Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

Descended from Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Distinct from Help, I'm trapped in an ivory tower! Or "what the fuck am i getting myself into with this academia stuff" because about institutional collapse more generally not so much the lived experience of being inside collapsing institutions

Or to quote amateurist, "this seems too broad..."

as a progressive empathetic person, I know I should think these adjuncts etc. are being exploited, but as someone who has spent the last 20 years doing jobs that the "academic class" wouldn't deign to stoop to, I feel like they have a sense of entitlement based on a glowing past, perhaps when they were students, and aren't really looking at how shitty other people have it economically.

prior art

generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

one thing i've been thinking about is that this (the mismatch between phd's generated/jobs available) is generally presented as a humanities problem (and in english / philosophy / history in particular -- or that's what i know most about at least)

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

i do suspect that the "applied" end of STEM certainly is in more of a growth period, and e.g. if you want to make it onto tenure track in computer science that seems not an impossible dream still, but that's really an outlier in terms of growth.

i'd be curious to see a good breakdown between fields/departments that actually takes account of the pure/applied split.

as a progressive empathetic person, I know I should think these adjuncts etc. are being exploited, but as someone who has spent the last 20 years doing jobs that the "academic class" wouldn't deign to stoop to, I feel like they have a sense of entitlement based on a glowing past, perhaps when they were students, and aren't really looking at how shitty other people have it economically.

What sorts of jobs? What is this perception of the 'academic class' based on? When I was a sessional, I did plenty of other jobs as well, as did many of my colleagues. I had actually started growing reasonably comfortable with the gig economy. Still, what would you consider fair and appropriate compensation/conditions?

trailing indicators:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/05/the-three-highest-paid-people-at-or-by-the-university-of-notre-dame-in-fy2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/nyregion/dreams-stall-as-cuny-citys-engine-of-mobility-sputters.html

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

yes you can find articles on the postdoc crisis as well. an old girlfriend of mine is now a research biologist working at a major u and it's apparently impossible to get ahead / stable in the face of all the performance-metric bullshit, funding dances, professional hierarchies

In Florida adjuncts can now be up to 70% of a school's teaching staff. There is no and can be no meaningful oversight of the quality of a liberal arts education in the post-MBAification of higher ed, and accreditation bodies are in practice virtually indifferent to the idea of quality academics and instruction anyway. Some of the issues relating to the quality of instruction aren't even new. Many states have long allowed instructors to teach anywhere from 15 to 23 credit hours per semester, and this workload has historically been approved by staff because picking up extra hours meant being able to eat or buy their kids clothes.

My old school's most recent academic growth plan included changing the school's name for the third time in 10 years, building a basketball stadium when the school had no league to play in, renting out for a season a pro baseball field several miles away, and chartering greyhound buses for the purpose of taking students to said baseball field as spectators. Meanwhile its library has shrunk in every five year period since I left, and the school's new president, coauthor of the the academic growth plan, is said to be even worse than its previous president, who didn't understand, for his entire interminable tenure up to the moment of his deferred retirement, when he was practically on death's bed, that his quixotic goals for the school flew in the face of what was statutorily allowable in the state of Florida.

The other school in the region was built on graft and straight up illegality. They needed surveys and tests and permits to build over wetlands and the school's reaction was fuck you, fine us. Three out of five members of the board who voted on the location the board ultimately chose worked for the company that owned the site and the land around site.

80% of the people getting a liberal arts education deserve free or cheap occupational/vocational training. The US workforce is heavily over-credentialed.

If I were king, I would socialize 80% of the private schools.

accreditation bodies are in practice virtually indifferent to the idea of quality academics

SACSCOC is responsible for accrediting more degree awarding institutions than all the universities in the UK, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain and Australia combined, I believe. idk how they are meant to be able to do it properly.

What is this perception of the 'academic class' based on?

the hundred or so people i know IRL who are university faculty (most adjunct) and what they've mentioned in person or in facebook posts on the subject. Almost all are arts and humanities ppl.

So the majority of them are MFA's or MM's (or whatever the official U.S. Music Master's degree is called now) who pursued jobs in higher education partially in order to advance their careers as composers, artists, writers, etc.

one thing i've been thinking about is that this (the mismatch between phd's generated/jobs available) is generally presented as a humanities problem (and in english / philosophy / history in particular -- or that's what i know most about at least)

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

That's true of "some really amazing people," but only some -- in general it would be absurd to the point of offensiveness for Ph.D. students in pure math to compare their situation to that of their fellow students in English. The job situation in math is leagues better and has been for at least twenty years. That might change if universities decide calculus should be taught by machine, or not taught at all, but that hasn't happened yet.

english is another mainstay of service-curriculum needs in most institutions, so…?

It seems inevitable that the admin & sports creep pendulum has to swing back the other way at some point. Or else it's not a pendulum and in that case I don't see how in the world higher education survives in any state resembling my college experience from the late nineties, even.

full disclosure i have not yet read this but ppl i trust are sharing it approvingly on fb:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elephant-seminar-room-phd-saved/

That's true of "some really amazing people," but only some -- in general it would be absurd to the point of offensiveness for Ph.D. students in pure math to compare their situation to that of their fellow students in English. The job situation in math is leagues better and has been for at least twenty years. That might change if universities decide calculus should be taught by machine, or not taught at all, but that hasn't happened yet.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, May 29, 2016 9:47 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think j's point pertains here. there are slots to do undergrad adjuncting in remedial math, but seems to be precious little else. not sure how this is functionally different from introductory english courses. degreewise as a whole, the difference being i think that a math degree better suits you (in terms of how you will be judged) for employment prospects _outside_ of academia than many humanities degrees.

the analogy in that article with the AMA isn't quite right---the AMA restricts the # of MDs each year to help keep wages up, it's rent-seeking. I don't see how an organization could come in now and induce that kind of discipline among Ph.D.-granting departments now.

also ime grad student teaching doesn't add up to a lot of hours / "instructional units", relative to faculty. & sure they do some grading / sections but not *that* much. temp / adjunct teaching is a different story, but cutting a doctoral program wouldn't change radically the kinds of undergrad teaching that regular faculty too. losing the occasion grad course would be a drag, I guess, thoughI only got called up to the big leagues four years ago, & I was happy enough before that. the article *doesn't* mention the loss of institutional prestige in cutting a doctoral program, something admins care about since it can lead to $$$ by donations, both by pumping up occasional alums b/c of the subject area, b/c it contributes to staying within associations like the AAU, or b/c it offers the slim hope of having a faculty member win a big prize.

also ime grad student teaching doesn't add up to a lot of hours / "instructional units", relative to faculty. & sure they do some grading / sections but not *that* much.

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, May 30, 2016 1:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this deeply varies by field. Big intro courses are often taught in ways that are sort of unthinkable without an army of student support. Otoh, I know that often advanced undergrads are given opportunities to TA as well, and so i could imagine institutional shifts towards that as a way to compensate should grad resources be cut.

2 of my math friends who did geo/topo and finished phds in the last year got jack shit. one of them is in nyc trying to get back into banking (which he left to do math), the other spent >a year unemployed and then got a job writing python on another continent :-/

math seems to have a weird job market though. when i asked them about it they didn't apply to that many places and said you needed to have connections so they just applied to places their supervisors told them to. i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with and you can apply to hundreds of depts and interview for dozens. i can see why that doesn't work in math though, where everything's so specialized and it's hard to quickly get a feel for someone's research

xxp i think the faculty themselves can often care a lot about the prestige, too? from their peers, from having students to boss around, etc.

my graduate alma mater scrapped its upper-level writing requirements for u.g. degrees some time ago, end of the 90s i think, and moved to using a writing-intensive designation on courses across disciplines, rather than just requiring something from a range of junior/senior english/rpc courses. my department's offerings would surely change if there weren't grad students around to grade all those papers (in most undergrad courses below the senior level, often the junior level, the faculty grade exactly zero): the curriculum is overloaded with W-designated courses that are meant to lure as many students as possible into taking them for the writing credit.

"i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with and you can apply to hundreds of depts and interview for dozens"

no this exists in math in the states, at the big MAA/AMS joint meeting each January

in my job in cornland we had a doctoral program & I got a grader for my early modern course, sophomore level, but not for my junior/senior courses. I wasn't used to that because in wheatland I did all my own grading, but my colleagues in cornland were...pretty used to having that grading.

faculty definitely care a lot about prestige. I did; I didn't want to stay in wheatland for a bunch of (obv) reasons but one was jumping to a dept with a doctoral program, for the sake of vanity and to teach more advanced material occasionally. but yeah vanity for sure.

here in cheeseland first and second year undergrad courses are split between something like lecture and something like sections, and the person doing the lecture does just a little bit of grading on the final; in the sections you give three exams and if you're teaching those you have to grade them yourself. I taught one of those sections this last term, but the others were either grad students or adjunct-like people.

i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with

some of my housemates from college were discussing this on fb. one is now an econ/applied math professor and the others were bio and pure math people, and the others were envious at the efficiency of the economics faculty job system.

there are slots to do undergrad adjuncting in remedial math, but seems to be precious little else

Just don't think this is really true. To take a good but not top-10 department, University of Illinois, here's their recent job placement info:

http://www.math.illinois.edu/GraduateProgram/doctoral-graduates.html

Lots of these people are going to industry jobs in finance or data science, and lots are going to academic postdocs (which are not adjunct instructorships.) Now you could say maybe the postdoctoral system in math just means these folks are all dumped from the academy three years after Ph.D. instead of right after?

Just googling some of those grads from 2012, who would have been on the TT market this year or last, I see Avsec has a second postdoc at Texas A&M, Butterfield is tenure-track at U Victoria, Choi I can't find, Cummins is TT at West Point, Dixit is TT at IIT-Gandhinagar, Hu is TT at Georgia Southern...

So I just don't think it makes sense to say it's a pipe dream for math Ph.D.s that they're going to get a non-adjunct faculty job; a large proportion still do.

