive Technology program as well as being a SUNY Canton graduate from the same program.  He is one of only 48 automotive professionals being recognized by the ASE this year.  Dennis began working at SUNY Canton in 1999 and has been an ASE Master Technician since 1986.  He teaches classes in welding, automatic transmissions, and manual transmissions and drivetrains.  He has also assisted SUNY Canton’s award-winning American Institute of Steel Construction Steel Bridge Team over its 25-year history, helping fabricate and weld the student-designed bridges.  Dennis also sponsors an Automotive Student Textbook Scholarship.  Congratulations on this major accomplishment!

Finally, I’d like to congratulate our Director of Library Services, Cori Wilhelm, on her new appointment as Program Manager for the Office of Library and Information Services at SUNY System Administration.  Cori will work with libraries across SUNY in the development and adoption of open educational resources (OER) and digital learning resources.  As most people know, Cori has led the OER effort here at SUNY Canton for the past six years, resulting in savings of well over $1M for our students.  Cori has been integral to the reimagining of the Library as a ‘Learning Commons’ space that creates access and support for students, contributing to their success and retention.  Congratulations Cori, and best of luck in your new position!

Freebie!

I have a box of music books—the ones with the notes and chords for piano players.  If anyone would like it—no charge!—please drop me an email.  The first person who responds gets it and can pick it up in my office.

Jazz with the Prez

Last week’s session of Jazz with the Prez was cancelled due to so many people losing their internet, so we’ll try again this Saturday.  It will be about Louis Prima and Keely Smith, the “King of the Swingers” and one of the greatest jazz vocalists ever.  Not only is their music wonderful, its often extremely funny!  As always, the session is at 8:00 PM on Saturday night (December 18) on zoom.  The link is: https://zoom.us/j/92049417499?pwd=QVV0eENuU2Y3OUJCazhQY3dNbkUyUT09.

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with Major Disasters.  Our best answers came from James Roorbach (no big surprise—he teaches in our Emergency and Disaster Management Center), Brandon Baldwin, and Terri Clemmo.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall.   

Here are the correct answers:

1. Hurricane hitting Florida and New Orleans in 2005, causing 125 billion in damage and killing 1800.  Katrina.
2. Nuclear explosion and meltdown in the Soviet Union in 1986, causing an estimated 4000 cancer deaths.  Chernobyl.
3. Volcano eruption in Washington State in 1980, killing 57.  Mount St. Helens
4. Volcano eruption in Italy in 79 AD, it destroyed the city of Pompeii.  Vesuvius.
5. Chinese river that flooded in 1931, inundating 70,000 square miles.  Yangtze River.

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Our contest this week has to do with Christmas Songs.  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. Gene Autry was responsible for two Christmas children’s classics.  Name one of them.
2. Best-selling song of all time, from the 1942 Bing Crosby movie Holiday Inn.
3. Nat King Cole classic that starts “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”.
4. Song from the musical Meet Me in St. Louis with the lyrics “Let your heart be light; From now on; Your troubles will be out of sight.”
5. Eartha Kitt song with lyrics “Just slip a sable under the tree for me; Been an awful good girl; …So Hurry down the chimney tonight.”  

December 8, 2021

The Weekly Blab

Volume 15, Issue 11:  December 8, 2021

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

The holiday season is well upon us.  Chanukah started on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, lasting eight nights and just ended.  Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s Day will be here before you know it, and there are many other holidays and celebrations between now and the beginning of next semester, and I hope you have a festive time with each one you and your family celebrate.

SUNY Canton’s annual President’s Holiday Party was a luncheon on December 2, with a wonderful buffet featuring many kinds of Italian favorites, catered by our terrific College Association.  For those who weren’t able to attend, we also did our second set of prize drawings to thank people for the work they have done during the pandemic.  Michaela has sent out a list of the winners and if you are one but haven’t yet gotten your prize, come by our office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall to get it.  A big thanks to Michaela Young and Amber Baines, who handled most of the logistics for the party.

By now, you should either be about to get or have gotten our annual holiday card and our tree ornament.  The ornament is the third of an ongoing series of twelve, corresponding to the twelve days of Christmas.  Both the cards and the ornaments are designed by our own Matt Mulkin (a member of our Public Relations Office) each year, with a little bit of input from my office.  He does a fabulous job, which is much appreciated.

Every year, we hold a Children’s Holiday Party for children of our faculty, staff, and (starting this year) children of our students.  Given the pandemic this year, it would have been inappropriate to hold this indoors, since so many children are unvaccinated.  After a bit of discussion, a plan was developed to still hold the party, but as an outdoor “trunk or treat” sort of event.  

We held the party last Sunday, and the good news is that the weather was very cooperative.  It was actually sunny for the first hour, and there was no snow or rain throughout.  We had eight cars with their trunks decorated, each with a different theme—one was based on the movie Elf, another on the movie A Christmas Story.  Others included The Night Before Christmas, A Coca-Cola Christmas, Christmas in Whoville, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and others.  About 80 children came, went from trunk to trunk collecting a toy, book, candy, or DVD; were able to pet a sheep; see inflatable figures like Santa, Snoopy and Woodstock on a Zamboni, a penguin eating a fish, the Grinch, and a Christmas tree; see Roody, our mascot; get a cup of hot chocolate; and go in to see Santa and Mrs. Claus and get a cookie and a stuffed animal.  Parents took lots of pictures and the children all had a wonderful time, as did all the volunteers for the event.  

A big thank you to everyone who participated, who include: Michaela Young, Amber Baines, Megan Warren, Amanda Rowley (and daughter Madelyn), Amanda and Jeff Crump (and daughter Lexie), Melissa Tulip, Todd, Tina and Natasha Flanagan, Travis Smith, Nellie Lucas (and daughter Izzie), Miqueas Guerrero, Danielle Giron-Reyes, Liz Brown, Michelle Currier, Matt Metcalf, Diana Para, Jen McDonald, Deb Molnar, Julie Parkman (and Zoey!), Al Mulkin and his wife Kate, Roody, Susan Robert, Sean Conklin, Nicole Fullerton, Rob Kelley, Kelly Peterson, Dale Hutchins, Jacob Pitcher, Josh Crawford, Anthony Ange, Jason Haggett, Roy Clough, Leah Fitzgerald, Greg Kie, Amanda Deckert, Alexa Sobon, Debbie Keith, and my wife Jill.  Wow—that’s a lot of people!

Photos are courtesy of Greg Kie, photographer extraordinaire!

Are We Just People?

