Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

This isn’t a question, per se, but it’s too good not to quote. A longtime correspondent writes (edited for relative anonymity):

Our chief academic officer (CAO) just submitted his resignation. He will have been here (less than three years) when he steps down. Over the last decade, we have had more ‘interims’ than ‘permanents’ in that role, and few have lasted more than a couple of years.

From the time the current CAO arrived until this past summer, he and our chief administrative officer (a staff position, not our president) fought over their relative status on campus and about access to the president. Last summer, things came to a head, our faculty governance group took a very strong position in support of the CAO, and our president asked for the resignation of the administrative honcho. Reluctantly.

So here we go again. For more than a decade, we’ve had really, really fragmented academic leadership, no clear direction, things happening in fits and starts, declining-to-stagnant enrollments, individual programs more concerned with protecting their turf (a problem in good times; imagine what it’s been like here) than with helping develop the institution. And several presidents, so not all that much continuity of leadership there, either.

My current feeling is that we should call the position Interim Acting Temporary Until Things Get Worse While We Spend Another Five Years Looking for a Permanent VC Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, but I don’t think anyone would apply for that.

Yuck. This kind of turnover is distressingly common, in my observation. In fact, not long ago, a national study pegged the average length-of-service of an academic vice president at a jaw-dropping three years. I don’t know if that counted ‘interims,’ but even if it did, that’s an amazing amount of turnover when you factor in learning curves.

My first reaction, which may or may not be accurate, is that the current President has a gladiatorial style of management, in which he pits his various underlings against each other as a conscious strategy. The theory behind that, as near as I can muster, is that competition is supposed to bring out everyone’s best. (Donald Trump did this on The Apprentice.) Of course, student services and academics aren’t supposed to be in competition, so what actually happens is one-upsmanship, silly political infighting, and focus directed away from the health of the institution as a whole and towards games of leapfrog among the courtiers. It’s pathological, degrading, and silly. (My personal theory is that the ‘competition’ justification is just a rationalization for the preferences of narcissistic personalities, though I’ll admit that’s just a theory.) Eventually, vp’s subjected to this will either lose so badly that they can’t really stay there, or just get sick of it all and walk. Either way, it’s a turnover generator, and you couldn’t pay me enough to walk into that.

Based on other observation, I also suspect a direct correlation between a leadership vacuum in the middle, and hard silos on the ground. When the center doesn’t hold, departments and programs usually turn inward and play defense. It’s individually rational, even if collectively insane. When programs are more concerned about scoring points against each other than with growing the institution as a whole, it isn’t hard to predict the long-term trend. Worse, it tends to be self-amplifying over time, since the first department to let down its shields gets mobbed, which the rest take as confirmation that they should continue to play defense.

Turning around a situation like that takes extraordinary leadership. Off the top of my head, it would require a new and very different President, a housecleaning of many of the upper-level administrative ranks, an early retirement package for long-entrenched faculty, a reorg or two, some farsighted union leadership (if you have unions), and a Board willing to take the short-term heat for a long-term improvement. Also, a big blast of external money would help. That’s a tall order in the best of times. Whichever of those happens first will encounter tremendous opposition, and may or may not survive.

Although bashing administrators is great sport, and very frequently justified, the truth is that the strike zone in these jobs is remarkably narrow. Presidents can overreach and micromanage, thereby destroying the integrity of the institution, or they can withdraw, leaving each division for itself and sowing divisiveness. VP’s who have to please mercurial Presidents can’t necessarily make the best decisions for their own areas, with destructive fallout all the way down. And a faculty that puts too much faith in a given VP, without understanding the insanity of the situation higher up, is setting itself up for bitter disappointment. That’s true regardless of individual intention or preference.

I don’t envy you your situation. Honestly, if my diagnosis is anywhere near correct, your CAO probably has the right idea. Sometimes the best answer is to walk.

Good luck!

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

This story didn’t surprise me.

Having been on this side of the desk for a while now, I can attest that I’ve heard deans, HR directors, department chairs, and even vice presidents say candidly that adjuncts are underpaid. We pretty much all agree on that. (I’ve never heard a counterargument beyond “nobody put a gun to their heads.") It may be surprising to hear it from a podium, but it’s nothing that hasn’t been floating around for some time.