Times Higher Education is launching a new ranking system in September, having decided that the current systems for ranking US schools is 'not fit for purpose'.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/us-college-ranking-launched-by-times-higher-education

Is anyone at NAFSA this week? I'd intended to go this year but it got nixed. Seeing that David Brooks is giving the plenary speech might mean i dodged a bullet.

https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/737541019797848066

with leaders like this the future is bright

dear god

Queens has a good anthropology department, iirc. That doesn't necessarily mean that anyone wants to study it there. It looks like a gloss on market forces at work. Not unrelated:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/tuition-fees-force-students-pick-degrees-salary-prospects

That goes double (or treble) for lucrative international students.

a few theoretical premises / hypotheticals, if i may ~

1. class inequality in the US has been dramatic for some time and continues to slide toward neo-feudalism

2. as in all other prestige professions, those born into privilege are the most "marketable" and thus over-represented in academia

3. to reflect 'the world as it is', why not dispense with the marxist pretenses of our humanities departments altogether, and award college admission and professorships at birth? AP classes and SAT tests would then only be taken by the "smart" comfortable / active / rich kids, to determine where they end up at school (although sooner or later, we might want to consider fine-tuning that, too, to accord with increasing feudalism)

4. the collective sigh of relief among the children of say, the bottom 66%, realizing they're not allowed to take AP classes or SATs like their "smart" comfortable counterparts, could very well release the engines of personal industry, and get this country moving again. first, they might get off their lazy butts and start working earlier. second, instead of taking out student loans upon high school graduation, the bottom two-thirds could take out small business loans. in any event, the money the government would save no longer subsidizing the advanced educations of people not born into comfortable circumstances could then be applied to further tax cuts on the job creators, which can only benefit the less industrious classes who'd be jobhunting at younger and younger ages, a virtuous circle

5. in the short term, this would mean shutting down a ton of schools, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. another drawback would be the shrinking of the NCAA, but perhaps it's time to have basketball and football minor leagues, anyways? the college music scene would likewise shrink, but hey, the obscurer the audience the better!

xxxpost
I wonder how much the econ job market system contributes to their culture of assholishness. They gossip and backstab to rival the cast of Mean Girls: http://www.econjobrumors.com/

But that doesn't mean it's not somehow "efficient"...

What could sociology, anthropology, and history possibly have to do with the analysis of society?

i love EJMR but i think the ass-holishness on display there is just typical conservative message board trolls and doesn't reflect irl. the fact that the polisci and sociology equivalents are just as toxic kinda proves that. all the econ grad students i know are nice people who are disturbed by the stuff written there anonymously by peers

the hundred or so people i know IRL who are university faculty (most adjunct) and what they've mentioned in person or in facebook posts on the subject. Almost all are arts and humanities ppl.

So the majority of them are MFA's or MM's (or whatever the official U.S. Music Master's degree is called now) who pursued jobs in higher education partially in order to advance their careers as composers, artists, writers, etc.

I dunno, the music sessionals I've known have generally either taught a tonne of courses or done other jobs as well (mostly music lessons or some kind of performance/conducting gig but I know people who have done manual labour). I did quite a bit of temping for a while until I was in a place where I could do well enough with other teaching work. I don't necessarily think there should be a really easy ride to tenure and a six-figure salary or anything but I think the labour situation could fairly be described as exploitative in a number of places. The fact that other people are also facing exploitative conditions does not change this.

i'm not quite sure how to work it so that 'area studies' get to be saved but lately i've been feelin the crazy idea that academics should start pushing back hard against usefulness in schools, anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

i guess this would solve nothing tho, since aside from STEM-related fields needed to get the engineers out the door it would mean universities' revenue streams would vanish

I worry that we'd end up with a lot of musicologists who can't play.

The jump in the number of students between 1980 and now, and particularly over the last ten years, has been extraordinary and I'd guess mostly driven by people who were the first in their families to go to college or the children of first generation immigrants. Usefulness isn't just built into the political agenda, it's in the agenda of millions of families where the risk of fronting up college fees needs to be tied to demonstrable increases in conventional employment prospects. Obviously there are questions over how demonstrable those prospects remain but I can't really see much of a way back from here. Business / marketing / finance are also absolutely crucial to the international student demographic, who'll be increasingly important in the the U.S. in the future.

actually i was partly thinking of uselessness as a proxy for (the freedom for) rigorousness and student motivation (perhaps again in the freedom from certain occluding motivations). in my adjuncting adventures i've kicked around to a pretty representative range of the levels of institution in my region, had traditionally/untraditionally good/bad students at all of them, but it seems like the most poisonous combination, pedagogically, has been the ones who are only at college because they (economically) have to be, pursuing a practical major (in that mid range of the ones housed in universities, never traditionally in vocational schools) which has no real or even speculative need for anything like scientific/systematic knowledge, and are fundamentally incurious. it seems as if the traditional disciplines, trying to play the administrative numbers games, just cannot win with those students, thus just cannot win with the administrators.

this is a serious question, but, like, what do marketing majors even study

Every marketing course I've ever seen has been a combination of business fundamentals (intro to business statistics, management theory, finance, business ethics, etc), psych modules and more specific content (retail marketing, digital marketing, etc). As an undergraduate course it does often look like it has been cobbled together but there is also a fairly serious academic discipline behind it that gets fleshed out more at post-grad level and does cross over with the more traditional ideas of applied social science research.

There clearly needs to be viable, respected alternative routes for people who fundamentally don't want to be at university but feel they have no other options though. Whether that is vocational study, apprenticeships or something else, I don't know. Germany is an interesting example of a country that is arguably more 'over credentialed' than even the U.S. but still retains a strong alternative path for less academic students.

it's mean the way vocational schools and the like are under-emphasized in secondary schools. kids who aren't great at school are made to feel like society has no use for them.

even though i agree about incurious marketing students i feel like explicitly railing against 'usefulness' backfires in practice

I dunno, the music sessionals I've known have generally either taught a tonne of courses or done other jobs as well (mostly music lessons or some kind of performance/conducting gig

uh, those are all perfectly respectable. Those aren't at all the types of "wouldn't stoop to x" jobs.

It's a supply and demand problem, as has been mentioned by others in the past dozen posts. Should "we" create more economic opportunities for all the MFAs etc or should there just be less of them? And what hasn't been discussed is education for education's sake. If someone wants a Master's in Music Composition or an MFA in visual art, because it will make them a more emotionally/intellectually fulfilled person, then why shouldn't they? Why should they have to reproduce the means of production by becoming a professor or a professional artist or musician?

This is definitely tied to socioeconomic class, but, this pressure to have a career in what you studied in college feels more pronounced now than when I was in college.

given the cost of college in america, degrees are either 'investments' or luxury goods and if you get a job in your field then you avoid feeling like you bought a luxury good.

Otm

what's wrong with luxury goods?

and "cost" is relative.

nothing's wrong with them, but unlike buying a sportscar a lot of people only find that their degrees were luxury goods after they made the purchase

yeah, it's as if they told everyone that a sports car was the ticket to a well paying job and a comfortable lifestyle and then when you got home they were just lol now you can pay this off for the next 20 years except w/ the sports car you resell it but no one will buy yr diploma even from a fancy college

anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

Coming back to this for a moment, i do think it's at least plausible that a substantial cohort of students might, in the future, decide that a traditional academic university environment isn't the best place to learn business skills. Given the option of studying a degree-level course at a mid-to-low level college / university with little to no 'brand recognition' or studying a vocationally-orientated degree course with a theoretical path to direct employment at IBM College or the Chevron School of Management, i think a lot of people would probably lean towards the latter.

Sumsung does this reasonably successfully in Germany, Canada and the UK, typically at a lower level and in partnership with traditional colleges, but it has the potential to take a much larger segment of the market. One FTSE 100 company in the UK has launched its own stand-alone degrees rubber stamped by a trad university and aims, in the future, to have degree-awarding powers of its own.

This inevitably means the "corporatisation of higher education" and has been resisted on those grounds, and also poses a potential revenue threat to traditional universities, but it could lead to refocusing of attention.

*Samsung

at regional public schools in the u.s. there is a LOT of talk about partnerships between business—often quite local—and universities/colleges, at i know not what levels of remove in terms of money and influence. naturally businesses prefer to offload their training costs onto the taxpayers as much as possible, and lawmakers love to service business interests in politically and ideologically mutually-beneficial ways, but given how savagely lawmakers have been imposing austerity conditions on public schools i wonder just how long this can carry on before they turn things around and start letting business credential its own people to meet its needs directly, rather than using business needs serve as the standard against which supposed failures to (efficiently) educate are occurring.

London Met, one of the most commercially-focused of the new UK universities, is cutting 400 jobs, getting rid of two campus sites and aiming to reduce student numbers to 10,000.

They currently have a student to staff ratio of about 4 to 1, which seems pretty low.

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/may/31/london-university-scraps-400-jobs-and-two-campuses

Also looking to move some of their courses to blended learning.

“What we’re doing is being on the front foot responding to the policy context,” Raftery said. “We’ve got to be way more digital, have way more blended learning... that is built around complex lives, whether students are working or raising kids. This is the reality of our demographic, they’re working their way through university.”

On a similar theme:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/futurelearn-launches-first-moocs-offering-academic-credits

The courses will be free to take, but to collect the credits students will have to purchase a new form of accreditation called a certificate of achievement for each module, costing between £39 and £59 each. They would then have to complete a final assessment, costing several hundred pounds.

Sir Alan Langlands, Leeds’ vice-chancellor, argued that offering credit online could prove to be a valuable recruitment tool for campus-based courses.

“We are very conscious of the fact that, when we start recruiting next for students for 2018, many of them will have been born after the year 2000,” said Sir Alan. “I think young people are going to take a different attitude: they will want high quality, but they will also want flexibility as learners, and maybe some of them won’t want all this to be restricted by geography.

“Developing this longer-term position on digital learning seems very timely from our point of view.”

"digital learning" can significantly lower operation and commuting costs but it's beneath the dignity of many of the privileged who've succeeded as faculty and their younger cohort at prestigious schools *there, in person* to network, make career connections, "have fun", and evaluate lifetime mating and investment opportunities, so implementation could lag. ultimately though perhaps the underclasses can happily be kept out of the "good" schools altogether, by dangling the convenience of online learning?

something that bugs me about this "there are too many graduates in X" arguments is like... ok, there aren't professorships waiting for everyone, but, its nonetheless actually possible to not treat people that are just instructors and not on tenure track like actual professionals and not just disposable faces, even if there are a fair supply of people potentially willing to adjunct.

and if you pay people properly to do professional development you'll probably get much better instructors over the long haul -- so partly i feel like somehow academia has actually devalued the teaching aspect very drastically even as you have a huge influx of students, and thats weird to me.

teaching is for suckers. successful academics are researchers, first, last, and always

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/want-to-know-why-professors-dont-teach/article1202892/

One FTSE 100 company in the UK has launched its own stand-alone degrees rubber stamped by a trad university and aims, in the future, to have degree-awarding powers of its own.

no link yet to the study on how for-profit universities apparently actually damage the earning potential of people who attend them?

Margaret Wente = the worst

xps, Pearson, validated by Royal Holloway.