Speaking of our Public Relations Office, something that they’re doing that I like very much is a series of profiles of SUNY Canton students, called “People Like Me”.  The idea here is to select typical students at the College, who the reader might react to by thinking “They’re just like me” or my child, or my neighbor’s child. There is a growing fraction of the public that believe going to college isn’t worth the money, and that campuses are hotbeds of radicalism.  By showcasing our typical students, the public will have a more accurate picture of who are students are and what motivated them to come here.  The students who have been profiled so far are invariably interesting because they are representative of SUNY Canton—focused on their careers and learning and having the same motivations that most of us have.  The profiles are part of the weekly update appearing each Friday afternoon from Public Relations.  Please watch for it and if you’re so inclined, share it yourself on Facebook or your own social media site.

Shoot to Score

SUNY Canton’s Women’s Ice Hockey team has been in the news a lot lately.  Assistant captain Iida Laitinen had a spectacular goal, her seventh of the season, that was featured on ESPN SportsCenter’s Top 10 plays on November 25.  You can see the goal below.

The team has had a great start, resulting in three of our players, Iida Laitinen (rookie of the week), Micayla MacIntyre (player of the week), and Sirena Alvarez (goalie of the week), sweeping the NEWHL Player of the Week selection.  Congratulations!

SUNY Canton’s Chelsey Raven, a member of our Women’s Basketball team, won Player of the Week honors for a second time from the North Atlantic Conference.  Chelsey was the high scorer with 26 points and 12 rebounds when SUNY Canton defeated Clarkson University 69-54 on November 23.  This was only the second time that SUNY Canton defeated Clarkson since we became a four-year college, and the first time in the past nine years!  Chelsey is a senior and hails from Ogdensburg.

Stuck in the Middle With You

An article appeared in Inside Higher Ed this week, entitled “The Full-Time Faculty Factor”, which looked at an analysis of the number of full time faculty per 1000 students in the SUNY and CUNY systems senior colleges (the university centers were not part of the analysis), noting that the highest ratios occur on predominantly white campuses.  A graph within the article showed that the highest number of full-time faculty/1000 students was at SUNY Potsdam, followed by Maritime and Fredonia.  The lowest was at CUNY NYC Technology, CUNY York College, and SUNY Empire State.  The number of faculty/1000 students ratio was inversely correlated with the percentage of Black and Hispanic students—the higher the percentage of Black and Hispanic students, the lower the number of faculty/1000 students.  Thus, the most diverse campuses have the lowest number of full-time faculty per student, which (the report concludes) is unfair and perhaps illegal under Title IV.

The graph comes from a report by Ned Benton, a professor of public management at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and other members of the UFS Budget Committee.  There are a couple other factors which are mentioned in the report that are worth noting.  Back in 2003, both SUNY and CUNY had roughly 43 FT faculty/1000 FTE students.  Since then, the SUNY ratio has increased to 49, while the CUNY number has dropped to 34 in 2019, with the gap widening most between 2011 and 2019.  The obvious question is “why has this occurred?”  One might guess that it has to do with the number of students, but the opposite is true.  In SUNY, the number of FTE students has risen by 7% over this period, from 92,583 to 98,616, with the number of FT faculty rising at twice this rate (16%).  In CUNY, the number of FTE students has risen by 33%, from 101,299 to 135,006, but the number of faculty only increased by less than a third this rate (9%).  The TAP gap (the difference between the amount the State pays for tuition assistance–TAP–and the full cost of tuition, which must be covered by the campuses) seems to be part of the problem, since it impacts colleges with larger fractions of TAP eligible students.  The recommendation from this report was for full funding for TAP, with some additional targeted funding for those colleges with the lowest faculty/student ratios.  

A deeper dive into the numbers shows some odd trends.  While CUNY faculty/student ratios are generally lower than SUNY ratios, the differ significantly from each other and in many cases have been fairly steady over the time period, except for the last few years.  CUNY Baruch, for example, had faculty/student ratios ranging from 39.9 to 37 up until 2014, dropping after that to 32.  CUNY Brooklyn had ratios above 40 until 2016, dropping after that to 36.  CUNY City had ratios above 40 throughout, with ratios above 46 more than half the time and above 50 seven times.  At the other end of the scale, CUNY John Jay, NYC, and Staten Island have been below 40 for the entire period.  CUNY Medgar Evers fell from 48 in 2003 to 40 in 2008, and plummeted thereafter, never rising above 35.  In SUNY, Empire State has always been low, with FT faculty/FT student ratios in the 20s in all but one year.  This is presumably a function of their online-heavy status, with many part-time faculty who aren’t included in the FT faculty numerator.  

So where is Canton in this analysis?  Pretty much in the middle—below most SUNY campuses, and above most CUNYs.  Our ratios started at 37 and have risen to 42, having been as high as 46 in 2017.  Due to recent enrollment declines, we’re at 46 this year.

Fear (in Academia)

Another pair of articles about academic freedom in Florida have appeared in the Chronicle.  The first, titled Florida Man Attacks Academic Freedom, talks about a doctoral concentration called “Critical Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Education” at the University of Florida.  The article goes on to say: 

The goal is presumably to avoid triggering the sensitivities of the Florida legislature and of Gov. Ron DeSantis, for whom “critical race theory” has become “a fixation.” Apparently, the university is concerned that lawmakers will scan curricular documents in search of their pet anathemas. Chris Busey, a faculty member associated with the imperiled program, has filed a grievance. He was told, he said, by Chris J. Hass, associate provost for academic and faculty affairs, “that using the words ‘critical’ and ‘race’ together was an issue, and that they should consider renaming the concentration and/or delay putting it forward until the legislative session has ended.” Hass, to be fair, seems to have been searching for a way to preserve the concentration by avoiding the ire of the legislature.

Perhaps in response, the second, Florida’s Flagship Is Beset with Controversy.  Its Board Says Everything Is Fine reports that Morteza Hosseini, the Chairman of the U. Florida Board of Trustees, says that there has not been any political pressure from the Board, whether on the matter of faculty testifying in ways that may disagree with the state government, or in any other way, and that the Board stands with the faculty at the University of Florida in every way when it comes to academic freedom.

Both may well be telling the exact truth.  In way too many cases, there are people who are willing to do the bidding (or what they think the bidding is) of those in power, at least in part for fear that dire repercussions may follow if they don’t.  In many cases these enablers aren’t directly asked to do anything, in this case by the governor or legislators.  It is enough that they have made their views known on a subject.  The enabler creates a new policy or makes a request, always framed as being for the larger good—a way to preserve the concentration by avoiding the ire of the legislature—in this case.

