Riules
rule, from the Old French, riule
1. All of the "early," in-term paper and project deadlines specified in the course syllabus are optional but firm. If you want comments, feedback, and suggestions on how to improve your work, then submit your work on time and according to instructions. There is no penalty for not meeting these optional deadlines; but if you deviate from the instructions, or if you miss the deadline by even just a bit, then your work will be set aside with all the other late submissions that arrive in the days, weeks, and months after a deadline, and it will be evaluated at the next deadline, or at the end of term when final marks are submitted. Late submissions will be received anytime up to the beginning of the final examination period. Late submissions will not receive comments, feedback, or suggestions for improvement. If you want feedback, you must meet the early deadlines specified in the course syllabus.
2. When we reach the final, final deadline specified in the syllabus -- the beginning of the scheduled final examination for a lecture course, or the final absolute deadline specified for the final paper in a seminar course -- all of my flexibility is exhausted. At this point it's out of my hands and you're not allowed to pester me by email. If you find yourself in impossible circumstances, talk to someone in your Faculty's Advising office. They have the authority to assign you a "Standing Deferred." For the Faculty of Arts, their official paperwork specifies SD status on one of three grounds: Medical, Compassionate, or "Other," which I think just about covers all possible situations. I don't have the authority to grant SDs or extensions once we've arrived at the final, specified deadline. Advisors will often tell students to "try to work something out with the instructor," which means they will try to send you back to me. If they do this to you, show the Advisor this web page. Dear Advisor: I've been as flexible and accommodating as possible throughout the term; now I have to submit grades, and accommodation is not my job (or my authority) anymore. You'll have to evaluate the student's circumstances.
3. If you are granted a Standing Deferred, all of the next steps are up to you. Missed deadlines are not like red wine. They taste worse and become poisonous as time goes by. Quoting from the most recent "Faculty of Arts Interdepartmental Memorandum" I have received from the Academic Advising Office, "It is the student's responsibilty to make arrangements with you for completing the outstanding work. The deadlines for doing so are 24 August for a winter session course and 23 December for a summer session course. When the outstanding work has been completed, please submit a change-of-mark form (officially entitled 'Change to Transcript of Academic Record') indicating the final grade." Now, let's translate some of these terms. First, note that the deadlines I quoted are just for the most recent memo I've received, and they are probably different from the paperwork you have. I recommend that you move quickly to complete the work. If you get an SD and then you wait until three days before the deadline to "make arrangements" with me, and I happen to be traveling, you're out of luck. Second, "make arrangements" means "complete the work," not "send endless emails about transactional details instead of completing the work." A few years ago, one student sent me no fewer than thirty-seven emails in the final four weeks before his SD was set to expire, and none of them taught him, or me, anything useful whatsoever. They were all transactional questions -- or substantive questions that, well, um, I spent an entire semester teaching in a course that he completely forgot by the time he realized he had to finish the work ("...do you have a copy of the syllabus for the course last year? the one on your web page is this year's, and I need to remember what we did last year." "...can i meet with u tuesday at 3, or friday at 11?" "do i have to take the final exam?" "...can i do one big project rather than the two shorter projects?" "...are you going to be in your office later today?" "...can you explain what i need to know from the 'underclass' lecture to pass the exam?")
Please understand that if you have an old SD that you're trying to clear up, the course is over. The teaching job for that course is done, and I've moved on to other responsibilities. Clearing up the old SD is your job. I recommend that you move as quickly as your circumstances allow, so that you are not inundated with new work that makes it all too easy to forget what we did in the course you took with me so many months earlier. Work as quickly as you can on the tasks you did not complete. Consult the course syllabus and other resources, which clearly describe the expectations and requirements. If you want to ask substantive questions -- questions that have something to do with cities and urban life, theories, methodologies, epistemologies, data, all sorts of other cool stuff about cities -- then yes, do stop by, I'd love to talk. But in return, I ask you to give me some of that good old-fashioned, low-technology, real, live human conversation: please don't ask me to teach the course again through digital torture -- writing out detailed responses to questions by email. If you missed an examination, then study for it and show up at my office. Please don't send me emails asking about my office hours; see the right-hand side of this for information on my office hours, and more intemperate rants on the digital tyranny of email.
4. If you are out of town, or physically unable to come to my office, and you must use email, do so wisely. Consult the course syllabus and other resources, complete your required work, and then contact me, by phone, email, fax, carrier pigeon, or whatever other medium works best. But please don't do what students have often done in the past -- send plaintive emails saying, "Professor Wyly, I had to take a Standing Deferred in your class last December, because [insert very serious and understandable personal narrative of crisis here] and now I need to make arrangements to clear up the SD on my transcript. What should I do?"
