Category Archives: grieving

academic life/work, grieving

Taking (or Not Taking) Leave in Academia

I want to start with a few stories about taking leave in academia:

Story #1: When I was an adjunct instructor, teaching 6-8 composition courses a semester at two different community colleges to make a living, I had a stroke. My doctors told me to take six weeks off and that I would probably recover slowly over the next year. Luckily I had health insurance, which covered the bulk of my medical expenses, but I was in a panic about how I would earn a living.

When I called the department chair at one of the colleges to let her know about my situation, and before I had mentioned how long my doctor said I would be unable to work, she mused out loud, “I suppose we’ll need to replace you if you’ll be gone more than a couple of weeks.” I immediately assured her I’d be back in two weeks. I needed that job and couldn’t take a chance that they’d replace me for that semester and beyond. My first day back at work, my then-husband accompanied me, holding me up when I couldn’t stand on my own, helping me keep track of time and conversations, which was still challenging for me, and carrying my teaching materials.

Story #2: A few years ago, a colleague on my campus proudly told me that she hadn’t taken a single day of leave when she had cancer or when her own other was dying in hospice. When she told me this, she was chair of her department and expressed frustration that the faculty in her department took leave for every cold and minor illness.

Story #3: When my husband had his stroke in June 2020, I became his caregiver. As a full professor, I have health insurance, access to FMLA job protection, and enough sick and annual leave saved up that I can comfortably take time off from work to care for him without my pay being reduced. Avoiding a pay reduction is important because since his stroke, he’s been unable to work and while disability might be approved for him sometime soon, it hasn’t been yet (we applied in September!), and even if/when it is approved, it will only make up a portion of his lost salary. Since August, I have taken about 6-10 hours/week off from work, with complete support and understanding from my supervisors (as a faculty member with administrative duties outside my department, I have two supervisors: a department chair supervises me in my faculty role and an AVP supervises me in my administrative role). The only sticky point came when my department chair expressed concern that there was no department policy allowing me to reduce my service commitments in the department without it being potentially held against me at my next review. Because I’m already a full professor and have overdone service historically, I’m comfortable taking my chances on having a semester with a lighter service load.

These three stories show how deeply embedded ableism is in policies and practices around faculty leave. When I had a stroke as an adjunct instructor, financial insecurity made me feel the need to place my chair’s concern about having to find another instructor to teach my classes ahead of my own doctors’ advice for my recovery. Going back to work two weeks after my own stroke was dangerous and stressful, but it felt less dangerous and stressful than potentially losing my job. It’s impossible to say what impact going back to work so quickly had on my recovery; I do know that once the idea was put in my head that I would be replaced if I missed too many classes, I never cancelled a class, regardless of how ill or contagious I was.

I’m sure that when my chair mused out loud about having to replace me, she was thinking about students needing to be taught. However, the assumption that an adjunct instructor will not get sick or need time off relies on the idea that being sick or needing time off is not normal. In fact, in this particular situation, it was viewed as cause for being dismissed.

I have a colleague in a non-tenure track full-time teaching position who is a caregiver for a loved one; she does not have the same access to paid leave that I have. She and I are both full-time faculty and we are both caregivers; I can take 6-10 hours/week of leave to care for my husband without taking a pay decrease but she cannot. Why should we have different access to leave when we essentially do the same job? Why does my institution view it as more normal for me to need time off than for her?

Now that I do have access to leave, I’m able to make decisions about taking sick days for myself or to care for my husband without the added stress of worrying about how our finances will be impacted. Without leave, I would quite possibly become resentful about the high level of care my husband needs, or I would be regularly stretched too thin to be a good caregiver or a good professor. As it is, even with leave, I have had moments of burnout. Even with leave, I am judicious about taking it, and I typically bring work with me to my husband’s appointments so I can respond to student papers or plan a class in the few minutes between arriving at an appointment and being called in to see the doctor. I’m still aware that even with leave, there’s a perception at my institution that “good” employees don’t take leave.

