Monday, January 25, 2010

The Curse of Soft Requirements

I suppose that soft requirements is an oxymoron. If something is required, it is a requirement. If it is not required, then it is not a requirement. However, I think most people would understand the phrase soft requirements as things that you need to do where the exact nature or criteria are unclear. As academics we have two soft requirements: keeping up with the advances in our fields and publishing our own advances in respectable outlets. Both of those soft requirements are worded vaguely on purpose, because in the real life of an academic they are equally as vague.

Keeping up with the field means that as new things happen, you stay on top of them. This, however, can mean many, many different things. Is it keeping up with research, or news events, or technology, or policy changes, or current trends among practitioners? It could be any of those things. In my field of Information Technology, you could spend all your time keeping up with advances in just one area of the technology. This is unusual, however, as most fields do not have as much in the way of evolving and emerging technologies. Most people believe, somewhat naively, that if you are an academic in a specific field that you will be on top of everything happening in that field. This would only be possible, of course, if there were 5000 hours in a day and you had several hundred clones. Nonetheless, people tend to be aware of what comes across their field of vision and unaware of everything that doesn't.

Publishing in respectable outlets is also a bit squishy. In an ideal world, it would mean respected peer reviewed journals published in paper form. However, the world is not ideal. Peer reviewed journals often have a long lag in publication and focus on concerns largely of interest only to academics. This makes their relevance questionable. If you are in a hard core academic discipline, this is not a problem. But in a professional school it is. On the other hand, if you go to web based publication or widely read practitioner publications, it is considered to be lacking in rigor. So, you can't win.

That should be the mantra of academics. You can't win. And that is the curse of soft requirements. No matter what you do, there will be a few who think it is great and many who think it is a silly waste of time. So, you can work long hours only to find that others think you are just wasting your time. And this causes many academic to simply not work long hours. It is a rational response. You can work like a fool and face criticism or you can do nothing a face criticism. As Mark Twain would say, the wages are the same and one way is a lot easier.

After a while you find that academics who are productive can't help being productive and academics who can help it stop wasting their time. But what do they do instead? They have to do something and most turn to service, the homeless shelter for the academically dispossessed. And that will be the topic for next time.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Blessings and Curses

Now and then I like to provide some insight into life as an academic. And since I don't have a better topic on my mind this morning I thought I would write about one of the greatest blessings of my academic professional life. And that is that I have an enormous amount of control over my time. The things that I have to do are limited. I have to meet with my classes and when it gets down to it that is probably about it. If you don't show up for your classes the university could terminate your tenure. So that can be thought of as a hard requirement.

There are also firm requirements. I need to prepare for my classes. While I actually spend an enormous amount of time preparing for my classes, there is a wide variation in how much time academics spend in general. I spend a lot of time for several reasons. First, I am interested in the material that I teach so broadening and deepen my knowledge is something I enjoy doing. Second, I like teaching so I am constantly looking for ways to improve the delivery. Third, my field of Information Technology is constantly changing so just keeping up with what is going on requires time (in fact, a LOT of time). It would not be unrealistic to say that I spend two to four hours in preparation for each hour I teach. However, I think I am at an extreme end of the spectrum. It is easily conceivable that once one has their lectures nailed down they may spend very little, if any, time in preparation. But, clearly, if one puts in no preparation time for their classes, it will eventually show up on course evaluations. So, it is best to be prepared. This is a firm requirement because you have some wiggle room in how you pursue it. But, if it gets bad enough you can be pulled out of the classroom with dire consequences.

If one were to think about this in terms of hours per week, the hard and firm requirements could translate into as few as four hours a week (two 2 hours classes with no preparation time) and as many as 22 1/2 hours per week (three 2 1/2 hour classes with two hours of preparation for each hour of class) .

One of my colleagues once joked that the nice thing about being an academic is the flexibility - you can work any 80 hours a week that you choose. But how did we get from a range of 2 to 20 hours of hard and firm requirements to 80 hours a week? The answer is that the flexibility which is a blessing is also a curse. And as we get into the soft requirements next time that curse will become more obvious.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Power, Wealth and Fame

I listened to a book on CD last week entitled 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. It provided 48 laws (actually conflicting pieces of advice) on how to become powerful or more powerful. It was worth listening to and most of the advice was fairly sound although it would still take a fair amount of thought and reflection to apply it to the greatest advantage. Many of the reviews of the book on Amazon were offended by the Machiavellian tone of the book and this got me to thinking about power and related goals such as wealth or fame.

Aristotle said that happiness is the only goal that we seek as an end in itself. We want to be happy simply because we want to be happy. However, other goals, such as power, wealth or fame, we want because we think they will make us happy. I think the thing that offended the reviewers on Amazon was that this book provided rules to make yourself more powerful without asking if you wanted to be powerful, how much power you really wanted or whether you wanted to pursue power as an end in itself.

We actually know a fair amount about how to achieve power, wealth and fame. The problem is that most people are unwilling to do what it takes to achieve them. Why is that? I think the problem is that these are not end goals in themselves. They are sub goals in the pursuit of happiness. If we have to do something that makes us unhappy in the pursuit of happiness then we have defeated our attempts. But, let us say for the sake of argument that we can pursue these goals without doing anything unpleasant. Is there still a problem?

Yes, there is. The problem is conversion. Money itselfs does not make one happy. It is the things one can do with money that increases happiness. Power does not make one happy. Again it is the things one can do with power that may increase their happiness. If one acquires a large amount of money, power or fame and has not figured out how to convert them into happiness then the whole exercise has been pointless. There is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of power, wealth or fame as long as it is done in the context of a meaningful and satisfying life.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Ah, 2010

The New Year is officially underway. Two thousand and ten. Or, I suppose, Twenty Ten. I am not sure who gets to decide what the proper way to say it is. But no matter. It is upon us and I think it is going to be a great year. There has been much talk about the past decade and how is was the decade from Hell. I have to admit that it was a rough decade and I do think things will get better in the next decade.

It is nice having these cyclical patterns to time - weeks, months, years, decades. They give us a way to structure our time and have built in points of reflection and improvement. I have resolutions for the New Year as I do every year. I am a big fan of reflecting on a time cycle; seeing what when right and what went wrong; and having a shot at improving it next time around. In an earlier post I mentioned how I do this each semester.

Over break, I made substantial revisions to the two classes that I will be teaching in the Spring. I also made some further progress on a book that I am writing entitled Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology. I have decided that when I have the first draft of the book completed, I will make it available on my website for free. I think more academics should do this. The whole publishing business has gone so far off track that it can only be justified as an alternative to nothing. However, making things available for free on the Internet is probably a lot closer to the original ideas of freely sharing scientific and scholarly knowledge. So, I will give it a shot and see how it goes.

I am looking forward to 2010 how ever you pronounce it and will come back at the end of the year and reflect on whether or not it met my expectations.