I kind of want to become a stockbroker.

xp to tomboto

these two links give a (somewhat conflicting) overview of the data about private/for-profite ed and earnings

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/04/11/the-obama-administrations-claim-that-72-percent-of-for-profits-programs-have-graduates-making-less-than-high-school-dropouts/

http://blog.ed.gov/2014/04/fact-too-many-career-training-programs-lead-to-low-wages-high-debt/

xp - plenty of stockbrokers went to my college and got essentially "sports car" degrees, in that what they majored in had nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of being a stockbroker

that's what i am thinking.... i have no love for finance, but i have other (more pro-social) small business ideas that i wouldn't want to pursue until i built up some savings and (lol) knew about business.

so like, not necessarily being a stock broker, but i am increasingly considering trying to find a place in the private sector workforce that is not related to writing or teaching, the things i always thought of as "my things." still researching this stuff -- maybe not so fruitful to discuss on ilx.

you don't learn how to run a small business by becoming a stockbroker. you do so by working for one, though it definitely varies by business type, but a lot of stuff is the same, ... or you just start one and learn by trial and error.

yeah that's a good point. i think i mostly want to just be financially solvent so i can think about taking risks.

i definitely get the sense that us small business ppl are definitely a minority on ilx

but let me tell you, my college education was very valuable in that it taught me how to fill out forms. Like, I'm pretty damn good at filling out forms. Finding the instructions for the forms. Determining which instructions and boxes are relevant and irrelevant ... being good at filling out forms is a really valuable professional skill.

so much of adulthood seems to be filling out forms.

no link yet to the study on how for-profit universities apparently actually damage the earning potential of people who attend them?

Again, it comes back to a massive failure of regulation and i don't think tightening the rules around funding and applying a 'gainful employment' metric that just looks at elevated earning potential comes close to solving it.

For-profit colleges probably do increase earnings potential, simply by virtue of people being able to apply to jobs that require college degrees, but if billions in federal funding is going to be ploughed into for-profit colleges, there has to be a much stronger regulatory framework for checking whether they're actually providing educational value as well. A lot of them are very good but clearly many that could meet the new criteria are still basically a waste of time and money. Stopping the GI bill funding courses with a 13% graduation rate is the easy part, tackling 'quality' in the for-profit and not-for-profit sector is much harder but absolutely essential in the long term if a degree is going to maintain any inherent value.

pro-tip - don't steal code :(

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/report-at-least-two-shot-on-ucla-campus.html

i read that the professor didn't steal code and the shooter was delusional

any murderer is delusional imho

so much of adulthood seems to be filling out forms.

Even when you aren't filling out forms, most of professional communication is an indirect form filling activity. You write justifications that become decision memoranda which are realized as a signature on a form. You give people directions that become the population of a form and the receipt of the form by some other processing entity, which turns completed forms into travel visas, work orders, bills of materials, etc. Information and communication tailored to make it possible for complete strangers to efficiently work "together."

I forget how I found it but we have a copy of this and it's neat: http://www.thamesandhudson.com/The_Form_Book/9780500515082

graduation rate is a shitty metric! all that does is penalize schools that let in the people with high school degrees who aren't prepared for college work. there's this enormous gap between "having a high school degree" and "being prepared for college".

but let me tell you, my college education was very valuable in that it taught me how to fill out forms. Like, I'm pretty damn good at filling out forms. Finding the instructions for the forms. Determining which instructions and boxes are relevant and irrelevant ... being good at filling out forms is a really valuable professional skill.

― sarahell, Thursday, June 2, 2016 6:10 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this very david foster wallace esque

this is*

http://prospect.org/article/meanwhile-back-most-campuses

$$$$

less privileged undergraduates / graduates are gauche

good article, in sync with my ten-ish years teaching at public unis in the American Midwest.

Margaret Wente = the worst

Since I should back this up, I'll start by listing assertions that Wente does not back up in the article that reggie linked:
"student engagement is at an all-time low, according to numerous surveys.": none of which are listed
"Educating undergraduates is just about the last thing most professors want to do.": supported by one anecdotal quotation
" as enrolment soared, teaching loads - with the help of strong faculty unions - went down": no figures provided
"Of course there's prep time and marking and so on. But it's still not much.": no figures provided re hours. A 2/3 load doesn't sound unreasonable to me at all, even if I am not sure most seasoned profs are spending as much time as this guy says he is.
" Professors are rewarded not for turning out high-quality graduates, but for turning out books and papers - even if they are unread. "

and then just note how closely she followed this template in this piece. Maybe her professors should have taught her research and argumentative writing skills instead of getting high with undergrads?

She got caught plagiarizing again last month.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/inside-the-globe/public-editor-prose-must-be-attributed/article29749706/

Ugh.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-university-business-20160602-snap-story.html

and

https://www.aaup.org/article/does-academic-freedom-have-future#.V1SpPZMrKRt

(interesting mainly because of the source)

probably don't agree with 90% of this article, but its of interest as well:

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1430-why-faculty-searches-fail

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/for-profit-companies-nonprofit-colleges/485930/

A fairly slanted piece on 'online programme management'. Doesn't mention Laureate, for some reason, though i would have thought they'd be one of the market leaders in the US.

re. failed searches: once you have a your short list, things can get very personal, and the logic of those decisions would be inexplicable outside of that context (sometimes inexplicable in that context). It's never about just that search, but the next one, and the next one after that.

xp what do you mean by "slanted"?

It presents OPM in an unremittingly negative light when the reality is more nuanced. If universities are going to diversity into online delivery, it's ludicrous to expect each one to reinvent the wheel, with all the variable quality / expertise that would come with that.

OPM can vary from assisting with marketing to providing every element of curriculum design, courseware, platform and teaching (effectively running a distinct degree programme with the university just providing the badging) - and the pricing model reflects that variety. Metrics around pricing would almost always include retention and progression. If students don't stick with it (which is fairly unusual on some university-only online degrees) the company doesn't get paid.

Lots of very good universities in the US, UK and Canada have these kinds of relationships and, though there is scope for "predatory" behaviour, every university that does engage with the idea is putting their reputation on the line so has the ultimate incentive to make sure that what's being offered is of an appropriate standard.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-university-business-20160602-snap-story.html

The decline of the best public university systems in the country is fucking terrible for this country and to a certain extent the world.

The best part of this article? He correctly argues that the system is well fucked and he doesn't even have to bring up the NCAA!

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/for-profit-companies-nonprofit-colleges/485930/

A fairly slanted piece on 'online programme management'. Doesn't mention Laureate, for some reason, though i would have thought they'd be one of the market leaders in the US.

Gawker on the Laureate / Clinton connections:

http://gawker.com/the-clintons-have-a-for-profit-college-problem-of-their-1781631216

man, honorary chancellor, that's gotta be a sweet gig

https://twitter.com/LIU_FF

holy cow, this is nuts.

yeah, I really hope this backfires on them hard. Trying to understand what was going through the admin's head, like it had to be a power move rather than an attempt to permanently replace everyone, but it's just going to damage the university so much.

I think they were hoping this could be swiftly and efficiently blamed on the union, that students would turn against the faculty, the union would cave, and then be permanently weakened. Too soon to say but my gut is saying that it won't play out like this, especially since the selection of completely incompetent in-house scabs will make for irresistible hooks in the press. I mean it's clear that the university doesn't give a shit about anybody being educated and I think most students have a pretty good radar for that.

students are also pretty willing to not go to class in the name of just about anything

http://activehistory.ca/2017/03/shes-hot-female-sessional-instructors-gender-bias-and-student-evaluations/

this is not coddling related per se, but I guess this is the best thread for it? was thinking that some of the factors ppl have identified as causes of the polarising behavior discussed itt could also be factors here as well (treating students more like consumers with corresponding "the customer is always right" attitudes etc)

― soref, Friday, 31 March 2017 12:09 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

One of the rolling academia threads would be the best place for that but, yeah, there's a mountain of literature on the uselessness of student evaluations, the factor discussed in that article being but one of the reasons. I'm just thankful that I now teach under Program Chairs who agree.

― My Body's Made of Crushed Little Evening Stars (Sund4r), Friday, 31 March 2017 12:39 (thirty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A useful archive of some of the literature: http://studentevaluationsareworthless.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-student-evaluations-of-teachers-are.html

― My Body's Made of Crushed Little Evening Stars (Sund4r), Friday, 31 March 2017 12:40 (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess I don't think they're useless/worthless, since they can provide very valuable feedback. However, they can make or break your career when you are sessional, since departments sometimes use them as the sole measure of someone's teaching, which is a highly inappropriate use for them.

― My Body's Made of Crushed Little Evening Stars (Sund4r), Friday, 31 March 2017 12:41 (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I can't find the rolling academia thread either so: I'm not sure that that Vimy Ridge incident couldn't have happened to a male professor tbh. As a (non-white and at-the-time young-looking) male instructor, I will note that in my first 2.5 years of teaching, I received plenty of challenges to my authority, ranging from students openly chatting throughout every class, no matter how many times I asked them not to; students who obviously plagiarized telling me aggressively "I'm not taking a zero" before slamming the door; a student asking repeatedly "where are you getting this information? Is it just from the Internet?" to the point where I started including bibliographies with my Powerpoint presentations; students refusing to leave my office after fighting a grade (for frankly worthless work) for 20-30 minutes...

― My Body's Made of Crushed Little Evening Stars (Sund4r), Friday, 31 March 2017 13:04 (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i work at a university. before getting my permanent job i was in the temp pool. one of my assignments was doing data entry on a batch of student evaluations for the linguistics department. some of the shit students would write would be crazy, in terms of being extremely negative about instructors who were broadly popular. was also strangely common for both male and female instructors to get comments about how cute or hot they were

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Friday, 31 March 2017 18:12 (eighteen seconds ago) Permalink

Yeah, I mean, I've got "Prof S has nice hair" in student feedback, and guys get chillis all the time on Ratemyprofessor, although I've no doubt that it happens more to women.

it was more common with women for sure

Aargh fuck kill

i had a friend who had something like that happen, an adverse tenure verdict from an admin above the department level hanging on selective readings of the teaching portfolio. but it was only partway through the process and i helped my friend defend himself more forcefully in the reply letters that the process allowed for, and he won out in the end by swaying the remaining parties to vote yes.

https://www.wired.com/story/a-weird-mit-dorm-dies-and-a-crisis-blooms-at-colleges/

At that point the administration began what it called a formal review, including one-on-one interviews with all house residents. Barnhart announced this process at 10 pm in a hastily called meeting with all house residents. In that meeting, the students asked Barnhart if they could have a lawyer present in the one-on-one interviews and were told they could not. Students in the house say these mandatory interviews felt like interrogations, with questions centering on whether drugs were sold or used in the house. “This was Lord of the Flies,” Johnson says. “They wanted us to turn on each other.”
After the review, the turnaround was deemed a failure and five sophomore Senior House students were referred to the disciplinary committee. The unconfirmed story around the house was that these students had, using a group chat application, arranged to buy cocaine for a party.

poll: which group chat app did the five MIT sophomores use to buy cocaine

MIT’s dismantling of Senior House is part of a nationwide trend on college campuses, a shift that places a premium on safety, orderliness, and minimal bad publicity above all. Experts trace the roots of this shift to the 1980s. Since then, college tuition has skyrocketed and with it the competition for students who can afford it. Parents footing the bill are paying a lot more attention. The world has become more litigious and more corporate. All of this has led to an atmosphere in which university administrations have little margin for error when it comes to student safety or even bad publicity. And in this risk-averse atmosphere, places like Senior House, Eclectic, and Ricketts are increasingly viewed as unacceptable liabilities. “I first noticed this paternalistic ethos when I was doing some lectures at Vanderbilt University,” says sociologist Frank Furedi of the University of Kent and author of the book What’s Happened to the University? “There were all these campaigns being organized across America against drinking beer,” he says. “And I remembered that when I was in college the whole point was to get drunk.”