This is not always an unreasonable thing.  All funding agencies have a particular set of priorities.  The more closely you can frame your proposal so that the reviewers see it as satisfying those priorities, the more likely you are to be funded.  This may require you to restructure your research so that it has a somewhat different focus, to use the “master words” that the agency is looking for in your narrative, and to avoid using certain phrases or arguments that could sink your proposal.  If you’re asking for funding from an oil company foundation, it’s probably a bad idea to frame your proposal as having a goal to reduce oil consumption.

That having been said, there’s supposed to be a big difference between governmental and private foundation research funding.  The former is supposed to have the goal of furthering honest research wherever it may lead, while the latter has the goal of furthering the private foundation’s interests (which may or may not be benign).  When there is a realistic threat of governmental funding being withheld because research topics, their results, or their dissemination don’t fit a political agenda, academic freedom has indeed been imperiled—even when no direct threat has been made.

Jazz with the Prez

This week’s session of Jazz with the Prez will be about Louis Prima and Keely Smith, the “King of the Swingers” and one of the greatest jazz vocalists ever.  Not only is their music wonderful, its often extremely funny!  As always, the session is at 8:00 PM on Saturday night (December 11) on zoom.  The link is: https://zoom.us/j/92049417499?pwd=QVV0eENuU2Y3OUJCazhQY3dNbkUyUT09.

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with Snow.  Our best answers came from Erica Sharpe, Bruce Hanson, Terri Clemmo, and Elizabeth Madlin.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall.  

Here are the correct answers:

1. Winter song whose first line is “Though the weather outside is frightful”.  Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let it Snow.
2. Form of snow when drops of rain freeze into balls of ice as they fall from the sky.  Sleet.
3. What you make if you lie on your back in the snow and move your arms up and down.  A Snow Angel.
4. Structure made of snow that can be more than 100 degrees warmer inside than outside.  Igloo.
5. Snowiest city in New York and it is also where I grew up.  Its Common Council passed a decree in 1992 that any more snow before Christmas Eve was illegal.  Syracuse.

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Today’s challenge has to do with major disasters.  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. Hurricane hitting Florida and New Orleans in 2005, causing 125 billion in damage and killing 1800.
2. Nuclear explosion and meltdown in the Soviet Union in 1986, causing an estimated 4000 cancer deaths.
3. Volcano eruption in Washington State in 1980, killing 57.
4. Volcano eruption in Italy in 79 AD, it destroyed the city of Pompeii.
5. Chinese river that flooded in 1931, inundating 70,000 square miles.

December 1, 2021

The Weekly Blab

Volume 15, Issue 10:  December 1, 2021

Welcome Back

I hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgiving break, had a chance to catch up with things and even get a little rest, and enjoyed the big holiday feast.  Jill and I decided to eat our Thanksgiving meal out this year.  Originally, we planned to go down to Clayton, but the weather turned against us.  We ultimately wound up going to the Asian Buffet in Potsdam, which not only had the normal range of Chinese food choices, but also turkey and Peking duck!  The food was great and we both enjoyed it.

Sad News

Unfortunately, there was some bad news over the break too.  Our Vice President for Advancement, Tracey Thompson, lost her husband of 38 years on November 25.  Jay Thompson was a singer-songwriter, fine guitar player, a broadcaster, and (with Tracey) lover of cats.  I learned that he was a member of a folk group known as The Tikis and had released an album in 1962 on the Philips label.  I checked on eBay to see if any of their LPs were available and ordered one for Tracey and one for my own collection.  A celebration of his life will take place at Luthier’s Co-op on Main Street in Easthampton, MA from noon to 3 PM on Sunday, December 5.   His obituary can be found here.

SUNY Potsdam’s Officer-in-Charge, Dr. John Graham, passed away on November 27^th.  John was not only the leader of a nearby sister SUNY campus, but he was also my friend. I’ve known John for several years when he worked at SUNY System Administration in Albany, and knew him to be a strong student advocate, a fellow music lover, a straight-shooter, and a really nice guy. I was delighted when he was appointed as Officer-in-Charge at SUNY Potsdam and looked forward to our working together. We were planning to have a get together over the holidays so that Jill and I could meet his family. I am truly shocked and heartbroken by this terrible news.

On a More Positive Note

SUNY Canton’s newly renovated Dana Hall, which houses our Center for Criminal Justice, Intelligence & Cybersecurity, was featured in American School and University’s November/December 2021 issue as an Outstanding Design for a Specialized Facility.  

The article shows several pictures of the facility and reads: 

After extensive renovations, SUNY Canton’s Dana Hall is now home to the Center for Criminal Justice, Intelligence & Cybersecurity.  Built in 1967, Dana Hall was the original athletic facility and one of three campus buildings designed with unique glulam structural beams.  The building was slated for demolition because of structural issues with the beams.  However, with the help of a specialized consultant, all beams were repaired and structural concerns resolved, freeing the building up for the growing criminal justice programs.

To meet the space requirements of the programs, a decommissioned swimming pool was infilled, and the second floor was extended.  The new floor area allowed for the creation of classrooms, forensics lab, criminal investigation lab, crime scene staging room, practice interrogation rooms, classrooms, and faculty offices.

The University Police required a command center, lobby, offices, holding room, evidence room and renovated locker rooms.  To support the new programs, the facility’s MPE systems received a complete upgrade.  The center is also home to the St. Lawrence County Law Enforcement Academy and SUNY Canton Corrections Academy.

Winter Season Athletics Honors

 SUNY Canton’s Chelsey Raven, a member of our Women’s Basketball team, won Player of the Week honors for a second time from the North Atlantic Conference.  Chelsey was the high scorer with 26 points and 12 rebounds when SUNY Canton defeated Clarkson University 69-54 on November 23.  This was only the second time that SUNY Canton defeated Clarkson since we became a four-year college, and the first time in the past nine years!  Chelsey is a senior and hails from Ogdensburg.

More Attacks on Tenure

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a bill has been introduced in the South Carolina House of Representatives called the “Cancelling Professor Tenure Act”, which if enacted would prohibit public colleges and universities from awarding tenure to employees hired after 2023.  Tenure would be replaced by contracts of up to five years.  In addition, the bill would require all full-time faculty (except for departments that only teach graduate degrees) to teach at least two undergraduate or graduate courses each semester, beginning in 2024-2025.  The president of the AAUP’s South Carolina Conference, Shawn Smolen-Morton, said that this new bill is part of “an effort to muzzle professors…This isn’t some homegrown South Carolina concern…This looks like a national effort to infiltrate states and how states make their decisions about their education.”

