What Is Karl Doing?

When I first started this blog, I was uncertain about how much to share about who we were and what we were doing here in Prague.

I got over that. But I neglected to go back and fill in the blanks about what brought us here in the first place.

It's likely that most of the folks who read this know us and know why we're in Prague: Karl, an economics professor at Hartwick College, worked out a position for his sabbatical year at a local university. But knowing that still doesn't tell you what Karl does with his days. As an aunt of Karl's wrote (and I'm paraphrasing here), "I have a pretty good idea what your days are like, Kate, and what the boys are doing, but Karl's life in Prague is a big, black hole."

I gently encouraged Karl to write up a post on what he's doing and how we got here, but other work always trumped this little blog. I finally sent him an email interview. And that's what follows.

So Rita, we're hoping this post starts to fill in some of that hole.

Thanks for taking the time for this, Karl. Tell me, where are you working?

Česká zěmědelská univerzita v Praze. The official name in English is Czech University of Life Sciences Prague. The Czech name is literally Czech Agricultural University in Prague, and they don't want to change that because it's something of a brand name within the country reflecting the university's background as an agricultural offshoot of Charles University.

They still do ag-related things. Next to a fountain in the middle of campus there's a small monument commemorating an international plowing competition held here in 2005, and you'll occasionally see ag equipment on display in one of the classroom buildings. The Technical Faculty (roughly equivalent to a College of Engineering at an American university) posts information about professors' involvement in agriculture here and abroad, with farm equipment and engineering. There's a Faculty of Agrobiology and Food, a Faculty of Natural Resources, a Forestry Faculty, an Institute for the Tropics and Subtropics, and a Faculty of Environmental Studies.

There are a few test fields around the edges of campus (picture below), as well as other properties in other parts of the country.

Most entertainingly, there's an experimental brewery under the auspices of the Technical Faculty. This serves the important pedagogical functions of training students in the skills of brewing, providing a lab for developing small-scale brewing equipment, experimenting with craft brewing techniques -- and offering a great place to entertain visitors to the university.

That said, by far the largest part of the university is the Faculty of Economics, where I teach.

How did you land this gig?

In October 2008 I presented at the First International Meeting on Biophysical Economics.  (The website looks more like a good intention than a living entity. The "News" page hasn't been updated since before the 2009 conference.)  It was a small affair as academic meetings go, about 30 of us in a lecture hall at the SUNY's College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) on the Syracuse University campus. Among the attendees was a Czech couple who have lived in Syracuse since they emigrated to the States. They were friends with the conference organizer, Charlie Hall, and interested in biophysical economics.

Around May 2009 I wrote to Martin (the husband of the couple), saying that I had a sabbatical coming up and was interested in spending it in the Czech Republic. Did he know anyone in the field who might be interested in my experience? He suggested I contact his father-in-law, Milan Vlach, professor emeritus of mathematics at Charles University. I exchanged a few emails with Milan, who then referred me to Prof. Josef Seják from J.E. Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, a city north of Prague near the German border.

Seják is an economist dealing with agriculture, environmental economics, and valuation of ecosystem services. In 2010 he finished a book on Valuation of ecosystem functions and services in the Czech Republic (Warning: large PDF file, and in Czech to boot), written with a team of 17 other researchers from various fields (including Vašek). I wrote to him and sent him some recent work of mine, including an exploration of how economies create value.

After we exchanged a few emails, he wrote in October saying ČZU was interested in arranging a visiting lecturer position for my sabbatical year. Initially it looked as though I would be working at the Faculty of the Environment, then that my time would be divided between the Faculties of the Environment and Economics/Management. But ultimately, my contract was written for work with the Faculty of Economics and Management.

The offices of the Faculty of Economics and Management are housed in this building, but the college is big enough that classes meet all over campus. 

Do you teach in English or Czech?

English. The Faculty of Economics and Management is very proud of having a program with bachelor's and master's degrees taught entirely in English. Students who demonstrate sufficient ability in English may be accepted to degree programs in Agricultural Economics and Management or Information Technology. The vast majority of instruction in the Faculty as a whole is in Czech.

What are you doing?

I'm housed under the Department of International Relations within the Faculty of Economics and Management. I do a grab-bag of teaching. Once a week I lead an informal English class for the staff. In the fall, I filled in for three weeks teaching "English for Academic Purposes" while the regular instructor was away for family matters. I filled in for three weeks at the end of the semester in "English for Business Purposes" for another colleague who was diagnosed with cancer. I taught a four-week unit in "Principles of Ecology," introducing my ecological macroeconomic model. I did another four-week unit in "Natural Resources Management," looking at environmental economics within a framework of property rights.

For the spring, I'm starting off with four weeks of "English for Business Purposes," this time at the master's level rather than bachelor's, subbing again for the colleague being treated for cancer. I'll also be doing three weeks in "Agricultural Economics," and two weeks in "English for Academic Purposes" -- as with “English for Business Purposes,” this is also at the master's level. In addition, I'll be helping some students with the language in their theses.

In a way, the department is most interested in the staff English class. Through 1989, everyone learned Russian in school. The government knew they needed a few English speakers for dealing with the world, but people who knew English would also be able to read any writings from the US or UK that they managed to get their hands on. And the government didn't want that. If you showed too much interest in learning English, that made you somewhat suspect.