this all strikes me as so depressing and stupid and war-on-drugs pointless, it doesn't have any positive impact on the overall culture of our 17-24 year old campus set whatsoever, just forces the weird kids to live with more people who don't like them or understand them. Grrrr.

http://quillette.com/2018/03/02/academic-mob-fatal-toll/

I wonder if the author of that piece even understands what Quillette is, and how the article is going to be understood by that audience ("scientific" race/class/gender status quo defenders)

That’s not a bad write-up, nice use of a grisly tabloid horror story to hook you in, but I’m concerned that a professor of cultural anthropology had to go through all of that in order to figure out that we’re not very far removed from pan troglodytes

Causation of individual suicides is a bad route to start with there

*scrolls through the quillwette.com home page*

*FPs Mordy for being an imbecile and/or troll*

Also, autocorrect really hates that site’s domain name. Good job, autocorrect, first compliment ever.

oh no an article from quillette a magazine you've literally never heard of before 5 minutes i'm obv some idiot or troll gmafb dude you're a total cartoon

I don’t need to have heard of something to decide that an outlet that uses the word “transgenderism” in a headline is probably not worth my time

and silby another guy who i consider an omnivorous reader who never give kneejerk judgements to things based on other articles they share space with. i mean look i get it the whole valorous wokelord thing and it's appeal to you but can't you assume the shtick is ingrained enough that you don't need to keep rehearsing? i'll just assume you'll never read anything i ever post since i mean how much reading do you really do anyway i've gotta wonder.

I mean I read the thing you linked but I have to, you know, make time in the day for baking muffins

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6b/Joan_of_Arc_on_horseback.png/236px-Joan_of_Arc_on_horseback.png

l-r tombot, silby

I do less reading than I’d like but more than I did a few years ago, if you really are wondering xps

I mean yes groupthink dynamics and shunning have likely ruined academic lives ever since some Bolognese decided they didn’t like the cut of the new guy’s jib in 1440 or something like that, I don’t know what the linked article, which centers on an incident 24 years past, is supposed to tell us about our times let alone “the shitbin” of the thread’s title. Since I can’t precisely perceive its point I have to resort to its context, which seems to be the sort of self-satisfied supposed contrarianism of right-wing pseuds that future clerks for Clarence Thomas jerk off to in the Yale Law toilets.

Mordy is trying to elevate his victim status to the level of an anthropology Ph.D. who was denied tenure by a pile of sexist assholes at UT Knoxville

For whatever reasons, Mordy has been in a sour mood lately on ilx. whether this mood is general or just confined to ilx is not answerable.

Neither of the women in that piece were mobbed for their work or their beliefs or their controversial research btw - it would appear they both fell victim to being the most qualified female in their departments, and then the old guard found a way to get rid of them because women aren’t supposed to talk at meetings.

That’s not “rolling higher education into the shitbin” to me - that’s “why we need to roll a lot of higher education into the shitbin”

And the prize for Quisling of the Year goes to:
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/chambers-part-time-professors-should-be-paid-based-on-merit

at least they didn't publish it today (May 1)

If some part-time professors neglect to publish

https://www.salon.com/2018/09/08/a-witch-hunt-or-a-quest-for-justice-an-insiders-perspective-on-disgraced-academic-avital-ronell/

alas despite taking a class w/ ronell i did not have the pleasure of seeing this side of her however it was my experience more broadly that the academy at least in NY was comprised of cults of personalities + toadies, that more political machination took place than scholarship, and that generally people were cruel (to each other, to themselves) and dispirited. anyway i'm extremely happy i left, tho i still mourn the fantasy of the academy that had originally motivated me.

I'm happy to never have heard of this person, except in regard to this scandal. NYU seems like such a shitty place.

The stat I like to cite about NYU is it meets 70% of demonstrated financial aid need for undergrads compared to 90% for basically all its peer institutions and 100% for the wealthiest Ivys. It’s a real estate developer financed by student loans.

It was several years ago that I last dug into that though; maybe things have improved in that regard

These Ronell stories are funny to me because I think I went 6 months at at time without talking to my phd adviser at all.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/06/new-research-graduate-student-mental-well-being-says-departments-have-important

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2010-11-10-138

this is old (still awesome) but i just wanted to say

Disrespectfully yours,

Gregory A Petsko

lol

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2019/08/great-university-con-how-british-degree-lost-its-value

British academic friends sharing this article say it's the real deal. I saw similar things when teaching uni in the USA, though not as overt as admins raising faculty-assigned marks to satisfy student demands. I know things aren't like this in France & I don't think they're like this in Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, or the Netherlands, whose systems I know best.

Robbins advocated a near tripling of the number of school leavers going to university by 1980, from one in 20 to one in eight. The government would have to commit to decades of investment in higher education. With enough funding, universities would, in turn, uphold their standards – continuing to bring elite education to a wider, less selective pool of students.

“The essential aim of a first degree,” Robbins explained, “should be to teach the student how to think.” What was needed was “regular personal contact” and “the regular and systematic setting and returning of written work”. Academics could only offer so much if they were free to teach. Though a pre-eminent scholar, Robbins was categorical: a lecturer’s research should “naturally grow out of teaching”. He went on: “We should deplore any artificial stimulus to research.” Published work, he added, “counts for too much”. Erudite teachers who never published were nevertheless “priceless assets” to any university.

correct

All the academics I’ve seen discussing this have been raging. It’s very hyperbolic.

Standard setting is an issue but the fundamental change over the last thirty years has been a shift in the emphasis from independent-reading-led degrees to ones that follow a very clearly delineated taught model aiui.

There is much less of an onus on students to do their own research and much more focus on set resources / exams, making them more similar to the A-Level model. I’m agnostic on whether that is good or bad but it’s much easier to know what’s required to get good grades. The support model for students is completely different as well. The question isn’t ‘is this a worse model than 1990’ or w/e, it’s ‘does this model achieve what it sets out to do?’.

the studies cited are likely problematic in lots of ways, but they indicate that British (or just English?) degree holders are less well trained than they were in the past, compared to their international cohorts.

teaching can follow a "read these texts / answer these questions" model without being bullshit. obviously a lot rests on the format of those questions & how they're being marked.

but maybe even "read these texts" can be construed as "independent-reading-led" or "taught"? my courses, like most French philo courses at least, have robust reading lists & then I talk about some part of that list each week. the best trained students will be those who actually read the texts, since I only have a couple of hours with those students per week to talk about the texts. that right there is a mix of "independent reading" and "taught". I'm not sure if "independent-reading-led" is supposed to mean the Oxbridge tutorial model?

(my friends who've been on Oxbridge faculties have begrudged the amount of time they have to spend on teaching and seem to leave for lighter teaching places (outside of the UK, since otherwise you're losing a lot of relative prestige))

The OECD report focuses on basic literacy and numeracy skills iirc, which are an issue throughout the British education system and not something that universities are particularly meant to be fixing. There’s are valid concerns about the impact of marketisation and internationalisation but, as far as I can tell, they’re concerns shared by the vast majority of university systems in the Anglosphere.

The piece is weaves together a lot of anecdotal, highly-slanted commentary to make out that British degrees are variously ‘a con’, ‘a fraud’, ‘sub-prime’, etc to feed a very well-worn trope about too many people going to university - as though a system designed to allow the best-positioned 5-10% of the population to be “taught how to think” is the optimal model we should be aiming for. By and large, UK university degrees are still good and the obsession with ‘grade inflation’ largely pointless.

The fundamental questions for me are ‘does university do what it is supposed to do?’ and ‘can we agree on what it’s supposed to do?’. The fact that the university experience is different to that of previous generations doesn’t answer either, in itself.

‘Independent-reading-led’ probably isn’t the best way of phrasing it but I think the focus on students being trained to do their own research has largely fallen away at UG level.

grades are dum

In a U.K. higher ed context, absolutely. My American boss asked me to explain the grading categories to him when filtering CVs and my advice was ‘ignore them, they’re meaningless’. They could quite easily be scrapped. That’s fine, imo. There is little point having standardised grading when you don’t have standardised assessment. You have either met the requirements to earn a degree or you haven’t.

sv, as ever, otm

My British academic friends seem to think that the article is spot on in its hyperbole. It may matter that these friends are staff at Russell Group unis?

I don't see see why grades, or "the obsession with ‘grade inflation’", is "largely pointless". I suppose in a world where British graduates have no freedom of movement in Europe, jobs in Europe will be unusual, but grades are an important way to decide between job candidates (I am not talking about academic jobs).

When I hear the term "assessment" I know that someone's trying to scam. The QAA is bullshit.

What do u think grades tell u about someone Euler

They tell me about relative control of the material

^ That is one finely considered sentence.

That only really works with consistency of material and within a particular cohort. Grades might arguably allow you to judge the ranking of students on a course at a specific university but without uniformity of standards, they can’t tell you a great deal about relative achievement cross different universities and different courses. They never have.

Humanities courses have traditionally returned fewer first class degrees than STEM ones. The middle third of students on an exceptionally demanding, and in-demand, course might be more capable than the top five percent on a course with relaxed entry standards. Some universities are much better than others. This has broadly always been true and employers factor that in when screening applicants.

There are some specific careers where there is a stigma associated with getting less than a 2:1 but ime, the first thing employers generally look at is which degree you studied, followed by which university you went to - with degree class probably fourth after A-Level results. A 2:1 from a prestigious university in a traditional subject is typically going to be worth more than a first from a less prestigious one, whether it should or not.

Grade inflation may exist at some universities but the market has vast experience in factoring stuff like that in. It’s a national obsession, though, and most of the claims made about it below university level don’t stack up. The root, aside from antipathy to young people in general, is a belief that most people are fundamentally not worth educating, most humanities are pointless and political correctness demands prizes for all. It’s politics, not pedagogy, and the NS complaining about ‘taxpayers’ money being wasted’ and universities not grading on normal distribution curves echoes some of the worst commentary from the right-wing press.

The opening up of access means that huge numbers of very talented people who would have been excluded from higher ed by circumstance, finance or limited expectations have an opportunity to go. The kneejerk, reactionary approach that determines their degrees to be worthless, or a scam on the taxpayer, is enormously damaging.

There was a comment under one of the author’s tweets from someone quoted in the piece - agreeing that some of the issues raised are valid and important but disagreeing with the conclusion that the system is broken / worthless. U.K. universities are under constant commercial stress that puts standards at risk but they also, generally, stand up well vs the international average thanks to a high quality of teaching and good syllabus design. I work with internationally mobile students and, to some extent, with employers and the cachet associated with the U.K. Education brand is still very high.