This is exactly the attitude that was expressed by my colleague when she bragged that she hadn’t taken leave during her own or her mother’s health crises. She shared that story to highlight her devotion to her job and her professionalism, which she contrasted with the “less professional” attitudes of the faculty in her department who did take days off when they were ill. She did not express compassion for people who got ill, but rather, found fault with them. This is a class ableist thought: people who do not have ideal health are not as worthy as people who do or people who can pass as if they do. My colleague, remember, did not have ideal health and neither did her mother, but she worked hard to pass as if she and her mother did.

In an ableist model, getting ill or taking leave are framed as shameful, unprofessional, indicative of a lack of commitment to a job.

Even in the third story, which is a much happier story than the other two, there is the sticky point about whether a reduced service load while on leave can be negotiated. I am able to take leave, but the expectations for my service are not changed by me working less. In other words, I am still expected to do 100% of my service work, but in less time. Because of the privilege afforded me by being a full professor, I am not particularly worried about repercussions in my next review, but someone without tenure or someone hoping for a promotion would rightly worry.

In this situation, the ableist assumption seems to be something along the lines of, “We’re already giving you time off, now don’t put an unfair burden on your able-bodied colleagues by slacking on service.”

How do we change the culture around faculty leave? Here are my ideas:

  1. Fight for all employees to have access to paid leave. Yes, even adjunct instructors. Start from the assumption that people will get sick rather than from the assumption that they won’t.
  2. If you have access to leave, take it when you need it. The more normalized it becomes for people to take leave, the more normalized it becomes for people to take leave.
  3. When colleagues take leave, be supportive. Don’t question whether they “really” need the leave; assume that they do.
  4. Work to change retention, promotion, tenure, and other review policies to account for employees taking leave. Don’t treat the situation in which a colleague takes leave as an anomaly; plan for it.
grieving

The Lie of the Great Service Opportunity

My last post, On Having to Say No Over and Over, generated a lot of response on Facebook, so I’m going to stick with the theme of saying no for a while. I happen to have a lot to say about it.

Today I want to call bullshit on the idea that service is a “great opportunity” for junior faculty members or grad students or adjuncts or others in precarious academic positions. In my experience, “this is a great opportunity for you” is generally code for

  • I really want this thing to get done, but nobody else wants to do it, and if you don’t do it then I’ll have to.
  • If you don’t do it, it might end up getting done by someone I don’t trust.
  • It would look really great for me or my department if you would do this.

When I was a grad student, an adjunct, and a junior faculty member, I fell for “this is a great opportunity for you” almost every time. I misunderstood “opportunity” as something that would benefit me when I applied for tenure-track jobs or tenure, and I therefore thought the people offering me these great “opportunities” thought I had tenure-potential. In fact, however, my extensive service record never had any bearing on me getting a job or tenure. In my experience, decisions about hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion do not ever hinge on service. The reality is that putting your energy into service is more likely to be held against you in those decisions.

Sometimes service work is legitimately a good opportunity, but that is a judgement that can only be made by the person being asked to take on the service. In evaluating whether something is actually a good opportunity, I ask myself questions like this:

  • Will it allow me to work in my Zone of Genius? (I learned the concept of Zone of Genius from Kerry Ann Rockquemore—your Zone of Genius is what you are uniquely qualified to do; your Zone of Competence is what you are good–maybe even great–at, but so are lots of other folks; and your Zone of Incompetence is exactly what it sounds like.)
  • Will it allow me to develop skills I am interested in developing?
  • Will it allow me to develop relationships with people that I want to develop relationships with?
  • Will it help me move my scholarship forward?

I don’t have to answer yes to all the questions to agree to an opportunity, but answering the questions helps me think through my decision. And if I answer no to all of the questions, saying no becomes very easy.

There is one question that is not on the list that I think works against a lot of academics when trying to evaluate “opportunities”: Am I passionate about this? This question is very deliberately not on the list for two important reasons: 1) Academics tend to use their passion for a subject or cause as a rationale for doing too much and getting burned out, and 2) Other academics know this and use this knowledge to exploit each other.

Here’s how these questions helped me make decisions about some service opportunities in the last year.

