In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

More True Crime to Come

My post on "True Crime" below reminded me that I served jury duty on a first-degree murder trial last year, and that I took extensive notes during the trial and wrote up my experience afterward (something I tried unsuccessfully to get published). So I am going to start a series of posts tomorrow on the crime and the trial.

This fits this blog's subject areas in two ways: there is an epistemological issue -- how did the jury "know", or decide, that the defendants were innocent or guilty? -- and the work issue, since the testimony and other trial events told me a lot about the work environments of the police, the criminalists, the attorneys, and the jurors.

The End of BlogMatrix

Douglas Bass at Belief Seeking Understanding is covering BlogMatrix's exit from the free RSS feed business. Based on his posts, I've taken the BlogMatrix links off my template here. Coincidentally, I had been looking into BlogStreet this past week, and this is the substitute Douglas recommends and that I will support here if you want an RSS feed.

Douglas says he's reviewed this blog on BlogStreet, but when I check my profile there, it says "this blog has not yet been reviewed."

When I think about the multimillion-dollar products I've supported in real life that don't work very well, some of the free products we use that don't work very well look like bargains!

True Crime

Critical Mass recently mentioned the case of a Los Angeles area murder-suicide involving a Cal State professor and (apparently former) graduate student. "First he stabbed her and decapitated her," says Prof. O'Connor, "then he stripped naked and threw himself in front of a truck--and all for love." Prof. O'Connor prefaced this as being potential meat for those who favor academic non-fraternization policies, but I must admit that my true crime buff side was what actually drew me to this story (and I haven't blogged at all about my jury duty last year on a first-degree murder case).

The facts, as far as I can determine from the link Prof. O'Connor kindly provided me by e-mail (there was an inadvertency in her post that she's subsequently corrected), are these: Mark Guerro, 38, of West Covina, CA, received his Master's degree in Education from Cal State University Los Angeles in 2000. He had taken additional graduate courses at CSULA after that, but it is not known exactly when, or whether he was enrolled in courses at CSULA at the time. He had been "dating" (the word used by police) Glenda Vittimberga, 36 or 37 depending on the account, an Associate Professor of Psychology at CSULA. (As of this writing, her information is still available on the CSULA web site.)

According to the Los Angeles Times, "Officers went to Vittimberga's home on Medford Road in the Upper Hastings Ranch area of northeast Pasadena about 4 a.m. [February 18] after Guerro called his sister in West Covina to say 'something bad' had happened to Vittimberga, investigators said." ABC News continued the story: "The headless body . . . was found in her kitchen about 4 a.m. Monday, after Pasadena police were sent to check on the woman in her home. . . . The woman's head was found in her living room, police said."

Meanwhile, according to ABC News, "After cutting the woman's head off -- police did not say if a weapon was found -- the man apparently committed suicide by stepping in front of a truck in San Bernardino County, police said. Police found blood in the suspect's car, the newspaper reported. The suspect took off all his clothes and left his possessions in his car, before before walking in front of the big rig on southbound Interstate 15 near Oak Hill Road, according to the California Highway Patrol. The man died instantly, about 30 minutes before Vittimberga's body was discovered."

Our ever-vigilant LA Times promptly expressed its editorial outrage at the incident, since, in its words, "an act of domestic violence occurs every 18 seconds in the United States." Some "domestic violence." Since the likely perpetrator committed suicide, there probably won't be a trial, and this is about as much as we're ever going to learn about what happened.

Naturally this was a tragedy for everyone involved, especially the families. The facts as reported actually suggest that the relationship between Guerro and Vittimberga wouldn't have been covered by any existing or proposed university non-fraternization policy, and thus wouldn't be much in the way of ammunition for arguments pro or con. The reports say it wasn't known if Guerro had ever taken a course from Vittimberga. The Cal State University system doesn't issue Ph.D.s, so even if Guerro was taking more Education courses after his Master's, it's unlikely that Vittimberga, in the Psychology department, would have had any professional supervision over what was left of Guerro's academic career at CSULA. And it's entirely possible that Guerro was no longer enrolled as a student.

I have a much bigger concern, though, that Vittimberga was a Ph.D. with a specialty in Clinical Psychology, yet her story ends as the victim of someone who can only be characterized from the information available as a nut case. Domestic violence may occur every 18 seconds, but decapitations, we may assume, are somewhat less common. I can only think that alarm bells must have been going off in the minds of at least some people familiar with the circumstances: Guerro's sister, after all, called the police right away when her brother told her "something bad" had happened.

The saddest part of the story to me is that whatever insight into abnormal behavior Vittimberga's Ph.D. might have given her, it wasn't enough to protect her. We're told over and over that the social sciences, and disciplines like Clinical Psychology in particular, are simply unable to predict behavior like Guerro's, or likely recidivism by sexual predators released from prison. Somehow I think, just based on the insight Guerro's sister apparently had into the likely course of events, that our social science Ph.D.s ought to be doing better than they are. So I think there's a story here, but not the one we might have thought.

UPDATE: As someone who's spent a fair amount of time in the San Bernardino Mountains, it occurs to me that anyone who would take his clothes off on Cajon Pass at 3:30 AM in February would have a rather severe case of goosebumps, to say the least. On top of everything else, this makes me wonder if drugs weren't involved here. As a true crime amateur, I think that pure wacko rage can drive someone to multiple stabbings and decapitation, but drugs would probably exacerbate any natural paranoia leading to such rage, and would explain someone then taking their clothes off (brr) before jumping in front of a truck.

I agree with Oldman in the comment that someone can be just naively attracted to a psychotic individual, but if drugs were involved, even with Guerro alone, I would be much more inclined to question Vittimberga's judgment. This gets back to what a Ph.D. ought to mean, and apparently too often doesn't.

UPDATE: This story provides additional information from the perspective of Vittimberga's family and reinforces the sense of tragedy involved. It also updates a number of facts. "Guerro's" name is now spelled "Guererro". Guerro-Gurerrero is now said to have had an extensive criminal record, which he concealed at the time that he applied for a job at CSULA, and it now appears that he was an employee of CSULA, though we don't know in what capacity. The Vittimberga family suspects mental illness, though full-blown paranoid schizophrenics (the illness suggested by Vittimberga's sister) are generally too disorganized to commit armed robberies, as is now alleged to be the case with Guerro-Guerrero. That he concealed his prior criminal record on his employment application (but was otherwise able to complete the application well enough to be hired) argues against legal "insanity", and is also inconsistent with schizophrenia.

Given the prior extensive criminal record, the possible use of multiple names (though this may be simply an error in reporting), and the apparent concealment of the record, I would be inclined to call him a "psychopath", a more conventional criminal type, who may behave bizarrely, but doesn't have the debilitating delusions of schizophrenia.

UPDATE: There's an interesting comment here now from "Withheld", who says that Guerro-Guerrero appeared "completely normal" in the time he says he knew both Vittimberga and Guerro-Guerrero. Without any other information, I've got to take Withheld's assertion at face value -- he was acquainted with the pair in some way. On the other hand, while I'm trying to avoid judging any of the parties, I'm entitled -- like a juror is, by the way -- to apply my general knowledge of life to the circumstances as I see them, and I'm entitled to draw tentative conclusions. Among the things that make me question what Withheld says is the simple fact that he doesn't give a name or e-mail address, which is often associated with troll-like behavior. I would assume many at Cal State have stood up to say good things about Vittimberga, and have identified themselves in the process. It's hard for me to understand Withheld's reticence in a case like this.

But several things also concern me. One is that if, as the Vittimberga family says, Guerro-Guererro was schizophrenic, then schizophrenics simply do not appear normal. If, as I think is the case based on the evidence I see at this point, he was a psychopath, there are inevitably discrepancies in the story of someone who is covering up his past, and those discrepancies -- part of a pattern of pathological lying that you might expect to see in such a case -- ought to ring alarm bells. Keep in mind that with his criminal record, he must have done a fair amount of prison time, and he would need to have an elaborate and inevitably shaky cover story to explain those missing years. I would expect a clinical psychologist to be among the first to sense a pattern of pathological lying. This, it seems to me, is not casting aspersions -- it's simply raising a question a person of normal experience and common sense ought to raise.

In fact, before I got married, I dated a Ph.D. clinical psychologist, and she told me that the first thing she did when she met a possible partner was to "get a history", with a clear clinical implication. Someone with a background in the field might normally be expected to exercise this type of prudence. If the "history" included poorly explained gaps covering years of time, I suspect my former clinical psychologist date would have taken this seriously.

I've known several people who tell a lot of lies (and I would assume someone who covers up a long criminal record, as the news article says Guerro-Gurerrero did, frequently tells lies), and in every case, something bothered me about them in a major way, well before I was able to substantiate specific lies. The alarm bells simply go off for people of normal common sense and experience.

I'm interested in other odd discrepancies. Withheld says he knew the pair over a period of a year. The police called it a "dating" relationship. The family, on the other hand, apparently denies any romantic involvement. As a person of ordinary common sense and experience, I'm entitled to say that we don't seem to have the whole story here, and I'm skeptical of anyone who claims he or she does have it at this point.

Playing With Blog Statistics

If I go to the Technorati.com version of links to my blog I get (based on the last time I checked) 27 unique blogs linking to mine, with 35 links total. On the other hand, if I go to The Truth Laid Bear's Ecosystem entry for my blog, again the last time I checked, within minutes of the Technorati check, it showed 39 unique links, 49 links total. And based on a cursory comparison, it appears that there are numerous blogs in each list that aren't covered in the other list.

I have no idea what this means. I tend to think traffic, measured in unique visitors, is my best current gauge of whether I'm attracting and pleasing "customers" with this effort, since my primary objective with this blog is to develop an audience for my writing. Links are secondary to me except insofar as they give me traffic -- my rankings in terms of Technorati "blog authority" or position in The Truth Laid Bear's Ecosystem don't interest me in themselves.

Since the start of the year, my best source of steady referral traffic has been the permanent link at Invisible Adjunct, though I get a fair number of daily visits from Winston's Diary. (A check of referrals on Site Meter as I write this shows of the 20 most recent visitors, four from Invisible Adjunct, one from Winston's Diary, and one "other", the rest apparently coming from bookmarks or typing the address in the explorer bar.)

But Technorati.com says Invisible Adjunct has only 15 unique inbound blog links, with 20 links total. That is very difficult for me to believe for a blog that apparently has IA's high traffic -- if I'm getting just a fraction of her traffic, it's a lot, and if she takes a blogging break, I take a hit! Interestingly, Crooked Timber, which also has a permanent link to my blog, is listed on Technorati.com with 863 unique links from inbound blogs and 1129 links total -- and must have equivalent very high traffic -- but I get almost no referrals from them.

So I'm puzzled at the matter of links, referrals, and traffic. My best source of traffic seems to be repeat visitors, and I seem to get these mainly when some other blog -- usually Critical Mass or Invisible Adjunct picks up on one of my posts and spikes my visits with a link. Then some number of new visitors discovers the site, likes it, and keeps coming. But the spikes and their aftermath make it difficult to assess whether I'm making steady progress in visits, though my monthly totals so far have been increasing.

I do think I'm performing a service to the blogosphere in putting up good writing on subjects that aren't blog cliches (I run into lists of such on site after site, which always seem to start with "Presidential Politics" and go through "other blogs" and the like). My list of topics on the top of the page specifically excludes political issues, and I'm frankly surprised that no other blog to my knowledge covers workplace absurdity. In fact, I'm also surprised that so few blogs consciously try to provide good writing, and so few discuss religion from a mainstream Anglican-Episcopalian perspective. I'd like to develop a wider audience for this effort.

So the relationship between links and traffic isn't clear, but in some cases links do seem to increase traffic. And I would like to increase the traffic to my blog, which leads me to a shameless request: if you have a blog, visit here regularly, and like what you find, but don't link here yet, please consider setting up a mutual link. Thanks!

Hi Again to the Folks from Dartmouth

Most days someone from the Dartmouth.edu domain does this Google search and drops by this site. Nice work if you can get it, I would say. I hope whoever it is reads some of the other really good writing I'm doing here and doesn't just spend all their time on the Dartmouth stuff.

Does anyone have a theory on what they're doing with whatever information they get here? "No, President Wright, he hasn't changed that post all week. And nobody's made any new comments, either. He's probably gotten tired of the issue and moved on to something else."

Doggone, how much does that job pay, guys? I could do it from home. And come to think of it, how about a link?

They Need a Guru -- IV

A few months after my second call from HappyCare's HR department, I got a call from a recruiter wanting to know if I'd be interested in doing an XYZ contract at HappyCare. A contractor, of course, doesn't normally work directly for the company where he's on site, but is paid an hourly rate by a third party. But the players are likely to be the same.

"Who are you talking to at HappyCare?" I asked.

"Tina Hale."

I gave him the background and suggested it wasn't likely to work, but if he could convince Tina that I was only interested in doing the job and didn't intend to make anyone look bad, maybe she'd change her mind. Fat chance. That's what they'd really want, someone who was only interested in doing the job. I never heard from that guy again.

Then in the fall of 2002, I got the call Ms. Creamcheese referred to in the e-mail that opened this sequence of posts. Suzy called me while I was down in San Diego on an extended wild goose chase that I will have to discuss at some later date, but I took time off from that to return her call.

"We need an advanced XYZ guru for some work at HappyCare," she said. This was getting old. I gave her the whole story in a nutshell. They didn't want an advanced XYZ guru.

"This is different," she said. "They've given us an exclusive. We're going to come in and take over their whole operation and run it as a turnkey."

"OK," I said. "I'll e-mail you my resume in just a moment here."

"Actually," she said, "We've already got someone to do it. I'm just calling you in case we need a second person."

"OK," I said. Thanks for wasting my time, I didn't say, and I was wondering about this person they already had. But I heard nothing more from Suzy H. Creamcheese in any case.

Then in the middle of 2003 I got a bunch of calls from a Big Four consulting firm. They were looking for an advanced XYZ guru to do some work at HappyCare. The project manager and I had to play a fair amount of phone tag.

"I have quite a bit of information on the history of this project," I told him in my first phone mail message. "I'd be interested in talking about it with you, but I'd also like to hear from you on what you feel are the ingredients for success in the project." Translation: this thing is a turkey, and I don't know if I want to be involved.

When we finally linked up, he was tooling down the freeway in his BMW, cell phone in one hand, steering wheel in the other. This was, at least theoretically, an interview. "I need an XYZ resource on this project," he said. It's never a good sign when someone calls me a resource to my face (or in this case, to my ear). You can see how their people skills are right up front. They're the star, everyone else is a resource. "You asked in your phone message what I thought the ingredients for success might be. Well, our Big-Four firm is handling the project. There's your main ingredient for success right there."

I went into as much detail as I could on what specific tasks would need to be done to catch up on the passwords, but the manager interrupted me. "That's not the only problem," he said. "Every user they've set up has the bit set that lets them bypass security. That has to be fixed, too." That was a new one on me. Tina Hale hadn't bothered to mention it when I'd talked to her. What that meant was that they'd all been going through the motions of security. The security system, XYZ, was in, but they'd set it up so that it would never prevent anyone from doing anything unauthorized. That, of course, was the easiest way -- you'd never get complaints from anyone, at least not for not being able to get to something.

I told the guy about how I'd backed customers out of situations like that in the past, but he didn't seem to be listening very hard. He asked me for my references, but I don't think he got as far as calling them.

