A Guide for the Perplexed College Student

This has nothing to do with global political economy or burning political issues of the day, but I thought this guide might be useful to college students.  I occasionally have reason to notice that students don't necessarily understand what academic ranks mean and how to address the people they come into contact with on the college or university campus. Here are some guidelines that are generally in use.  

First: What to call your that person standing in front of the class and lecturing to you

In the University context, all faculty with the rank of anything with the word "professor" in the title -- Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor, or Professor Emeritus/a -- may be addressed as Professor. You can find out the professor's rank by going to the departmental website. And, by the way, the rank of Professor is often referred to as "full professor."

You are always safe with "professor" for anyone who is teaching you. Even those who are not officially of a professorial rank will not (in my experience) object to being called professor by their students.

It is also correct to refer to anyone with a doctorate as "doctor." Most university professors have doctorates. Typical exceptions to this are often instructors in the arts and advanced grad students who are teaching their own courses. Folks with JDs (juris doctor, the initial law degree in the US) are not referred to as "doctor." (Note, however, that a few colleges have the custom of using Mr./Ms./Miss/Mrs. rather than Dr.)

A graduate student serving as a course instructor or a more senior instructor who does not have a PhD may be politely referred to as Mr. or Ms. (Ms. because marital status is irrelevant in the work context. There's one exception: If the instructor herself introduces herself as "Mrs." or "Miss" then she has chosen that title.)

By the way, many staff members at the university will have doctorates, and they should be addressed as "Dr." Anyone with "Dean" in the their title -- Assistant Dean, Vice Dean, Dean -- should be addressed as "Dean."

And all of this goes out the window when the professor says, "Call me Joe."

Complicated enough?

In my case, "Mrs." is a social title that I do not use. In non-university contexts I use "Ms." I personally dislike "Mrs." for sociological reasons: it suggests that a woman somehow gains authority by virtue of being attached to a man. But I think this is a recent phenomenon, actually. I understand that until recently (the last couple hundred years?), an unmarried woman became "Mrs." as she got older: Mrs. at one point was at least partially a title of respect rather than of marital status. Hmm. I should check that out.  

Second, what university titles mean 

Universities are very hierarchical places, alas. Each part of the university (faculty, staff, and students -- the academic trinity) has its own hierarchies.

Students

freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, master's student, doctoral student (pre-comprehensive exams), ABD doctoral student ("all but dissertation," sometimes referred to as "all but dead -- one who has passed his/her comprehensive exams).

In-between student and faculty

Post doctoral fellows, often referred to as "postdocs." These are folks who have a short term appointment where they can polish their dissertation into a book manuscript and/or publish some articles, and sometimes teach a class or two.  

Faculty

At all most all universities and colleges, faculty have three obligations: research, teaching, and "service" (sitting on committees and stuff like that). The relative weights of these three tasks depends on the character of the college or university. "Research Intensive Universities" (sometimes referred to as R1 Universities) expect their faculty to focus more on research. Teaching obligations are less heavy at these schools. Many small colleges are teaching intensive, and faculty are expected to spend more of their time on teaching and little or no time on research.

Faculty ranks are complex. Note that below I am referring only to faculty ranks in the US!

Adjunct instructor/lecturer, adjunct assistant professor, adjunct associate professor, adjunct professor: These are (usually) part time teachers. Ideally these folks have day jobs and just teach a class now and then because they enjoy the interaction with students. Unfortunately, too many PhDs try to cobble together an income on multiple adjunct teaching gigs.

Instructor or lecturer (usually someone without a PhD). Some schools have promotion paths for such instructors, so someone might be called a "senior instructor" or "senior lecturer." (However, in other countries, lecturer and senior lecturer may be the equivalent of the US's assistant or associate professor.)

Assistant professor. No, an assistant professor doesn't assist a more senior professor in the US. It's just the lowest professorial rank. What is generally not listed on the departmental webpage will be whether the assistant prof. is non-tenure track or tenure track. Tenure track assistant professors -- those who will be eligible for tenure and promotion at the end of a (usually 7 year probationary period) -- are higher in the hierarchy than non-tenure track.

Associate professor. This is one step up from assistant professor. Associate professors usually have tenure.

Professor. The title is Professor, but we often refer to "full professor," to distinguish the title from assistant and associate professors. One is promoted from "associate to full." This is the highest rank most faculty can hope to reach.

University Professor. This is sort of a super-professor -- usually someone with a superior scholarly reputation whose contributions cut across fields.