  • I was asked to join an advisory board on academic integrity. I decided it was a good opportunity because it intersects with research I am doing on plagiarism.
  • I was asked to join a department-level task force on assessment, which I said no to because my answer to each of the questions above was no. Assessment work is not in my Zone of Genius. Serving on the task force would allow me to develop new skills, but not ones I am interested in developing now. It would allow me to work with people I like working with, but I have plenty of opportunities to work with those same people in other capacities, so no need to join this new task force. And departmental assessment work is unrelated to my scholarship.
  • I was asked to run for treasurer of a national organization and said yes because I wanted the opportunity to work with the people who were already officers.

I did not talk in On Having to Say No Over and Over about the fact that as a tenured professor, there are fewer consequences for me saying no than there might be for someone with less job security. I will devote at least one post in the future to that, so I’m not going to address it in depth here, but I do want to say explicitly here that those of us with tenure need to

  • Stop pretending that the work we don’t want to do is an “opportunity” for someone with less job security.
  • Support our colleagues who say no to “opportunities.” Respect their decision and don’t misdirect your anger about the exploitation of faculty toward your colleagues who say no. They are not the problem.
  • When you are part of a discussion in which someone suggests that the thing no one in the room wants to do is a “great opportunity” for someone else, question whether the thing really needs to be done.
  • Tell the truth. Some things that need to be done aren’t “opportunities” for anyone but they need to be done nonetheless. Instead of farming those things out to people in precarious positions with the fake promise that there is a reward in the future, look for ways to make the work less onerous, or to compensate people in tangible ways for doing it.
grieving

What place does grading rigor have during COVID-19?

My own grading practices have shifted quite a bit over the past few years toward what seems to be now called “compassionate grading,” which aims to eliminate less important assignments, allow students flexible deadlines, and provide more support for students to meet learning outcomes. I’ve seen “compassionate grading” recommended as a response to the sudden shift to online learning, but I wonder why anyone would practice non-compassionate grading, regardless of whether we are experiencing a pandemic. How is a lack of compassion equal to rigor? Is lack of compassion a teaching strategy?

When my classes suddenly became online courses in March, I emailed all my students and told them that if they were already passing the class, even if they didn’t turn in anything else for the whole semester, they would pass the class. I wondered how many students would simply stop submitting work, especially as many of them now had children at home with then 24/7, loved ones diagnosed with and dying from COVID-19, drastically reduced or increased work hours, and other intense stressors.

I also told them that my standards for what constituted a better-than-passing grade had just become more flexible.

With one week left in the semester, I can report an astonishing statistic: less than 5% of my students stopped turning in work, and the few who did all contacted me on their own accord to apologize and promise that work would be turned in before the end of the semester. That means more than 95% of my students, when told they would pass a class even if they turned in nothing more, continued to turn in work.

I’m halfway through reading their final projects, and damn, they’re good. As good as final projects from any other semester. This means that even with me announcing that it would be easier to get a B or an A, my students have not turned in work that is of lower quality than what I typically see. This seems like compelling evidence for more compassionate grading overall.

I think a lot of talk about grading rigor is code for enforcing white ableist standards of what academic success looks like, and it often goes way beyond evaluating the quality of work turned in. If you’re really looking at the quality of work turned in, why take off a point for every “error” (lots of research indicates that what we recognize as an error is often connected to our perception of whether the writer is white or not)? Why factor in whether the assignment was turned in on your timeline? Why penalize students who don’t know what office hours are for? Why dictate the genre an assignment must be written in? Why give extra credit for going to the writing center?

Grading is my least favorite aspect of teaching. I can read and respond to student work all day long, but having to assign a grade to it seems so counter to everything my pedagogy is based on. I believe all grading is flawed in some way. A traditional grading system evaluates how much access to resources (time, energy, etc.) a student has as much as it measures how much a student has learned. Labor-based grade contracts and portfolios, which I have embraced, are better, but not perfect. There’s still no way that I’ve found to really control for differences in resource distribution.

But at the end of the teaching day, evaluating how much my students learned isn’t the most important part of my job. On some level, I have to blindly trust that they learned the important stuff, and if the semester ends with us on good terms, then even if they didn’t learn it, they’ll know they can reach out to me in the future, perhaps when they are in a better place to do that learning. (Yes, that has happened.) This is always true, but particularly now.