A few days later I got a call from the Big Four firm's HR rep, who didn't know I'd already talked to the manager. I gave her a rundown on what he and I had talked about. "Well," she said, "it looks like we already have someone to do the main work on this. Right now we're talking to you in case we need another resource." Excellent. There are apparently numerous resources out there, each a veritable Achilles of XYZ. Based on what I hear, they each are going into HappyCare, or are about to go in, or have gone in. Body shops with contractors, Big Four firms, whatever, they all are about to go in and clean up the mess at HappyCare. I never heard from the Big Four firm again. I had no reason to think that the manager and his Achilles-like resource had not done the job.

Except I keep getting these calls and e-mails. They need an XYZ guru at HappyCare, project probably longer than a year.

They Need a Guru -- III

In late 2001, after I'd been laid off by DDT, I answered an ad on one of the job boards for an "Advanced XYZ Analyst" at HappyCare. In fact, I had quite a bit of experience in XYZ, and DDT had originally hired me because they needed someone with XYZ for a project. And when I was on site at HappyCare in the late 1990s, Latanya Johnson, who was the security manager there at the time, was halfway trying to hire me away from DDT because of my XYZ expertise. So I thought this might be a possibility, especially if Latanya was still there.

She wasn't. HappyCare had taken over some insurance company in Georgia, and Latanya had been RIFed in favor of her opposite number, who was now running the security group in Happiness Hills by remote control from Georgia. She had a bunch of lower-level supervisors in charge in California. So I met with one of them, Tina Hale. She took me back to a conference room in the security area, and I could see the big door and the angry signs were still there -- nothing, apparently, had changed.

When I answered the ad for "Advanced XYZ", I assumed they needed a new person to work as one of the gurus in the area, the ones who had sat outside the big door, and now worked from home to keep them from the password-seeking supervisors. Tina, who didn't know I'd been around for the creation of the big door into the bullpen area, patiently explained the whole situation to me.

"What we need is someone who can concentrate on issuing passwords," she said. "We have a big backlog of passwords. The staff we have now doesn't know everything they should about how to issue passwords." So she began asking me some very basic questions about what I knew on how to issue a password. From the questions, it seemed like the half dozen people in the bullpen didn't know enough to do their basic jobs -- no wonder there was a backlog.

But as I've said earlier, a bad sign in the interview is when the hiring manager wants to do all the talking. I didn't even get a chance to give my Horatio Alger-Mary Poppins routine on how I'd start out just working through the backlog, but in the process find ways to streamline the process. It didn't matter, anyhow. Tina asked me some more questions about XYZ, and she'd clearly decided that, although the position title called for "Advanced XYZ", I knew too much. In other words, I knew enough to be a threat to her, and probably everyone else in the place. She'd probably figured that one out from my resume anyhow.

So after I talked to Tina, I went back to Human Resources and wasted another half an hour with the HR rep. It sounded like Tina and the HR lady had already gotten together on the outcome to this one, and the HR rep began explaining to me, in terms and in a tone that a second-grader would probably find patronizing, that I was overqualified for the position. I'm overqualified, but they've got to talk to me as though I have a learning disability.

As part of that discussion, the HR lady told me that if they decided to call me back (which they weren't going to do), I would need to have an interview with the half-dozen security-wallahs in the password bullpen, to determine if I would be a good fit as a member of the team. Right. The security-wallahs don't know how to do their own jobs, can't get the passwords out to save their lives, and they're going to welcome in somebody who'll make them look bad by knowing how to do the work. Which is what everyone at HappyCare says they want, but can't seem to get their arms around.

I told the HR lady politely that, based on what HappyCare had specified in the job description, they probably did want and need someone with a fair degree of technical background who could work independently to solve the problems Tina had described. I suggested that they were going to have some difficulty finding someone who could do the work but wasn't, in Tina's opinion, "overqualified". In other words, I expected I'd keep seeing the ads for this job, and I would keep getting calls.

I was right. I few months later, I got another call from HappyCare's HR department. The lady I'd talked to earlier had left, and the new guy was working on the position, had found my resume in the file, and thought I'd be a perfect fit. I asked him if Tina was still there, and if he'd talked to Tina. He said he hadn't -- apparently he wanted to surprise Tina with what a good job he'd done finding the right candidate, or something like that. Right. I explained to him how things had gone with Tina and the other HR rep.

In fact, I figured it couldn't hurt to explain how I knew the whole history of how the big door got put in, and what I'd begun to learn about how things were going there, as a way of suggesting their job title of "Advanced XYZ" was probably still correct (they hadn't changed it). At that point I'd given up thinking I could get the job myself, but I still hated seeing everyone running around in such confusion. The new HR rep wasn't happy about my free advice, and when he learned I'd already interviewed for the job and been turned down, he got off the phone in a hurry.

To be continued.

They Need a Guru -- II

HappyCare's passwords were so far out of control that supervisors would try to go around the normal procedures to get some of the security-wallahs to do favors for them. So if you didn't know a security-wallah, you had to wait weeks or months to get a password for a new hire. If you knew a security-wallah, you could go over to the security area, and your friend would do you a favor and give you a password. Naturally, the supervisors who weren't connected this way complained, and the security department changed its policy.

They posted angry signs all over the cube walls in the security area reading more or less, GO AWAY AND WAIT YOUR TURN. WE WILL NOT GIVE PASSWORDS OUT TO PEOPLE WHO COME OVER HERE AND ASK FOR THEM. YOU MUST FOLLOW THE PROCEDURE AND WAIT UNTIL WE ARE READY TO GIVE OUT A PASSWORD. And so forth. I was in and out of HappyCare doing work there for DDT in 1997 and 1998, and each time I'd drop by, the signs would get nastier, apparently because nobody paid attention, and people kept bypassing the system if they could to get their passwords set up.

Then one day I found they'd called in the facilities people and mounted a regular door, with a lock, to block the aisle to the security area. It looked odd, because the area where the half dozen security-wallahs in question worked was just an open bullpen with low cube walls surrounding it. Right in the aisleway was now a full-height door, looming over everything else. You had to have a key card to get in. There were signs on the door and the cube walls just like the old ones: KEEP OUT. WAIT YOUR TURN. And so forth.

And the more senior security-wallahs, the gurus, also had problems, because of course they could set up passwords themselves, even though that wasn't what they were supposed to be doing, and they still worked outside the bullpen with the door, so anyone who knew one of the senior people would go see them, and just to get rid of those petitioners, the gurus would set up passwords themselves, and the system could be bypassed that way, too. So the managers decided the gurus should work from home, since that was the best way to keep people from pestering them for passwords in the office. At that point, I started working for other DDT customers in other parts of the country, and I wasn't at HappyCare for several years -- in fact, not until after DDT laid me off in 2001.

To be continued.

They Need a Guru

Where blogging and real life collide: I got the following e-mail yesterday afternoon. I've taken my profile off the big job boards, and I've deleted my job search agents, because I discovered that I was wasting enormous amounts of time on the wild goose chases that result from headhunter calls in this job market. But that hasn't prevented instances like the one below, where the headhunter has your resume from some past wild goose chase. (If you've got a name that's easy to get wrong, like mine, by the way, don't you just love it when people get it wrong so breezily?)

Hi Bruce

Don't know if you remember me, but I submitted for a position at HappyCare back in Oct. 2002. I have another opportunity out there and wanted to know if you are current available.

Please let me know. Thank you.

Suzy H. Creamcheese
Senior Technical Recruiter
etc.

To which, thinking I might get some blog mileage out of the contact, I replied:

I'd like to know more about the position.

And got the almost immediate reply:

Hi John

I do not have much information about the position. All I know they are looking for a XYZ guru for Happiness Hills, CA. The project length is over 1 year.

Please let me know if you are currently available. Thank you.

Suzy H. Creamcheese
Senior Technical Recruiter
etc.

Translation: she doesn't want to waste time finding out anything about the position if she can shoot my resume over there without having to. That's the point of "let me know if you are currently available." That way I get to waste my time if HappyCare calls, instead of her wasting her time finding out if there's a fit.

Actually, I already know that HappyCare is a waste of time. I go back a long way with HappyCare. I was on site there for about a year when I worked for DDT, and I worked right next to the XYZ team. The XYZ team handed out the system passwords. They were, in other words, the security-wallahs. The passwords were out of control then, and they're still out of control.

New hires are having to wait some matter of weeks or even months to get their passwords. People who leave the company or transfer to other jobs don’t have their old passwords disabled. In other words, they reached some pain point years ago where someone decided something needed to be done about passwords, and this made the company start interviewing people who might be able to help

Generally, when you go on a password interview, the managers never make the situation quite clear, but eventually you get the picture: somehow two or three or a dozen existing people haven’t been able to keep up. Maybe if they hire one more, the two-month backlog will disappear, especially if the one they hire has a good technical background and is willing to work hard -- harder, certainly, than the group they’ve already got.

I think a career counselor, and in fact almost any intelligent outside observer, would likely advise what I would call the Horatio Alger-Mary Poppins approach. You say something like this: “Well, this looks like a challenging situation, but if you apply some simple arithmetic, here is what we can do. If you have a backlog of xxxx passwords waiting to be issued, that comes to about yy per hour, or zzz per day, and it will take just a certain amount of elbow grease to work through them. I’ll be very happy to provide that kind of elbow grease. But while I’m working on them, I can probably get a better idea of the whole process you use to issue passwords, and maybe I can make some recommendations on how we might be able to streamline things and keep this kind of backlog from building up again. For instance, when I did this at Blah-blah, I found that we could reduce the number of etc. etc. etc.”

In fact, the Horatio Alger-Mary Poppins approach is absolute poison, because it does the following things. First, it strongly implies the existing people who are theoretically issuing passwords aren’t doing a very good job, and one person who is willing to work hard for a short while could replace all of them. This is a reflection on the manager for hiring them and keeping them around. Second, if someone figured out that you didn’t need all two or three or twelve people to set up passwords, this would affect the manager’s head count, and they might not be able to justify his salary, title, and prestige. Third, it implies that you know the manager’s job better than he knows it himself, or he would have thought of the solution first. If they brought you on, you’d have the problem solved in a matter of weeks, and that would reflect badly on the manager, such that someone might decide you should be in his job

If I could think of a better canned response in a password interview than the Horatio Alger-Mary Poppins approach, I’d have used it long before now, but I haven’t, and I keep getting the stuffing kicked out of me for it. I imagine that the successful performance would be some combination of knowing grunts, intelligent looking frowns, and strong statements that this is a very, very problematic issue, and perhaps with effective consultation and further study an acceptable solution could eventually be found. I go to password interviews, though, and I never get called back, and the ads for that job keep reappearing on the job boards month after month, so whatever they’re looking for, they don’t find it. Sometimes I drive by the place I interviewed a year or two later, and the signs are down, the blinds are drawn, and there are weeds in the empty parking lot.

To be continued.

Tocqueville and the San Francisco Gay Marriages

Over the past year I've been slowly working my way through the Harvey Mansfield-Delba Winthrop translation of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. During this time, I also read David McCullough's biography of John Adams, and I re-read the section on the American Revolution in Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly. I also shouldn't neglect New Jersey historian and folklorist Henry Charlton Beck, whose books often provide a fresh and unmediated look at pre-Revolutionary American society. This combination has led me to re-think many of the assumptions about how we've gone about being Americans that I took with me from my formal education. I'm very happy I've had the time at this point in my life to be able to examine some of my previously unexamined impressions and come up with some new tentative conclusions.

Over much of this period, there's been a growing controversy over gay marriage, presaged by the ordination of Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, continuing with the judicial and political events in Massachusetts, and now San Francisco's de facto recognition of gay marriage, in contradiction to a California initiative. I'm allowing this issue, partly political, into this blog because it's also epistemological and religious.

That San Francisco would step into the battle over gay marriage isn't a surprise, since the city has always been associated with various radical forms of self-expression, and it attracted such pioneers of gay public identity as Lucius Beebe. But in the past century we've been much more inclined to see social conflicts like these resolved via the courts, or secondarily the legislature, and in fact this was the paradigm we'd been seeing in Massachusetts -- and we'd been expecting the issue to continue to work itself out that way, with opposition forces looking to forestall gay marriage through the initiative or constitutional amendment processes at both the state and federal level.

All of a sudden the battlefield has turned to the municipal level, and I think this has left both sides of the political process flabbergasted. In fact, I think the only theoretician of democracy who could have predicted this is Alexis de Tocqueville (though I think Henry Charlton Beck would have seen it coming, too). Tocqueville studies the American township system first, because he sees American democracy as an aggregation of townships upward into counties and states, and only then the federal government. And he reasons correctly that if a society can't get townships to cooperate with its objectives, it's going to have major problems in adopting unified policies. "The township is composed of coarser elements that often resist the action of the legislator," says Tocqueville.

In the wake of San Francisco's move, Bernalillo, New Mexico, also attempted briefly to address the issue at the municipal level. I suspect that this is only the start of such moves.

When I got my political education in college, it was largely through the study of Edmund Burke, supplemented by reading David Hume and Percy Shelley (I was an English major). The result was on one hand epistemological caution -- beware of how little we know, beware of unintended consequences, but always pay attention to literary and old-world models. Poets, after all, are the unacknowledged legislators. Burke has been the underpinning of National Review style conservatism. Be cautious, especially regarding the new, revolutionary, and bizarre. Be especially cautious of things like gay marriage -- so we see writers like everyone at the National Review opposing it, along with Mark Steyn (now, of course a regular NR writer himself, more the pity).

On the other hand, we have what appear to be non-Burkean centrists like David Brooks and bloggers Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon taking positions in favor of gay marriage. I've already posted in appreciation of Brooks's later op-ed piece "Arguing with Oakeshott", now apparently no longer available for free on the New York Times site, but summarized here.

On reflection, it's difficult for me to understand Burke's popularity as a philosophical father of American conservatism. Burke's best-known political work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, while certainly an outline of epistemological caution and a warning against the unintended consequences that can result from incaution, is neither a descriptor nor a predictor of American conditions. American society has never been specifically aristocratic as Tocqueville would define it, and indeed, the part of American society that Tocqueville thought had aristocratic features, the antebellum South, is far less aristocratic now. Yet Burke's Reflections is in effect an apology for retaining ad hoc, vestigial aristocratic characteristics in English society. The more I wrestle with this, the less I see applicability to American conditions.

Burke, while sympathetic to the American colonists' cause, never visited America, and, like most of his English contemporaries, never understood the society that had already grown up in the colonies. Tocqueville, who did travel to America, and who applied a critical and systematic intelligence to what he saw, has a much better understanding of what had taken root. The ability to try something like gay marriage is part and parcel of what America has always been about, and if I were to take Tocqueville as a predictor, I would say that a municipal-level movement to issue marriage licenses to gay couples is likely to be unstoppable. You can tell 20 people in Bernalillo, NM that their marriages are invalid; you aren't going to be able to do this to thousands in California. And each municipality that does this makes it easier for others and harder to stop.

I do not see political viewpoints that derive from Burkean caution as adequately descriptive of what's now happening, nor predictive of the likely consequences -- though on this, we'll all be proven right or wrong by events.

Parasites!

Karl Hallowell has a really good multi-part comment to my post "And Then There's The Theory. . . " below (not bothering with a hyperlink, since this after all is Blogger) suggesting the parasitical model for incompetent managers. Subsequent commenters on that and other posts have picked it up in a flash, and I like it too. My only reservation is that the biological model makes it harder to think of remedies, since the only way you deal with a biological parasite is to kill it, and the question is the best way. But for now, I like the name, and so do other visitors, so maybe we'll stick with it until something else comes up.