Other Faculty Ranks

"Visiting" is usually added to a title of someone who has another institutional affiliation and is spending a period of time at a host institution.

"Research" is usually added to the title of someone who only conducts research and does not (under normal circumstances) teach. A research professor may be on "soft money," funding that comes from grants that are awarded to him/her. Research professors must often earn their salaries by writing grant proposals.  

University Units and Faculty Leadership Ranks

It seems like there infinite variation on these themes Here's a typical way a university is organized and the faculty leadership at each level:

Departments are led by a chair or head (usually a tenured professor in the department who takes on this role for a time-limited term).*

Several linked departments may be grouped together into a School or College, led by a dean (usually a tenured professor in one of the departments in the School or College). The dean may be assisted in his or her duties by assistant deans, associate deans, or vice deans. These can be either faculty deans (faculty from one of the departments) or staff deans (members of the university's staff, not faculty). A vice dean for admissions, for example, is usually a staff dean. A vice dean for research is usually a faculty dean.

The Provost is above the deans, and the President is above the Provost.

The Board of Trustees is the ultimate authority for the University or College.

Small colleges generally have fewer levels of governance.  

Why should students care about university hierarchies?

It's nice to know who's the boss (dean, department chair) -- especially if you have any sorts of problems.

It's a wise strategy to take at least some courses from members of the tenured faculty. Three years after you graduate, when you need a letter of recommendation for grad school, the tenured faculty are more likely to be around (or at least locatable).

It's good to know that you should probably not ask the assistant prof which professor he or she is assisting.

It's great to know why you are congratulating your favorite prof when her or his title changes from assistant to associate...

And the most important people really are...

the administrative assistants and secretaries, janitors, food service workers, and all the other people who make the place run.  Remember to be respectful and grateful. 

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*An important exception (for me) to the smallest unit being the department in the School of International Service at American University. SIS is composed of "divisions," each of which has a "director." I served as the Division Director of International Politics and Foreign Policy for many years.

Government spending and taxing: room for improvement

This all started with my comment on Krugman's op-ed piece in the NY Times
I posted this on my Facebook status:

Krugman's cogent argument against the Ryan Proposal is in two parts. 1. Despite some theory to the contrary, other theory AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE shows that simply cutting taxes does NOT spark the economy and create more revenue. 2. The Ryan Proposal, because it throws the elderly and those who are not rich (not even just the poor) under the bus, is immoral.

One of my high school classmates, with whom I occasionally politely debate political and economic issues (he's an Independent who tends toward the Right but not on everything; I'm a Democrat) commented. He hoped that both sides of the aisle would see the Ryan proposal as a starting point for negotiations about needed cuts. My general impression is that the Ryan Proposal is too extreme for that. But my friend's comment got me thinking about areas where he and I might disagree and where we might agree.

Agreement. There are vulnerable people out there who have a right to government help. A particular area of agreement between us is that the developmentally disabled have special needs which we, as a society, are morally obligated to fulfill. Charitable efforts (and this friend works very hard for Special Olympics) are not enough; we need tax-funded, governmental efforts.

Probable agreement. I think that we need to look at cutting the kinds of subsidies and tax loopholes that provide what I think are unfair benefits for large, profitable corporations. Look, for example, at agricultural subsidies that are primarily helping Archer Daniels Midlands and not family farms. That GE owed no taxes is ridiculous. Oh, it's not ridiculous that that it paid no taxes -- why should they pay more than the tax code requires? -- but the loopholes and the opportunities for "offshoring" profits are ridiculous. So, I think we could do a lot by cutting corporate taxes IFF we also cut out corporate loopholes.

Probably disagreement. Where I think we differ is in our views of what the government *should* be spending money on (in addition to care for the disabled). (See this link for spending categories and expenditures in the budget.) I suspect that my friend would want to see more services privatized. I have not actually seen any evidence that privatizing saves money or makes services more efficient. (Neither have I seen any evidence that it doesn't, to be fair.) One of the privatization trends that I really oppose is in military services. We privatize a lot of tasks that are specifically related to the provision of national security, but it's the State (the US Government) that is supposed to provide security.

I also am a big fan of having the government have sufficient regulators on payroll to make sure that its rules are enforced. (Providing appropriate regulation is a form of "internal" security.) Further, the pay scale needs to be good enough to attract smart, highly trained people (and to keep them from being tempted by bribes.) You get what you pay for. Penny wise, pound foolish.

I would like to see a lot more regulators out there working on food products, determining that food processing plants meet FDA requirements, etc. And need I mention the need to have REALLY highly qualified regulators for the nuclear industry?