The moan about league tables seems a bit of a tangent:

These league tables are given credibility by the newspapers that publish them, without those papers having either the desire or ability to affirm their legitimacy. They are not overseen by universities or government. There is limited academic research to verify the accuracy or relevance of any of the data in them. And yet, they direct the decisions of hundreds of thousands of students year after year.

I mean, there are objective stats people can look at to compare courses (Unistats, for example, which is overseen by a public body) which isn't mentioned. All league tables surely come with a healthy warning to actually understand what they measure, so you can decide if that's important to you, as one of the 'hundreds of thousands' of students who apparently really really care about them?

The root [of the national obsession with grade inflation], aside from antipathy to young people in general, is a belief that most people are fundamentally not worth educating, most humanities are pointless and political correctness demands prizes for all. It’s politics, not pedagogy, and the NS complaining about ‘taxpayers’ money being wasted’ and universities not grading on normal distribution curves echoes some of the worst commentary from the right-wing press.

I don't believe that most people should enter, under economic duress of course, what is to me a university education. I gather you & I do not agree about ‘does university do what it is supposed to do?’ and ‘can we agree on what it’s supposed to do?’. In France we have a wide variety of post-secondary institutions that would be called 'trade schools' in English. I think that universities in the English-speaking world as we have known them handle too many students, and should be shrunken considerably, replaced with trade schools.

Is there a deficiency of tradesmen such that an expansion of trade schools could supply them? Who are you going to route into a trade school? On what criteria? What if someone wants to be an underwater welder but get a liberal education first?

xp do you mean the equivalent of Further Education colleges (age 16-19)?

Is there a deficiency of tradesmen such that an expansion of trade schools could supply them

Isn't there?:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5054456

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/04/25/605092520/high-paying-trade-jobs-sit-empty-while-high-school-grads-line-up-for-university

in France middle school students are given the choice between trade high schools and "general" high schools. Then at the end of high school, students in both types of high schools can choose between trade schools and "general" universities. School councilors advise students on their choices but it's the choice of the student and her family. The advise is given on the basis of the student's interests during their four years of middle school (high school is three years), and her grades during that time. The thinking is that if a student has not adapted well to general subjects like mathematics, history and French during middle school, then it is best that they not continue with those courses in high school. They can learn a trade like a mechanical art (car repair, plumbing, electrical work), a medical or laboratory technician, or to be a chef or baker, for instance. Nursing used to be a trade but since 2009, unfortunately, it has become part of the university system.

To the question of whether there's a deficiency of trade jobs: these are often rather physically demanding jobs but at least in our economy here, they are good jobs.

In my twenty+ years of teaching university students I have met many students who wanted to get a liberal education after doing something else first (like serving in the military, being a stay-at-home mother, or doing construction work). The few cases I've known of students doing trade work after university are those who experienced problems in university: e.g. they didn't dream of being janitors, though they did eventually embrace that as a job during which they would have a lot of time to think.

I don't know what Further Education colleges are, exactly, but I don't think so. Those sound like our (French) trade high schools (les lycées professionnel et les lycées technologiques). I am talking more about trade universities (for examples, les instituts universitaires de technologie, IUT).

Anyway, I'm actually on board with welders taking a few years to read Joyce. xp

(But is that what is happening most of the time?)

A lot of this article reminded me of my own experience as a humanities undergraduate at a "prestigious Russell Group university" 30 years ago. Very few people got firsts, but it was pretty easy to get a 2:1. I wasn't required to do many essays, attandance was not closely monitored, I didn't read many of the set texts, and the exams were similar every year, so if you got the past papers from the library you could predict the questions. And I left entirely unprepared for the world of work.

I'm a huge proponent of vocational education - both as a stand-alone thing and, where appropriate, as a non-traditional pathway into university. There are challenges, not least the negligible amount of industry we have in the UK, but it's a valuable resource. I'd argue if someone really wants to go into hospitality, it may be better for them to do a BTEC or HND in something very specific to their area of interest, rather than be pressured into three years of university studying something unconnected.

The move to shift learners on to vocational tracks at 14 hasn't been working particularly well as a lot of parents feel it's too early to decide. Vocational provision at FE colleges, etc, is pretty good though. The government should be doing a lot more to elevate the standing of vocational courses and encourage employers to drop degree requirements from job listings wherever they can, etc.

However, that has to be an organic process of persuasion, rather than further capping university numbers or de-funding courses. I think only around 30% of school leavers go to university at present, and that drops to 15% for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The best predictor of whether you'll go to university remains whether your parents did. There's a vast number of people not served by any form of tertiary education. Looking at how to get some of that 30% out of university, rather than how to get more of the 70% in to some form of education (be it university, vocational colleges, apprenticeships, etc), seems like misplaced energy.

I think we can work on both : improving the education given to students admitted to universities, and finding a way to educate those not served by the current system. my job entails doing the former and I obviously write from that perspective, but not at the expense of the latter. I don't think lowering the level of university education is the answer, though, as the article suggests and my British academic friends confirm is being done. one of them pointed out that New Labour sought to game the system in exactly this way, and the Tories have tried to keep that up while privatizing in order to extract rents. I hope that Labour nowadays has a better plan. Corbyn's roots in trade unions give me hope that Labour today could revalorize trade education from high school up. I support the same here in France, as do many of my colleagues here.

The move to shift learners on to vocational tracks at 14 hasn't been working particularly well as a lot of parents feel it's too early to decide.

I agree with those parents. Age 14 brings many ancillary complications which can interfere with clarity about a young person's talents and interests. Seems better to create a larger age 'window' during which this opportunity was easily available. Possibly attach increments of rising incentives followed by receding incentives for making the decision at an earlier or later age within that window.

There’s also the pace of technological change. What seems to require a baccalaureate one year could become a vocational business a few years later, or vice versa. I’m thinking about coding, other network/IT jobs, multimedia work, etc.

Euler why did you say “unfortunately” regarding how nursing is now a vocational school thing in France?

he's saying it was vice versa; it moved from the trade track to the university track

Yes I think nursing should still be vocational.

in the USA nursing is kinda "all of the above", you don't need a bachelor's degree to become an RN but the Bachelor of Science in Nursing exists for both first-time undergraduates and as post-baccalaureate programs and there's graduate degrees in any number of practice specialties for nurses.

Vocational provision at FE colleges, etc, is pretty good though. The government should be doing a lot more to elevate the standing of vocational courses and encourage employers to drop degree requirements from job listings wherever they can, etc.

"[Now] a note that some of you might find crass, or even offensive ": https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/university-of-calgary-ian-holloway-law-sessional-uofc-1.5403576?fbclid=IwAR2xA5Os-EnobEN4UmVZNb9HCw2zVTwEIFef4GIpHH194Uk6D-OI6rkzNp4

(For context, this is happening at a public institution in the richest province in the country.)

eh it's a law school, whatever

Really? I'm not really in favour of asking employees to donate their pay to their employer, especially when their employment is precarious and especially in the context of also informing them about impending position cuts.

Regardless of the kind of school. Not like the students are attending for free.

As the article says, the temps in question are lawyers doing this on the side. This isn’t a general university issue, but an issue of the law school.

I'm standing by the previous post (esp bc I think "mostly" is doing a lot of work). They can start a podcast if they want to give away tips for free.

The 5% cut is the university-wide issue.

The dean's salary - which is surely over $6k; is he donating any of it? - is coming at least in part from tuition dollars the students are paying for the sessionals' instruction. Whether they have good day jobs is beside the point imo.

The 5% cut was a provincial choice, not a university choice. But I’m not trying to argue about this; obviously an employer asking employees for donations to pay for their workplace is terrible. My thought is that law schools are quite different than universities as a whole—in bad ways of course, they’re greedy and lazy places. I wouldn’t infer anything general from what they do.

I don't think I said at any point that the university as a whole, and only the uni, is responsible for this, but fair enough if your point is that this is a "law schools exist in an eternal shitbin" issue as opposed to a "higher education into the shitbin" issue.

Totally, just that

UCSC administration is attempting to frighten faculty, graduate students, and undergrads from standing in solidarity with teach other. I just sent this message to the over 300 students I'm teaching this term. https://t.co/RtI8Uwu4sP pic.twitter.com/df1pM6DUcP

— yung epistemologist #FreeLiyah (@touchfaith) February 8, 2020

A colleague who works at a small private university in socal, a European who kept his job here (in France you can go on leave for up to five years and the job stays yours, without pay obv), is asking those of us in Europe to let colleagues here know about the devastation coming to usa higher education, so that Europeans will finally drop whatever (ill-guided) dreams they may have had of relocating to the usa, and warn prospective grad students away from usa universities (since there will be no jobs for them upon completion, even more than there were no jobs before)(yes, you can get a lot less than zero, because a doctorate from the usa doesn't mean very much when you're trying to get a job in European academia).

i think this was a long time coming for many reasons - but maybe particularly bc of just the massive generational size difference btwn millennials (children of boomers iow echo-boom) + zoomers and below, even b4 dealing w/ economic/debt issues that will also be exacerbated by this crisis.

Euler, didn't you get a European job with a doctorate from the US?

that's right, Sund4r, and that's why I know that it's exceptional! also I know a lot of Euros with usa doctorates who get stuck in shitty small american towns but thought they'd end up in NYC, not understanding how shitty 99% of the usa is. and they're forever damaged goods in their home countries because there's a certain amount of patronage in getting a job and you only earn that patronage at home.

Mordy, right, it's the economic/debt issues that I'm thinking of. cohort sizes changing will have an effect especially on specialized places, like unis for religious denominations on the decline (thinking chiefly of mainline-ish protestant places, which litter the usa, but also catholic ones. don't think Jewish instituions are under this threat)

since there will be no jobs for them upon completion, even more than there were no jobs before

0 x 0 = 0

(My bitterness knows no bounds.)

Jewish institutions should be spared the worst demographic crunch but YU seems perpetually under threat bc MoDox in general is an endangered species and "higher education" in Ortho Jewish institutions means yeshivas. I don't know how JTS is weathering these storms but I wouldn't be surprised if they're struggling as well, as I understand Conservative and other liberal denominations are.

otoh iirc i think i saw that even liberal jews are growing in real numbers partic just smaller % bc of massive charedi growth so maybe they'll all do fine as long as jewish pop is growing

ignore 'partic' plz part of sentence i deleted*

my contact with yeshivas is mostly in Israel (I spent some time at Mir Yeshiva in December), but I reckon they're pretty similarly run elsewhere, and yeah, that's a completely different world than the degree-seeking aim of higher education that's dominant otherwise.

what did you do at Mir?? when i was in high school Mir was one of the feeder schools for bochurim who went to israel for bais medresh (a few students also went to ponevezh every year) most students stayed in the states at the yeshiva and eventually lakewood

one of my friends/hosts in Jerusalem took me there for part of a day, because his son has been a rosh yeshiva there, having married into the family (a Lithuanian family whose name I've forgotten).

and oh no no no, I just learned that that friend, who took me to Mir, died of the virus today in Jerusalem. He was a great philosopher of mathematics, trained at Princeton, then a longtime faculty member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. RIP.

baruch dayan emes sorry such sad news

thanks Mordy. Here's a link.