Some of the comments to the IHE story are dispiriting, in that they seem to suggest that any administrator who wants to can just wave a magic wand and create tenure-track positions out of the clear blue sky. They also fall into the trap of assuming that bad results can only be explained by bad intentions.

Quick quiz: which of the following bothers the public more?

1. Tenured professors being replaced by adjuncts
2. Tuition increasing faster than inflation

If you guessed 1, you probably work in higher ed. The correct answer is 2. And keeping a relative lid on 2 is one of the driving forces behind 1.

In my state, as in most at this point, we’re actually taking budget cuts right now. The taxpayers are crying out for more and deeper cuts. We’re running a deficit supporting the faculty and staff we have now. In this context, the resources for conscience-driven hiring are supposed to come from where, exactly?

(Perversely enough, the percentage of courses taught by full-timers in the short term will probably increase, even without new hiring, since we’re balancing this year’s budget by cutting released time. When that happens, the existing full-time faculty teach more courses, and the adjuncts fewer. Our adjunct percentage will drop accordingly. I doubt this is what Cary Nelson had in mind, but there it is.)

Over the years I’ve blogged, I’ve seen repeatedly that the attitudes prevalent in higher ed have yet to catch up to the facts on the ground. Conscience-driven appeals may have at least held the potential of working, back when resources were relatively flush. But at this point, especially at the cc level, we make the decisions we have to make. They can be carried out well or badly, and I absolutely agree that the common practice of making implied promises to adjuncts to lead them on is objectionable. (It goes the other way, too – I’m concerned that integrating adjuncts too completely into the life of the college will open up the college to a backbreaking lawsuit. If adjuncts become truly indistinguishable from full-timers, then the pay differential is unsustainable. To protect the institution, it’s crucial to have some sort of clear boundary, even if we’d rather not. The ability to believe both “what must be” and “what I’d prefer,” even when the two conflict, is a basic job requirement for administration. I like to think of it as a tragic sensibility.) But assuming infinite freedom of action among administrators is simply false, and it leads to blind alleys and useless infighting.

I’d prefer to see the loop-the-loop arguments wind down, in favor of action that might actually help. For example, and I know that most of us aren’t ready to hear this yet, I think it’s time we drop the “one size fits all” idea of the job of a professor. Is the daily work of a community college professor really the same as the daily work of an R1 professor? If it isn’t – and it isn’t – then why do we insist on using all the same terms and categories to judge both?

And rather than continuing to pretend that community colleges are sitting on Ivy-sized endowments, let’s take the battle for resources where it really belongs: the public. Until the public buys into the idea of steady, reliable, sustained, serious funding for public higher ed, we’re chasing our tails. I think that the first move there is to reframe it as a truly public good, rather than as a private good to be supported by user fees. After decades of horrific politics, the concept of a public good seems almost quaint, but in its absence we just don’t make sense. Either we’re serious about an educated workforce and citizenry, or we are not.

Until that happens, administrators everywhere will make choices we’d rather not make, knowing full well their human costs. Bash us when we mess up, but let’s stop pretending that it’s all just a matter of bringing enlightenment to a few suits. We know. We know.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

I have the relative misfortune of following in the footsteps of some pretty good managers. Right now a brain-dead predecessor would come in handy.

As veterans of downcycles in the public sector can tell you, large-scale cuts are often done in an ‘across the board’ way. ("Every cc in the state will lose ten percent of its appropriation this year” — that kind of thing.) That means that previous profligacy can actually save an institution, since there’s fat to cut. It also means that previous frugality is punished, since the only way to sustain a serious reduction when the fat is already gone is to cut things that actually matter. Across-the-board cuts are made without reference to the spending habits of any given college, so an already-efficient college has nowhere easy to go.

Annoyingly enough, my predecessors seem to have been pretty good with budgets. What I wouldn’t give for an “executive retreat” line item, or maybe an “annual vanity conference” appropriation. Those come in handy when times get tight, since you can cut them without giving up anything that really matters.

Capital projects often resemble boondoggles, but ‘capital’ and ‘operating’ budgets are typically kept separate, so savings from ‘capital’ won’t save you if you need to cut ‘operating.’ There’s also the unfortunate truth that once you’ve gone to a certain point in a construction project, it’s actually cheaper just to finish it.