There has been a disturbing pattern over the years of the S.C. legislature or governor getting involved in higher education for partisan purposes.  Examples include overturning or trying to influence search committees in college presidential selections to install their preferred candidates, cutting state funds to colleges that assigned summer readings that legislators didn’t like, and pressuring colleges to cancel campus performances they didn’t like.

So why is it that there are so many attacks on tenure?  Sometimes, it’s due to misinformation.  As I’ve written in more detail in previous editions of the BLAB, tenure does not increase costs (in fact, it lowers them), it is not a defense against meeting one’s faculty obligations, it is not easy to get, and it is not impossible to lose.  Tenure is a protection against arbitrary termination, which makes it a critical support for academic freedom.  

A different argument that’s sometimes raised is “What other occupation gets tenured?  Why should faculty be treated differently than anyone else?”  The argument is flawed in two critical ways that I’ll detail here.

First, there are many other occupations that get tenured in one way or another—it’s not only faculty.  While academic tenure is the type that most people think of, other common types of tenure cover judges and civil service employees in many states and at the federal level.  In addition, workers at companies that are unionized have a form of tenure as well.  The key element of tenure is that you can only be terminated for cause.  An accusation or allegation is not sufficient to establish cause—there must be objective proof that the accusation or allegation is (a) well founded and (b) relevant to the professional obligations of the job.  

Second, let’s flip the question and ask: “Why shouldn’t every profession have a form of tenure?” Looking at faculty, judges, and civil service employees first, what is it that these three categories have in common?  All of them have an expectation and necessity of dealing with issues in an objective way.  Our justice system depends on judges being non-partisan—after all, what decent person wants a biased judge?  Our homes, safety, and ability to access and benefit from vital services depend on non-partisan civil service employees.  Our educational system relies on teachers and researchers who teach and research in an unbiased manner.  This is true in business too—well-run companies rely on a workforce that feels heard and can rely on policies that prevent capricious terminations.  While abuses on the part of employees can and do occur in all these professions, tenure is not and has never been a protection against termination for someone who commits abuses within their position.  Tenure is a protection that requires those who want to terminate a tenured individual to prove that they have cause.  Why is that a bad thing?

If everything I’m saying is true, why do some legislators, colleges, and businesses want to get rid of tenure?  In many cases, it’s either (a) because they don’t actually have evidence that would give them cause to remove someone, or (b) to cover up their own procedural failings to document that they have cause, or (c) to advance some partisan purpose.  Here’s an obvious example.  If a judge decides a case in the opposite manner than you would like, that shouldn’t be sufficient grounds to remove the judge.  Demonstrating cause would require you to provide evidence that the judge consistently acts in a way that contravenes the law and justice.  If you have partisan goals, you’d prefer to not have to do all that because it may be impossible to prove—what you’d like is to be able to fire any judge that doesn’t see things your way.  Similarly, without civil service protections, any new mayor, governor, or president could fire anyone under them without cause and appoint cronies in their place. 

These are also the reasons that some legislators and colleges want to eliminate academic tenure.  The faculty member may be teaching or researching something that they don’t want taught or researched.  In some cases, this can be legitimate—the faculty member may be teaching something that is demonstrably false or inappropriately biased.  If evidence can be gathered that shows this, the faculty member is informed of the problem, and still doesn’t change their ways, cause has been established and tenure isn’t a protection.  On the other hand, someone who has partisan goals (or who doesn’t want to be bothered with having to demonstrate cause) simply wants to get rid of a faculty member who makes them feel uncomfortable or is interfering with their partisan goal and to replace them with someone who sees things their way.

The real problem is that there are too many legislators, colleges, and business leaders who don’t want to bother with demonstrating cause.  They just want things their own way and want to have the power to get rid of anyone who stands in their way.  That’s not justice, good government, good business, or good education.

Jazz with the Prez

This week’s session of Jazz with the Prez will be about Oscar Peterson, one of the greatest pianists 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.

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with Thanksgiving.  Our best answers came from Joseph Kelly, Alice Reed, Andrew Fitch, and Terri Clemmo.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall.  

Here are the correct answers:

1. How is the date for Thanksgiving currently determined?  It is the fourth Thursday in November.
2. Who celebrated the first Thanksgiving back in 1621?  The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Native American tribe.
3. What department store is associated with the biggest Thanksgiving Day Parade?  Macy’s.
4. For shoppers, what is the day after Thanksgiving commonly called?  Black Friday.
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.  Over the River and Through the Woods.

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Since we had our first snow of the season this past weekend, today’s challenge has to do with Snow.  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. Winter song whose first line is “Though the weather outside is frightful”.
2. Form of snow when drops of rain freeze into balls of ice as they fall from the sky.
3. What you make if you lie on your back in the snow and move your arms up and down.
4. Structure made of snow that can be more than 100 degrees warmer inside than outside.
5. Snowiest city in New York and it is also where I grew up.  Its Common Council passed a decree in 1992 that any more snow before Christmas Eve was illegal.

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.

November 4, 2021

The Weekly Blab

Volume 15, Issue 8:  November 3, 2021

What’s New

This past weekend was a bit busy.  On Friday night, I participated in the annual Trunk or Treat event, sponsored by our Early Childhood Education faculty, along with around 25 or 30 other SUNY Canton faculty, staff, and students who had brought their cars, decorated their trunks, and were prepared to give out treats.  We’ve done this several times in the past and my son Mark always enjoyed being part of it, giving away not only candy, but toys and DVDs that he had accumulated over the year.  Jill and I arrived a little before 5:30 PM to set up, and by 5:45 a large crowd of parents and children had already arrived and were let in early. Typically, Trunk or Treat draws about 115-130 children, but it quickly became clear that we were going to break all records this year. 

We brought two large boxes of children’s DVDs (about 350 or 400 in total), two big bags of toys, a stack of children’s books, and a lot of candy, which Jill thought would be far more than we would need.  The first children reached our car and we started giving out the treats and talking to them, complimenting them on their costumes and how cute they looked.  When I looked up, I saw that a line of about 50 children had lined up before our car, waiting to see what we were giving away.  Tracey Thompson, our VP for Advancement, came by to help and started distributing our candy to the kids while they were waiting.  Jill and I gave out the books, DVDs, and toys as quickly as we could.  More and more children kept coming.  The books went gone first, and it was clear that the candy would run out soon. Tracey ran into her office and brought out some more, but we soon ran through that as well.  By about 7:00, things slowed down, which was good because by then the toys were gone too, and only about a dozen DVDs were left.  My best guess as to how many children came would be between 450 and 500, about triple the usual number.  The event was a huge success, so I’d like to thank our Early Childhood Education program, especially Dr. Maureen Maiocco and Christina Martin and everyone who participated for a fantastic job.