My condolences, Euler. RIP.

Sorry to hear, Euler.

I know a lot of Euros with usa doctorates who get stuck in shitty small american towns but thought they'd end up in NYC, not understanding how shitty 99% of the usa is

tbh I know tons of US phds in this same boat - a lot of people don't realize when starting a phd program that you will end up living where you find a job, if you are lucky enough to do so. And the chances that you end up in a cool big city are close to zero, especially when a lot of schools in those places pay shit relative to local cost of living and have arduous tenure requirements because they know people really want to live there.

That said a lot of them get used to living somewhere small/shitty/cheap, can deal with it for 9 months if they can GTFO in the summer, or get some sort of stockholm syndrome where a bigger, less shitty place feels like a huge win in comparison (see: me, for example).

Not wanting to live in the middle of nowhere working for a shitty college is probably the main reason I gave up on the academic job search after school. My brilliant peers in grad school all managed to get good jobs in nice places but, uh, I was not my brilliant peers.

yeah that's a good point, I certainly didn't realize when I chose my doctoral institution in the midwest usa that that significantly increased my chances of having to take a job in the midwest usa, a region I wanted nothing to do with. once I ended up in kansass I mean of course I spent every summer out of town, usually in Europe, but it didn't help the sense of failure, of having trudged so hard only end up in a shithole where my students didn't give a fuck about the subject I taught & were ill-equipped to write a cogent sentence about anything. the teaching was the most depressing part, just that empty look in their eyes, with their neckbeards and beer tshirts. I guess that's why getting out of town never helped. and people who got used to living there only made it worse for me, because then we had nothing in common: they were trying to set up roots there, and I was just hustling to get out asap. & I did! but those were friendless years.

Ominous projections in the U.K., with some universities expecting to lose over £100m in revenue through the absence of foreign students:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/11/universities-brace-for-huge-losses-as-foreign-students-drop-out

Without a bailout, I can’t see them all surviving.

A friend, a prof at St Andrews, expects doom. International students, or at least Chinese students, pay 3x what home students pay! And St Andrews is a top UK uni! I gather UK universities at all levels are funded this way. Also St Andrews relies on fees from renting out its facilities to conferences and the like over summers, and at least this year that's gone.

Of course there will be a bailout. But still, that's a mad way to fund a university system. When I was on the faculty at a USA Big Ten institution, that institution also relied on international students, in particular Chinese and Brazilian students, who indeed paid more than in-state and even out-of-state students. In France the Macron government proposed last year upping the uni fees for non-EU students to about 3000 € per year for bachelors students and 4000 € per year for masters students. But this was strongly contested by universities, and most have committed to not apply those fees. Furthermore, one of the French "supreme courts" ruled late last year that fees, even for non-EU students, violate a constitutional commitment to free university access. It's thus unclear whether these fees will ever be widely charged to international students. (To be fair, since French university courses must be given in French, by law, our pool of international students is not as extensive as those of the US and the UK. Though I have (excellent, as usual) Chinese students here too.)

Does Ireland do it differently, as it's an EU country, or are they more on the US-UK model?

Ireland has negligible fees for EU students and higher ones for everyone else - not dissimilar to Scotland, iirc.

The U.K. model is driven by a commercial mindset focused on investment to fuel growth. Most universities will have ambitions to expand the number of students, spend heavily on recruitment, plan larger campuses, etc. A huge amount has been borrowed against anticipated earnings. That’s one of the main reasons his is so disastrous. You can’t just scale down operations.

only negligible in comparison to US and UK - by continental standards they are high iirc

first Google hit (from 2017) says Ireland has the second-highest fees in Europe: https://www.thejournal.ie/college-fees-ireland-3675177-Nov2017/

iirc Sharivari you said uk universities even borrowed off expected fees from the next term—ooof!

The government stopped giving any funding for most (all non-STEM?) students a while back, so that universities can stand on their own two feet, best education system in the world, etc.

In Ireland or the UK? The latter I imagine.

The whole thing is a nightmare. Universities, iirc, have taken on north of £12bn debt and the majority of that is to private lenders - only a handful are able to go down a public bond route and the banks are pretty restrictive. To compound things, there has been a dip in the number of domestic students and many universities, even those borrowing nine figure sums, are already running a deficit. There has been an underlying assumption that the government will bail out any universities that get into trouble, which just fuels irresponsible borrowing (and irresponsible lending).

The majority of the borrowing aiui is over a fairly long term but a £100m revenue hole at a university that has next to no surplus even under normal circumstances is going to make it impossible to meet payments.

What do you think the consequences of that will be for unis? And will it be different for Russell group unis? My sense is that even Bristol is vulnerable (I know several staff members there and in my area it’s quite good)

i don't claim this as fact at all but i seem to recall reading something about u.s. public universities having more difficulty reaping big international student $$$$ because of certain pressures by their state legislatures/regents to stop tuition growth and to not price residents out by throwing so many admission slots to international or out-of-state applicants (in a secondary version of the international student finance strategy, i guess publics have also been leaning harder into domestic but outstate recruitment because of the cost differential).

(not sure how this applies at the non-small non-elite public i do most of my teaching at, since i don't spend much time on campus to even have a sense for what it's like demographically, but i do get fewer international students in my courses than i used to at my r1 alma mater. i infer that more elite schools are more vulnerable to dropoff from international enrollments just because they have more to draw them in the first place.)

more concerning i think would be that the steady decline in most states' hs grad enrollment percentages / absolute student numbers over several years (the demographic dip) has been turning the screws tighter and tighter on budgets and staffing, and there is little give left. assuming a significant dip in enrollments and thus necessary tuition dollars this fall/next spring, plus probably associated financial crisis from not being able to milk other cash cows related to residential student support and athletics, i expect to see deep cuts, starting at the bottom where there are fewest impediments to them.

j do you expect those cuts to involve you? How has the disease changed your job so far?

I agree that smaller us public unis don’t rely as much on international students as r1s but I bet it’s generally a non trivial revenue source even at those institutions.

The government stopped giving any funding for most (all non-STEM?) students a while back, so that universities can stand on their own two feet, best education system in the world, etc.

― rí an techno (seandalai), Sunday, 12 April 2020 11:44 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

In Ireland or the UK? The latter I imagine.

― Joey Corona (Euler), Sunday, 12 April 2020 11:48 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, UK. In Ireland the universities are more directly connected to the state, in the UK aiui they're basically independent organisations that just happen to get some funding from the government.

I agree that smaller us public unis don’t rely as much on international students as r1s but I bet it’s generally a non trivial revenue source even at those institutions.

Yep - a number of smaller universities were badly hit when Saudi Arabia recalled most of the students they fund a few years ago.

What do you think the consequences of that will be for unis? And will it be different for Russell group unis? My sense is that even Bristol is vulnerable (I know several staff members there and in my area it’s quite good)

tbh, I’d expect the government to turn up with a wheelbarrow full of cash. The lending was predicated on the sector being too big to fail and that’s probably correct. Bristol had debts of close to £500m a few years ago but a lot of that is long-term borrowing structured over 30-40 years. No Russell Group universities will go under, imo, but they’ll be forced to go through brutal cost-cutting. Whether the government will see it as so critical to keep others open remains to be seen. The Office For Students suggested that failing universities wouldn’t be bailed out in 2018 - but 2018 feels like a very long time ago now.

Whether anything actually changes, in relation to behaviour, when things return to a semblance of normality, I don’t know.

My school is a massive flagship type place in big state, my department runs a critical university-wide program, my wife has tenure (not me though) so I feel pretty lucky right now.

But we have between 4000 and 5000 students from China alone and if a big percentage of them don’t return it’ll be pretty catastrophic, for the school and the local economy. There have been a number of “luxury” apartment buildings built in the last decades targeting wealthy international students, there are lots of luxury cars purchased and driven by young international students (like there is always at least one Maserati, sometimes three or four, parked at the Asian grocery store I frequent), plus markets and restaurants that cater heavily to students from China and India in particular. No way all of those stay open and occupied without the students coming back.

yeah when I was in urblanda the Chinese restos were ace! and similarly lots of luxury apts for the Chinese students. gonna change.

Sharivari: yeah I wonder how the cost-cutting will go at eg Bristol. When you cut contingent staff then you cut their courses too. If the number of students drops enough then that works out. Intro type courses are revenue drivers but inessential educationally imo (I’ve taught many of them). But does this cut into the core, to permanent staff? Tenure doesn’t exist in the UK.

And in the USA tenure only matters until they cut your department. In 2008 that was something relevant at the dumb big 12 university employing me at the time. I was still untenured then but my colleagues made it clear they couldn’t (wouldn’t?) do anything to save my job if it risked theirs (or maybe even just their salaries). This is going to be considerably worse than 2008.

yeah, since i moved to boston in 2013 my neighborhood (which is bordered by bu and bc to the east and west, and has a ton of other universities around it) has had a huge uptick in asian restaurants/snack shops/grocery stores. i wonder what that's going to look like now. already i think that at least four units in my 12-unit building have gone unoccupied.

on the bright side maybe rents will go down... lol jk

I don't teach at a university, I am member of staff - white-collar-working-class office bullshit. I'm on the executive board of the union local and we're glad to be ratifying our new memorandum of understanding right now because the modest pay raises that are contained within it will probably not be on the table for much longer (there is a cartel of public sector employees that sets how generous public employers can be with pay raises in their collective agreements here in BC, we got the maximum - 2% a year).

we expect redundancies. the membership is worried and all we can really say is "we have lay-off procedures in our collective agreement". i.e, "you might get laid-off but you'll get some notice and a bit of a severance".

"cartel of public sector employeRs" that should read, not "employees"

yeah, that just seemed wrong when I read it

Who needs philosophy anyway?

https://afterxnature.blogspot.com/2020/06/message-from-ian-grant-attempt-to-close.html

sorry to miss your q earlier, euler. i do expect the cuts to involve me. i've already lost work i was used to getting, because of enrollment declines (which had already been affecting the availability of work for me before the current situation(s)). it's pretty much fait accompli. the only opposing factor rn seems to be that fall shortfalls statewide are not nearly so bad as they had feared. one school's dean just finally reached out to the contingent faculty (because of their nature as a school, they've never had many permanent faculty, and run at about the high end of adjunct reliance relative to the whole industry, 75%) with a message to the effect of, if you're not teaching next year, don't take that to mean you won't be teaching the year after that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i was only teaching at one school when the virus hit, the one where i was already teaching online, so the schedule got screwed up by the extended closure (we added a week to spring break) and by the general disarray, but nothing was essentially different. the other schools i regularly teach at do offer some curriculum online, but not the courses i had been teaching, so those are encompassed by the schools' overall initiatives to prepare for fall, which vary depending on how much online teaching they'd already been doing. generally they're still wishy-washy plan-wise, like most schools i've read about, trying to get faculty to prep for offering courses 2-3 different ways so that they can adapt them at a moment's notice to being online. info about in-person measures has been misty and aspirational so far, but i doubt they'd even be able to afford niceties like purdue's plexiglass. faculty and (where relevant) unions have been pushing back on anything that takes the decisions about where to teach out of their hands, but otherwise their involvement in the planning processes seems as ineffectual as the admins' has been. naturally, adjuncts don't have much of a seat at that table.

sounds like we will be converging (with the 2-3 distinct branches of the public system, and regional slacs, taking cues from the flagship that is following trends set by other flagships) on a model that runs til thanksgiving and has pushed hard for on-campus, socially-distanced semester starts. more than one school has suggested its inclination to choose hy-flex type models where in-person courses could be offered/taken simultaneously online (e.g. by students sitting in their dorm rooms). sounds wack to me.