In a perfect world, of course, legislators would be savvy enough to know which colleges make a habit of spending money stupidly and which don’t, and would distribute cuts accordingly. (Actually, in a perfect world, the concept of ‘cuts’ would be foreign and bizarre.) But that’s not how these things play out. Typically we either get the flat percentage cut, or – and this can be worse – the percentage cut that also comes with rules (what we on campus call a “negatively funded mandate"). The rules are a gesture towards prudence, but since they’re usually at least as blunt as the cuts, they wind up causing all manner of counterproductive response on the ground. I’d rather take a straight 10 percent cut than a 10 percent cut that also comes with a mandatory hiring freeze, for example, since some positions only have one person in them, and not-replacing is really not an option. In practice, we’d take a pretty strict line on hiring anyway, given a 10 percent cut, but it would be nice to be able to make those decisions according to actual need. ("Implement a 10 percent cut, but don’t replace the auditor who just quit.” Alrighty then.)

The public image of higher ed doesn’t help, either. The Harvards and Stanfords of the world dominate media coverage to such a degree that if you didn’t know any better, you’d think that the major issue around higher ed finance is failure to spend enough endowment money. That’s true of a remarkably small slice of higher ed – all of it private – but it doesn’t help us rally the troops.

The lesson I’m picking up from all this is to be just a little less critical of Presidents who fund otherwise-inexplicable pet projects. When those horrible, thoughtless, across-the-board cuts arrive, it’s good to have something relatively painless to sacrifice. Frugality in good times leads to brutality in bad. A little wastefulness in good times may actually serve a purpose.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

Dear Boston,

Although I mostly enjoyed my recent visit, I couldn’t help but notice that some of your residents seem confused on a basic point. Allow me to clarify.

The middle lane is not for parking.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dean Dad

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

‘Sustainability’ usually refers to the environment, but I think it makes sense in referring to organizations, too. Some structures, cultures, and behaviors are more sustainable than others over time.

My college is in the midst of some external financial shocks of astonishing severity. (It’s a measure of how bad things are nationally that I can say that and not worry about compromising pseudonymity.) There’s simply no way to take cuts of this magnitude and not feel them. This is especially true with the academic year already well under way, since we’ve already committed to the Fall classes and signed most of the staff to annual (July-to-June) contracts. Worse, it’s fairly clear that we aren’t yet close to hitting the bottom of the current cycle, so whatever cuts we make right now are not likely to be the last.

(This is the real downside to the public sector. When tax revenues crash, we can’t help but feel it. And since nobody is about to say “jeez, how many more prisons do we actually need?,” or “let’s let the baseball team pay for its own damn stadium,” or “you know, progressive taxation wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” higher ed takes a disproportionate slam.)

As a subsidized nonprofit with a mission of providing access for the poor and working class, the tuition and fees we charge don’t cover all of our costs. That’s not a mistake; that’s by design. Although we charge tuition, our underlying model is closer to public libraries or the K-12 system than to a for-profit business. That’s because, like public libraries and the K-12 system, there’s an underlying concept that community colleges are public goods.

I like that aspect of the community college mission. I can sleep well at night knowing that my job, when push comes to shove, is about helping people with few options acquire the skills and credentials to make better lives for themselves. I’m good with that.

But the boom-bust cycle of public funding does a number on an institution whose work, by design, takes years.

Having spent most of the week reeling from the shock of some of the numbers I’ve seen, I’m beginning to think there’s actually an upside to the collapse. When funding is almost-enough, it’s possible to balance the books by trimming here and adjuncting there, without really disturbing the underlying model. Then when the bad times come, you juggle layoffs and furloughs and maybe even a program closure or two, until the money comes back and order can be restored.

No. No more. Enough.

There’s a saying that nothing focuses the mind like a gun to the head. When ’shortfall’ becomes ‘free fall,’ the cost of denial becomes prohibitive. In breathtakingly short order, we’ve blown right past the point at which the usual playbook will do.