Pictures are courtesy of Tracey Thompson, our VP of Advancement

On Saturday, we had our second College Open House of the fall.  The weather was a bit iffier than it had been the previous night, though still not too bad, and we had a nice turnout for this “live” event as well.  I had a nice time talking to various families both at times scheduled for “Meet the President” and later at lunch, when I walked around the dining hall talking to various families.  It was wonderful seeing how much they were enjoying the open house and how impressed they were with our programs, facilities, and most of all the friendliness and helpfulness of our Admissions Office personnel and our staff, faculty, and students.  I agree—you’re all terrific!  Saturday night was another session of Jazz with the Prez, featuring Cannonball Adderley, a great alto sax player, hugely popular from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s.  

Sunday was home time and the big job was moving most of the stuff from our patio into the garage before winter, in between when it was raining.  I also cleared out enough space for our car for when the snow inevitably comes.  

Monday was, as many of you know, the first anniversary of our son’s passing away.  That’s the traditional time to say prayers at the gravesite and unveil the monument.  We had ordered the monument about six months ago, but with the delays at the quarry and trucking delays due to COVID, we weren’t sure that it would arrive in time.  The monument finally arrived early last week, and they were able to pour the foundation, let it set, and install the monument on it just in time.  We thank everyone for their condolences for our family and fond remembrances of Mark—I can’t tell you how much they are appreciated.

Something Timely and Important

A number of articles have appeared lately in the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere that I think are worth bringing to your attention.  

On the timely side, we all know that student disconnection is an especially large problem at this point in the semester.  An article titled “4 Simple Ways to Help Your Most Disconnected Students” by Mischa Willett, an assistant professor of English and Writing at Seattle Pacific University, offers some good ways to help deal with this issue.

The first way is Tell Your Story.  A lot of students have never interacted with a faculty member before going to college and are afraid to do it.  We seem like an alien species to them, someone who couldn’t possibly understand them or their particular circumstances, so they are reluctant to approach us or seek help.  Telling students a little about yourself, your family, your heritage, or problems you encountered at home or in college and had to overcome can break the ice.  Back in the day, I used to bring a small boom box to my General Chemistry class and play a song on it in the time before class began, asking them to name the tune or the group.  Some would be well known and others pretty obscure.  If no one recognized the tune, I’d always say “It’s a sad day when the faculty are cooler than the students!” and they’d all laugh.  One day I played a song by Cesaria Evora (a singer from Cape Verde who performs sad ballads) and was shocked when one of my students not only recognized it, but told me her grandmother lived next door to the Cesaria.  “She doesn’t wear shoes, you know” said the student.  You never know what will connect you to a student, and that can make all the difference.

Second, Seek out the Lost.  Too many people figure that the students are adults now and attending class is up to them, so when a student misses several classes, they don’t do anything.  The author told of a time she missed a class and the professor saw her the next day and said: “We missed you in class yesterday.”  As she struggled to come up with an excuse, he continued “It’s too bad.  You would’ve liked it.  Part of the class goes missing when you’re not there.”  This put three thoughts in her head she’d never had before: (1) He talked about it as something fun that she was missing, (2) That he thought she added something to the class, and (3) That she was more than a tuition bill or enrollment number.  She was a student, a member of a community.

Third, Settle for Medium-Impact Practices.  Let students know what opportunities there are on campus, such as movies, discussions, speakers, and events.  Encourage them to go, offer extra credit, and if possible, tell them “I’ll be going with my family; you should come too.”  If you’re doing any research or project work, or willing to offer an independent study, why not tell them about it and invite them to participate?

Finally, Create Community Where and When You Can.  It’s more difficult than ever for students to make real connections with other people.  This can be at campus events, but it can also be in the classroom.  If a student misses class, rather than saying “Ask someone for the notes”, why not help them make a connection by saying “This is James; he seems to take good notes.  James, will you share your notes?”  If you see one of your students outside of class who seems to be upset, why not ask “How’s it going?”  You may just get a perfunctory “Fine”, but it may also give the student an opportunity to connect with you and tell you what they’re really struggling with and for you to help with some empathy and suggestions.

I’m sure that many of you are already doing such things and might have thought of some other ways of addressing disconnected students.  Email me or comment below to add your ideas of how to connect with students. As always, the most important thing is to notice and be willing to reach out to help.

Attacks on Higher Education

On the disturbing side, a large batch of articles have appeared lately that are focused on various types of attacks on Higher Education.  One you may have heard about is an article titled Georgia Regents Approve Changes in Post-Tenure Review which talks about some serious faculty concerns about the changes, and whether they amount to an erosion of tenure.  I’ll be talking more specifically about this article in the next issue of the BLAB.

Another article, entitled Florida is a Five-Alarm Fire for Academic Freedom, talks about a series of interrelated issues that have raised faculty concerns and drawn national attention.  First, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis used an executive order to ban any vaccine or mask mandates, including at state universities.  When asked why the University of Florida was not mandating masking indoors because of COVID, its president, Kent Fuchs, replied: “I literally don’t have that power.”  Second, the article reported that the governor also “had arranged this fall for the University of Florida to hire and grant tenure to a controversial UCLA professor, Joseph Ladapo, in only two weeks.  DeSantis quickly named Ladapo as the state’s surgeon general … Now he does DeSantis’s bidding as the state’s chief culture warrior against masking and vaccination mandates—while also serving as a professor at the University of Florida’s medical school.”  

Most recently, the University of Florida denied a request by three faculty members to serve as expert witnesses in a lawsuit challenging a new Florida law placing new limits on ways that residents can vote.  The University of Florida affirmed that it had denied the request, saying that it would be “adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution.” This has raised concerns about censorship and attacks on academic freedom.  The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS, the regional accreditation body) said that it was looking into the situation, and the university has seemingly backed off a bit, now saying that its objection was that the three faculty would be paid for their testimony, and if they were to do it pro bono, it would be OK.  The part about pay was not reported as part of the original denial, though it seems to be there now.  A fourth faculty member has now reported having an earlier request to serve as an expert witness denied and stating that there was no pay involved.  Additional Chronicle articles on this subject include Totalitarianism Takes Aim at Higher Education and Stand Up for What You Believe, President Fuchs.  

