Networks and Distributed Systems
Research group of Prof. Peter B. Ladkin, Ph.D.
Peter Ladkin: Experiences Teaching at the Uni Bielefeld
I have been teaching Informatics at the University of Bielefeld since January 1995, so now (September 2009) for nearly 15 years. During this time, I have had a succession of work experiences which have at times severely handicapped my teaching, and also, because of the time it took to sort these matters out, or in some cases to live with them, as well as the personal toll on my emotional life, I believe my research has also suffered.
Recently, in June 2009, I have been subject to what I feel is another bout of discrimination, this time largely from two professorial colleagues and the faculty student organisation (the "Fachschaft"). I describe on this WWW page what is going on, which I think will astound people who work in university environments in, say, Britain or the U.S. The page is not here, though, to offer opportunities for readers to engage in Schadenfreude. The purpose is more broad, as follows.
First is the obvious practical purpose to acquaint people who are thinking of working permanently in a German university with what, to me as an Englishman, are bureaucratic and political idiosyncracies for which I was not prepared. The way to be prepared is, in some cases, to know in advance. So, Dear Reader, read here and know!
Second, Informatics is a global occupation, with global criteria of success, but German universities can be very local affairs. For example, all my Informatics colleagues are German, which is typical for German informatics departments, and somewhat over 80% of the university's students come from the immediate region around Bielefeld (Ostwestfalen-Lippe, or OWL). Compare with the best British or U.S. universities, which have a high proportion of non-citizens as permanent teaching staff, and a higher proportion as graduate students. It has for many years been estimated, for example, that around 55% of engineers gaining Ph.D. degrees in the U.S. are foreigners on student visas. And - an important figure - 80% of those stay. I feel very strongly that this is a major factor in the intellectual success of major universities, and I would like very much to see Bielefeld gain in stature, for some very good people work here. This is happening in part. For example, our new organisation CITEC is attracting young researchers internationally. But they will not necessarily stay. German professors are civil servants, and the university is a civil service organisation. I feel from my experience that the idiosyncracies to which this leads puts off capable foreign talent (in which category I deign to include myself) from entering the system. In order to gain access to the top ranks of universities (no German universities are in the most-cited Top-50 lists) I feel that German universities need instead to encourage foreign talent rather than hinder it through idiosyncracies such as have occurred with me. I hope that airing some of the issues will lead to wider discussion and thereby to an eventual easing of such hindrances.
One major handicap was not having access to any secretarial help for over a decade. Although it was agreed at my pre-employment negotiations that I could share the secretary of another working group (our faculty is divided into "working groups", each led by one professor), this arrangement ceased when the secretary went to another job, and her replacement declined to do any work for me, on the basis that it was not in her job description. I approached the then-Dean who, along with his successors, declined to make any alternative arrangements. Readers familiar with German civil-service bureaucracy will not be surprised to learn that, even with reducing administrative work to an absolute minimum, I was spending 10-15 hours per week on secretarial work that could easily be accomplished by an experienced administrative worker (and now is!) in 10 hours or less.
The moral here is clear. Make sure in your job negotiations to get written confirmation of the level of administrative services to be provided you by the faculty, and don't treat anything spoken as binding, even though in theory it is, and even though you may think you have witnesses. And don't rely on such thoughts as that, if you can't do your job as well as you could if you had support, then colleagues will have to do more of theirs to make up. Not everybody sees that far.
Similarly, when I first came to the university, I had difficulties with the faculty computer services group (RBG), which ran its own local area network (LAN) more or less independent of the university computer facilities, as one would expect from an Informatics department. The RBG would not make available to me standard networking tools, such as "ping", which they claimed were "too dangerous" for me to be allowed to use. Now, I had been appointed as the Networks Professor and rather felt that I was competent to use whatever tools I felt I needed, in particular those I had been using for years at other institutions. I approached the then-Dean, who suggested it was a "personal problem" between the then-RBG-manager and myself. I said that I saw it as a service problem: either I could be doing the job the university had supposedly hired me for with the tools I needed, or not. Nothing happened for months. Then a meeting of the faculty Structures Committee was convened to address the issue. They offered to me that it was open to every working group to provide their own computer service should they wish to. Great. Alone amongst the working groups in Informatics, I was the only person employed in my working group and I did not relish having to set up and run my own Unix LAN as well as the other tasks, such as research and teaching, that I was to perform. However, the faculty did provide me with resources for student helpers during my first year, up to about 27 hours a week total, and I was able to find three part-timers who were enthusiastic about the chances of setting up and running their own LAN. So we did it. This turned out to be a success story. Over the years, up to a few years ago, we were able to provide ourselves better service than offered to the rest of the faculty, partly due to an unusually talented administrator, Marcel Holtmann, who was keen to develop his skills while working for almost nothing - and then indeed for nothing. Marcel became the maintainer of the bluez Bluetooth stack for Linux when he was working as my Sysadmin for free and could use my LAN as his personal playground. We were so lucky. In recent years, with a change in structure and leadership of the RBG, we have been able to arrange LAN services again through the RBG. Indeed, my doctoral student Jan Sanders works for the RBG and is assigned by them to administer our group services.