After 1990, everyone wanted to learn English -- or rather, most people quickly became aware that it would be advantageous to know English. Schools frantically looked about for ways of getting English teaching into their classrooms. That's partly what I was doing in Plzeň in 1991-92, working both at a high school and in a private language school with evening classes for adults. I was not alone. In addition to bringing in college grads from English-speaking countries, some schools just relabeled their Russian teachers as English teachers and sent them off to battle. You can find Czechs who tell amazing stories about the quality of that instruction.

Over time, the situation has improved considerably. In addition to native English speakers (probably better qualified than the average of the grab-bag that was brought in during the early 1990s), there are more and more Czechs who've had the chance to study English at the university level without political risk as well as many who've had the opportunity to spend time in English-speaking countries. Following the 1989 revolution, there were groups that set up schools taught partly or entirely in English -- for example, my Plzeň landlords sent their kids to a Lutheran-run English-language school which opened its doors in 1992 -- and those have increased. The result is that, for a program like the English-taught degrees at ČZU, with each passing year the incoming students have better and better English-language skills.

The teachers (of subjects other than English) are in a different situation. The younger ones are young enough that they got English in junior high school or even elementary school and they tend to be fairly comfortable with it. But even someone as young as 35 may not have had any English before finishing high school, and anyone 45 or older made it all the way through university in an environment where English was discouraged. Given the college's English-taught program and the academics' interest in being able to communicate with foreign colleagues in their fields, many members of the staff and faculty are motivated to attend a weekly class with a native speaker in which they can practice conversational English, review translation exercises, and even group-edit their scholarly abstracts.

As far as gigs outside of ČZU, I've been invited to speak at a seminar at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University at the end of this month (which will be presented in Czech if I feel up to it at the time).

How is what you are doing different from what you thought you would be doing?

I had envisioned more collaborative work than has panned out thus far. In the Fall, Seják and I met weekly, exchanging ideas. He put me onto some interesting readings. I helped him with the English version of a paper extracted from a book he recently finished with a team of 15 researchers. And we discussed economic problems. Some normal end-of-semester busy-ness on both parts slowed things down. Lately I've been doing a lot of reading and some writing as well as cultivating new connections to develop other interesting conversations. The talk at Charles University is a result of one of these new connections.

The nature of the teaching is also different from what I expected. My understanding was that I would be doing the once-a-week English class for the staff, plus one course a semester: a version of my Hartwick course on "Resources & Growth" in the fall, and something to-be-determined in the spring. Instead, I'm doing these four-week drop-ins, where I do a coherent unit within some other course, or a couple of one-week topics in a course. For instance, next week I'm doing a lecture and seminar on biofuels for the third-year course on agricultural economics, and a couple of weeks later I'll be doing another lecture and seminar on genetically modified organisms, in the same course.

This difference from what I expected is actually welcome. It takes less brain space to organize a smaller unit than to run a whole course, and I've used the opportunity to pull together material and observations that had been piling up in random corners of my mind.

Another surprise has been the difference in expectations about when class schedules are made and students are registered. At Hartwick, the schedule for 2011-12 was made in the fall of 2010. By Christmas, I knew what I would be teaching all next year and what time each course would meet. Next month, students will start registering for Fall classes, and by May I'll have an initial roster for each of my Fall courses, which is likely to change only minimally before classes actually start. There's nothing unusual about that in the U.S. college system. I mention it only because that's not how it is here.

There are two groups of students in the English-taught degree programs at ČZU. Most of them are full-time students of ČZU who have chosen to study in English rather than in Czech. The remainder are what are called "Erasmus" students, who come from all over Europe to spend a semester or two at a university in a different country. The ČZU students follow a very prescriptive program, so if there are 35 third-year students, then you know that the agricultural economics class will have 35 ČZU students. The wild card is that you don't know how many Erasmus students will show up, and you don't know how many of those will choose to take agricultural economics; it could be five, it could be 20, so you don't even know how many seminar sections there will be until just before classes start. On top of that, some of the Erasmus students show up a week or two late, because semester schedules don't necessarily line up across various countries.

Related to the uncertainty about class enrollment is class scheduling. The week before classes start, a class schedule can be completely moved around, with lectures and seminars all happening at different times than you originally thought. Once the semester starts, you don't have to worry about any more of those changes, but then there's "block teaching."

The International Relations Office has connections with academics at universities elsewhere in Europe, and these outside lecturers come in for a week of intensive teaching in a particular subject. During a week that students have block teaching in a one course, they spend a lot of extra time in that class, so their other classes are canceled. So even if the class you're teaching doesn't have any block teaching, some holes will probably show up in your schedule due to the students having block teaching in something else. And the block teaching can change even after the semester starts. So flexibility is a useful attribute.

* * *

I'll corral Karl for another interview soon and see if he'll share some of his impressions of university life, the students here, perhaps his reflections on changes in the country, subtle or obvious, since his time here 18 years ago. If you have any other questions for Karl (or any of us!) feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Speaking of which, following the Billa post, our friend Andrée asked what the average Czech salary was, wondering what percentage of salary went to food. I asked Karl to suss that out and he emailed me a really detailed table, which it seems I've deleted. We'll chase that down again. I know this much: the salaries here are much lower than in the States. Public school teachers start out at the equivalent of about US$12,500, doctors are around US$30,000.