If we’re going to survive the next few years with the kind of financial hits we’re taking now, we’re going to have to start working with some blank sheets of paper. And we’re going to have to do it in inclusive ways, or the infighting will prevent anybody’s idea from succeeding.

Perversely enough, the severity of what we’re facing now may actually do some long-term good. The usual half-measures, which avoid just enough conflict, just won’t cut it. I’m thinking it’s time to get clear on the distinction between means and ends, and to treat means with no more reverence than you’d treat any other tool. Deference to the fiefdoms of strong personalities is just too expensive to sustain.

The tricky part will be in maintaining enough trust to get productive changes on the table and on the ground without falling victim to internal politics. ‘Faculty vs. administration’ becomes moot when a college closes. In the original meaning of the word, it’s time to get radical.

Incrementalism just isn’t sustainable anymore.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

Yesterday’s IHE features a thought-provoking piece on the structural contradictions within shared governance. It isn’t entirely successful, but it gets the major things right, and even its failures are instructive.

The ‘hook’ of the piece is the (correct) observation that faculty’s incentives and administrators’ incentives are often poorly aligned with each other, and sometimes simply contradictory. Faculty are trained to devote their first loyalty to their disciplines, rather than the colleges for which they work, and the up-or-out nature of tenure often means that they get trapped for life at an institution they’ve been trained to believe is beneath them. (This is especially true as you move down the academic pecking order. If you got your doctorate at a major, respected R1, but you’re teaching at Nothing Special State Teachers College, it can be hard to shake that nagging sense of resentment.) Although the article doesn’t mention this, the two-body problem that many younger academic couples have makes matters worse; ‘your tenure or your marriage’ is not a happy choice to have to make.

Administrators, as a group, face a different environment. Administrative jobs don’t carry tenure, and may or may not carry faculty rank. (Mine haven’t, for example, though the article seems to assume that most do.) The bulk of my daily work addresses the guts of my college, rather than what one academic discipline might find interesting. ‘Service,’ the category of faculty work with the least payoff, is most of what I do. To professors oriented to the latest and hottest work in their scholarly fields, most of what I do probably looks like busywork (at best). It (mostly) isn’t, but the ubiquity of the perception among faculty speaks to a specific set of attitudes.

Oddly, given the different orientation towards the guts of the institution, administrators actually have more geographic flexibility than do most non-superstar faculty. The folks who care the least about the institution that actually pays them are the ones who stick around the longest; the folks whose day-to-day work is all about sustaining the institution usually last somewhere between two and seven years. The mismatch leads to – among other things – some nasty issues with morale and stereotyping.

There’s also an information asymmetry between the groups. Most academic administrators have been faculty, but most faculty haven’t been administrators. As the article notes precisely:

Yet there’s a conundrum: While faculty and administrators alike argue that academic administrators must come from the faculty, faculty training does not adequately prepare people to manage large and complex organizations. This is especially important as universities get bigger and more complex. When a campus is the size of a small town, it’s not enough to have been a marvelous cell biologist or a meticulous Romance scholar.

The mismatch of skills sometimes finds expression in the canard that administrators are ‘failed faculty.’ Other than the obvious, part of the cost of such reverse snobbery lay in the talents untapped by people who aren’t willing to buck cultural norms.

Where the article trips up slightly is in its recommendations. After having noted, correctly, that faculty and administrators often misunderstand each other because they’re trying to solve different problems, it recommends ‘more permeable boundaries’ between the two camps. Well, okay, but we’re still stuck with the ‘conundrum’ they nailed so accurately above. If a marvelous cell biologist spends a couple of years as an incompetent associate dean before giving way to a meticulous Romance scholar as the next incompetent associate dean, I’m not entirely clear what’s being gained.

Having been trapped in far too many conversations with professors whose concept of college budgets was “there’s my department, and then there’s everything else,” I can’t simply sign on to ‘increased transparency’ as the panacea. Tendentious reading will defeat transparency every time. Instead, I’d be much more optimistic about shifting faculty incentives so they align more with the actual needs of the college. Get the incentives right, and the behavior will follow. If you want more and better college service, make it count – really count — in promotion, merit pay, and tenure decisions. I’m intrigued by a few colleges that have tied faculty pay raises to enrollment increases, for example. It’s a blunt instrument, to be sure, but at least it has a way of introducing an element of reality to the conversation.