In that context, I've had an old news item that's been in the back of my mind that I thought I would pass on, since it's more in the way of clear evidence that market forces frequently in fact do not act to weed out non-performing managers. This item is by no means unique, but it does cover a prominent individual who seems to fit the "parasite" model. The item is from the May 2003 Railpace Newsmagazine (not on line), by Ray Saunders:

Former CSXT CEO John Snow received $68.9 million in deferred compensation and other pay when he departed the railroad company in February to become [S]ecretary of the U.S. Treasury. Snow received a $33.2 million lump sum in lieu of future pension payments that would have totaled $2.9 million per year. Snow also received $8.1 million in cash in lieu of a $25 million life insurance policy, $18.9 million in the value of stock that he had not yet received, and $8.7 million in other compensation. CSX also generously forgave a $24.5 million personal loan Snow took earlier. Apparently, the Board must have been eager to show him the door. According to CSX spokesman Adam Hollingsworth, Snow's pension and related benefits are similar to what other executives from Fortune 500 companies receive -- except that Snow was rewarded for poor performance. During his tenure at CSX, profits declined and its stock underperformed its competitors by two-thirds since 1991.

Snow is apparently, to at least some economists, an outlier, and one must theorize that he was being screened out by market tests. Not. Since this is a non-political blog, I'm referring here only to the work-related issues raised by Snow's compensation, and in fact, to be fair and balanced, I should point out that Snow does not wear a hairpiece and looks quite good without one. But he also appears to be a very successful parasite.

It seems to me that Snow represents what is in fact a considerable body of real-world experience that contradicts current economic theory. A significant number of managers "succeed" in terms of their own medium to long-term aggrandizement while not being subject to what we would normally think of as market tests. Some commenters here have pointed out that one factor in the contradiction is that some economic actors are able to distort the market by mimicking more rational economic behavior.

Mimickry, of course, also implies deception, and I suspect what we're looking at here is a range of behavior that doesn't rise to the level of crime or fraud, but is in fact related. In fact, one function of society is to re-define the level of acceptability for this kind of behavior, and I now believe the level of personal loans Snow got, and perhaps some other factors in his tenure, would not be permitted under Sarbanes-Oxley as well as SEC regulations. I look forward to further discussion!

UPDATE: Karl posed a question in an e-mail to me: "[What] if I try and work hard as a manager for a company, but my badly managed team falls apart, the company goes under, etc while I end up with a lot of guilt, a generous layoff package, and a lifetime supply of swag, pens, and staples. Suppose this scenario repeats itself a couple more times. Am I a poor manager with a run of bad luck or a good parasite?"

This is, I think, actually two separate questions, and Karl has answered the first if he ends up with a lot of guilt. If he feels guilty, then there's no real issue here, it seems to me. But if he's always reliving the situations, asking what he might have done to keep the bad things from happening, and so forth, I would think that's not guilt, but something more like the reaction of a normal person probably blaming him or herself a little more than is justified. So the real answer is what's inside the person.

But from a management standpoint, this is why, if I were a CEO, I'd be doing what Richard Gerstner did when he turned IBM around: firing my Human Resources VP. I would be pushing pretty hard for people who could give me answers to Karl's question with some level of predictability and reliability. This is my gripe with the social science Ph.D.s we have, who don't seem to be doing research that would help give better answers to questions like this -- and instead, they're publishing stuff that tries to argue that there's no such thing as an incompetent manager.

I've Added a Few Links

Over the past few days I've tried to correct a couple of oversights and added some links, especially to academicgame and Oldman1787's Blog, both of whose bloggers have made very fine contributions in the comments here. I first ran into Oldman on Daniel Drezner's blog, where I disagreed with him fairly frequently. Now I am worried that Oldman is starting to make sense!

UPDATE: Former Dartmouth prof, current University of Chicago prof, and WGN radio talk show host Milt Rosenberg found my remarks on Dartmouth on Friday, and after a cordial exchange of e-mails, we've also exchanged links to each other's blogs, so you will see Milt's File over on the right now, too.

Dartmouth and the Ph.D. Overproduction Problem

For whatever reason, as I pointed out below, I've been getting several hits a day from different Dartmouth servers, apparently all looking for my remarks on Thurman Rodgers's petition for election to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees -- most recently about 90 minutes before this post. This is gratifying to me, certainly, and I'm sure my remarks have already garnered much more attention than an equivalent letter to the Alumni Magazine. But if you're interested, guys, here are some more thoughts.

President Wright is thought to favor turning Dartmouth, now a "College" that focuses on undergraduate education, into a "University". Dartmouth has, of course, for many years offered MBAs, advanced degrees in Engineering, and MDs from its professional schools, but as a "university" is loosely defined, Dartmouth wouldn't qualify because it isn't producing Ph.D.s, or at least not in sufficient quantity. Now, there are those alumni who are irked at Dartmouth because of its restrictive speech codes; there are those who object to how it treats fraternities; there are those who find the Student Life Initiative micromanaging and nanny-like; there are those who complain about Dartmouth's overspending and financial priorities. My particular gripe is with Wright's idea that Dartmouth should become a university by sharply increasing the number of Ph.D.-program graduate students.

My reading of the "Strategic Imperatives" section of the College's web site suggests that becoming a "university" isn't now in Dartmouth's short or medium-term objectives (and the hit the endowment took in the tech bubble doesn't help, either), but the language on the site is so vague and subject to interpretation that it's hard to say for sure. And in a speech on April 8, 1998, then President-designate Wright declared, "Dartmouth is a research university in all but name, and we are not going to be deflected from our purposes." This language is certainly strong, if not coherent, and if President Wright does indeed want to turn Dartmouth into a "research university", there may be more to his agenda than what's now in published plans.

I note that Dartmouth currently offers a small number of Ph.D. programs, mostly in the hard sciences. This is probably more than it should be doing, but at least there are fewer surplus Ph.D.s in these fields than in the humanities. But why on earth is Dartmouth considering increasing Ph.D. production at all? No field has a shortage of Ph.D.s. Some fields, such as English and History, may overproduce by 200% or more. The overproduction leads to working conditions among those trying to get academic jobs that harken back to the conduct of the nineteenth-century robber barons.

The overproduction of Ph.D.s and the consequences of the overproduction are, I think, a sleeper issue that will eventually do great damage to the reputation of the US university system. In this area, the system hasn't been able to keep its house in order. The prestige the system gained from being on the right side in the Civil Rights movement and the Viet Nam war protests is steadily being eroded. So far, Dartmouth, focusing on undergraduates, hasn't had a dog in this fight.

But only three things can happen: the current situation can continue, leading to more and more unemployable Ph.D.s being dumped on the academic job market, with the current situation of massive de facto pay cuts for new Ph.D.s continuing to erode the number of tenure-eligible positions. The current situation can end with true market information reaching applicants and the graduate enrollment bubble popping, causing extensive retrenchments in graduate programs. Or the current situation can end when someone is able to put together a class action suit alleging systematic fraud among the Ph.D. job market players, misrepresenting career prospects to graduate students and exploiting their cheap labor. And Wright thinks Dartmouth should buy into some version of this future trouble?

I think it's generally acknowledged that universities overproduce Ph.D.s because it's in their financial interest to do so. They can exploit the cheap labor of graduate students to teach highly profitable lower-level courses, then dump them on the job market as new cohorts enter the system each year. Reducing the number of graduate students to match more closely the number of job openings would require a near-unthinkable overhaul of current academic culture. I read almost daily the posts of tenured professors, with a vested interest in the current system, who say such a thing is impossible -- there's just nothing that can be done about Ph.D. overproduction, and bloggers like me are unrealistic dreamers. But even if this is the case, why would Dartmouth want to invest in this remarkably unjust system when it hasn't done so before?

The only reasons I can think of are as follows:

• Influential professors feel having more graduate students would add to their prestige. But Dartmouth has never been focused on Ph.D. level graduate study, yet it has always been among the world's most prestigious institutions. Why would a professor elect to teach at Dartmouth -- or be hired -- if he wasn't in agreement with Dartmouth's focus on undergraduate education? And of those who feel the need to teach graduate students, certainly their position at Dartmouth would help their chances of getting employment at a research university.
  

  
  

• Influential professors prefer the maturity and stimulus of graduate students. To some extent, I think this may translate as the professors would prefer to have a ready supply of exploitable menials, gofers, bumkissers, drinking buddies, and casual playmates, for many of which functions undergraduates (especially undergraduates from privileged backgrounds who might object in inconvenient ways to attempts to treat them as such) are less suitable. The near-inevitable adoption of non-fraternization policies by universities will most likely make the window of opportunity in which Dartmouth profs can exploit such new possibilities short.
  

  
  

• Influential professors see opportunities for greater financial aggrandizement with the adoption of much-expanded graduate enrollment. Maybe so, but it seems to me that market information is in fact becoming more available to prospective graduate students via the internet, and I wouldn't count on an inexhaustible supply of cheap new graduate students in future years.
  

There may be other reasons why some people at Dartmouth may wish to expand graduate enrollment, but I think professional prestige, a pool of exploitable flunkies and babes, and money probably cover the main points. It's ugly enough in itself, but then you've got the unpleasant byproduct of Ph.D.s at the end of the process. If I were a betting man, my money would be on the likelihood that this curve is past its peak. And in fact, the idea that Dartmouth should become a university strikes me as more than a little like some pleasant community deciding, "well, what we really need to do is become a city. Like Pittsburgh, say. We need more steel mills. And we especially need more slag."

President Wright is, I think, 65, or close to it. Has anyone been talking with him about where he'll move when he retires?

More on Policies Banning Academic Dalliances

Via Cold Spring Shops, I find that Academy Girl at academicgame has been keeping up with the progress of the University of California system's proposed policy banning amorous relations between students and professors. When this issue first surfaced in some academic blogs last year, I was close to despair: non-academic commenters and professor-bloggers alike seemed to take some of the positions that Academy Girl rightly derides: Gee -- that's how my wife and I got married! Get real -- schtupping the prof is how you grow up! If you think hanky-pank leads to a conflict of interest, you're a repressed Puritan! What do you do if the dean and the department chair are already doin' it? And so forth. More recently, I'm happy to see some considerable measure of sanity on this subject.

Check her post, though, to see some of the sillier objections to the policy from people who appear to be in high-level policy making positions at the UC system. My favorite is the request that some relationships be grandfathered in under the new policy.

A Fellow Economist

Via Best of the Web Today, I find a colleague: Matthew Richardson, a 23-year old Oxford (UK) Engineering student, who due to a mixup found himself delivering Ph.D.-level lectures in Economics in China, and faked things quite well until he ran out of material and had to sneak out of town before his lecture series was complete.

I know that several Economist-bloggers have roughly the same opinion of my assertions that tenure has cartel-like qualities, or that incompetent managers aren't just ordinary people subject to unrealistically high expectations following their promotions.

I continue to be convinced that in many cases, an educated, intelligent person with common sense and some undergraduate Economics courses ought to be able -- and entitled -- to make general observations about the field in public discourse, such as blogging. And indeed, I continue to think that if Ph.D. Economists find objections raised to their own assertions by educated, intelligent, and economically literate people on the basis that the Ph.D.s' assertions are counter-intuitive, this ought to be cause for reflection.

So I salute my colleague, Prof. Richardson!

Project Manager

Bill Baker was DDT's project manager at Interplanetary Insurance, which was in Illinois. He had been nominally in charge of the project, which was in deep trouble, for more than a year. For the first year, he had been there in charge of a subcontractor that was putting in a system -- let's call it Product S. After the year, the project wasn't finished, the customer wasn't happy, and the subcontractor decided not to continue. Bill Baker was still there. DDT's area Vice President started rounding up other people to come in and continue trying to install Product S. This quickly included me.

A few weeks after I started there, I began to realize that I was the only person who knew what was going on. One day Bill absently handed me some documentation the former subcontractor had left behind, and as I read it, I realized that this was the key to some of the pieces of the installation that had puzzled me. In fact, it was the answer to a lot of questions. Bill could have saved a lot of time if he'd brought me up to date on this stuff the day I started. Then I realized that Bill didn't have a clue what this stuff was about, whether it was important or not. He wound up giving it to me because he found it one day, and he figured he ought to give it to someone, and that was it. And as long as I had it and seemed to think it was worth something, that was all he needed to worry about.

Bill was a bizarre-looking guy, disturbingly skinny. His trousers hung precariously around his pelvis, the shoulders of his shirtsleeves drooped a couple of inches down his arms below his real shoulders. He had long, shaggy hair and a shaggy mustache, both of which he peroxided, because they were a bright platinum blonde. This, with his sad brown eyes, made him look like a forty-niner down on his luck who had just gotten back from having his hair dyed.

Bill had left LA years before. He grew up in California, had some jobs there, especially one he talked about with a computer vendor that had gone under, but wound up in Illinois working for another vendor that went under. Depending on how the economy goes, sometimes people leave California. LA is a tough town, and not everyone stays there. Bill, for whatever reason, had left for easier times.

Bill was probably anorexic, though he was a guy, and it's mostly women who have anorexia. I've heard from other people now and then about working for anorexics. Under stress, the condition gets worse. They can't focus, and they forget things, which makes them hard to work for. This was Bill. Bill would have meetings with the customer, from which he would return with tasks, schedules, and dates. Or more accurately, he would come back with tasks, schedules, and dates that would have miraculously changed between the time he talked to the customer and the time he talked to me.

I would call travel and make arrangements to stay over a particular weekend, because that was when Interplanetary Insurance could give me their systems. Then by chance I would run into the customer's systems programmer and mention the schedule. He would tell me that they had thought it was the following weekend, or the previous weekend, or whatever, and then I'd have to go back to Bill and reconfirm everything, and after much hemming, hawing, blinking, and equivocating, I would learn that the customer had told Bill something other than what Bill had told me. So I would have to call travel again and get my tickets reissued and call my wife and tell her it wasn't next weekend, it was this weekend, and so forth. This didn't bother Bill, since he was in the sublime, peaceful state of being the boss, and he was probably also woozy from hunger.

My last two days working at Interplanetary Insurance were taken up with this kind of a Bill problem. I had stayed over the prior weekend doing installs and upgrades on production servers. (The date for this had already suddenly changed, as discussed above). I had decided that it would be both prudent and professional, prior to doing these installs, to develop a detailed list of exactly what features I was going to install, what data bases I was going to copy, what fixes I was going to apply, and what parameters I was going to use.

I made sure that Bill and the customer set up a status meeting with me present, in which we went over this detailed list, point by point. Bill didn't make it to the meeting; he had Fernando, one of my co-workers, stand in for him, and the customer didn't much care what I was or wasn't going to do with the system as long as they had it back in time and it worked. But at least I thought I'd gone through the motions of getting a buyoff on what I was going to do.

I hadn't reckoned on Bill. The following Monday, the production systems had come up with all the upgrades I had applied -- as far as I knew, all the right ones, with all the right parameters set, and all installed in the right order -- and the product still wasn't working right. Nothing new was wrong, but the problem the customer was upset about still wasn't fixed. Bill's personality changed. I had begun to recognize that when Bill could afford to be, he was just one of the guys, and he didn't adopt any sort of distance to show he was the boss. But when things went badly, which was happening more often, his personality changed in a hurry, and he became very top-down.

In this case, he began to chew out Fernando in front of me, telling him that he hadn't told me to install the product with a certain parameter set very high. I was still foolish enough to think this was an open discussion, and I told Bill that as far as I understood it, the setting of that parameter wouldn't affect what the system was doing. Bill said this was something the developers in San Diego had requested, and according to him, it was something the failed subcontractors had tested and found necessary a year earlier. All I said was that this was news to me; it wasn't anywhere in any documentation; I didn't think it would make much difference; and I didn't think it would be a responsible thing to try to refit on the fly.