Perhaps the most disturbing attacks on higher education appeared in Tablet, an online magazine.  The more recent one, Why Ending Tenure Is Only a Start, is by Michael Lind and literally hopes for the end of the American university.  Its last paragraph reads: “The American university has existed in its modern form as a dysfunctional conglomerate that devours ever more of society’s resources with ever worse results only since World War II.  Now in its 70s, it is not long for this world.  Rather than keep it alive on a morphine drip of student and taxpayer money, we should let it pass away and be replaced by institutions which, in truly innovative ways, use technology and teamwork to lower prices, raise wages, and keep the number of managers to a minimum.”  

Does Mr. Lind give an example of such innovative institutions?  The other two members of the liberal professions, medicine and law, have (according to him) “been replaced by factory style organization. In Europe, most physicians have long been salaried employees of hospitals.  But it is only in the last generation that most American physicians have become salaried employees of hospitals and other organizations, rather than independent practitioners.  Meanwhile, large law firms are growing into law factories.  From the perspective of the old-time country lawyer this is a tragedy, but it is progress from the point of view of the consumer who buys manufactured goods made by factories, not self-employed blacksmiths who keep their own hours.”  Have you noticed that the cost of medical and legal services here in the U.S. has dropped?  Me neither. 

Who does he blame for the sorry state of higher education?  Lind is an across-the-board critic, going after “administrative bloat” and “the progressive Democratic monoculture among all but a few professors and administrators, or the job-for-life guarantees for even the most ineffective and unproductive scholars.”  His greatest anger seems directed at “the expansion of the diversity bureaucracy on American campuses in the last decade or so…”  A specific example he cites is the 97 administrators in diversity areas at the University of Michigan (cited by Mark Perry, an economics faculty member at UM-Flint, who one might also be interested to know has filed over 100 lawsuits supporting men’s rights while also being a Faculty Affiliate to the Women’s and Gender Studies Program).  Both fail to mention that UMichigan employs some 16,000 staff and 6,500 faculty, and so the 97 in diversity constitute a whopping four tenths of one percent of the workforce.

An earlier article by Lind was called Who Should Pay for College? with a promotional blurb that reads “Making students and their families pay small fortunes for employment that is not guaranteed is pure sadism.  Hamburger University shows us a better way.”  In case you think that this was just a teaser, the final line in the article reads: “Forget Harvard and Yale, America’s knockoffs of aristocratic Oxbridge.  If we want a more egalitarian and efficient society that serves the interests of workers, employers, and taxpayers alike, Hamburger University shows us the way.”  His basic argument is that companies should pay for higher education, not the public and not the students.  In this way, workers who show aptitude for higher things would be selected for additional training that precisely fits their company’s needs, without any additional fluff.  Hamburger University serves workers at McDonalds who are selected for advanced training in how to be a good employee, and sometimes results for the best ones in becoming a restaurant manager.  Similar processes in law firms could provide a path for accomplished paralegals to work their way up to senior partners, and in hospitals lead talented nursing aids to become nurses and even doctors.  He does admit that most companies will resist having to pay for their own employee training (something that colleges now do for them), especially since their newly trained employees may leave for greener pastures.  His solution for making this happen? “The federal or state governments can play a role by incentivizing or requiring all firms in a sector [as well as government agencies and non-profits] to take part in the training scheme and by matching their contributions with taxpayer funds.”  

Given these views, one might wonder where exactly did Mr. Lind get his college degree from?  You might be surprised to find out that his master’s degree is from Yale.  He also has a J.D. from the University of Texas Law School, though for some reason his mini-bio in both articles omits that.  Where does he work?  Again, you may be surprised to learn that he is a Professor of Practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs (at the University of Texas at Austin), which one might presume he doesn’t include as one of the colleges that we should let pass away, though that could be wrong too.  After all, he is leaving LBJ-UT-A in summer 2022 to write full time. 

Finally, the title of another article in the Chronicle, Administrators Are Not the Enemy, gave me some hope, but the article itself? Not so much.  Not surprisingly, it was written by an administrator, Brian Rosenberg, who started as a faculty member and went on to become president of Macalester College.  He starts off by mentioning that “it appears at times as if the condescension of some faculty members toward the administrative staff of a college or university—a group that by definition includes everyone from the president to the most newly hired admissions officer—is nearly limitless.”  He quotes several articles describing “common faculty viewpoints”, one describing administrators as either autocrats or widget makers; another saying “the authority of academic administrators is only solid to the extent that they themselves are credible practitioners of the scholarly life”; and a third saying “large numbers have little to do besides attend meetings and retreats and serve as agents of administrative imperialism.”  

Rosenberg admits that in his 15 years as a faculty member, he sometimes held these views himself, or did little to discourage them.  After 17 years as a college president, he now realizes that these views were wrong because “there are many nonfaculty jobs within the university that are both essential and require high levels of expertise, and destructive because a community cannot be both truly inclusive and contemptuous of a large number of its members.”  True enough, but his article closed with the snarky straw-man admonition: “Here is an idea: The next time a student overdoses in a residence hall, call a faculty member; the next time a family pleads for financial aid, call a faculty member; the next time an institution has to figure out a way to navigate safely through a global pandemic, call a faculty member.  They are, after all, the experts.”  

What does all of this add up to?  OK—it is true that I’ve run into a few administrative autocrats and widget makers in my academic journey, and I’ve also run into a small number of faculty who held demeaning views of all administrators and longed for the days when faculty controlled and did everything at colleges (whenever that was).  Far more often, however, I have worked with administrators who deeply valued and supported their college’s academic enterprise and worked hard to support the faculty and their needs in every way possible.  I have also worked with a multitude of faculty who spent considerable amounts of time outside their classrooms working with admissions officers to recruit students; working with student life staff by advising organizations or athletic teams; calling administrators for help when they feared a student was going to harm themself in some way; and working with advancement staff by meeting with alumni for fundraising, donating to student emergency funds, and working to help desperate students solve a financial issue.  Where did these few bad things and far more numerous good things happen?  At every college I’ve ever been at, including this one.  

Maybe the real answer is for all of us to remember a few important things.  The real enemies of higher education aren’t found on our campuses.  They’re the people who twist our reality to fit their own venal or political agendas.  Doing our jobs and keeping moving forward is enough of a problem without going after each other.  Supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion are basic American ideals that we too often haven’t lived up to.  Faculty are not do-nothing dilletantes that have to be carefully monitored, and administrators are not their enemies.  Are there problems in higher education?  Sure.  Are people breaking their backs trying to address these problems, even when they’re overworked and sometimes underpaid?  Absolutely. 