If faculty can become more fluent in some of the economic, legal, and political realities facing colleges, they can become much more effective advocates for their own interests, since they’ll know which arguments will actually fly. (I consider this blog my contribution to the cause.) Those who prove particularly good at it would make excellent administrators, the better to build trust over time.

The alternative is simply to abandon shared governance as a quaint carryover from the guild era, and to run colleges like businesses, with faculty as customer service reps and administrators as management. There’s a certain simplicity to that, but if we want ‘management’ to actually understand what’s at stake, I’d rather go with the ‘new incentives’ approach.

What do you think?

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

Recession

Rescission

Revision

Review

Realign

Rethink

Reorganize

Retrench

RIF

Tune in next week, when the list will be brought to you by the letter ‘F’

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

When I saw the Gene Wilder version of Willy Wonka, I was taken with the idea of everlasting gobstoppers. They were hard candies that never melted or lost their flavor; they’d last as long as you could. Something about it intrigued me, even beyond the obvious ‘never running out of candy’ usefulness.

I’m beginning to think that there’s a cognitive equivalent of everlasting gobstoppers. They’re the comments that you hear once in a while that suggest a much greater depth than you can process at the moment. You can’t quite decode them, but you can’t forget them, either. Years later, you see or hear something else and think “ooooohhhhh, that’s what that was about.”

Some people toss off gobstoppers like, well, candy. They just throw these little sourballs of wisdom out into the ether, and you catch what you can and hold onto it for as long as it takes. When I find people like that – they’re rare, but they’re out there – I shut the hell up and try to catch as much as I can. Once in a while, many years later, I’ll get that satisfying mental click when the line finally makes sense.

My dissertation advisor was one of those people. He died several years ago, and we had lost touch several years before that. He and I had a difficult relationship, partly due to fundamentally different ways of seeing the world and partly due to my own constitutional inability to be anybody’s follower. In plenty of basic ways, each of us considered the other mystifying, and we seemed able to offend each other without even trying. And yet, when he got going on his favorite subjects, he had a way of hurling gobstoppers. Even at my most contrarian, and when I had no flippin’ idea what he was talking about, some of his lines had the unmistakable air of the gobstopper about them. I didn’t know what he was getting at, but I knew it was something good. Some of those stuck with me.

This weekend, I had the eerie moment of registering exactly what one of those lines meant. I first heard it probably fifteen years ago, and I remember being both slightly offended and slightly humbled.

I can remember the room in which I heard it, the occasion, and the slightly electric silence of the group when he said it. I remember the distinct impression that this seemingly-inexplicable statement portended something wise and true, and being frustrated that I couldn’t suss it out.

(I won’t share the statement here, since it’s entirely too revealing, and if you didn’t have my distinct frame of reference, you’d probably be underwhelmed. It works in a particular context. Feel free to substitute your own.)

Folks who knew me in grad school can attest that I was sort of chronically unsatisfied with pretty much everything, including myself. Even at the time, I had a sense that some of that had to do with not having had enough life behind me to really appreciate some of what I was dealing with, and therefore being trapped at predictable, asinine, first-level responses. I knew I was callow, but that’s not exactly the kind of thing you can fix through determination. Knowing it didn’t help, and in a sense actually contributed to the frustration, since I couldn’t just blame my dissatisfaction on other people. (Of course, there was also the ridiculous poverty, which certainly didn’t help.)

The occasional gobstopper – call it a wisdom mcnugget, if you want – stopped me in my tracks, since it so clearly showed me that I was falling short of who I wanted to be. I could hear just enough echo of wisdom to know that I was missing something, but not nearly enough to know exactly what. Once in a while I’d boil over and actually let fly with some knee-jerk sign of frustration, which didn’t help, either.

This weekend I finally ‘got’ what he was trying to say, right before the electric silence. (Annoyingly, after getting it, I know that it should have been obvious.) Even better, I got why I couldn’t quite decode it at the time. And I can finally forgive myself.

It’s okay to be callow. That passes. And it’s okay to be frustrated – frustration can motivate progress.

And sometimes it’s okay to be a jumpy twentysomething. The world has survived those before, and will again. Some ideas just take a little more seasoning to appreciate.