I said that because I knew what was coming -- Bill told me to make the change on the fly, on a system that was up and running. There wasn't much I could do. We never found out if the change worked, because, following orders, I made the change, and it brought the system down on the customer's production. There wasn't much I could do to protect myself at that point, either.

And a Big Wah Hoo Wah For

The visitors from Dartmouth who've been dropping by all week, either referred by Prof. O'Connor's post referring to my entry here on Thurman Rodgers's petition campaign for the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, or via Google searches relating to the same thing. Welcome!

And Then There's The Theory. . .

I was interested to see a link at Cold Spring Shops to a post at Marginal Revolution summarizing an article in the Journal of Political Economy. It suggests, I would have to say incredibly, that managers who are promoted but turn out to be incompetent are in fact "competent", apparently because the bar has been set high for their promotion.

Wha?

I would refer anyone trying to theorize about management and competence to the three posts immediately below. The stories are based closely on notes I took regarding the situations (partly for my own protection at the time) involving a Vice President, pseudonymously Kit, at a major software company, and her approach to management. What I observed and recount in these posts was:

• A tendency to favor and protect clearly dysfunctional subordinates
  
• Clear instances of damaging the company's business reputation with important customers
  
• Abusive conduct, such as hair-trigger threats of termination at minor or non-existent transgressions, possibly related to alcohol consumption
  
• An inability to focus on simple priorities, such as answering e-mail or delegating this task
  

I would say that for most people in the working world, a characterization of managers as "incompetent" is not a simple subjective interpretation of a regression to the mean following an effort to get promoted. Much more frequently, "incompetent" managers demonstrate apparent effects of drug or alcohol abuse, an inability to perform simple functions or understand simple technical issues related to their job description, and destructive behavior in relation to key corporate objectives in their purview, such as satisfying customers or ensuring that non-performing employees are dealt with appropriately, while employees who perform well are encouraged and rewarded where appropriate.

Articles like the one cited suggest the scholars involved haven't had sufficient exposure to the real world, or are perhaps slanting their research toward preconceived notions of acceptability. The problem continues to be, as I see it, that we ought to be smarter as a society than we are in dealing with these situations, and the current crop of Ph.D. social scientists doesn't seem to be helping us.

UPDATE: Prof. Karlson at Cold Spring Shops has added a Second Section to the post I've linked above, suggesting that managers like Kit are statistical outliers, and that market tests weed out ineffective managers. I simply don't know how many visitors here have experience in a corporate environment, but I suspect that everyone has known, worked for, or has otherwise suffered through Kit or her equivalents. It's a little like the computer company whose CEO, when he first saw the Dilbert comic strip, was convinced that a spy in the company was leaking events at the company to Scott Adams, Dilbert's creator, who was then basing his strips on that information.

That, of course, was not happening, and Adams was simply hitting a nerve by depicting situations most people in corporate environments found typical. Incompetent managers are by no means outliers. I think the market explanation for why they remain is that they are so common that the market simply discounts their existence: it will assume that there are just as many at Microsoft as at Oracle as at Cisco and cancel out the zeroes. As I've outlined in anecdotal cases below, incompetents are routinely protected from market tests (and of course, so are professors with tenure, as I've argued here as well). It is probably a real measure of social standing to be protected from the market, in fact, no matter what the occupation.

A much more productive question for research, it seems to me, would be to ask why alcoholic or non-feasant or otherwise unqualified managers are routinely promoted. What is the motivation that allows this to happen, and how can incentives be changed to avoid it? How are managers able to insulate themselves from market tests? What changes in corporate structure could reduce this?

War Stories -- IV

One of the consultants I worked with at DDT used to sit behind a desk doing nothing in the lobby of a branch bank. She got laid off when the bank finally realized all those people sitting in the lobby weren't needed. They gave her some money for computer training, and she wound up working at DDT, sitting behind a desk doing nothing.

I was caught flat-footed one day by this woman's apparent focus on doing as little as possible. I needed to talk to someone else at the site where she was working. We discussed it during the staff meeting conference call: the person I needed to talk to was in the room at that time. Following the call, I would call the ex-bank lady back at her number, and she would bring the other person to the phone. Five minutes later, the staff meeting broke up. I called, as we had agreed.

"Is Susan from Digital there now?" I asked her.

"No," she said. "She's left the room."

"I thought we had agreed she was going to stick around, and I was going to link up with her by calling you."

"She's not in the room."

"Is there any way you can get her to come back in?"

"Well, she could be in one of two or three places. I don't want to go looking for her."

"But I thought we were going to link up after the staff meeting."

"Well, we were going to, but she's left." At that point, she began to sound impatient and edgy.

"She told me to page her earlier," I said. "I paged her a couple of times, and she didn't return the call."

"Oh," she said. "Were you the one calling from the 818 area code?"

"Yes."

"Well, she wondered who that was. But she didn't know what the 818 area code was, so she didn't return the call."

"Ah," I said. "I just wish there was some way we could cut the crap and stop playing phone tag with her."

She blew up. "There's NO CRAP, John! I just don't feel like getting up and going and looking for her."

"OK," I said, and went back to phone tag with Susan from Digital. For several days afterward I kept waiting to hear that the woman had gone to Kit and complained that I hadn't talked to her right. All that time I even went over and over the conversation in my mind, trying to figure out what led me to say "cut the crap" and make her lose her temper. Another writeup for that sort of thing right after the problem with her secretary wouldn't be good at all. But I never heard from Kit on that one. It probably was too much work for the woman to pick up the phone and complain.

Secretary

Kit, whom we met in the post just below, hired a new secretary who was turning out to be scatterbrained. She did a lot of irritating things like page you during lunch, and since the company didn't give us cell phones, you had to put down what you were eating, find a pay phone and call her back, and when you did, you'd just get her phone mail. So you'd leave a message and go back and try to finish your lunch, but then she'd page you again, and so forth.

A few days before the Friday meeting, I got one of those lunchtime pages. When we finally stopped playing phone tag, her instructions were simple. "Kit says you have to fax me all your weekly time sheets for last March, April, and May." This was October. "You know," I said, "I don't carry them with me. I can't carry all that in my briefcase, and I'm up here in San Francisco until Friday. They're probably home, but I'm not sure they're all in the same place. How soon do you need them?"

"Let me find out," she said. "I'll call you back."

About 20 seconds later I got another page, this one from Kit, with a code after the number indicating that Kit was very unhappy. (This was one of her clever innovations. If she was unhappy, she'd put a "911" after the number on the pager.) I called her. "My secretary has lost some people's time sheets," she said, "and Accounting has some questions. We need your copies right away."

I told her pretty much what I'd already told her secretary.

"Call your wife," growled Kit. "Tell her where the time sheets are, and tell her to fax them up to my secretary."

I fought down the urge to tell Kit that what she actually meant was for me to ask my wife to ask her secretary to fax the time sheets, but I kept quiet. So when I called my wife that night, I told her where I thought the time sheets were, and she took them in to work the next day and gave them to her secretary to fax up to Kit's secretary.

The next day I got another page from Kit's secretary. "What happened to your time sheets?" she asked. "We still don't have them."

I called my wife, who verified that her secretary had faxed the time sheets and kept the confirmation. I called Kit's secretary back. "My wife says her secretary has a confirmation sheet off the fax machine that says the time sheets went through," I said. "Is there anything you might be able to do on your end to look again where the fax might have gone? I sort of think my wife and I have gone the extra mile on this."

"Let me find out," she said. "I'll call you back."

About 20 seconds later I got another page, this one from Kit, with the 911 code after the number I called her. "I hear you said something to my secretary," she said. "Something about going the extra mile, or something like that."

I started to say something.

"I will not have you talking to my secretary that way," she said. "If I ever hear of you talking to her that way again, you will be terminated immediately."

"OK," I said.

"You are coming to the staff meeting Friday, aren't you?"

"Yes," I said.

"I was worried for a while there that you might not be. Well. I think you and I are going to have to have a separate little meeting after the staff meeting. We need to discuss how you are to talk to my secretary in the future. Anything my secretary tells you is actually coming from me. Anything you say to my secretary you are actually saying to me. Do you understand?"

"That's your call, Kit," I said. I could see the writeup coming. I was thinking of a number of things I would do once I got it, none of which would involve my continued employment with the company.

About half an hour after that, I got another page from Kit's secretary. "You can tell your wife she doesn't need to fax the time sheets again," she said. "I found the fax."

"Thank you," I said.

No matter what Kit tried to do to protect her, though, that secretary didn't last long.

Staff Meeting

For a long time at Digital Discipline Technologies, which everyone called DDT, I worked for a woman named Kit. Kit belonged to the management school that favored staff meetings, lots of them, and long ones with no particular agenda, just random talk. These started as conference calls, with everyone calling at a particular time from the office or customer site they were working in. Soon enough, they ran as long as two hours, and the customers began to complain that they were watching the DDT consultants burn up hundreds of dollars of the customers' time sitting on the phone in DDT staff meetings.

Once this happened, the project managers mostly had enough sense to find ways to keep the consultants out of the calls with some excuse or other. "Oh, he's working with the customer, Kit." Kit countered by demanding that anyone who wanted to be excused from a call send her an e-mail the previous day, and only limited, specific exceptions were allowed, like a previously scheduled meeting with the customer that could not be rescheduled.

E-mailing Kit, however, was a dodgy proposition. One of her favorite topics in the staff meetings was the number of unread e-mail messages she had in her mailbox, an index, she apparently felt, of how important she was. "I had 118 unread messages in my mailbox this morning," she would say. Her instructions on this would be that if anyone had sent her an e-mail that was actually important, they should instead call her about the issue on the phone. The unread messages built up far enough that periodically she would have to say, "I can't answer any e-mails for a while. Something has gone wrong with my mailbox." This simply meant that her secretary would need to call the help desk and have them fix the problem so she could go on not reading her e-mail.

Although the conference calls never had a formal agenda, they were predictable. The first stage (following roll call), and most important, was always the enumeration of offenses that would lead to immediate termination. This list was ever-expanding, although occasionally there were specific deletions. Terminable offenses included not having one's time sheet faxed to Kit's secretary by close of business on the day it was due. These days were not predictable, because Accounting's idea of pay periods was intricate. The threat made sure you stayed up-to-date on what they were.

You could also be fired immediately if you didn't have your weekly expense forms in overnight express by the Saturday of that week. This requirement had been relaxed from Friday only after people pointed out that they normally flew home Friday nights still having to charge expenses like parking or taxis long after the overnight deadlines had passed. This meant that people who traveled had to make an extra trip into the office Saturday to send in their expense reports or be fired.

And once Kit learned that people had found ways to avoid her conference calls, she decreed that you could also be fired immediately for avoiding a conference call. A week or so later, in one of her occasional deletions from the list of terminable offenses, Kit started the meeting with a giggle and said, "Of course, I didn't really mean last week that you could actually be terminated immediately for missing a conference call." It sounded as if someone might have spoken to someone else, and someone else spoke to Kit, and the policy was rescinded. But she said the whole thing in a way that made you think maybe she was joking this time, rather than last time, so you could never be sure, and nobody took any chances.

So the conference calls still began with a roll call, heavy with the portent of consequences to those who missed it. "Al, are you there?" Pause. "Al?" Another pause. The fear of missing a conference call was so great that people would call in while out sick or on vacation. Then Al would wake up from his doze while sitting in the office on the bench: "Wha? Wha? Who? Oh, yes. Here."

"OK. Al is here. Tina?" And so it would go. After ten minutes or so of roll call, with the usual suspects forgetting their names or otherwise delaying the process, Kit would say what she always, said, "Well – I don't think I have much this week. We'll probably get this over quickly for once, ha, ha." But Kit would keep remembering things: "Oh, yes. I forgot. I was talking to my Senior VP on Tuesday, and he wanted me to remind everyone that you will be terminated immediately if you. . . ." and so forth. Sometimes I wondered if there were offenses that could lead to delayed termination. As I write this, I realize that there certainly were, and those were the ones I was committing all too frequently. But it probably took only one.

After a few months, Kit decided staff meetings were too important to handle over the phone. Once a quarter, she decided, we would all fly in to California from wherever we were and have an all-day staff meeting on a Friday. (And after one Friday meeting, she decided this was so worthwhile that we would continue through Saturday in subsequent quarters.)

As it happened, I was scheduled to wrap things up with a customer the week the first Friday meeting was scheduled. The customer had been unhappy with DDT, but they liked me, because after all the problems, I had finally been able to make things work the way they wanted them to. And they wanted me there the whole final week, including the Friday. This was the old problem of the consultant burning up hours in conference calls writ large. The customer thought they were entitled to have me the whole week. Kit thought a Friday all-day staff meeting was more important. As far as I was concerned, the customer was always right, especially if it could get me out of one of those staff meetings.

So I talked to the project manager about the problem and suggested he ask Kit if I could be excused from the meeting. I knew I was putting the project manager in a bind, because if Kit had definite ideas about not avoiding conference calls, she was going to have even more definite ideas about not avoiding all-day staff meetings. But the customer had also made what they thought was a reasonable request under the circumstances: they thought they were going to get five more days of me in the final week; they were only going to get four; and I wasn't going to be back.

The outcome, the project manager told me, was not pleasant. The customer kept insisting, and the result was that to get me in the Friday staff meeting and still keep the customer happy, Kit had to give the customer two free days of my time the following week. In other words, I would be back after all, with a couple extra days thrown in. I could sense the bad vibes in it for me, since in Kit's mind I was the cause of the problem. Not only had I gotten Kit into a losing argument with a customer, but behind it all lay an obvious desire to avoid a staff meeting.

Trusty

A trusty is, strictly speaking, an inmate who, because of good conduct, is given some measure of freedom in and around a prison or jail, often in order to perform various menial work assignments. My criminal record is so far clean, and I've never had occasion to become a jail or prison trusty, but when I was in graduate school, I was one of those students who got a kind of "trusty" status with the faculty. As a result, I was given various unpaid menial administrative duties in the department.

Those duties gradually taught me how the department worked and how professors thought, though I'm now able to draw many more conclusions in retrospect than I was able to understand fully then. There were trusties in the department before I became one, and I think most of us had the impression that being a trusty was a sign of favor and perhaps showed some measure of good prospects for a career. In fact, based on what happened to all the trusties I knew, it was no such thing -- a lesson I still had to learn for myself.

The first trusty I knew was Adam Smith MacPherson, who came from western Ontario, a student brought along from his previous academic post there by David Hume Browne, easily the English Department's most prominent scholar. Both Browne and MacPherson spoke in an Ontario-Scotch brogue. MacPherson was clearly Browne's acolyte, and the only person in the department who felt entitled to refer to him as "Dave" -- though it was always "Dave Browne" the emphasis heavily on the last name, so nobody mistook which Dave this might be.

Adam Smith MacPherson was the closest human being I've ever met to match my mental image of Mr. Casaubon, the dried-out pedant who marries Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch. He had a steel-wool Vandyke beard, bushy, steel-wool red hair, puffy, red cheeks, and thick glasses that exaggerated his normally popping eyes, which were red. Like Browne, he was a Samuel Johnson scholar, to the point that he had named his dog Boswell. Like Browne, too, MacPherson was cold. Once I had a chance to chat with him briefly on campus, but he quickly tightened up, pulled his shoulders into a shrug, and hurried off with an air of having more important things to do than waste time with me.

Browne, in fact, was far more than cold. He had an air of imperturbable self-absorption. He'd been through a divorce the year before I showed up on campus; it appeared that if his wife came or if she went, it was all the same to him. There was a son somewhere, also a matter of apparent indifference. It became clear that if MacPherson chose to follow him around, a bit like MacPherson's own dog Boswell, that was MacPherson's choice and a matter of indifference as well. All of the trusties, as I was when I became one, were by some design Browne's students, but to Browne it didn't matter.