Mostly disagreement, I think. There are a lot of other areas on which I believe the government needs to spend. Social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as Defense are very important, in my view. I also believe the government should be spending money on various social safety-nets, on basic research, on the arts, on infrastructure (roads, bridges, railroads [including bullet trains]), and foreign aid.

Probably agreement. Tax cuts on personal income tax will fuel the economy most if they are given to the people who are in the lowest tax brackets because they will go out and spend the money. At the higher end, yes, we should tax more. I'm willing to pay an appropriate amount more in taxes as long as everyone else in my bracket does, too. Cut out the loopholes in personal tax (simplify!) and there might be opportunities for tax cuts at the lower end.

Probable disagreement. I think we need to reconsider the tax break for mortgage income. Think how that works. People of modest incomes who rent get no benefit. For us more well-to-do people, the more house we buy, the bigger the benefit we get. The gap between rich and poor gets bigger, especially across generations. Poor people have little accumulated wealth to leave their children; rich people get tax breaks for mortgages that allow them to accumulate more wealth than they would have accumulated without the tax breaks. Their children inherit, and have a tax-break funded leg-up in the world. The gap between rich and poor increases.

Probable disagreement, but I'm hoping to win him over on this. Our lack of national health care funded by the government (through taxes) ends up being a "tax" on businesses, and the incidence of that tax falls disproportionately on SMEs (Small & Medium size Enterprises.) Why? Because SMEs have to compete for good employees in part with benefits, which include health insurance. The insurance company looks at the SME and thinks about the risk they take on by insuring the SME given its relatively small pool of employees. An individual SME's rates are high. And the SME is pretty much a "price taker." It doesn't have much clout for bargaining. But a large firm or other large employer (like my nonprofit Benevolent Employer) has lots of advantages in negotiating prices because its risk is spread over a larger pool and because it controls a larger market share. My Benevolent Employer is virtually a monopsonist in Maryland! So SMEs are at a significant disadvantage relative to large firms and relative to competing firms from abroad that don't have to worry about health care benefits.

Definite disagreement. I think the economy needs more stimulating through more government spending as we are climbing out of this recession. I expect that cuts -- including Obama's cuts -- will be damaging and will slow the recovery. What we need now is for the government to spend more on things like infrastructure (fixing roads and bridges, etc.), spurring the economy through increased employment while providing tangible benefits.

IR Theory Words to Live By . . .

Once upon a time, when I was an undergraduate, my advisor, who taught the senior seminar in IR theory, had a famous saying about systems & processes. I had completely forgotten about it, until I discovered it when I Googled his name, looking for some of his publications. Instead, I stumbled upon a Facebook page for Florida International University's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Student Group. There, right on the righthand side of the page, was the group motto, appropriately credited to JKZ:

“If you don’t know what you are talking about, call it ‘system’; if you don’t know what it is made of, call it ‘subsystems’; if you don’t know how it works, call it ‘process’ . . . ”
J.K. Zawodny

So, how did the FIU students find this quote?

Data and Teachers: Wisconsin's averages

Back in the old days when I used to teach quantitative methods to undergrads and MA students, I would assign the classic How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrell Huff, illustrated by Irving Geiss (Norton, 1993). The book should be required reading for anyone who is a citizen since so much of what we are presented with nowadays as "facts" are statistical interpretations which may or may not accurately and impartially reflect a condition in the world. (Oh, I know: we can't get away from subjectivity. But I do believe we live in the world and it is important to see what is, to the extent possible.)

I am reminded of the problematic nature of statistics by the debate over what is going on in Wisconsin. Factcheck.org has a nice, well-documented article on claims about Wisconsin's budget that are being made by supporters and opponents of the Wisconsin governor.

The article leads to comments here on use, misuse, and manufacturing of that most plebian of descriptive statistics, the arithmetic mean. So, how much do teachers in Wisconsin make? Not, as Buchanan claimed, $100,000 ($56K in salary and $44K in benefits). That, apparently is a fairly good estimate for the pay of teachers in Milwaukee -- the largest city in the state. Is Milwaukee typical for Wisconsin? Is the mean for Milwaukee teachers a good point estimate for the state? No.

Or consider Rand Paul's more modest claim that

The average teacher in Wisconsin is making $89,000 a year to work nine months

That's not right either. It's not clear whether he's talking about plain salary or salary plus benefits. Even if he were referring to salary plus benefits, it is highly unlikely his number, as precise as it sounds, represents mean salary or salary plus benefits for Wisconsin K12 teachers.