5. Thank you for your patience if you've read this far. I'm sorry for the stern tone of this document; I'm really quite flexible, understanding, and friendly -- in person. I've just received so many transactional emails over the years that I finally decided I had to draw the line somewhere. I've written tens of thousands of words responding to various student transactional and procedural questions sent by email, and finally I just decided I'd try to write out one clear document, this web page, rather than start each note from scratch.
Deadlines,
Disappearances,
and Deferrals
dead•line (déadlaine) n. a set time limit for completing a piece of work || a line around a prison which a prisoner crosses at the risk of being shot. Bernard S. Cayne, ed. (1990). The New Lexicon Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Lexicon Publications, p. 246.
The Limits to Transactional Communication
Don't worry, my etymological preference is biased towards the first definition above, not the second. But if you are reading this page, then you've probably sent me an email asking for an extension on a deadline, or you've sent me an email explaining why you missed a deadline, or you've sent me an email asking how to arrange to make up work for a course that you took with me in a previous term, or you've sent me an email about some other kind of administrative, "transactional" issue. I offer you my sincere apologies for sending you to a template web page, rather than writing a customized note that recognizes your distinctive circumstances.
Let me explain why I am forced to do this.
The multi-dimensional complexity of individual circumstances, multiplied by the number of students who miss deadlines or obtain "Standing Deferred" status in the hectic end-of-term period, equals a very large number of hours devoted to transactional stuff that has nothing to do with the actual substance of what you and I are trying to learn, study, teach, and build. Email has opened the floodgates to an unlimited reservoir of transactional correspondence. With the approach of every looming deadline, emails pour in with requests for extensions. As the deadline passes, more emails arrive with explanations of why the deadline was not met. Meanwhile, as the grading deadlines approach, all faculty members are reminded that our departments will be assessed fines and penalties if final grades are not submitted on time. I try to be as flexible and understanding as possible; but after many years of struggling with the rising tidal wave of emails, I've reached my limit.
Aren't you overwhelmed with email too?
Yes, you may be correct to say that your email will only take a few minutes. But I often receive extended discussions of the very real, very serious and often painful and stressful life circumstances faced by students, and everyone has an understandable circumstance. The time required to respectfully read and respond to these kinds of emails adds up very quickly. Finally, there are two fundamental ethical constraints that force me to shut off the spigot of transactional emails. First, I am not an investigator, enforcer, social worker, or grief counselor. I don't have the expertise and specialized training of those professions. I'm just an absentminded professor. But UBC regulations require that I treat everyone fairly and equitably, and I take this injunction very seriously. This means that if I grant extensions to one person, I have to do it equitably and evenly, applying exactly the same standards and criteria to everyone, working to ensure that some students are not disadvantaged by other students who fabricate excuses to make their course schedules more convenient. Technically, then, if I grant an extension, then I'm expected to follow procedures, such as carefully scrutinizing doctors' notes for relevance, severity, authenticity, and so on. That's the last thing I want to do, because it puts me in the position of creating quite a toxic climate of suspicion and surveillance. If you have an emergency of any kind, you have my understanding, my compassion, and my flexibility. But you will not receive it through an endless stream of emails, and there are limits to what I can do. This is why I have the rules specified in the syllabus, and to the right.
The second fundamental ethical constraint involves the simple economic axiom of opportunity cost. Transactional correspondence takes up a lot of time. Every moment I spend on transactional stuff is a moment that has to come from somewhere. And these days, one of my major obligations is illustrated in the images above and below. This is a small sample of files from my role as Co-Editor of Urban Geography. Each one of the files above contains a full-length research manuscript submitted for review -- the physical files are from the days before we took everything completely to digital form -- the image below is a sample of my (digital) file of reviews. Each manuscript represents considerable research -- a laborious investment of several months, or several years, of reading, theorizing, surveying, modeling, interviewing, interpreting, analyzing ... put simply, these manuscripts provide a window on the ongoing creation of all of the collective knowledge about cities and urban life that I try to keep up with, and to convey, in the courses I teach. I read each manuscript, and then I ask a few experts around the country and around the world to read it too, and offer comments, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement for the author. Collectively, we all wind up putting a lot of work into each of these files. We all love doing this, but it takes a lot of time. If I'm struggling to keep up with transactional correspondence about missed deadlines and such, then I have less time to spend on my obligations to other people.
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"...there are marked differences in approach between staff in dealing with ethical dilemmas. Experienced staff, accustomed to higher levels of professional autonomy, were more inclined to argue for a 'situationist' position, while inexperienced staff, inculcated into a more rule-bound culture, tended to adopt an 'absolutist' or 'exceptionist' stance." B. McFarlane (2002). "Dealing with Dave's Dilemmas: Exploring the Ethics of Pedagogic Practice." Teaching in Higher Education 7(1), 167-178, quote from p. 167.
December, 2007 (Elvin Wyly)
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." Douglas Noel Adams (1952-2001), quoted in Una McGovern, ed. (2005), Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, p. 4
A sampling from the reviews files, August 2009