I took one seminar with MacPherson in it. He made a presentation on Isaac Watts, who in the late seventeenth century made metric translations of the Psalms that later became the words to many well-known hymns. Many years later, I became interested in Watts myself but found that a cursory search on the web turned up far more information than I remembered in MacPherson's paper. It seemed like he'd missed almost everything important, from Watts's apparent mental illness to his later career as a physics teacher.

My first impression, and likely the impression of all the other grad students, was that trusty status was somehow a recognition of merit or promise, but after fairly minimal exposure to MacPherson I recognized it was no such thing. At some point, I think even before taking his Ph.D. qualifying exams, he went back to Canada to accept a job teaching English to Francophone soldiers in the Canadian army, and that seems to have been that for his career in higher education.

I googled him not long ago and found him posting on a listserv in Toronto, well-respected among the members who were agitating for a guaranteed minimum income for all Canadians. They had things pretty well worked out. Everyone would get a decent middle-class income whether they worked or not, but it wouldn't be too hard on the corporations who'd fund it with their taxes, because for those who chose to work, the corporations wouldn't need to pay them all that much, since they'd get good money from the government in any case. Something made me sure it was the Adam I'd known.

His successor as trusty lasted quite a while, but he finally threw up his hands at graduate work and left to teach business English at a local trade school. He found the job of writing a dissertation for Browne impossible, as Browne was interested only in his own projects and the heated controversies he would engender with other Samuel Johnson scholars. MacPherson had, in fact, been fond of pointing out that Browne had "killed two professors with bad reviews of their books", but quickly qualified the remark by saying that all that had actually happened was they'd had heart attacks shortly after the reviews appeared, and nobody could be sure of the connection.

So eventually my turn came to be the trusty. I should point out that I was fully aware of the paths my predecessors' careers had taken, and by then I wasn't taking my own future in the Eng Lit field very seriously. My job was to organize and serve as program chair for the monthly departmental sherry party, which was held on a Wednesday afternoon, with unlimited supplies of sherry courtesy of one of the English Department slush funds -- this one came from compelling all freshmen to buy the plagiarism guide at $12.00 a pop, which paid for a lot of sherry but prevented no plagiarism. I benchmark my aging process by thinking of the amount of sherry I could consume in an afternoon at age 25, compared to my current inability to stomach sherry at all.

My job was to reserve the room, order the sherry, and line up the speakers. Right around the time I took over, the department decided, likely based on some remark from Browne, that each graduate student in the Ph.D. program should deliver one paper at the sherry party during his or her time at the university. This was, of course, a mathematical impossibility, since reading the paper, answering questions, drinking sherry, and general chit-chat took all afternoon; there were at most eight monthly sherry parties in a year; but a couple of dozen graduate students entered the program each year. The sherry parties were not, of course, referred to as such. I think they were called the "English Conference", and my title as trusty was "English Conference Chair".

The casual innumeracy whereby Browne and the rest of the faculty thought all graduate students should give a paper at the English Conference was probably reflective of their overall attitude toward us -- the same innumeracy applied, of course, to the number of assistant professorships that opened in universities each year, compared to the numbers of Ph.D.s they and other departments produced. But given the position I had, trying to line up graduate students willing to give a paper (without honorarium, of course) in front of their peers and the faculty, it was just as well that not many slots were available.

Most of the graduate students, many of whom I knew from seeing them in multiple seminars, others from drinking sessions at the bar across from campus, were simply not capable of writing or delivering a paper of 20 typewritten pages, containing sustained analysis or argument -- and certainly not anything worth spending an afternoon over. Most had drifted into the graduate program, and they were there, from the department's perspective, mostly to babysit the freshman comp sections. Whether they could do a competent job at reading, marking, and commenting on a student paper was somewhat beside the point, because most papers were plagiarized, and there was a tacit recognition that this was the case. My peers were often nice people, fun to drink beer with, but I don't think anyone seriously thought they had much of a future in academics.

The university's official policy, in fact, was that graduate students were to receive either an A or B for course work, so there was little chance of a TA flunking out. In fact, while "screening exams" were given following the first year's graduate work, I don't recall anyone failing that exam. Now and then, as I've recounted in the case of a TA fired for telling the freshman comp chair that he was having an affair, some TAs were dismissed, but this was rare and more or less random. Most simply drifted out the way they drifted in, and were tolerated for the tuition credits they brought to the graduate program.

There were some graduate students that I had to slot in as "duty", proteges of one or another professor, who were thought to have some future in the field, but there weren't enough of those to schedule into all the sessions. So, with a few of my friends, I had some fun, consistent with the true nature of the English Conference as a sherry party. One of the more interesting, though thoroughly disreputable, graduate students had come to the English Department in middle age, after a career in the military and driving trucks.

He and I got together on an idea for a paper that, while generally prolix and humorous, contained what was actually a serious critique of Chomskyan linguistics. The point, after much Tristram Shandy style rambling, was that if you could use a refrigerator magnet poetry kit to put together a poem that appeared to be meaningful, this was in fact a serious flaw in Chomsky's theory, since according to him, a meaningful utterance had to come from a subconscious "deep structure".

Despite the sherry and the humor, some in the audience found the paper deeply disturbing -- at bottom, I think the faculty didn't like to see graduate students who were potentially smarter than they were, who could put together a paper as a joke that could refute decades spent carefully grooming a career. One of the more irritating features of classes for me was the tendency for professors to pull rank over matters that should have been fair game for intellectual debate. A typical instance was an assistant professor's insistence on explaining Renaissance literature based on E.M.W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture. This book argued that, prior to the 1642 Cromwell Revolution in England, the English had a rigidly hierarchical view of the world, and characters in Shakespeare or Spenser were good or bad insofar as they adhered to conventional views on hierarchy.

I found this viewpoint remarkably condescending to major writers and works of literature, as well as just plain historically obtuse, since the Reformation had taken root in England well before Cromwell, and the political process had been other than rigidly hierarchical for some centuries. Unable to get the newly-minted assistant prof to discuss the matter in class, I wrote a paper examining and dismissing Tillyard for the English Conference and, as the Chair, scheduled myself in.

It was a hit. I still have a fond memory of our Shakespeare specialist getting out of his chair at the end, coming up to me at the podium, shaking my hand, and saying, "Mr. Bruce. Mr. Bruce. Congratulations." It didn't help my career, of course. It didn't help the assistant professor's career, either; he was turned down for tenure, in part, I think, for letting a grad student make a monkey out of him. Though, oddly enough, Browne himself found the guy another job, where he eventually did make tenure. I googled him and found that he'd finally distinguished himself there: poking around the library, he'd discovered a new sonnet by some minor writer. With little else to point to, his university had featured him in its alumni magazine, though in light of recent academic scandals and knowing the guy, I don't know if I'd try to look too hard at the new sonnet.

Somehow Browne felt bad about what had happened and got the guy his new job -- something Browne did, as far as I'm aware, only once for one of his own students. It was, and probably is, typical of an English department that someone who puts in considerable unpaid effort and might reasonably expect some level of goodwill as a result, is ignored. And in my case, like my classmate who could refute Chomsky with refrigerator magnet poetry, I was edged out as being a little too much of a smartass in any case.

The following year the department changed the English Conference. I don't know if the papers on Chomsky and Tillyard had an effect or not. It was no longer a forum for graduate student papers. Instead, tenured faculty would read old papers of their own, and they'd even get honoraria. That money came from another English Department slush fund. Up to then, there'd been a fund, established by some thoughtful donor, to give each Teaching Assistant a hundred-dollar gift at Christmas, something that amounted to half a month's pay at the time. Somehow the department chair was able to get that changed: the money would now go to pay honoraria to the faculty for their old papers on Wednesday afternoons. There would still be sherry.

Unfinished Thinking, Loose Ends in the Ph.D. Job Market Discussion

I've posted frequently here on the idea that the Ph.D. job market has many Ponzi scheme-like or multi-level marketing-like features, though I've been careful not to say that it "is" either one of them. I've also said elsewhere that faculty tenure has cartel-like features, but I think a complication in the cartel model is that departments both produce and consume the product, unlike a classical cartel where the customers (the industrial world) are separate from the producers (OPEC). So these models are more like tools to try to understand the phenomenon, rather than explanations in themselves.

The similarities to a pyramid scheme are certainly enough that I'm not the only one to have seen them, as Academy Girl has pointed out below. But a brother or sister of the Ponzi is the bubble, and I think there are also bubble-like features to the Ph.D. job market. This leads to additional problems, I think, because Economics either asserts that bubbles do not exist, because markets are efficient, or if they do exist, they can't last long, because as soon as all market participants get the same information (e.g., tech stocks are overvalued), the market returns to equilibrium, albeit at a suddenly lower state.

But there are market bubbles -- your tech stock turns out to be worth only a third of what you thought it was yesterday, but recovers much of its value over a period of years -- and there are more traditional bubbles, the seventeenth century "tulip bubble", or the eighteenth century "South Sea bubble", that are probably more like Ponzi schemes, since the investments in these bubbles turned out to be valueless. The traditional, Ponzi-like bubble is probably beyond the ken of Economics, since the economic actor is presumed to be rational, and bubbles are thought to be irrational.

So I have areas where I can't smooth out the wrinkles in the carpet as I try to analyze the Ph.D. job market phenomenon. The "bubble" part is the tendency of the investors (the graduate students) to overvalue the result of their investments, not just over a brief period until all participants have the same information, but over several generations. Why?

The second problem is related: what is the value of the "prize" in Academy Girl's model that would result in so many students over so many generations being willing to forego income and opportunity to have what they appear to have recognized is a lottery-like outcome?

The third problem is how far are, or have been, key faculty players witting participants in this scheme? In general it worked if graduate advisers and other market participants simply didn't think too hard or did nothing positive to counsel or help their students. But to what extent did any participant understand his or her moral failures, and to what extent was there active recognition that people were essentially being defrauded in this scheme?

The fourth problem is whether the Ph.D. job market bubble has burst, is bursting, or is continuing.

I'm just starting on these trains of thought. I'd be interested to hear what others might come up with.

UPDATE Oldman in the comment below suggests that the Ph.D. job market problem stems from the fact that the universities are a vestigial guild system. I don't disagree about the guild heritage, and I've used the terms "apprentice" and "journeyman" freely in the posts below. I went to the link Oldman provided and was interested in Adam Smith's remarks about guilds and the assertion that guilds did not survive the Enlightenment -- in previous posts, as well as comments elsewhere, I've been scratching my head that universities have not, in fact, been influenced by Enlightenment concepts like transparency and the rule of law or policy. The encyclopedia entry Oldman cites is very good on this!

But I do still say that the guild influence on university culture does not explain the large overproduction of Ph.D.s in the post-World War II period. It appears to me that the production of Ph.D.s versus the market for them was more stable prior to World War II. This, of course, is much later than the medieval guilds. And there is nothing in the structure or practice of the guilds that would imply that there had to be an extreme imbalance between apprentices and journeymen, any more than there would necessarily be an imbalance between trainees (say, in network engineering) and job openings in that field now.

So this answers some side issues, it seems to me, but not the main questions that are tormenting me. However, my wife and I bought a new mattress this week, so I am having fewer sleepless nights -- though not because Oldman has solved my problem!

UPDATE: Conscientious Objector has some very worthwhile thoughts, as a result of the character limit on Haloscan. This character limit was one of the factors that prompted me to start my own blog!

Another First-Person Outsourcing Experience

An insurance company had outsourced its computer operations to Digital Discipline Technologies, or DDT, where I was working, and there were several teams of DDT people on site, taking over the operations and making an inventory of the computers they had acquired from the insurance company. My job was to install software that would tell a control center what computers were up or down.

Once the software was in and the computer that ran it was attached to the company network, the software went out and identified every other computer on the network. This wasn’t its main purpose, but it had to find all the other computers in order to be able to report on which were up and which were down. It could take days for the system to find everything, but it would definitely find everything and list it. The total of servers alone, leaving out desktop PCs, was running into the hundreds.

I took the list to Will, the project manager for the group I was working with, because it was plain that there was a lot more on the network than anyone had estimated. When I started, he had given me an out-of-date list that looked nothing like what we were seeing now. We went to talk to another team that was making a physical inventory of the computers. They had found something like 30, and they were very happy to see the list my software had come up with, though they didn’t ask many questions about it. There could be many explanations for why my list had 300 servers and their list had 30, including the possibility that I had made some kind of mistake in how I ran the software -- someone should be checking on the reasons for the discrepancy. That didn’t bother these folks. They figured they’d have a lot less work if they simply substituted my list for theirs.

Will had a different take. He and the people with him had been at this customer’s site for five months before I got there, installed the software, and came up with a list of 300 servers. If someone suddenly turned up and was able to do that in a few days, there was a possibility -- remote, but a possibility -- that someone higher up might wonder what Will and his people had been doing for five months. The customer might ask the same question. To his credit, Will did ask a lot of questions about how my list got to have 300 entries, but the problem was that the answer to every question was showing that everything was working correctly, and there were in fact 300 servers out there when everyone had thought there were 30.

In fact, DDT’s deal with the insurance company had already gotten a nasty write-up in the trade press, a front-page story on how morale had plummeted among the former insurance company employees who’d been taken over by DDT as part of the deal. Soon afterward, those same people had begun to steal computer equipment, and we had to install cables and locks to hold everything down. And the high-tech bubble was bursting -- DDT’s stock lost two-thirds of its value while I was at that site. Clearly the market as a whole was beginning to conclude the same things about the kind of work DDT and other high-tech companies were doing for their customers that the individual customers were.

Will decided the best way to handle the list of extra servers would be to have me delete them from the software that was discovering them, on the basis that we “weren’t interested” in those other than the official 30. Will took a real interest in this work. One morning, before I got in, he went and checked the software himself to see if the servers had been deleted the way he had told me to, and by the time I got in, he was in a very angry mood, because it was clear that they hadn’t. The problem was, I explained to him, that if you deleted something that the system had found, it wouldn’t stop the system from going out and finding it again, and even if you deleted everything by quitting time, most of it would be discovered again and be back the next morning. The system was doing what it was supposed to do. There was no way you could stop it.

That was fine with Will, he had found a way to keep me busy. My job henceforth was to delete the extra servers from the list each day after the software had rediscovered them. But that work didn’t last long, because the layoffs began. I was in an early group. DDT’s stock price has recovered in recent months, helped by the award of a big new government contract.

Another Take on the Academic Pyramid

Academy Girl points out in a comment to the post below that she raised the same issue on her site last October. She takes a slightly different tack, comparing the elements of the graduate studies scheme to the elements of a pyramid sales violation of the Postal Lottery Statute, prize, chance, and consideration. It seems to me that the recent discussions of the MLA/AHA type interviewing process on sites like Critical Mass go some way to giving the impression that in many cases, actual selection for the "prize", the tenure track position, is lottery-like.

Also, I think many discussions attempting to value tenure as a component of salary -- and thus the value of the "prize" -- heavily underestimate the actual value of tenure, especially if you look at the "discounted present value" of 25 or 30 years' guaranteed salary and benefits over the rest of a professor's working lifetime. A comment to my post below suggested, for instance, that the "value" of tenure to someone holding it might be estimated at $10,000 per year.

I think that heavily underestimates the case. Even in the civil service, a "tenured" government employee can be -- and often is -- laid off due to budget cuts. All the government has to do is follow a particular procedure, and lay the employees off in a particular order. The provisions of academic tenure, on the other hand, essentially forbid layoffs unless the university is in imminent danger of financial collapse. Someone may be more knowledgeable than I am here, but I'm simply not aware of such a thing having happened, ever.