He’s gone now, so I can’t thank him directly. Instead, I’ll just send this post out into the ether, hoping that somehow it makes some minor payment on a life debt.

Thanks, big guy. I get it now.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

As direct operating subsidies are losing ground against our expenses, and becoming increasingly tenuous as tax revenues drop, we’re turning increasingly to grants to find the money to get things done.

Grants are great in many ways, of course. They give us revenue that doesn’t rely on taxpayers or students; they allow us to experiment; they increase the number of people interested in seeing that we do our jobs well. In a few areas in which our grantsmanship has been particularly successful, we’ve been able to supply opportunities and resources for students we otherwise couldn’t have.

But grant money comes with conditions, and as grants become more important, so do those conditions. We’re increasingly defining our operating budget around filling in the gaps between grant programs, or around grant expiration dates. Worse, long-range planning becomes difficult when our controllable funds are tenuous, and grant availability fluctuates with the political winds.

Over the years, a number of grant-funded (grant-founded, really) programs have attained a certain level of popularity on campus. When the grants expired, the programs became part of the college’s operating budget. In a way, that’s the purpose of grants: they’re often intended to be “seed money,” with the idea that the seed would grow into a permanent part of your plant. I can understand the impulse, but sometimes I wonder if the folks behind the grants actually understand how nonprofits work.

In the non-profit world, the occasional big splash is relatively easy. What’s difficult is maintaining a high level of service over time. In other words, seed money is great, but what we really need is steady, reliable, predictable operating funds.

Steady, reliable, predictable operating funds allow for thoughtful long-term planning, since you can actually have a reasonable idea of the resources you can devote to any given enterprise. They allow for inclusive planning, since promises made can actually be kept. They even allow for meaningful assessments of success or failure, since you can actually keep focus on the same task over time.

When that’s sacrificed to the political winds, and the best you can do is to keep hopping from grant to grant, long-term planning becomes much harder. At any given RFP, you have to drop whatever you’ve been doing and try to match the conditions of the latest program. Multiply that over the years, and you wind up with a crazy-quilt of programs assembled whenever the opportunity came along, rather than a coherent whole.

In better years, when the public subsidies are actually keeping pace with inflation for more than a year at a time, you can fill in some of the gaps with careful planning. But when the public funding gets cut – even worse, when it gets cut at midyear, which is looking increasingly likely – careful planning is off the table. At that point, decisions are made based on exigency, rather than sustainability. (That’s the best case. The worst case has decisions being made based on politics, favoritism, and the like.) And the prospect of not pursuing a grant, any grant, becomes ludicrous – even if the grant isn’t a perfect fit, some of the money can probably be used to save something. Long-term coherence can wait.

My heartfelt plea to granting agencies and philanthropists everywhere: seed money is well and good, but if you’re really serious about improving access to higher education, we need operating funds. Give grants for existing programs. Support existing institutions. Right now we’re running more classes with adjuncts than I care to admit, even while ponying up matching funds for new grants. Honestly, I’d rather skip some new programs and hire some permanent faculty, to give the students those close ties with advisors that we all know they need. (This is one of the underappreciated dynamics behind the shift in administration/faculty ratios: every grant-funded program needs a director.) Extras are great, but first things first.

Comments

Digg This  |  StumbleUpon  |  Save to del.icio.us

The scene: an organizational meeting of the junior lego league, in the elementary school cafeteria. We’re sitting at the picnic-table-style tables, listening to a badly undermotivated teacher explain the lego league. TB and I are patiently waiting for something to happen. A Dad with three boys sits down next to me.

Teacher: and the projects are really about creativity, you know, thinking outside the box...

Boy 1: What box?

Dad: Shhh.

Boy 1: WHAT BOX, DADDY?

Dad (urgent stage whisper): The box inside your head.

Boy 1: I DON’T HAVE A BOX IN MY HEAD!

Dad: Shhh!

Boy 1 (to boy 2): I don’t have a box in my head!

Boy 2: Boxhead!

Boy 1: I’m not a boxhead. You’re a boxhead.

Boy 3 (laughing): boxhead...

And another figure of speech dies at the junior lego league meeting.