The moral again: get explicit written agreement during pre-employment negotiations about the level of computer services you will need.
This moral generally holds true for any resources. For example, rooms and labs, although I have had relatively few problems with these (rather too many moves, but there is a lot of moving going on in our faculty so nothing untoward there).
For many years, I was awarded an annual budget of half that of my colleagues. In 2005, the then-Dean proposed a restructuring of the working-group faculty budgets, which resulted in a reduction of some 30% in my already-meagre budget. To give some idea, our faculty annual budget is up in the three-quarters of a million Euro level, and I was getting 14,000 Euros of that, reduced to about 11,000 Euros. Amongst other courses, I had a compulsory module to teach about computer communications, which involved a laboratory, and with this reduction in budget I could no longer afford the equipment for the lab, which I had been intending to buy. With this, coupled with the lack of secretarial assistance and trying to keep my LAN running, I considered the advice of an employment-difficulties counsellor, whom I had been to see about earlier difficulties. He had eventually decided that I was being discriminated against ("mobbing" is the German term for this), that it was unlikely to stop and that I should quit my job. It was good advice but I didn't do that. Instead, I told the university vice-chancellor ("Rektor") that I couldn't do my job with the resources I had been assigned. When nothing had progressed after about six months, I sued the university in administrative court to get appropriate resources. The case went into mediation. And dragged out for a year. Then the newly-appointed Dean, Prof. Dr. Jens Stoye, who had started out as a graduate student in Bielefeld at the time I was first hired, told me that he thought it was a waste of useful faculty resources (namely, me) that I couldn't adequately do my job. We negotiated appropriate resources and resolved the court case through the agreement. I am very grateful to Jens for his thoroughly sane approach to the issues.I will write more about this significant event, or series of events, but there is a German law preventing civil servants from discussing details of their work in public and I need to find out first how much this constrains me. It is important for me to be able to say some things, for example I was criticised in public for my lack of professorial "performance", even though my performance in some respects which I and others hold to be important, for example citation counts, was superior to that of any colleagues at the time. (Our citation counts on citeseer as of December 2005, which I calculated not by taking citeseer's figures but by going through the citations it found one by one, are actually part of the court's judgement in the case. They had been misrepresented during the discussions and I needed to set the record straight. At the time, I found that citeseer handled the issue of self-citation more appropriately than Google Scholar.)
The reason for writing about this series of events is also to indicate traps for the unwary. For example, the university vice-chancellor ("Rektor") wrote to me that he did not think citation counts were very important. People brought up in a intellectual culture which considers having your work cited by other researchers as an important (though fallible) indicator of scientific success will be astonished that senior university officials may hold such contrary views. As indeed were our particle-physicists in the Physics faculty here when I told them!
On to the present. The informatics student body, the "Fachschaft Technik", has just awarded me their "black chalk" for particularly poor teaching performance. They tell me this happened largely because of an incident in which a student who was about to finish his course of studies and go on to start a Ph.D. program took my introductory networks lecture course in his last semester, failed the exam, and complained to the Examination Committee. The Examination Committee invited me to a meeting to explain the grade awarded to the student, decided that I had not adequately justified the grade, and changed his grade to a pass.
There is a reason the Committee could decide that I had not explained the grade adequately, namely that they point-blank refused to look at any of the supporting written material I had prepared, justifying the grade. There are some 15-20 A4 pages of it. The Committee is legally required to consider that material. So much for people here being sticklers for the rule book. The words "kangaroo court" come to mind. The big question is: why colleagues did this?
Anyone interested in the details of the complaint and what actually happened in the Examination Committee meeting, as well as some thoughts about wider consequences, can read my essay on Some Funny Things that Happened at Work.
The Fachschaft wrote a justification for the award (my English translation here) on its WWW site, which says some pretty awful and untrue things about my teaching, and which seems to me to be defamatory. Now, there is such a thing as youthful exuberance but there is a fine line between that and causing real harm to someone's professional reputation. Besides, these authors are in their mid-twenties and certainly want to be taken seriously.
There are at least two sets of laws governing what you can write about people in public. I pointed out to the authors that in writing stuff like that they were opening themselves up to being sued them for libel in an English court, and that none of the usual defences were available to them. It costs money, and lots of it, even for a successful defence. They weren't very impressed. Maybe the idea was too abstract for them. But that is the kind of real-world knowledge that you need if you are going to make a career out of, say, writing WWW pages, as Informatics graduates are wont to do.
The other set of laws is German, specifically the Telemediengesetz which governs what one can publish on, say, a WWW site. When they say stuff about me, I have a right to correction of factual error (which they write themselves) and a right of reply (a "Gegendarstellung") with the same prominence as the original statement. I have chosen to write a more extensive reply (in German / in English), because they touch on subjects very close to my professional heart. The WWW-site publisher, in this case the Dean of the faculty, has set a link to this reply in the original accusatory text.