UPDATE: In the comment below, Prof. Burke of Easily Distracted cites the instance of Bennington College, but says that this is done only in dire circumstances (and may happen in the future). Institutions do not lay off small numbers of tenured faculty as a routine form of retrenchment, as is often done in the private sector.

So the value of a tenure "prize" is actually something very similar to the annuity that's paid to a lottery winner. If you get the prize, you have a guaranteed lifetime "job" -- just show up for class and office hours, and try not to get a DUI. That's it. And you're as well off as someone who won the Power Ball, with some measure of prestige thrown in.

So I disagree with those who suggest that tenure is just a minor emolument thrown in as a consideration for accepting a "lower" salary (and I've always wondered "lower than what?", especially for nine months work). Tenure is in fact a form of annuity attached to a sinecure, and I think the appeal of graduate work stems from the large number of people who value it in that light -- they are simply not saying, "well, I could earn $90,000 as a network engineer, but I'll become a professor of Renaissance literature for $80,000, and you can throw in tenure and make it even." That is simply not how the "prize" is valued among the game participants!

Stepping on My Own Post

I've deliberately refrained from posting since yesterday morning, since three blogs (Critical Mass, Gene Expression, and Invisible Adjunct -- thanks to each of you!) have linked to the post below, and my fraction of those blogs' traffic will make this my best day yet by some margin. Given Blogger's difficulty with permalinks, I may as well let the new visitors see what they came for.

However, several things have interested me about reaction to my post, and related earlier posts, so far. First is the relatively small number of comments on this and the linking sites, given the large number of readers. A fairly small number -- fewer than what I would have expected -- has taken exception to a classical economic, market model for the Ph.D. problem, or to the comparison of the graduate studies scheme with a multi-level marketing scam.

A somewhat predictable number of ex-graduate students and current adjuncts has simply said, "yup, that's about right." That again is about what I'd expect, and as an ex-graduate student trying to record my 30-year-old impressions, I'm happy that some number of others sees things the way I saw them.

The dog that isn't barking here is the tenured or tenure-track faculty. A few, like Prof. O'Connor, and from his remarks, Prof. Karlson of Cold Spring Shops appear to be in either sympathy or at least amused neutrality. I know my blogfather Prof. Banaian takes fairly strong issue with my opinions on tenure. But I'm interested that there's so little comment from this quarter otherwise.

More on the Academic Job Market

Invisible Adjunct links to a piece by Gwendolyn Bradley in Academe, "Contingent Faculty and the New Academic Labor System", that gives somewhat more "official" recognition to problems being informally discussed and parsed by bloggers, but I think it continues to miss some key points. Bradley's focus is on the adjunct side of the problem, rather than the larger, Ph.D. job market side of the problem.

She makes a remarkable observation that "only 3.3 percent of faculty appointments were off the tenure track in 1969, but by the 1990s, over half of new full-time appointments were off the tenure track. Only one in four faculty appointments was to a full-time, tenure-track position." But then she cancels out a very productive empirical observation by applying an odd definitional constraint to the problem:

As graduate student activists have been pointing out for years, the rather dismal employment situation in some areas of academe, particularly the humanities, is a result not of a job market but of a labor system. Attributing the problem to a job market implies a simple issue of supply and demand: too many PhDs are produced, but there aren't enough jobs to go around, so job seekers are forced to piece together a living from a patchwork of part-time positions. Looking at the problem as a labor-system issue acknowledges its complexity. The same institutions both manufacture and consume the PhD "product." There are too few tenure-track jobs for all the PhDs in some disciplines because graduate students or faculty on fixed-term or part-time appointments teach so many courses. If full-time tenure-track faculty taught most courses, there might not be a job shortage.

My Economics 101 course was somewhere around 35 years ago, but I think it's still appropriate to say that if there are too many widgets and too few buyers, there is a market problem. The simple solution is for the price of widgets to fall until enough buyers are willing to purchase a widget at that price. The same applies to Ph.D.s. The simplest solution to the Ph.D. "labor system" problem is for the price of Ph.D.s to fall until there are enough buyers willing to purchase a Ph.D. at the price. In this respect, I think, contrary to the assertion in Academe, this is in fact a "market" or "job market" problem, not a "labor system" problem.

Various interpretations of history have tried to substitute other analysis for the classical Econ 101 model, but they've all failed in practice to predict or solve fairly simple problems like the Ph.D. job market. (It's puzzled me, by the way, that US Ph.D. economists, who've successfully designed deregulation schemes, spectacularly effective in cases like the airline industry, for some reason aren't being consulted in finding a solution to the Ph.D. job market problem.) I am going to dismiss the assertion that this is a "labor system" issue -- likely defined as a "moral" perspective on what some market players "ought" to be doing from the perspective of other players -- and come back to what I think is the productive model from Econ 101.

In my pre-blogging days, I helped stimulate a thread on Invisible Adjunct on "Is Tenure a Cartel?" I continue to think the tenure system has many cartel-like features. It is certainly an agreement among key market players, the AAUP, the professors themselves, and the universities that purchase Ph.D.s, to maintain prices irrespective of market conditions. The classic contemporary example is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which attempts, with greater or lesser success, to maintain oil prices at a level that the producers find suitable by price-fixing.

(I should make it clear that when I use the term "price", I include the other conditions of employment -- and in the case of professors, the real 500 pound gorilla is tenure. Every professor granted tenure becomes an actuarial burden to the university making the hire; this burden of many hundreds of thousands of dollars must certainly outweigh any considerations of current enrollment or this year's budget. The flexibility of a non-tenure track hire must certainly figure into any university's consideration of "price".)

In the past, many of the same Ph.D. economists who proposed successful solutions to problems like airline deregulation argued that the regulatory systems they wanted to eliminate were also cartels, agreements to fix prices, often enforced by the government via regulatory agencies "captive" to the industries. The industries also enforced the cartel by using the government to impose high regulatory barriers to market entry.

The demand side for Ph.D.s has in fact been dominated by the cartel-like agreements cited above. Those agreements focus on the "tenure track", but the action of human nature, and thus the market, has been to find ways to get around the demand price for Ph.D.s set by the cartel, and thus we have the price cutting at the edges that is predicted by classical cartel theory. It is to the advantage of cartel participants to produce or consume at the rate specified by the cartel. It is even more to the advantage of each individual participant to enhance its position by discounting on "under the table" surpluses produced outside the official agreement.

It's interesting that the Academe piece uses similar language to describe the "contingent" faculty problem: "Many full-time faculty probably have no idea how many part-time colleagues teach in their departments. . . . Deliberately or not, departments do a lot to minimize the visibility of part-time faculty. . ." Hiring adjuncts, in other words, is perceived in some way as not playing according to the rules, and is tacitly ignored or concealed. This would certainly fit a psychological expectation of cartel-like behavior, including price cutting at the edges.

More recently, though, it's occurred to me that the academic job market also has similarities to multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes. In a classical MLM scheme, participants purchase "distributorships" in an enterprise, which confer on them the right to sell other "distributorships". To stay on the tenuous side of legality, the MLM theoretically sells a product like cosmetics, but the real interest among participants is in the cascading commissions that arise from selling "distributorships" at successively lower levels in the scheme. In such a system, any actual product sold is a distant secondary consideration, and the key transactions all involve the "right" to sell the product and its "distributorships". In this respect, all important transactions are intramural to the organization, which both produces and consumes its key good.

By earning a Ph.D., a participant in effect purchases an MLM "distributorship". This enables the Ph.D. to participate in the market by selling other "distributorships" as a professor (particularly in a graduate studies program). While the process of purchasing a "distributorship" in the graduate studies scheme is much longer, more expensive, and at least theoretically subject to tests of competence, the real action seems remarkably similar. As Bradley says in the Academe piece, "The same institutions both manufacture and consume the PhD 'product.'" A knowledge of world history, economic literacy, basic ability in expository writing, and similar educational outcomes are, even in this AAUP-sponsored essay, implicitly described as secondary products as much as the cosmetics or cleaning supplies for an MLM.

An MLM quickly collapses because, due to the need to sell distributorships at successively lower levels to increasing numbers of participants, the number of new distributorships needed for each level to realize its investment will increase exponentially, and the market quickly becomes saturated. The early investors at the top of the pyramid then promptly leave town with the proceeds of the "distributorships" purchased by the later investors.

Again, while the math in the graduate studies Ph.D. scheme doesn't depend on exponential expansion of distributorships at the lower levels, there is no reason it should have to. But the end result is the same: a class of investors loses its investment in a form of "distributorship" when the market saturates, as it clearly has.

Several people, including my esteemed blogfather Prof. Banaian, have suggested that other occupations have what might be called an achievement pyramid, such as acting or professional sports. The key difference there, it seems to me, is that the product in those occupations is external to the actors or players. Success depends on box office or albums purchased by the general public, or the willingness of a team to hire a player based on proven or expected performance in a game -- and that performance is validated by external market factors.

This isn't the case with Ph.D.s, which I think is one reason tenure is built into the system. Baseball and football players, good as they may be, grow old and have to retire. Others burn out on drugs or too many babes on the road. Actors, like Orson Welles, lose their ability to draw audiences. A professor who gets tenure is protected from these potential downsides. But actors and sports figures, again, achieve money and fame through external validation of their market worth.

If the same organization, a faculty, both produces and consumes the product (and certainly in many cases does this literally, when a person earns a Ph.D. and is hired onto the tenure-track faculty of the same institution), the external validating market force is absent. If you add the market saturation factor, then some mechanism needs to be in place to protect the faculty member.

From a market perspective, tenure is simply a means to protect certain participants from market consequences. Where an actor or a sports figure might lose his market power due to alcohol or drug use, this in and of itself won't damage a tenured professor. The same protects a professor from the market effects of aging or simple incompetence; there may be good or bad aspects to this. The usual defense of tenure, that it protects "academic freedom", must fall in that empirical evidence shows that even tenured professors tend to be rigidly conformist in their political expressions, and in other areas where tenure might contribute to outspokenness or risk-taking in administrative disputes, tenured professors are, in Prof. Banaian's word, "cowards". Indeed, in recent years, academic freedom has been supported largely by organizations outside of, or on the fringes of, the academy. For whatever reason, tenure does not produce the effects claimed for it.

If we look at the graduate studies scheme as an MLM-like organization, tenure exists to protect the early investors from the consequences of the market saturation that results from the excessive sale of "distributorships" or Ph.Ds. Professors can benefit financially via high graduate enrollment (in other words, processing of new distributors), yet not have to fear losing their jobs or having their pay cut due to the increasing number of Ph.D.s they place on the market, because tenure protects them from that competitive force.

The Bradley proposal, which seems to have at least some sanction from the AAUP, argues that minor adjustments can fix the problem. If universities would just open up more tenure track positions and be less concerned about how to pay for them, everything would be fixed. I hope economists like Prof. Banaian will agree with me that Ms. Bradley is probably not an economist, and does not appear to be displaying the kind of economic literacy that ought to mark an educated person.

I'm puzzled, actually, that the AAUP or some other body hasn't contacted some of the economists, like Alfred Kahn, who have in fact been able to solve real-world problems. I would almost wonder if such a group, which might include others like Robert Mundell or Arthur Laffer, might be willing to donate their efforts, if it would lead to a more orderly solution to the academic dilemma. But even if they wanted big-bucks consulting fees, it would clearly be money well spent.

The Bradley Academe piece already provides the outlines of what will happen without intervention: a continued two-tier system, with the lower-tier participants, out of sight and out of mind, working under exploitive conditions that are otherwise almost unheard of in a post-industrial democracy. The fact is, though, that the market toothpaste is out of the tube: I don't think there is a way academic culture can go back to tenure as a realistic expectation for most, or even many, participants, and in that regard I think the Bradley proposals are unrealistic and unhelpful. A more realistic proposal would be simply to end the tenure system as it now exists for new market participants, in effect placing all future professors in an adjunct-like labor pool.

I think we've already dealt with complaints that this would damage "academic freedom". Tenured professors don't make effective use of the freedom they have, and something like half of those now employed by universities have never had it in any case. The market effect of large numbers of Ph.D.s all entering an adjunct-like pool would naturally drive down the price of a Ph.D., but I suspect this would not be for long: All Ph.D.s, I suspect, would by some near-miraculous insight discover the bad effect of saturating the market with "distributorships".

As the cop says to the barricaded suspect, you've only got one choice here: you can make it hard, or you can make it easy. The AAUP and related institutions can make transition to a market-based academic job system hard -- keep living in a dream world, keep pretending the adjuncts aren't there, keep allowing half your work force to labor under conditions that are a disgrace to the university system and our society -- or they can make it easy. Set up a blue-ribbon commission with members on the order of Alfred Kahn, and create an orderly transition to a system that's fair for everyone.

The third option, which I've discussed elsewhere, is that someone at some point is going to have a very productive discussion with a very bright but underemployed litigation attorney, and the result will be a class action suit that, as Invisible Adjunct has said in a comment on this site, would likely destroy the academy. None of the options is good. Right now, though, my money is not on the least-bad.

This Old House, Again

This Old House (TOH) runs on Saturdays in my area, so I watched it last night. The current series deals with a dilapidated garage in Concord, Massachusetts which, due to its location in one of those historic preservation districts that frequently serve as the scene for a TOH project, must serve as the seed for construction of a much larger faux carriage house, that instead of serving its intended function, will house the homeowner-wife's mother in a newly-built two-story efficiency.

Several things interest me here. One is the historic preservation district mentality, that I think is a first cousin to faculty tenure: it's a means of aggrandizing early investors. At a certain point, the community says no new building can take place, except under certain heavily circumscribed conditions. The result is immediate and continuing rise in the value of the existing homes in the community.

Notice, however, how such rules can be bent for the early investors, in this case the homeowners wishing to add an extra unit in their back yard. They will be taking an existing building, and that's apparently within the rules. They will be more than doubling the building's size and changing its use to an additional residential unit, and somehow they can get by with this, as long as certain parts of the original garage are retained. Thus by elaborate legalisms are the early investors enabled to do pretty much as they please.

In the process, a garage, which as far as I can tell was never intended to do anything but house an automobile, is transformed into a phony pre-auto age carriage house, complete with hay door in the (entirely new) second story and stone hitching posts outside. This is just fine, apparently, with the folks on the preservation committee. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a TV star carpenter with a hairpiece is a major figure in the project!

The homeowners, like nearly all the TOH homeowners, appear to be the parents of Organization Kids, the overprogrammed upper-middle-class college students in David Brooks's essay. While Brooks thinks such kids are a new phenomenon, I'd say I grew up with many such myself, and in fact it seems to me that the typical TOH homeowner is simply a 1960s or 70s Organization Kid who's grown older.

As is frequently the case, we see very little of the homeowner-husband in this program. I assume he's still on his overprogrammed career track, stuck in the office 12 hours a day, six on Saturday. His spoiled, controlling wife is running the remodeling project at home. One traditional feature of TOH was that the homeowners used to put in some type of "sweat equity" on the project, doing something useful like scraping paint themselves. That seems to have gone by the board in more recent projects. The only "sweat equity" I've seen so far on the current project is the wife sitting with the interior decorator, selecting upholstery fabric for her mother.

"Where's the mother in all this?" asked my wife. "I mean, she still seems to have all her marbles." This, I suppose, is the nature of the TOH homeowner. Nobody seems to select what they themselves want. It all boils down to an unhappy quest for just the right antique clawfoot bathtub.