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with vacations and vacation spots.  Our best answers came from Megan Reidl, Kelly Peterson, Julie Cruickshank, Terri Clemmo, and Bruce Hanson.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^thfloor of MacArthur Hall.  

Here are the correct answers:

1. Top vacation attraction in Western New York and Ontario.  Niagara Falls.
2. Male lead in the movie National Lampoon’s Vacation, Vegas Vacation, European Vacation, and Christmas Vacation.  Chevy Chase.
3. Location of Waikiki Beach.  Hawaii.
4. The world’s busiest airport is in this US city.  Hint—it’s not NYC or Chicago.  Atlanta.
5. Introvert personalities are more likely to pick the mountains for their holiday.  Extroverts are more likely to vacation at the                                 .  The Beach.

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Today’s challenge has to do with our own home base, St. Lawrence County.  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. County seat of St. Lawrence County.
2. Largest (and only) city in St. Lawrence County—it was also the original county seat.
3. Distinction that St. Lawrence County has compared to other New York counties.
4. There are four major rivers that drain into the St. Lawrence River.  Name at least two of them.
5. Why did Jacques Cartier, the French explorer, name the St. Lawrence River for Saint Lawrence?

October 22, 2021

The Weekly Blab

Volume 15, Issue 7:  October 22, 2021

What’s New

Advances in technology continue to amaze me.  I used to have two external hard drives providing memory for my mac computer at home—one was 512 MB and the other 1 TB.  The 512 MB drive gave up the ghost a few months ago, but I don’t think anything important was on it—not anything I’ve missed anyway.  It gave the death-knell clicking sound that such drives do when they’ve failed, and nothing I tried could resuscitate it.  I can’t really complain, because I bought the thing at some point when I was in Georgia and at least a year or two before I bought the 1 TB drive, which would make it at least 10 years old.  The 1 TB drive soldiered on, but as of late would run almost non-stop, with its white light blinking and it was making the sound that a drive makes when it’s writing something.  I got worried that it was about to go bad too, so it was time to buy a new drive.  

After rooting around on Amazon, I settled on a new 5 TB drive that was pre-formatted for Macintosh computers, which arrived last Friday.  I was able to transfer all my files from the old drive to the new one.  It took about 4 hours to do it, given that the transfer involved about 750 GB of files.  What’s really amazing to me is back in the day, I started with a 1 MB Macintosh computer and bought a 20 MB Jasmine external hard drive a few years later, thinking: “I’ll never need more storage memory than this!”.  How wrong I was! The Jasmine drive cost about $200, if my memory is correct.  My new drive is not only cheaper ($119) but holds 250,000 times as much memory and is 90% smaller in size!  I can’t imagine what I might need more memory than 5 TB for, but I’m certain that I’ll find out in the next few years, when drives storing 5 petabytes (a petabyte is 1000 terabytes) will no doubt become available, and will probably cost $79 and be the size of a matchbook.

Welcome Back

I had the pleasure of attending a “welcome back” party for three students from Cameroon who had graduated from SUNY Canton and were back for a visit, namely Alex Kenmogne Tayou, Vladimir Tchounga, and Temde Beaulys Vischall Lee.  They are now pursuing their masters degrees at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA.  For those who don’t know, SUNY Canton has had students from Cameroon earning degrees from us for several years now.  

Many of you will remember Pierre Nzuah, an exemplary student from there who graduated several years ago, completed a masters degree at Clarkson, and has gone one to write a book.  When I was interviewing for becoming president at SUNY Canton, Pierre was a student representative on the search committee.  When he introduced himself to me and mentioned he was from Cameroon, he was surprised to find out that I had been there, that my former college had worked with a college in Cameroon in the area of Engineering Technology, and that we had a number of students from Cameroon coming there each year.  I told him that I hoped we would be able to set up a similar arrangement here at SUNY Canton.  Of course, that’s exactly what happened starting in 2015, and it was wonderful to see some of our Cameroon graduates again as well as some of our new students, Aliance Tedonfouet, Blanche Brinda Yougang, and Benjamin Mambou.  

I very much appreciate that several of our faculty and staff have gone out of their way to welcome our Cameroon students and to take them around to enjoy the many things the North Country has to offer.  Cameroon is a beautiful country and I hope to visit it once again to celebrate the success of so many fine graduates from SPSU and SUNY Canton that I have known.  

Thank You Event for Volunteers

It was a pleasure to attend the “Thank You” event we held on October 15 for our volunteers who participated in our COVID testing effort in 2020-21.  I hope everyone in attendance enjoyed it!  For those who couldn’t come, we had donuts, apple cider, and hot chocolate available.  While you never know what the weather will be in October, as it turned out it was an unusually sunny and warm day, so the hot chocolate was probably a mistake!  The highlight of the day was a surprise drawing for gift cards.  For each time our volunteers participated in the testing, we put their names on a slip of paper.  We put the slips in a rotating drum (thank you to St. Mary’s Church for loaning it to us!) and had Roody, the world’s greatest kangaroo and our mascot, draw the winners.  Truth be told, given the size of Roody’s paws, the plan was that it would be impossible for him to draw the slips of paper, and that he would shrug his shoulders and turn to me to do it, which would have been funny.  Instead, the joke was on me, since Roody had far more dexterity than I could have imagined and was able to do it himself!  

We will be having several additional events over the course of the academic year to thank volunteers this fall and next spring, as well as to thank people from campus who helped us navigate the pandemic in other ways.  Thanks again to all our volunteers, and congratulations to our first round of winners!  

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with plays on words that were hopefully funny.  Our best answers came from Edward Murphy, Rajiv Narula, Bruce Hanson, Terri Clemmo, and Rosemary Philips.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall.  

Here are the correct answers:

1. A backwards poet always writes inverse (one word).  (reverse was also acceptable.)

•  I sent ten puns to my friend, betting her it would make her laugh.  I lost, because none in ten did  (5 words).

•  A criminal tried to escape by running down the stairs.  His personality disorder was that he was   condescending  (1 word).

•  Last night, I dreamt that I was swimming in an ocean of orange soda, but it was only a Fanta Sea (2 words).

• I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it was only an optical Aleutian (2 words).

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Today’s challenge has to do with vacations and vacation spots, since we just came back from fall break.  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. Top vacation attraction in Western New York and Ontario.
2. Male lead in the movie National Lampoon’s Vacation, Vegas Vacation, European Vacation, and Christmas Vacation.
3. Location of Waikiki Beach.
4. The world’s busiest airport is in this US city.  Hint—it’s not NYC or Chicago.
5. Introvert personalities are more likely to pick the mountains for their holiday.  Extroverts are more likely to vacation at the                                 .

