Aug. 17

The Annual Emergency

By Dean Dad

This year I’m seeing again some very creative definitions of the word ‘emergency.’

It’s a special word, since it gives license to ignore the usual rules about all manner of things. It’s easy to come up with cases in which a drastic, sudden change in circumstance required some improvisation in the short term – natural disasters, a string of snow days in a row, an unexpected and abrupt death. When things like that happen, there often isn’t enough time to fulfill every procedural nicety, and there’s a general understanding that some slack need be cut.

The catch is that some people figure out, over time, that invoking the magic word can be a way to get what they want. So they start to invoke it to cover what most people would consider non-emergencies.

In discussions with a colleague, she mentioned in passing that a particular department was facing its annual staffing emergency, and was pressing for its usual dispensation from certain rules.

My response: “annual emergency?”

We started to discuss the nature of an emergency, and whether an annual emergency even qualifies. (I argued that it doesn’t.) To my mind, an emergency is emergent – that is to say, new – and urgent. If it’s annual, or perennial, then it isn’t an emergency. It’s something else: a structural flaw, a failure to plan, a pattern of corruption, perhaps. If the staffing in a given area is so terribly thin that anything at all can throw it into chaos, and that has happened for several years running, then a short-term fix isn’t the answer. In fact, a short-term fix can become addictive or counterproductive, since it can make the underlying problem seem more manageable than it really is.

Worse, those serial fixes (in several senses of the word ‘fix’) send a message to the more responsible folk throughout the college that their extra efforts aren’t necessary or important. Why do the painstaking work of constructing a department within all the rules when you could easily invoke the e-word and just do whatever the hell you want? And what, exactly, does it say about the leadership of a department when it hits the same emergency year after year after year?

I asked her what the department was doing about it. Her response, which I am not making up: “oh, the usual things.”

So much for ‘emergency.’

What this group had apparently learned over the years was that it could just roll over the same Fall schedule every year, wait until August, declare an emergency, and break all the inconvenient rules. No, no, no.

(Something similar happens with budgets at the end of the fiscal year in June. Lo and behold, the same department overspent the same line that it did last year and the year before that!)

Long-term, structural changes are hard, expensive, and rarely won without serious engagement. They aren’t nearly as easy, in the short term, as emergency dispensations. But they last, they work, and they’re defensible in public.

Wise and worldly readers – what’s the annual emergency on your campus?

Comments

Emergencies

Accounting has similar issues with ‘extraordinary items’. Non-recurring is one of the characteristics of an ‘extraordinary’ item.

Lack of planning and lack of consideration of possible (and probable) outcomes adds to the mix.

regardsHenry

henry collier, University of Wollongong, at 7:30 am EDT on August 18, 2008

Yes, Virginia, there IS an Annual Emergency

I laughed out loud at today’s blog title, because it’s my life right now — before I got to the blog and found Doubting Dad at the helm, raining on my emergency.

I don’t know what small-time problem prompted his definitional eye-roll, but our university, the annual emergency is gen-ed staffing via adjunct labor at the 11th hour.

It’s annual, true, because of bad planning and long-term structural decay. Here at Whatsit U, particularly in the last two years, our upper admins have had terrible times predicting student enrollment, much worse than usual. (They overestimated by 400-500 students last summer.) So while we attempt to play by their rules all summer ("There’s a swarm of freshmen descending for orientation: open and staff more sections! No, wait, all the freshmen have been kidnapped by Martians, close all the underenrolled sections now before the budget crashes and burns!"), we are inevitably caught short some way at the 11th hour.

The structural problem is education-on-the-cheap: universities want to run only fully-enrolled classes, but they want to serve the needs of every last student who shows up, especially the newly $$ enrolled $$. They can do this, but only by deliberately causing/tolerating emergencies in August and occasionally in January/May.

It’s an emergency because there are real people involved. When we have to cancel classes four days before school starts because of underenrollment (ah, it shouldn’t happen, Virginia, but it does), it’s a blip on some admin’s computer screen. But down at ground zero here, some people in our program are working emergency hours, un-hiring adjunct faculty members (while begging them not to hate us forever because we may need them next time), re-arranging schedules so that FT faculty get their required course loads, notifying students, etc.

And some people experience the emergencies personally: un-hiring changes their family budgets for the term, while rescheduling can affect syllabus-writing, book-ordering, child care, other jobs, commuting, and all attendant personal relationships.

It can be less dismal when we’re directed to *add* sections the week before classes, but we’re still working in emergency-status to find qualified instructors, as described above: changing child-care at the last minute isn’t all that much easier when there’ll be an extra pittance of salary than when there’ll be a drop in salary.

And I’ve not mentioned the possibility of an instructor quitting at the last minute, which nearly always happens. This too is mostly structural: we don’t pay enough to be someone’s top-choice job, provide enough stability to recruit/retain people less likely to flake-out and quit, or provide enough flexibility to enable them to stay with us if they encounter their own emergency in late August. We don’t have the power to shift the emergency down-stream by cancelling the class outright and disrupting the lives of enrolled students, so it’s on us.

The annual staffing emergency (a colleague of mine intones a Monty Python-esque “bring out your dead {clang!}") nearly always happens, but never the same way twice, and it always necessitates frantic last-minute begging and shuffling and inspired duct-tape-and-paper-clip work-arounds based on the goodwill or powerlessness of various faculty and staff.

I think a blizzard you can see coming, during the height of winter in a blizzard-prone area, can still be an emergency.

ezry

Ezry, at 8:05 am EDT on August 18, 2008

The annual emergency

In my department, it hits in early February when we are recruiting grad students for the following year with the premise that if we can’t offer them a TA line for support, they won’t come. If we offer, we have to produce, and we are at the mercy of a number of factors to know how many lines we actually have to attract the newbies. The scary image that carries the day is the thought that we might have NO new grad students, because of course the world as we know it would end. Every February there’s screaming and scrounging and tides of Maalox and we admit more grad students (suspending all normal rules, as you point out), and find them funding, than we can handle as a faculty. We let in mediocre applicants when the all-stars go elsewhere and moan that it’s because we couldn’t make the offer quickly enough — no matter that we make offers quite hastily in February and they turn us down in April. The grad program stays unmanageably large, the tail continues to wag the dog, and the next February: EEEK! We have no vacant TA lines to offer! We won’t have any new students next year! Suspend the rules! Annual emergency!Please excuse length — I feel better now.

Big Ten faculty member, at 11:35 am EDT on August 19, 2008