Frustration In Education

 In 2016, a good friend at a different college private messaged me through Facebook to tell me his school was going to start a sports journalism curriculum and wanted me to be the lead professor. He told me he was going to get a committee together and have a job posted.  SWEET! The ad was posted. I applied.  I was called in for an interview. I met the search committee for dinner the night before and everything went extremely well. I loved the committee.  The next day, I met the committee, sat down with the department chair, had lunch with the committee, got a tour of campus and especially of the athletic facilities. I met with someone who was the assistant provost as the regular provost was unavailable. I had a phone call with the president.  I felt great! I felt like I had this locked up.  The department chair told me privately at the end that the "only thing holding this back is if the provost doesn't think we had a diverse pool of candidates BUT we did b...

So if you read my post about Academic Freedom and wondered just how bad was the reading material, I've got you covered. The issue was over the three scanned double-pages.  I'm not a prude and didn't grow up in a religious cloister. I just don't think this material is appropriate for a Senior Seminar class in Communication.  I don't care what students see in their daily media diet of Netflix, Criminal Minds, etc.  This is from the novel Waiting by Ha Jin. 

What follows are some direct quotes from a senior faculty member at Hiram College that are bullet-pointed. The explanations or context are underneath the quotes after ***.  "You don't seem to have a grasp on what it means to be a member of the department of communication here at Hiram College. We teach classes  we're not well-versed in like my p.r. class."  ***said to me in response to my complaining that I was being assigned three new classes the following academic year. A female faculty member one year my junior in the same department has yet to teach three new classes in any academic year.    "We teach classes we're not well-versed in?" What the hell is that?   "This isn't some state school. If you can't handle the workload, maybe Hiram College isn't the right place for you." ***said to me in my office the fall of the academic year when I was teaching 3 new classes.  I said I am overwhelmed and she said “we are all overwhelmed!” ...

Once I was asked to take over a Senior Seminar Capstone class in Communication. To be ready to do this,  I was told to sit in and kind of "audit" the current version of the class as it was being taught by a senior faculty member who had been doing it for year. Her name was Glenda.  In this class, students would typically read 3 books, have student-led class discussions and submit thought or response papers in relation to the readings. The books aren't textbooks! The books were novels or nonfiction books like The Boys In The Boat , the story about the US Olympic rowing team that won gold at the 1936 Olympic games. For this class, there was The Boys In The Boat. Then there was The Five Dysfunctions of a Team , a business culture book by Pat Lencioni. It's a great business fable about teamwork. And the third book was a Chinese novel called Waiting . The Chinese novel was incorporated for an intercultural component of the class as a trip to China was coming up for a Stud...

I once worked 7.5 years at a college in a department that had that one person. You know, that one person that everyone needs to be warned about. I had been teaching at the high school level for 7.5 years and was tired of the parental over-reach and general lack of support from the administration for my career-tech program. I felt it was time to move up to the college level. I saw an ad placed in a major newspaper for a lecturer position in communication and to address the cover letter to a certain person....let's call her Lisa. Lisa has been at this college for a number of years. Her qualifications for her role I found out later were a little sketchy as she never talked about her own experiences "in the field."  Anyway, I applied for this position. Lisa called me and invited me to campus for an interview. I travelled to the college, was given a tour, taught a lesson to the faculty, had lunch with the department, and met the department chair. It was a great interview! I to...

After over a decade in the "real world," I have spent almost two decades in education. Prior to entering academics, I had held the field in such high esteem. I thought it was the paragon of ethics and morals. In many instances, yes, it is! And in a lot of instances, it is unbelievably bad. This blog is to document the things I have experienced. All true stories. My posts will mostly deal with the hiring and firing ends of education. I have applied for many, many jobs in education. I have interviewed for many, many jobs. While I have not been fired from any job in academics, I have worked with many people who should be fired but don't lose their jobs. And this is where the frustration comes in.  Feel free to chime in if you like.