October 7, 2021

The Weekly Blab

Volume 15, Issue 6:  October 7, 2021

What’s New

This week’s BLAB will be a bit shorter than usual, because I’m busily working on the budget presentation that is planned for later today at 4:00 PM.  There are several complexities in comparing pre-COVID years with this past and current years, due to the dates that state support and CARES funding actually got booked in the budget.  To make the comparisons as valid (apples to apples) as possible while keeping the presentation as understandable as possible is a bit of a challenge.  I’ll do my best to present the information in a clear fashion.

On the home front, I spent a good part of last weekend searching through the house for some photographs I know I have but can’t find.  I’ve gone through every box I thought they might be in (and quite a few others as well) and while I found some interesting things I’d completely forgotten we had, I still haven’t found those pictures.  I know they exist because in the past, I always got double prints of photos and gave a copy to my and Jill’s parents, and my father turned up copies of a few of them.  So, the mystery continues.

What did I find on the search?  To name just a few things, a letter of appointment certificate from China appointing me a visiting professor at Hangzhou Teachers College back in 1998 (I gave a microscale chemistry workshop there); an offprint of the June 1994 cover of the Journal of Chemical Education (which featured panels from the Archie comic I was in on the cover, as well as an article on how the comic came about); and the Farewell Book my colleagues and friends at my first college prepared when I left in 1998, which included a letter from my secretary when I was Dean who wrote “First, I need the number of your new Assistant because she will need to tell you that it’s time for a hair cut.”  When I told Michaela about this, she laughed and said “Some things never change!”

Two Articles on College’s Roles Regarding Civics

A pair of articles appeared last week on basically the same subject—what are college’s obligations in terms of teaching our students to be good citizens?  The Atlantic, a publication that leans a bit to the left, had one named “Universities are Shunning Their responsibility to Democracy” by a Canadian, Ronald Daniels.  He bemoans that few colleges or university systems have a specific requirement related to civics, and that dissatisfaction with democracy among young people has risen precipitously in the United States, and argues that universities need to step into the breach.  Within the article, he mentions something that I was unaware of—that back when colleges first were established in the United States, virtually all had a course in moral philosophy, “giving students an opportunity to exercise moral agency, personal autonomy, and debating skills—core capacities of democratic citizenship—by engaging with serious philosophical and political questions”, usually taught by the college president!   Colleges turned away from moral philosophy in the 1870’s with the rise of research universities, replacing it with the young fields of political science, economics, and sociology.  The commitment to civics returned with World War I and World War II, especially in the creation of the national best seller “General Education in a Free Society” by a committee at Harvard in 1945.  The Cold War ended this push, replacing it with “a race for scientific dominance”, which in turn was replaced by the activism of the Civil Rights era, and the careerism of the 1970s and 1980s.  Service Learning is the most recent of these trends.  He concludes that civics is beginning to make a comeback once again, exemplified by a $1 billion investment in civic education currently under consideration in congress, supported by both Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch.

From the other side of the aisle, an article titled “The New Battle at Yale” by Aron Ravin appeared in the National Review, a publication that leans a good bit to the right.  The article looks at what is going on at Yale University today, comparing it to when William F. Buckley published the book “G-d and Man at Yale” 70 years ago.  Then, Buckley accused professors at Yale of “being hostile to faith and provided evidence of subversive teaching within the syllabi of economics courses”.  Ravin finds the syllabi today at Yale to be more balanced, and religious student organizations are doing well.  While he believes that the “fringes of the Left do control Yale”, the issue isn’t with the faculty.  He argues: “The current problem with the intellectual environment is that the students control it.”  While faculty are perfectly happy to present all sides of major issues, students want to control who speaks at Yale and what they say.  He writes: “Through the Left’s crusades for ideological purity and its full-throttle swerve to revolutionary politics, it has begun to alienate college professors, once their most ardent supporters.”  Ravin finishes by saying “But the fight for free speech on campus should not be framed as the Right versus the Left…Conservatives should make common cause with sympathetic academics.  This is not a political fight: It is a battle between those who seek the truth and those who wish to destroy it”, which sounds like a plea for civics education to me.

I personally have a bit of a problem with both articles, each of which go farther on their side than a balanced view of the facts would justify.  Still, I was actually a bit hopeful after reading both that a way might be found, even in our polarized times, to work together to strengthen democracy in America.

And in Closing:  You Heard it Here First—Sports

As I mentioned last issue, our women’s soccer team is much improved from last year, and this weekend’s results showed that rather emphatically—they won both games!  SUNY Canton beat NVU-Johnson this past Saturday by a score of 3-0, with rookie goalie Skylar Williams turning away all five shots on goal.  This was followed by a 1-0 win over SUNY Poly on Sunday, with Skylar successfully dealing with eight more shots on goal.  This won her Defensive Athlete of the Week in soccer from our NAC conference, obviously well-deserved for her two clean sheets.  The ladies now have a 2-2-1 record and a lot of momentum. Congratulations to our team and their coaches!

Last Time’s Trivia Challenge

Last week’s trivia challenge had to do with words that begin with oct.  Our best answers came from Kelly Peterson, Greg Kie, Andrew Fitch, and Terri Clemmo.  A CD awaits your coming to my office on the 6^th floor of MacArthur Hall.  

Here are the correct answers:

1. Sea animal with eight legs.  Octopus.
2. Eight musicians performing as a group.  Octet.
3. The eighth note in the sequence A, B, C, D, E, F, G… is one    higher than the first one.  Octave.
4. Platonic solid with eight identical triangular sides.  Octahedron.  An octagon is 2-D, thus not a solid.
5. Nadya Suleman, who actually had 14 in all.  Nadya was known as the “octomom”, since she had octuplets, as well as six additional children.

This Time’s Trivia Challenge

Today’s challenge has to do with plays on words that are hopefully a bit funny.  They’re also a bit difficult, so please enter even if you can only figure out one or two of them. 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.  A backwards poet always writes   __________  (one word).
2.  I sent ten puns to my friend, betting her it would make her laugh.  I lost, because                                     _____________ (5 words).
3.  A criminal tried to escape by running down the stairs.  His personality disorder was that he was                           ____________ (1 word).
4. Last night, I dreamt that I was swimming in an ocean of orange soda, but it was only a                             _____________ (2 words).
5. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it was only an  ____________   (2 words).