Factcheck.org says:

The state Department of Public Instruction only calculates average teacher salary and benefits on a district by district basis. Of the 425 public school districts in Wisconsin, only one had a salary and benefits package in 2010 that exceeded $100,000; the Nicolet Unified School District average total compensation was $103,315. And only 22 school districts — about 5 percent of the total — paid average total compensation that topped $89,000.

A link, provided by Factcheck.org to the Wisconsin district-by-district averages can be found here. Note that this is an official government website. One thing immediately becomes obvious from the Factcheck.org article: The data are dirty. There are mistakes in the spreadsheet. The known problems are for the Kenosha Unified School District and the Niagara School District. There may be other errors. From what I've seen, we generally assume that reporting errors of this kind are not going to be biased: it's not that the numbers are systematically made too high or too low; it's just that someone typed in the wrong number, and wrong numbers are as likely to be high as low. But data like these are collected and reported by human beings. There will be mistakes.

Another thing to notice is that unless we have information about the number of teachers in each district, we can't use the information in the table to tell us anything about average teacher salaries in Wisconsin. Without the number of teachers per district, we can't compute a weighted mean.

And third is a question of interpretation. We can't judge salaries and fringe unless we have appropriate comparisons from Wisconsin. How much is the governor making? How much does a store manager at Walmart make? How much does a computer programmer make?

In addition to looking at how salaries and fringe vary by locale within Wisconsin, we still need to ask: How does teacher salary vary by seniority (alas, not a great metric), educational level achieved (more for teachers with graduate degrees?), and quality measures (Is there a fund for paying fabulous teachers more money so they keep teaching? There ought to be!). But if there is a superfund for superteachers, their salaries will skew the mean. (More on that below.)

Further the fringe numbers seem really scary, but how many people know exactly the value of their benefits packages? I don't. I know it's a lot of money, but I have no idea how much our Benevolent Patron pays in fringe. When I write a proposal for a grant that would allow me to spend some of my teaching time on research, the University asks me to request my salary + 33% of my salary for fringe benefits. I'm not sure how standard that amount is or the extent to which the cost for fringe benefits varies across different parts of the country. Moreover, I would expect K12 teachers to have a larger proportion of their salaries go to fringe than people who work all 12 months because teachers are specifically paid for 9 months in the classroom, but the fringe benefits (health insurance, most notably) have to be paid all year long.

A final point: the notion of "average" salaries. Everyone here is using arithmetic mean. Means have flaws: they are easily skewed by extreme values. If teacher salaries in Wisconsin are well represented by a normal distribution (a bell curve) or even by a flat distribution (for example: 1/3 of teachers get the same low pay, 1/3 get the same moderate pay, and 1/3 get the same high pay), the mean is reasonably informative as a point estimate, as one number that summarizes the central tendency of the data. But means tell you nothing about dispersion of the data: how stretched out the data are. An example: The numbers 99, 100, 101 have a mean of 100. The numbers 0, 100, 200 have a mean of 100. These are very different distributions! (Standard deviation is the usual statistic used to report the dispersion of the data, but it still doesn't tell you anything about the shape of the distribution.)

My bottom line: As citizens it's our job to be critical about the statistics that are presented to us and to question their accuracy and their meaning.

And a note on teachers:

It's too bad that as a society we don't want to pay our teachers at rates that would attract more excellent teachers. Don't get me wrong. I know many absolutely wonderful teachers out there, but in my experience (anecdote, not statistic, here!), those teachers teach because they love it. They could be earning more money doing something else, but they choose to be teachers because they have a calling. Other potentially wonderful teachers don't consider teaching because they have other concerns and priorities that work against being able to give up more remunerative pay in order to teach.

To paraphrase Rabbi Jonathan Maltzman, wouldn't it be wonderful if we paid our star teachers the way we pay our sports stars? What could be more important to us, our children, our country, and the world than to have highly qualified and competent teachers appropriately compensated for the difficult and critical job that they do?

Saideman's Semi-Spew: Secessionistly Speaking

Steve Saideman's blog post on state's rights is worth reading: Saideman's Semi-Spew: Secessionistly Speaking

Vint Cerf says current Internet governance is "bottoms-up." He's wrong.

In the news today has been UN discussions concerning the governance of the Internet.

Google's Cerf Slams UN 'Monopoly on Internet Governance' | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

It's not reported quite this way, but here's my take on it: The rest of the world is sick and tired of US dominance of Internet governance. Now some of those countries -- the authoritarian ones -- want more control over the Internet because they dislike the architecture that enables end-runs against state-controls on content. But other countries are just annoyed by the fact that much of Internet governance is conducted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit, created at the behest of the Clinton administration, chartered in California, and operating under a Memorandum of Understanding with the US Department of Commerce. (How weird is that?)