Once I went to a New Year's Eve party in the far northern LA suburbs, where the LA cops live to get away from work, and everyone seems to have the same well-programmed glow. I was chatting with a husband and wife who'd just bought their dream house, after maybe 20 years hard work on the carefully planned career path. For all this time, the husband had wanted to have model trains. He couldn't have them in school, of course -- he had to study. Couldn't have them in college -- no space, and still had to study. Couldn't have them when he got married -- no money, no space, there were kids, had to put in all his time as an associate.

But now -- he'd made partner. He could buy his dream house. And in the dream house, there was one room he could use. His kids had their own rooms, his wife had her own office, he had his own office, there was a rumpus room for the pool table nobody ever used, and even on top of that, there was one room he could use for the thing he'd been dreaming of since childhood. Some model trains.

When they moved in, his wife told him she'd changed her mind, and she was going to use the room for storage.

New Occasional Subject

In my last post on hairpieces, I mentioned Norm Abram, the Master Carpenter of PBS's This Old House and the related New Yankee Workshop program. I've weaned myself many years since from nearly all TV watching, and the only two programs I regularly catch are The News Hour (though I often watch it only partway through), and This Old House. I used to watch The New Yankee Workshop, but my station has quit carrying it in favor of the more recent spinoff, Ask This Old House.

I started watching these shows out of an ordinary fascination with watching other people work, especially watching other people work with tools. This is probably the basic appeal of all such shows. But over the years, I've begun to realize that This Old House is a remarkable portrayal of the values and expectations of the haute bourgeoisie, David Brooks's Bobos. A mild work-voyeurism has gradually been replaced in my interest with a horrified fascination at what I'm seeing -- not least, beginning with a TV star carpenter who wears a hairpiece.

There was a major non-event earlier in this television season on these shows -- the essentially unacknowledged replacement of Steve Thomas, the long-time host, by a newcomer, the almost preternaturally smooth Kevin O'Connor. In fact, the replacement was so little mentioned, either in the television columns of newspapers or in the blogosphere, that it seemed almost like the airbrushed removal of faces from group portraits in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Thomas's manner seemed a little too preppy, but that matched the show's prejudices, it seemed to me. Likely the producer simply thought he was getting too old and cut him loose. Again, I think this is a remarkable demonstration of the actual values behind PBS: there are certain showcase senior citizens like Jim Lehrer, but in Lehrer's case it helps that he owns the program. If he didn't, he'd have been replaced the same way, too.

More to come.

Cell Phone Follies

Two of my pet peeves, at least one of which I share with many others, are people who drive while holding their cell phones to their ear, and people who, due to whatever problems they have with the technology, become confused at the drive-up ATM and make long, ineffectual efforts there, keeping those behind them who have their act more together from doing their transactions.

Yesterday I found the two of them together. A guy had his cell phone to his ear in his right hand, and was talking on it, while with his left hand he was trying to get the card into the ATM slot, and failing repeatedly. I mean, repeatedly. He would turn it every which way, but he'd keep on trying, and it wouldn't work. The whole time, he kept talking on the cell phone. Finally I reached whatever frustration threshold you reach while you wait for something like this.

I lowered my car window and yelled out, "Why don't you put down the cell phone?"

The guy's face turned very dark in his mirror. "What did you say?"

"I said, why don't you put down the cell phone? You're trying to do two things at once."

Of course, the guy just got madder, kept talking on the cell phone, and kept trying to push the card into the slot even harder. Finally I honked my horn. No change. The guy just kept fiddling with the card. I honked my horn again. The guy finally gave me the "you're number one" sign and drove off angrily.

I pulled up to the ATM. The screen said it was out of service.

Freshman Comp, Writing, The Academy, and Blogging

Prof. Banaian, my blog parent at SCSU Scholars, has a post on something called the Briggs Report. The organization that put it on line seems quite pleased that it's done so, but since the report is dated 2001, any self-congratulation should perhaps be well-modulated.

I read or skimmed through most of the report, since I misspent some part of my twenties teaching freshman comp, and how one goes about learning to write is still an interesting question for me. The report says that there isn't enough "literature" in composition classes and somehow feels that more of this would improve classes. But it also says that the amount of literature in the classes varies with the school, and better-quality schools (such as the Ivy League or the California systems) have more literature and greater attention to literary models in freshman comp classes. I don't want to sound sophomoric here, but did someone pay Prof. Briggs for this?

One thing that fascinates me about Briggs's report is how poorly written it actually is. I think this is because learning to write is a process that needs more than a single environment, or a single set of inputs. I didn't learn to write the kind of genuinely persuasive policy paper that Briggs seems to be trying to write until I left the academy. I have a sense that, in some way, Briggs would teach his freshman comp students (it would be interesting to discover how recently he's taught such a class) "Here, let's look at how to persuade someone to adopt your policy proposal. See how well Matthew Arnold argues for educational reform in Culture and Anarchy. Now, I want each of you to write an essay in which you imitate Matthew Arnold in attempting to persuade your state legislators to increase funding for freshman composition."

The result will be predictable, and in the hands of an experienced professor, it will somewhat resemble the Briggs Report, vague, unsure of who its audience is but certainly preaching to a choir of Ph.D.s in any case, and quite snobbish. Just the sort of thing to motivate those folks down at the capitol, wouldn't you say? I didn't learn to write for real people, and write to persuade real people of important things, until I got completely clear of anyone who'd ever taught freshman comp. It's a little like how to cook snails: first feed the snails one heck of a lot of corn meal so they get the stuff they'd been eating completely out of their systems. (I don't think Prof. Briggs would approve of that simile if I submitted it in an essay.)

Being used to both reading and writing real policy papers or staff recommendations, I'd say the first thing that's missing from Briggs's report is a useful organization. A corporate staff recommendation (on subjects that are often non-trivial, such as the following) will read: RECOMMENDATION: The ABC Bank must provide duplicate facilities to allow customer access to its ATM machines in the event of a significant outage at its data center. SUMMARY: If large numbers of customers can't access the funds in their accounts via ATM machines, there could be major social consequences, as well as damage to ABC Bank's business reputation that would be very difficult to repair. In addition, the ABC Bank has contractual and regulatory obligations to maintain its ATM system availability. Redundant computer and telecom facilities, as discussed below, are currently the only means of assuring this level of reliability.

Now, in a short stretch of time, I've delivered some very clear, if unpleasant, news to a group of corporate managers. I searched in vain for any such informative, concise brief at the start of the report to give me an idea of what Briggs's point is. It isn't there. In fact, I would think that if Briggs had seen the need to summarize his recommendation and main points this way, his whole report would have been clearer and more understandable. But Matthew Arnold, we may assume, didn't write this way, so we won't tell our freshmen to do it, either. (I sense in Briggs as well the "colonial cringe", the predisposition to follow English models, well out-of-date.)

In fact, based on Briggs's report, I think the freshman comp course I had as an undergraduate, which I describe here, probably met all of Briggs's requirements. It was taught by a tenured professor, it followed canonical literary models (Frost and Conrad), and it consisted of exhortations (described in the link) to write as Frost and Conrad would write. It was a truly horrible experience that taught me nothing, and has been the cause of many reflections on the nature of futility in my subsequent life.

There's another issue that interests me about Briggs's report, and that's the complete absence of the elephant in the faculty office: plagiarism. What's the point of exhorting your students to write like Matthew Arnold if they'll do just that -- they'll order up a paper on that subject from the paper mill's page on the web, or they'll find one in the fraternity files. I've discussed this below in "Cheating and the Academic Transaction". From what I've been able to glean on the web in off-and-on investigations, something between a third and two-thirds of all papers submitted in freshman comp classes are plagiarized. If we can't address this problem, what's the point of arguing that the students need to read Othello?

In fact, Briggs's perspective reminds me of F. Todd Weatherbee, my old freshman comp chair, who was full of theories on how comp should be taught, but never bothered to take a section of his own, and indeed never visited the TAs' classes to see what they were doing. I would, though, slightly revise Weatherbee's favorite aphorism: if you think following literary models makes good writers, look at the professors who blog.

I wouldn't assert Prof. Banaian's blog-paternity without recognizing that he does in fact write clearly and well, and he appreciates good writing (I know this, because he's called me a good writer!). He cites James Lileks and Mark Steyn as examples -- but they're hardly academic writers. Lileks is a college dropout, and Steyn seems to have acquired his skills via experience as a journalist and direct exposure to artists themselves. But the quality of writing in professorial blogs begins to drop off fairly quickly. Reynolds writes clearly, but his style is often faux Lileks and Kaus. A commenter recently took Drezner to task for churning out Kaus-like "editorial comments" as well, and I would also fault him for occasional facile cuteness.

If you are what you eat (and I'm drawn back to my snail simile above), you also write what you are. If you're in a narrow, stratified, self-referential environment, as many academics are, your writing will reflect that. The task of learning to write clearly and persuasively for real people inevitably can only start in the academy.

UPDATE: My blogging instincts, only a little more than 60 days old, are still not quick enough -- I could have googled John C. Briggs, Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside, sooner than now. Prof. Briggs appears to be a polymath among lit scholars, with books and courses covering rhetoric, Renaissance literature, Francis Bacon, and the like, and oh-by-the-way, he directs the freshman comp program at Riverside. Sounds like he's much too busy to take a section himself, of course -- too preoccupied with his next treatise on how it should all be done. I'll welcome any info from Prof. Briggs or anyone else that would clarify my impression, one way or the other.

Legal Impressions of Two Recent Academic Labor Cases

Invisible Adjunct has raised two recent cases that may potentially hinge on labor law. One, a Dartmouth College case where a long-term "visiting professor" was terminated, and another, the case of Chris, a temporary instructor who had his pay per class cut in half and lost his benefits when offered an additional semester of teaching.

I ran these cases by my wife, a corporate attorney who sometimes deals with employment law. Naturally, our discussion could only rely on the minimal information available in the relevant blog posts, and the opinion presented here does not constitute legal advice.

Chris's case to her seems to be the easiest: he signed a contract that he knew would give him one semester of employment under a particular set of conditions. The university -- surprise! -- discovered it could offer him an additional semester of employment, doing precisely the same work. However, the pay for the additional semester would be about half the previous semester, and there would be no benefits.

Under contract law, Chris doesn't have much of an option. However, the university is behaving in this case like nineteenth century robber barons. Corporations learned fairly soon that acting this way led to bad publicity and hurt their business and public reputations far more than the amounts of money they could twist out of competitors, vendors, or customers by treating them badly. Universities apparently haven't learned this lesson.

Under existing legal theory, Chris wouldn't stand much of a chance bringing a traditional lawsuit. The amount of money involved, about $3000, isn't worth such an effort. The act of bringing a suit would end any potential Chris might have of getting another contract with the university, which might be worth more than that amount. If he took his case to small claims court, he might be able to allege that the university could have predicted enough enrollment for a second semester of work, and the university could have drawn up a contract that allowed him to be paid the same amount if enrollment allowed a second semester's work -- thus, potentially, alleging bad faith on the university's part.

There might also be an overtime issue if the amount of work done in the first semester could be shown to correspond to the amount Chris was paid, and halving that amount would result in Chris essentially working unpaid overtime to do the same work at half the pay. However, the $3000 discrepancy would not justify a normal lawsuit. The argument might be used in a small claims court action. Again, the issue for Chris would be whether the amount he might win in such an action would balance the likelihood that he wouldn't work for the university again.

The Dartmouth College issue presents potentially greater problems for that institution. Normally an assistant professor in a "probationary" tenure track position has six years to establish his or her eligibility for tenure. If, after six years, the university does not grant tenure, the assistant professor is terminated -- an "up or out" provision. However, Ronald W. Edsforth served as a "visiting professor" at Dartmouth College for eleven years. Toward the end of that period, Dartmouth decided it no longer had courses for Edsforth to teach, and declined to renew his contract.

With only the minimal information on the case that's available on the net, it's difficult to tell what Dartmouth's and Edsforth's exact legal positions are. However, an attorney for Edsforth could potentially create a theory that, in retaining Edsforth beyond the normal six-year probationary term, whatever Edsforth's exact status may have been, Dartmouth could have created a presumption that Edsforth had been granted tenure. Dartmouth's legal and human resources departments would have had to go to considerable lengths to make sure all parties understood that Edsforth did not have tenure under these circumstances. If this wasn't done, Dartmouth could have a problem.

In fact, my wife thinks that the fact that a temporary, "visiting professor" was staying so long should have been ringing alarm bells at Dartmouth long before this case came up.

My wife stresses that she is following California precedents in these cases, and suggests that there are attorneys who specialize in academic employment law who could apply their expertise in these matters. However, in the Dartmouth case, she sees a potential for eroding the legal basis of traditional tenure expectations if the university has not taken care to avoid a blurring of employment status between tenured and non-tenured positions.

What Could Alleviate the Graduate Studies "Crisis"?

I'm referring to a graduate studies "crisis" in quotes because Daniel Drezner raised the issue in the title of his post yesterday, but I don't want to use an urgent-sounding word without distancing myself from it. The "crisis", as I see it, is the constellation of academic problems resulting from the decades-long overproduction of Ph.Ds. This includes the high social cost of recent college graduates who are lured into several years of unproductive activity in graduate school (degree work in the humanities is largely not transferable to other, more economically useful fields).

It includes the direct cost to graduate students who "invest" foregone income and opportunities in hopes of securing tenured professorships. It includes the damage to the academic environment that results from inevitably corrupt and lottery-like personnel outcomes, when large numbers of applicants must be screened for small numbers of openings. It includes the social cost of underemployment for adjuncts waiting for tenure-track positions to open up.

I think the only reasonable cure for the problem is to reduce the number of openings for entry-level graduate students. The existing problems occur because there are too many graduate students for the full-time career openings available. This situation exists because it's to the advantage of universities and faculties to employ cheap, part-time graduate student labor, on the basis that such students are "apprentices". However, the numbers of "apprentices" in total don't remotely match the numbers of "journeyman" positions. This suggests that the universities' use of "apprentice" status is less than sincere, especially when no systematic means is employed to evaluate the "apprentices'" competence and cull the field prior to awarding the "journeyman" or Ph.D. designation.

The various ways that universities can use the large labor pool of underemployed "journeymen" are illustrated in the current post on Invisible Adjunct, where Chris, a temporary instructor, finds himself in an ethical dilemma after his university halves his pay and removes his benefits for performing the same work. This is behavior that the press and the labor movement would certainly find unconscionable if it were done by an industrial, private employer.

The only economic remedy to this problem, of course, is to reduce the size of the labor pool that can be exploited so readily by the universities in cases like these, or force the costs to the universities higher through legal remedies. Here are some thoughts:

Over the past two decades, employers have sometimes abused "exempt" employee status to force large amounts of unpaid overtime. This discussion covers employer vulnerabilities to class action suits by employees claiming unpaid overtime. The mere threat of such suits has tended to slow private employers' willingness to push employees for unpaid overtime.

Until recently, universities were able to claim that graduate students were not employees, but recent court cases allowing University of California teaching assistants to organize have eroded this assumption. Once graduate students are recognized as employees, minimum wage and overtime laws begin to apply. I'm somewhat surprised at how long it's been taking for class-action suits to be filed in this area. If I were to bet, though, my money would be on a continuing process of forcing pay and benefit increases for teaching assistants (and if I were an administrator, I wouldn't be planning on cheap labor forever).

It sounds to me as though a little creative thinking on Chris's part, with perhaps some research into existing state labor laws, might uncover a theory an attorney might find productive in addressing the issue of whether Chris's employer is violating the law in halving his pay for the same work. The issue, as several have pointed out in the comments, is whether Chris realistically can expect continued business from the university in future semesters, and thus might find it prudent to accept current conditions in hope of a better offer later. Most commenters feel such hope is vain.