Ugh. That’s awful, j.

I’ll be starting at a new university this fall (as a consequence of the general requirement her, as in Germany, that to become a f u l l p r o f e s s o r you have to compete again for a position, that is, no internal promotion). That will involve a bit of a train commute on teaching and seminar days but I don’t yet know if we’ll be teaching in person or not.

Sorry j

eh

the Aussie government has decided to sort higher education into the worthless and worthwhile. Cutting tuition on courses it deems worthwhile (read training for known jobs) like Nursing, STEM, languages and raising them on its, humanities, economics, social sciences management and law; all while keeping total funding fixed. All this is, of course designed to encourage students to study these cheaper subjects. It, of course took the Econ departments of all these universities a grand total of 5 minutes to work out that although students may be incentivised to study the cheaper courses universities will be incentivised to pile as many students into the ones that are now more expensive.

Yeah I saw this and it's so dumb. At the big 10 university I taught at a few years ago, majors in engineering and the hard sciences paid more in tuition than in the humanities, ostensibly to cover the costs of the labs. That made things complicated for people like me who developed interdisciplinary majors between the humanities and sciences, since the tuition for such majors had to be worked out in some equitable way (thankfully CS was willing to be generous in this regard). But I don't think it ended up "incentivizing" students to choose the humanities.

It’s exceedingly dumb our dipshit in chief suggest that law students should take CS modules to lower their fees, which is good in principle, but that’s not how universities work or bill here.

Unis were also excluded from wage support schemes and I keep having to remind my wife it’s because she is a hotbed of dangerous socialism rather than part of One of Australia’s key domestic and export industries. She’s fine other than some extra teaching but adjuncts, admins are a thing of the past, and tenure requirement just got a lot stricter. Many other universities are a lot worse off, though.

Ugh, they raised your wife's teaching requirements?

Are tenure requirements set at a national level, or is this just relative to particular universities?

We don’t quite know yet, it was part of the deal with the union which the union rejected. She taught overload this semester which she may or may not get paid for but either way she doesn’t have to teach next semester. Basically a hot mess.

Tenure requirements are on an individual contract basis but the scope for granting extensions or being flexible just evaporated. Everything got very prescriptive.

haha liberal governments
haha endless online teaching
haha no research ever
haha optimism

I see. What a mess.

I'm at a bit of a low. After 20 years in this game it is one of those slow motion nightmares watching research starve and operating funding dwindle so we are forced to stuff the channel with students who either don't know why they are there or would rather be studying something else. And my 25 years of neuroscience is now reduced to teaching the absolute basics to postgraduate nurses, who are generally excellent people but not the people I should be teaching. But that's where the money is. On we go.

* or students who are there purely for their cash value to the Aus govt, who do not give a single fuck about them (cf post COVID treatment) or whether they're getting the actual education they pay dearly for

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3612467

Powerful article that really brings together all the threads about how Higher Ed. approach to re-opening for Fall semesters is so, so bloody wrong.

ugh.

my new university this fall will be doing the infamous "hybrid" format. French universities have relatively few on-campus residences and students don't have the Animal House aspirations of American students (I was one of those fwiw) so our outbreak fears are tied to classrooms.

The fear here, though, is that universities will use further distance education to move further toward it as a norm, thus reducing the number of full-time faculty. The LPPR law currently being debated, an initiative of the Macron government to move closer to a North American model of university funding, gives context to this worry. Administrators don't want to waste this health crisis in their neo-liberal push.

Everything here is so up in the air - like some in person classes, a modified schedule, vague reassurances about safety, hedging until the thousands of first year students commit and pay their non refundable deposits, etc. I can and will teach all my classes online though and my department has everyone’s back on this.

A local college bar reopened with all the right language about half capacity and masks and social distancing which were promptly ignored by all so there are now 50 cases tied to this one location.

In response this quote from the mayor is great - “The mitigation strategies won’t work because they ignore the behavior of unsupervised young people…. I am not saying one way or the other if the U should open. I am just tired of hearing that it can open safely”

"mayor of college town" sounds like a thankless job

I know universities are worried about students backing out of enrollment if they can't have the on-campus experience and have to take all their classes online, but what the hell kind of on-campus experience are they even going to be able to have? dining halls, gyms, libraries, common areas, all of these fancy spaces are going to be a hell of a lot less pleasant if they're open at all. and I just can't fathom college football happening this year. schools certainly aren't going to isolate players from the rest of the student body and so they're all just going to be living in the epicenter of that cesspool. I honestly don't trust some of these programs not to lie to their players if they did test positive and just send them out there on the field if they're not symptomatic.

"mayor of college town" sounds like a thankless job

― all cats are beautiful (silby), Friday, June 26, 2020 11:13 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's probably gonna pay off pretty nicely for 'ol Mayo Pete.

South Bend is not a college town

I imagine it’s particularly thankless when the university is one of the biggest in the country with more students than residents and everyone knows who really calls the shots on a lot of things

the football team?

https://www.ab-inbev.com

I never had any illusions about a career in academia-- tbh I just sort of fell into adjuncting at several places when I first got to the city where I live, and I've kept being asked back...

But let's just say I'm glad I can still work digging graves or working at a grocery store.

Also apologies if that didn't make much sense, I've had a few.

it made good sense to me. you define yourself as able to fit comfortably in many working milieux. I've worked as an ad copywriter, clerk in a tool and die retailer, a technical writer in an obscure high tech field, and a school bus driver. I've also hawked ice cream at parades. It's all just stuff one does for a paycheck.

Yeah. I admit that I really *like* teaching, and get rave reviews from students no matter the class, but adjuncting is also totally unsustainable.

the uk has decided to charge EU citizens at international rates for uk universities going forward, instead of the home rate. my boy was thinking of applying to cambridge but at 20k pounds that's not happening. even at 9k pounds it was probably silly when it's free here. I wouldn't expect many eu citizens to be willing to pay anymore, and certainly not for anything less than oxbridge when if all you want are english-speaking courses you can go to ireland or even the netherlands.

Wow, that completely passed me by.
Been anticipating some fee changes ever since the Brexit vote but sort of forgot about it.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/eu-students-lose-home-status-and-loan-access-england-2021

Will be interesting to see the effects.

Some cartoon villain shit here, it seems.

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/06/30/desantis-kills-online-learning-program-amid-virus-resurgence-1296178

I thought this was OTM (h/t j): https://www.chronicle.com/article/When-Academic-Solidarity-/249086?key=hsZMErKIgGC276GPIxqHkdtWpPJPmTDez0sVEOxaQSBEq2np2vOTiSg-ZL1RCw7NeVlJQUlXMG1NWV9ZYXpHU005dlBQSm9EX3VycWFVcVBHTHJQZFh1bmRoYw

Haha, I see that he was actually a bit critical - I was OTMing it on the assumption that by letting go of adjuncts (who are handling a massive amount of the teaching rn) and requiring f/t faculty to take on heavier teaching loads, the inevitable result would be an increase in the # of f/t teaching positions that would be created, many of which would go to those erstwhile adjuncts. There was briefly a move towards doing this at the two big local universities and under the previous provincial govt and a number of sessionals did get f/t teaching positions.

Not going to lie: if I could get even a full-time NTT position, I'd be overjoyed.

Yeah, the difference in working conditions and respect was so huge that it was impossible to go back to sessional teaching after leaving a f/t VAP.

For me personally ofc; lots of smart, accomplished people do it.

In my experience, the more elite the institution, the more it is the norm for research academics to consider teaching to be burdensome “grunt work.” The exploitation of adjuncts is the natural outgrowth of such an attitude.

i think she's one of those crypto-back-to-tradition-my-intellectual-life-is-apolitical types? but i don't know positively

anyway yeah it is gobsmacking to read a comfortably-positioned academic casually toss off a line like 'let the adjuncts go'. i asked her about it on twitter—she says she was merely addressing an argument to those with power, tenured faculty, while adjuncts should hahahaha take up grass-roots intellectual tasks outside the academy—whether she wasn't just assuming that those with power should keep it and those without it now should keep on not having it, and she came back with some hand-waving about pragmatism and vocation and labor. i don't really think she's thought some things through.

Which incentives do you think she is overlooking, Euler?xp

i don't understand how addressing an argument to those with power makes it any better - if anything it seems to make it much worse that she's endorsing this course of action to ppl best in place to execute it???

i have been thinking about this since u first mentioned it. "don't worry about my plan to screw marginalized employees of the academy i'm only making the case to your betters." how is this not "don't be concerned that i'm trying to feed you to predators i'm just pitching the idea to the lions"

Yeah, like I said, I assumed she was advocating for effectively making all uni teaching part of full-time jobs, many of which would go to the people who had experience doing them part-time. It occurs to me that I may have been projecting that into the piece.

i think she imagines that because a lot of tenured types are in it for the research or the cushy conference per diems they would jet once they had to teach more than a 1/2 and that would open up spots for the ~true teachers~, the current powerholders would thus be the benefactors of those pedagogical hopefuls who are currently on the outside of power

but there is definitely an emphasis on shrinkage, so she can hardly believe that taking this action would be likely to preserve rather than eliminating jobs

it's just the kind of junk you would expect a st johns full-timer (they have their own revolving system of temps!!) to preen about like they were the only institution in existence that understood teaching and learning

The incentives I’m thinking of: adjuncts get paid less, can’t mobilize as readily, can be fired easily: all aspirations of the ruling class.

The working conditions and job security of tenured faculty in the USA are exceptional in that country, and those faculty should advocate for the extension of these conditions to every worker. I don’t think she’s making that argument.

Haha OK well MY argument is do this part of it and also convert p/t teaching positions into f/t gigs:

Fight for a smaller administration. Fight for reduced research requirements. Fight for a single pay scale that includes administrators, and, yes, coaches and top-flight surgeons. Fight for smaller class sizes, and for greater freedom in the classroom. Fight for greater faculty governance,

There is a lot of confusion in that article.