Vint Cerf, quoted in the article above, is wrong, in my opinion. I disagree with the premise of his statement that "The current bottoms-up, open approach works—protecting users from vested interests and enabling rapid innovation." Gone are the days when the only users of Bitnet and ARPANET were the engineers who were creating the network from the bottom up. Governance of the Internet today is NOT "bottoms up" and users are not protected from the vested interests of those who are governing the Internet. In short, ICANN promotes governance of and for corporate vested interests, with large corporations having an advantage. Corporate entities definitely have vested interests, and sometimes those interests involve slowing innovation. (If you created the last great innovation, you want to slow others from creating the next innovation.) Users have little voice (no voice, really) in the governance provided by ICANN, and we users are subject to decisions made by corporate entities such as ISPs.

I wrote about some of these themes a while back in:
R. Marlin-Bennett (2001). “ICANN and Democracy: Contradictions and Possibilities.” info: the journal of regulation and strategy for telecommunications information and media 3.4 (August 2001), pp. 299-311. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14636690110801978

The big problem is that we, the world, have never really figured out what the Internet is. If it's more or less a communication medium, then international cooperation on international communication has some well-established precedents: the Universal Postal Union was created in 1874. The International Telecommunications Union was established even earlier in 1865 to deal with what has been called "the first internet" -- telegraph networks.

Or maybe the Internet is a public, a place for interaction among people who may be geographically distant but can still bump virtual shoulders online. There's a lot of work that suggests that the Internet is becoming a cyberpolis. Perhaps this works in some very limited circumstances (our neighborhood listserv, for example, but that works because of the geographical proximity of the participants not without it). I just don't see this happening to a large extent. Nevertheless, It would be great if the Internet actually were a democratically governed place where cyber-citizens could come together to discuss matters of global public import. After all, here I am writing a blog, at some level engaging in cyber-enabled democratic deliberation. The reality is, though, that VERY FEW -- IF ANY -- people are going to read this. And most of them are my friends. But if the Internet is a cyberpolis, then we might want to think about how it might be democratically governed. ICANN, despite its claims of democratic legitimacy and bottom-up governance, doesn't meet that test, in my opinion.

Or maybe the Internet is nothing more than a rather free market, with minimal regulation and subject to logic of the market place. This is where I think the Internet is, for the most part, heading; this saddens me. In the absence of appropriate regulation, large corporation are becoming dominant. Oligopoly has always been understood as market failure, and oligopolistic control of the Internet (Google, Microsoft) will skew future developments toward things that make money for those corporations that have the power to make the market.

I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm better at critiquing governance than coming up with new forms.

Offshoring key federal government functions????

It seems to me that government must be responsible for its e-government functions, namely its website and citizen services provided online. All in all, I'm usually pretty pleased with the US government's websites. I recently went to the IRS page and used a rather useful calculator to do some planning. The calculator seemed to work fine, but soon things got interesting.

I clicked on a link that promised to explain estimated payments. The information in the window that popped up was not understandable and contained an obvious error, so, good doobie that I am, I reported the problem to the website helpdesk.

When you submit something to the IRS helpdesk, the website helpfully advises you to add irs.gov.website.helpdesk@speedymail.com to your approved email sender list.

Speedymail.com????? Well, boys and girls, we've outsourced the IRS website helpdesk to a company called AFFINA, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Hinduja Group, which was "started in Sind, the cradle of the Indus Valley Civilization, where more than 5,000 years ago, the human race learnt its first lessons in organized business and banking."

Now don't get me wrong: I am not actually opposed to offshoring because it can be efficient for firms and helpful for developing economies. (I am, though, a rather enthusiastic supporter of "inshoring," setting up call centers in poorer parts of the US to provide jobs at home. Besides, those people from Arkansas are so nice!) But to get back to my story . . .

I think of this as simple syllogism:

Government services should be performed by nationals of the country in question (whenever possible).
Government services in the information age include e-government services.
Therefore, e-government services should be performed by nationals of the country in question.

Have we reached the point of our de-development that we do not have enough competent people in this country to handle website customer care for the IRS? Is it really the right choice (I don't mean the cheapest choice, I mean the appropriate choice for a public function) to be outsourced?

Tomorrow is election day in Maryland. Maybe we can get the votes counted in India.

Sigh.