Being accountable

I just received my TN Visa letter from my other job. I work for two different universities but in both cases my employer is the State of Texas. However, I need two separate TN Visas to work for both universities. Apparently Homeland Security needs to count me twice. I am amused and bemused by this each time it happens. It would be a pleasant change if I didn’t have to explain to the NAFTA inspectors that “yes, I can have two jobs at the same time,” and then show them information from their own website. Everytime I teach my class I also have to tell my primary employer that I will be working for the second employer even though……

I have to account for the time that my second job will take so that I can reassure them that I still have time to do my first or primary job. This is called outside consulting and it really seems directed at faculty and researchers who might possibly be earning gazillions of dollars from their inventions. My adjunct salary and time commitments look rather sad stacked up against all that.

In today’s Inside Higher Ed there was a faculty member, Eric Arnesen from Illinois complaining about the mandatory Ethics training that he is required to undergo. We have a similar training but apparently Illinois is a little more rigorous with its state employees. He relates a contentious point in the following.

“In a multiple choice “Self Check” in the tutorial, we learn that “time reporting is mandatory under the State Officials and Employees Ethics Act.” Under the “Reminder of Key Laws, Rules, and Policies — Personnel and Other Policies” section, we are further informed that as state employees, we are “expected to document the time that you work for the college or university accurately and on a timely basis.” Indeed, “time sheets must be submitted by each employee periodically and must document the time spent each day on official state (university or college) business to the nearest quarter hour.” Now I know for a fact that many — perhaps all? — of my faculty colleagues in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences do no such thing.”

The faculty member facetiously goes on to describe his ethical dilemma arising from this conflict. Should he report his fellow professors to the State of Illinois for violating this policy, does it even apply to faculty, would he get more ethical colleagues through this process? Sigh

“So I arrive at two possible conclusions: Either a) the tutorial is a poorly designed response to a poorly thought-out ethics requirement or b) it’s a secret plot to strip faculty of control over their time by falsely declaring that we are subject to specific rules that, in reality, do not apply to us.

Both, it seems to me, would be ethics violations. In the case of “a,” it is a misuse of state funds to produce a shoddy tutorial that wastes vast quantities of employees’ time and state dollars since, at a minimum, the public’s trust would be diminished if knowledge of this tutorial was revealed. In the case of “b” — well, anything to strip faculty of control, under whatever pretense, is self evidently unethical. Whatever the case, I do know that I have an affirmative obligation under the law to report what I believe to be an ethics violation.”

I think this is another example of do as I say and not as I do, as patently state legislators in both Texas and Illinois, would never allow their time to be managed in such a manner.

Commercialization of Academia

I have been attending meetings on my campus for a few months now regarding research and research clusters. In a previous post Visionary Bingo I talked about the gentleman running the program as a tad bit science focussed. In the last meeting he didn’t precisely rehash the points he previously brought up but I heard a lot of sighing when the powerpoint presentation started. I almost feel bad for the guy because he just doesn’t seem to “get” it. Many of the faculty involved in this cluster come from fields such as social work and education yet the federal agencies that he was promoting were the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health. I was keeping score of their mentions and these were the Big 3. He never mentioned the Department of Education or Health and Human Services which I would presume would be more logical funding sources.

Coming from Canada I guess I heard the same grumblings from Social Sciences faculty about the lion’s share of campus money going to the sciences because they “bring in the money.” However, there is a taint of desperation in the recent meetings and I understand and respect my faculty for questioning both the need and the usefulness of this process.  Some of them are already collaborating with other departments and colleges and they feel like this should be an organic process rather than a forced initiative by university administration.  Others feel that they aren’t being given credit for their societal contributions only their financial contributions to campus coffers are being valued.

Taxation rates in Canada unfair

This article from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CBC website is reporting on a study that showed that the very wealthiest citizens are paying less in taxes than the very poorest in Canada.  These taxes included not only income taxes but all taxes paid by all groups, such as sales taxes, property taxes, payroll taxes, and gas taxes.   I think for most of my American friends they would be shocked to hear that those in the highest income bracket (over $266,000) ONLY paid 30.5% in taxes.  The sad truth is that Canada has created many, many, regressive taxes and service charges to make up for the much advertised tax cuts in income tax.  The poorest (less than $13,523) can least afford to pay these and feel them much more keenly than those in the higher income bracket.  In the study it was determined that the poorest Canadians did indeed pay very little if any income tax but it that these increases in other taxes added up to 30.7% of their total income.

I usually ponder the differences between the United States and Canada whenever I end up paying large amounts in health care costs.  Yesterday’s root canal and crown will cost me $900, my ankle surgery from August has cost about $1300.  These are my out of pocket expenses, the service providers have charged significantly more to my health and dental plans.  I had to argue with the financial services person to change a portion of the bill being directly charged to my insurance company.  The bill showed that they had done a panoramic xray of my teeth when they had not and I pointed this out to the staff member.  She asked me what did I care since the insurance would just pay it.  Arghhh. Its this attitude that has resulted in the over inflation of bills that realistically only get paid by those without insurance.  My insurance company will negotiate with the service provider to a much lower bill amount than is originally submitted.

For those Canadians who are thinking that American style health care is the answer think about significantly more than 10% of your income going to maintain your basic health care through co-payments and monthly premiums.  Think about your lack of mobility if you have a spouse or family for fear of losing your benefits for even a short while.  Think about the millions who do not receive basic health care and the chronic illnesses that result.  Think about what your taxes do support in Canada and decide if you believe in a system that is troubled but still provides basic universal health care for everyone.

Digital immigrant (second generation)

I just read Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” and he said many things that resonated for me. I think his point that each generation is different from each other is self evident. He continues to say that previous incremental changes can’t be compared to the tremendously different world our last generation grew up in. He refers to this as a “singularity” and suggests the following about traditional teaching modes.

“But this is not just a joke. It’s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”

We had an internal training and someone who would self identify as a digital immigrant stated the following, “Why should we have to learn a entirely new way of teaching, why can’t the students today just figure it out?” My question is why should they when our publication models are changing, authority is changing, and information is increasingly becoming disseminated in ways I never dreamed of as an undergraduate in 1987?

Having grown up with the non-graphical internet (Gopher) and the card catalog I recognize that my understanding of information is very different from the students I teach. What I hope I can do it to help translate for the digital native why scholarship itself hasn’t changed but rather morphed from a finite, closed system to one where authorship is universal. My role as a library instructor is to help students understand how to locate needed information in both environments.

As Laura Cohen discussed in her post “Information Literacy in the Age of Social Scholarship” authority in its traditional context is changing to “authoritative bias.” She states, “We’re on the cusp of profound changes in the scholarly process. The evolving nature of publishing, scholarly conversation and peer review is rich fodder for our students. This makes the work of forward-thinking instruction librarians challenging, but not impossible.”