In Chris's specific case, considering the amount of money involved, I might even consider a small claims court action against the university, demanding the difference between the prior semester and the current one. In small claims court, you can lay out the basic justice of your case in plain language in front of a judge, and the judge decides on the overall issue of fairness or equity. My limited experience of small claims court is that there is a bias in favor of the small plaintiff, and if the $3000 or so were more important than the certainty that I'd never be hired by the university again, I'd go for it. The news of such an action would likely spread quickly among administrators and might restrain the temptation to deal this way in the future. But also, experience gained from such tactics, if shared among others, would also assist individuals caught in equivalent situations.

Finally, I continue to be intrigued by the possibility of a class action suit against universities with graduate programs, on the basis that the graduate student or teaching assistant "apprenticeship" is fraudulent, and the actual numbers of graduate students versus the openings in the academic job market, wildly out of adjustment for many dozens of years, amount to the kind of mathematical impossibility that makes a pyramid sales or multi-level marketing scheme a fraud. Again, even the credible threat of such an action would probably cause a major adjustment by universities in how they recruit and employ teaching assistants.

Ph.D. Program Retention Rates, Again

Daniel Drezner cites a Chicago Tribune story on Ph.D. program retention rates. The quote he gives from the story suggests that the problem can be fixed with a little more hands-on from the graduate advisors, or something to that effect. Drezner is skeptical, though he appears to feel that being left to drift in a graduate studies program builds character.

As I've said earlier, graduate studies in most disciplines, but especially in the humanities, can't be fixed. The numbers simply don't work, and apparently have not worked since the 1950s. There aren't enough academic jobs in most disciplines to accept, even remotely, and even accounting for normal attrition, the numbers of students who enter graduate programs each year. Estimates for disciplines like History and English suggest that only 30 percent of an entering cohort of graduate students can hope to attain tenure-track jobs once they receive Ph.D.s. And as many bloggers have pointed out, it's not the best students who make it through -- in fact, there's little systematic effort in graduate programs to cull the field based on merit. The most capable and intelligent graduate students often see the true situation partway through the program, and they're able to rely on their initiative and ability to find other work when they do.

The Chicago Tribune quote on Drezner's site says that graduate faculties look on this as a "budget" issue, and as I've pointed out, that's exactly what it is. Professors who teach graduate seminars are paid directly from the tuition credits earned by the graduate teaching assistants in those seminars, and the TAs fund the tuition credits via foregone income -- they teach lower-level courses at subsistence pay in hope of eventually being like the tenured professors in their seminars. The problem is that, much as in a multi-level marketing scheme, the numbers don't work.

There are good, bad, and hysterical discussions of multi-level marketing (MLM) on the web. This one has an intelligent summary of both the mathematics and the psychology of such scams, with the key quote, ". . . MLMs can never equalize into profitability the way companies in the real world can, so that the result will be that the organization as a whole cannot, even in theory, be profitable. When this inevitable destiny occurs, the only money to be made is not from the product or service but from the losses of people lower down in the organization." A traditional MLM attracts "distributors" to invest in a mathematically impossible business scheme, driven by the hope of easy money. The graduate studies con is remarkably similar to MLMs, funded by the losses at the bottom, "profitable" to certain participants only via exploiting those losses.

The discussion I link to above also says that an unrepairable defect of MLMs is that they are designed to reach and exceed market saturation, to the point that the low-level investors, who have bought into the scheme on the assumption that they will be able to sell their inventories, will lose their investments. In the case of graduate studies programs, they've been producing Ph.D.s at a rate that meets or exceeds market saturation for decades. There is no field with an actual shortage of Ph.D.s, while many fields have enormous surpluses. The surpluses are, in effect, built into the business plans of the graduate departments who produce the Ph.D.s (and the early investors who profit from the scheme are protected from the consequences of market saturation by the market distortion of the tenure system and the AAUP-sponsored resulting market cartel maintained with the cooperation of the universities).

The mathematics of graduate study are also questionable on their face. In a typical graduate program, especially in the humanities, the graduate students far outnumber the graduate faculty. Even in seminars, the ratio of students to faculty is likely to be in the neighborhood of 12 to 1. The assumption is somehow made that there will be enough jobs in future years to absorb this large number of students relative to faculty -- yet the number of actual jobs has been static. There is no way 12 jobs will magically appear over the coming years to absorb all the students in that one seminar, any more than thousands or millions of potential customers will magically appear to buy the new distributorships in an MLM.

If you look at the Ph.D. program dropout rates in this light, each dropout is simply a predictable part of this MLM-like system as it's been semi-consciously designed. The dropouts are simply the later investors who've decided, from an economic standpoint, to cut their inevitable losses, with their investment having already passed to the tenured early investors in the form of their paychecks.

The responses suggested in the Tribune quote don't seem much different to me than what Amway might say if it found its distributorship entrants decreasing -- maybe a little more hands-on, maybe some more mentoring. But however much "mentoring" takes place, if the numbers don't work, the people at the bottom are still screwed. This is the case with graduate studies. There is no way a graduate program can "retain" more students without having more unemployable Ph.D.s at the end of the process. In fact, in the dreams of graduate studies chairs, I would think they'd want to keep the suckers on the hook as long as possible, even though there are no more jobs available next year than last. But the solution, rather than retaining students, is to cut the number of students entering the program. This won't happen without outside pressure, because fewer graduate students means fewer classes for tenured faculty. Nobody will cut his or her own pay if there are still suckers out there willing to join graduate programs and help make tenured professors' boat payments.

Interestingly, Daniel Drezner suggests that prestige of graduate faculty is based in part on how many graduate students they place. In my experience, this wasn't the case. My own dissertation director, certainly one of the most prestigious scholars in eighteenth-century English lit -- he received a D.Litt. as something of a lifetime achievement award, for example -- placed, to my knowledge, exactly one Ph.D. during his time at my university, and in fact was notorious for not helping his students.

And if you think about it, if the numbers don't add up, then the actual rewards to the participants at the top of the game would not, at least in theory, depend on the success of lower-level participants, against whom the cards are inevitably stacked. My own experience (though at USC, somewhere between top-50 and top-100) in graduate school confirms this. A more systematic tally would be much more informative.

Just for fun, it would be interesting to name a list of the most prestigious professors -- I would toss in Stanley Fish (of course), Paul Fussell -- and see if we can draw up a total of how many Ph.D.s each has placed. Perhaps some of my fellow bloggers can come up with a list and some kind of a total. I suspect there would be surprises.

Another interesting theoretical question is the relationship between the codification of the tenure system via the 1940 agreement between the AAUP and the universities and the start of what might be called reckless Ph.D. overproduction. Opinions I've seen on various blogs on the start of overproduction have been unanimous that it's not new, and that it certainly dates from the 1950s. It would naturally have been unwise for market participants to overproduce Ph.D.s if such overproduction threatened the security of their own jobs -- but with an ironclad tenure system in place to protect the investment of the early participants, overproduction then became in the interest of the universities, perhaps assisted in the first instance by the GI Bill. I'd be interested to hear opinions from people more informed than I am on how tenure may have affected the overproduction of Ph.D.s, since chronologically the two seem potentially related.

UPDATE: Prof. Banaian at SCSUScholars is unconvinced of the MLM parallel, saying, "the numbers never work if you assume all that apply, or all those admitted to grad school, are assured jobs." He uses the parallel of baseball, where many apply, but few get careers in the majors.

I think this breaks down, because the selection process in sports is almost by definition merit-based, while I think the consensus in blog discussions of the graduate studies problem is that attrition is unpredictable. An anecdotal case on the current Drezner thread cited above says, ". . . when I was in graduate school- it was not uncommon for a fourth year student (in a 5-6 year program) to drop out because of funding losses. The usual cause was the loss a critical grant renewal by his/her advisor." The implication is that this was capricious, not necessarily merit-based.

On the related thread at Invisible Adjunct, a commenter says, "In most humanities disciplines, you will be competing against 100-250 applicants for every entry-level position. That is not a job market, it is a lottery." We may assume that decisions like these in professional sports aren't so routinely described as capricious or lottery-like. Also, those in professional sports tend to get feedback in a fast, clear way -- most know fairly soon if they have a future in the game or not. This isn't the case with the academic career path, where people can toil for six or eight years, with career outcomes depending on what another commenter on Drezner calls "the 'politics' of getting tenure let alone the politics of committee selection."

Also, the nature of a major league baseball player's job in relation to a minor league player is completely different from a professor's job in relation to a graduate student. The major league player's job and salary depends entirely on his performance at the sport. It has no relation to the number of minor league players that he trains -- and that's not his responsibility. If a team organization had to cut some number of minor league players, it would have no impact on the number of games the major league player had to play, nor on his pay. But a cut in graduate students would directly affect a professor's classes and pay. Among other things, if academic standards applied to baseball, the major league players would have an incentive to retain large numbers of non-competitive minor leaguers in the organization, and a financial incentive to mislead them about their prospects.

Instead, I think what many would agree happens in the academic selection process is a random winnowing that tends to come later rather than sooner, and certainly isn't based on any consistent measure of merit or retainability -- past the GRE's for instance, there's no consistent measure of a graduate student's level of subject area knowledge, against which keep-or-leave decisions might be made. Instead, such decisions are almost by consensus regarded as political, or based on criteria other than merit.

How people see the operation of systems that may or may not be essentially fraudulent or corrupt will vary. Those who like their chances in the lottery will naturally look favorably on the system. The link I made above on MLMs goes into some depth on the psychological operation of such schemes. Those who benefit from the existing system will naturally be favorably inclined toward it, and may feel those who have cut their losses due to a realistic assessment of mathematical reality are "failures" or perhaps "quitters". But the fact remains, it seems to me, that if graduate departments were to take their own advice and somehow "retain" graduate students, the only result would be an enormous increase in unsuccessful seekers for adjunct or tenure-track jobs -- there would be no other benefit, socially or academically.

So irrespective of character judgments, it seems to me the only reasonable solution to what Drezner calls a "crisis" (though it's been a chronic one) is to cut the number of incoming graduate students. This of course would have reverberations throughout the academic world, since the result would be the need to eliminate many tenured positions.

What other solution would Prof. Banaian propose? The default will be to leave things as they are, but I suspect that something like a class action suit will change that world the way Sherman changed Georgia. I think "Stein's Law" says something to the effect that "if things can't continue the way they are, they have to change." That's likely to be the case here.

More on Disappearing IS Jobs

My comment section and e-mails show that this is a very popular subject, and I have more to say on it. Daniel Drezner has more to say this morning as well.

I wanted to include an additional point in earlier posts here, but they were plenty long and complex enough without it. But here it is now: IS jobs have been disappearing for some time, and are continuing to do so. They aren't going overseas, they're just disappearing.

One of the big factors that motivates bank mergers is the economies of scale that come from combining data centers. You can run 2X thousand ATMs and branches from one data center without much more trouble than you can run 1X thousand. The result has been that Los Angeles, still defined in the early 1980s as a "financial and banking center", is much less so now, since it's lost many of the banks and savings and loans that at one point employed many thousands in their data centers. Those jobs really haven't gone anywhere -- they've essentially disappeared as data centers belonging to the bigger banks that took the small banks over have taken over the new work without hiring (or retaining) equivalent new staff.

The same is happening in the insurance industry, as deregulation is allowing banks to own insurance companies. The practical result on the ground is data center consolidation and disappearance of IS jobs.

Another topic: despite what's been said in some of the comments, I very much doubt that this job disappearance is affecting many college-educated workers. In large part this is because, if you look at job boards like Monster.com or Dice.com (as apparently some of us have done for many, many months), you'll see that a four-year degree is often simply not mentioned as a requirement for IS jobs in areas like operations, programming, network engineering, system administration, and the like. In all such cases, employers appear to prefer the certifications offered by the vendors, such as Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE).

This is a further indication to me of how far a four-year degree has been devalued, since an individual with an MCSE and a GED high-school equivalence certificate can certainly earn in the high five-figures, as much or more than many college graduates. I say this having worked in the IS field myself with a Bachelor's from Dartmouth and an ABD, and I recognize that in effect I was low-balling, working well below my capability.

So while many folks are saying "how will college-educated programmers get real-world training?" I'm not sure if this is a good question. A better question, as I see it, would be "what work should liberally educated college graduates be looking for?" And this goes to why employers don't seem to be very interested in such liberally educated college graduates. If you've gone to college looking to qualify for a computer programming job, it seems to me, though, that you've wasted both time and money, since an MCSE would have served you as well or better.

Alumni Involvement in Academic Reform

I almost threw out a piece of what looked like junk mail yesterday, but it turned out to be from a fellow Dartmouth alumnus soliciting my signature for election on a petition basis to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees. You can find the whole text of his letter here. Actually, I was familiar with Thurman Rodgers as a California political gadfly, but it wasn't until now that I realized he was a Dartmouth alum, and that our time there overlapped. (As a Physics major and fraternity member, his path didn't cross mine, an English major and independent.)

Due to alumni support in a financial crisis in the nineteenth century, Dartmouth's Board of Trustees must include a certain number of members drawn from the alumni community at large. However, in the past, such members have been co-opted by the administration. In fact, the most prominent such member, and indeed the Chair of the Board for several years immediately past, has been Susan Dentzer, The News Hour's so-called "health unit" -- not, it seems to me, someone to embody the best of Dartmouth or any other elite institution. (Dentzer is better known within alumni circles for her crusade to ensure that "healthy, unsalted snacks" are served at all College social functions involving alcohol.)

There has been some movement among alumni to become more actively involved in changing what we feel Dartmouth has become -- and this involves, I think, least of all concern about political leanings of the faculty. Thurman Rodgers's letter proposes, in part:

Stronger curriculum. As the CEO of a 4,100-employee high-tech company and one personally active in the recruiting and reviewing of new college graduates, I am disturbed by the fact that many graduates -- including those from Dartmouth -- are unprepared to assume their responsibilities in a 21st century information society. . . . The graduates we hire are also not as well educated as they should be in life's basics: thinking and reasoning, writing clearly, understanding the economy in which they function -- and even understanding the basic principles and history of the American Democracy in which they live. Dartmouth should not be part of the problem; it should be the solution.

This reflects my concern in the post below on what I feel a "real" college graduate should be capable of -- my list of qualifications seems pretty similar to Rodgers's, in fact. However, as I wrote them a few days ago, I realized that such a person with those qualifications would be difficult to find in the real world -- something Rodgers, from his perspective, would apparently agree with.

Rodgers is also concerned about "stifling of free speech" on campus, which "starts with the trustee oath, which mandates that the decisions of the Board of Trustees be announced and discussed only by its chairman or by the President, as if unanimously passed. . . . a mandated campus orthodoxy, defined and enforced by expensive overhead bureaucracies. . . limit[s] free speech on campus."

He's also opposed to President Wright's intent to change the College to a University and the dilution of the College's mission. I thoroughly agree with Rodgers here -- while there's no shortage of Ph.D.s, there's certainly a shortage of well-educated people with Bachelors' degrees. And why should Dartmouth now join the ranks of universities with graduate studies programs that exploit students, most of whom will never have the academic careers for which they forego income and opportunities?

I don't know how successful Rodgers will be in getting elected to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees (I'm mailing in my signature), and should he get there, what his chances are as a single voice crying in the wilderness. But it's an indication of what alumni involvement ought to be in the overall education reform movement, and unfortunately, an exception that suggests much more could be done.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Prof. O'Connor at Critical Mass for her link, giving Thurman Rodgers's campaign the wider publicity it deserves.