The one takeaway I can agree with is that tenured faculty often consider teaching to be grunt work. I can't count the number of times that people
with tenure I know and otherwise respect have said awful, demeaning things about their students and teaching loads. From my perspective, many tenured professors seem totally uninterested in teaching, or even scholarship. I've published more in the past two years than 90% of the tenured faculty in my department at my R1 school, yet I have little to no chance of ever getting a full time teaching job, despite years of fantastic evaluations from students and supervisors. I could go on and on, but some particular bits of that piece ring especially true.

OK, I actually have no idea what she is talking about here (which she has repeated a few times on Twitter, it seems):

I was addressing the people with power: tenured faculty. If I were addressing contingent faculty, I would tell them that their vast talent and dedication can be put to wonderful use in the grassroots intellectual enterprises that this country desperately needs.

— Zena Hitz (@zenahitz) June 30, 2020

ahh, the grassroots, didn't know they were hiring... how's their health insurance these days?

She seems confused

I'm not sure that she is confused tbh. Her point is not quite what I originally took it to be but I think she is actually pretty clear on what it is and is handwaving away the question of "what will the adjuncts do instead?", in part bc she seems to doubt it will be much worse than what they do now. She wants tenured faculty to take on heavier teaching, service, and admin loads; control administrative bloat; and, yep, she really does want mass layoffs of contingent faculty afaict:

Is lecturing 4/4 or 5/5 for peanuts and without security really the best use of your talent? Why are you doing this? Serious question.

— Zena Hitz (@zenahitz) June 30, 2020

Oh, OK, sorry j, I see you addressed a lot of this and think I found the tweets of yours you mentioned.

Agree this is the basic hole:

whether she wasn't just assuming that those with power should keep it and those without it now should keep on not having it

Her target is research university tenured faculty. Adjuncts are just collateral damage.

She's confused because she doesn't address some of the underlying reasons behind the meteoric rise of contingent faculty in the US, and also assumes that there are scads of jobs out there for those who aren't tenured. There are not. She is as delusional as an adjunct who thinks they can work their way up.

Also anyone who treats adjuncts as collateral damage can fuck right off.

Damning the people who are doing most of the actual work of the university to rescue the university is some next level dumb ass shit.

we had to destroy the village in order to save it

Damning the people who are doing most of the actual work of the university to rescue the university is some next level dumb ass shit.

Of course it's a story we all know. But it still is 100% stupid.

Faculty governance has been all but erased at my school. We have been fighting (hard! with many negative consequences!) for what seems like forever (almost a decade?). We are a young mission-based teaching institution and research/publishing has never been expected.

Is lecturing 4/4 or 5/5 for peanuts and without security really the best use of your talent? Why are you doing this? Serious question.

^^^ that hit home but the answer is "because there is no other outlet for my talent that will pay me." Teaching as a skill/talent is so chronically undervalued in this country (USA) and sadly I don't see that changing anytime soon. I will hang on as long as I can.

Ding ding ding! Like it's not like I ever expected to make a ton of money as a prof, but who else is going to pay me for my talent and knowledge base?

I started my own online workshops that are going well, but without scaling up significantly, one workshop is about 2 mortgage payments with nothing left over.

Yeah I’ve tossed around the idea of workshops but my parallel issue is a lifelong repulsion at branding, including (especially?) branding myself.

I’m working on getting a website together and I’m getting over it but all I really want in my perfect world is an institution to lend my skill to + the chance to reach students who benefit from my teaching + a life outside of work where I can be social and creative.

Instead I’m going to have to hustle to sell myself 😢 at least I can accept that now.

I definitely thrive in cooperative environments much more than competitive ones. That’s why my institution was such a good fit for me for so many years.

a lifelong repulsion at branding, including (especially?) branding myself

You and me both. Just thinking about it makes me want to retch, it's utterly visceral.

Higher ed: the sunk cost fallacy.

(holy shit)

Unless yours is the winning ticket.

every time i get an email from the administration about plans for the fall i have a panic attack. really excited to be at the top of my pedagogical game in seven weeks.

have they told you what game you'll be playing yet

omg maura super otm
i have not been told anything either

honestly i am sort of glad i taught over the summer bc it has given me time to better acclimate to the online environment and prepare at least one course that i can teach again in the fall without sweating the living shit out of it

seeing an email from our university president describing protocols for the return of students to campus in fall. re dorms, "beds in shared rooms will be separated by at least 6 feet" LOL GET THE FUCK OUT

Unbelievable. These people are living in a fantasy world

i don’t know what it’ll be like. i always have a hybrid class anyway but i do not feel good about going to campus. but if i don’t teach how can i afford my $500/month insurance premium, lol

meanwhile at purdue:

I feel safer already. This will most definitely be fine. pic.twitter.com/Ay99KyEvzH

— David Atkinson (@drdaveatkinson) July 9, 2020

Jeez Louise.

what the f

https://movie-fanatic-res.cloudinary.com/iu/s--qMWTMzeD--/t_full/cs_srgb,f_auto,fl_strip_profile.lossy,q_auto:420/v1408553550/naked-gun-full-body-condom.png

lol

i'm gonna miss all the radical left indoctrination training and meetings :(

Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2020

xpost - it's a good thing air stops circulating completely about 7 feet above the floor level. that's a foolproof plan!

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/opinion/liberal-arts-college-covid.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Ctrl+F = "tuition" 0/0

ohio state had a meeting today. here are some notes. notable: if a student tests positive their classes have to quarantine for two weeks.

I took some notes. pic.twitter.com/sZGTfzCAtT

— Elena Cruz-López (@elenacruz_lopez) July 13, 2020

not even reading that, it will give me a panic attack
esp if the first sentences are "we don't really know..."

aggggghhhhhhhhh

Cool time today dealing with a Canvas issue that others have had in the past, and which hasn't been solved by Canvas. I go to the support chat, and am placed at the back of the queue. Fine. I leave the computer to do work and walk the dog, checking the queue all the while, etc.

Eventually, I am working and realize the laptop has gone to sleep. I log back on and lo and behold, my session has timed out, and I'm now at the back of the queue again...for a problem that shouldn't be a problem in the first place.

If this is the future, then fuck the future, let it all burn.

ugh fuck canvas

this week sucks so much

i hate everything

Also, a query: anyone here quit an adjunct job a few days into the semester?

These fucks have increased course caps due to some fuckery and I'm now at 45 students.....and getting paid $4500 for the semester. So my question is: do I make things easy on myself and just give everyone A's, collect the check, and never work for this school again? Or should I just quit? While it would be hard to take the hit, I am ready to take one suffering over another at this juncture.

ha ha I submitted my expression of interest in a voluntary redundancy last week

and table that is unacceptable, negotiate or quit!

So my question is: do I make things easy on myself and just give everyone A's, collect the check, and never work for this school again?

seems to me to be a win (you)/win (students)/lose (the school) which sounds cool

Yeah, talked with a number of people, including one of my childhood friends who is a union leader at the school, and I'm going to go with the making things easy on myself option. Also seems like some more major labor action might be in the works, so I'd like to stick around for that.

this roundup of covid reactions at universities made me feel both despondent and less alone


https://annehelen.substack.com/p/between-fked-and-a-hard-place

I’ve got 34 students in a comp 2 writing class which amounts to 8.5 hrs of grading (at a modest 15 min per paper) per draft per assignment. Adjuncts are paid $2,000 for this class.

This thread stresses me out in the absolute worst way.

I agree w the “giving everyone A” option provided that the material in the class is not going to be essential to their future jobs or classes. I feel differently about shorting developmental writing students than I do about music appreciation students. They’ll live without remembering what the elements of music are but it’s hard to make it when you can’t write a coherent paragraph.

It is a class on short fiction. Like can you read and talk about a New Yorker story? Okay? Cool.

(though only 30% of the stories I used were in the NYer, but the basic thrust of it is that)

Oh ok! A’s for everyone!! The lit class I’ve been assigned this semester is basically that only it’s called “American Literature and Culture”

Still total bullshit that 45 students are crammed in there.

I saw a post on a fb group I’m in with a woman who is teaching a class with 232 students enrolled. No wonder people think college is a waste of time and a ripoff. 232!

Has to be automated and with multiple TAs at that point.

But yeah, that's not learning.

Definitely not, or not the place for me at least!

https://www.ajc.com/news/university-of-alabama-orders-faculty-to-keep-quiet-about-outbreak/7ZAHSQPNDRBINBEF3A6YAVMPRE/

“During that time, we encountered many students who have been exposed since returning to campus, particularly in the Greek system,” said Dr. Ricky Friend, dean of college of community health sciences

what a surprise!

As I mentioned on a other thread, my institution is 20% of the cases in our metro right now. So they've pivoted to online classes for the next two weeks...

Basically, the administration is avoiding making the safe and ethical call to cancel in-person classes for the whole semester because after a certain date, parents can't get back their room and board deposits. As long as the idea of in-person classes returning is put forward and the school can blame students for spread, which has already happened, then they're covering their asses.

To say that I am ready for this semester to be over and to never work for this corrupt institution ever again is an understatement.

Student posted incendiary, offensive, unfounded, and racist things on discussion board. In my haste, I simply deleted the posts without screen-shotting them— there is a policy in my syllabus that dehumanizing language will not be tolerated, and this was certainly that. Now incredibly nervous about potential blowback, though doubting there will be any...if there is, will simply bring up anything that happens to administrators.

I did note everything that was written in a separate email to myself, but then it is student's word against mine.

I'm not getting paid enough to babysit racists.

Well. I've been offered a redundancy and hope it will be a pretty solid deal. Now to think about life after academia at age 50.

Are you a full-time tenured faculty member or the equivalent wherever you are?

It's that time of the year when the student emails begging for grade adjustments start piling up.

Anyone feeling more amenable to give students the benefit of the doubt this semester due to the circumstances?

For example, I have a student who has done...D-level work all semester when it has been turned in, but she also lost one of her best friends to Covid and has been working full time. She needs a passing grade to graduate on time. I mean, fuck, I'm almost out of the academy at this point, should I just give everyone an 'A'?

Sorry Euler, missed your question, but yes I am and no I didn't take the redundancy. God knows what's coming though, the Australian sector is f-u-c-k-e-d.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/australia-universities-education-job-ready-scott-morrison-covid

and table are you able to offer some kind of supplementary task to let the student demonstrate that she actually does reach the standard? because otherwise a grade bump is an insult to the folks who did the work and reached the standard. Unless the standard itself is arbitrary or poorly assessed.

should I just give everyone an 'A'?

Does this fit your philosophy of the role of grading in education? It's a surprisingly complicated question.

My personal sense is that during classes letter grades are mainly an incentive/reward to do the work of learning. imo, the real controlling question for the educator as classes end is pass/fail. But if at the start of classes you set specific expectations about how final grades would be determined, then it seems like you need to honor your own announced structure.

pass em all imo

just make sure your own ass is covered

nb don't take advice from me

Several Canadian universities have now switched to a pass/fail system, which I think was the correct call.

I'm going to leave it up to the student...if they can get the rest of the work in by Saturday, then they might eke out a D. But I'm not chasing them around like I've done in the past.

sounds perfect

All I can say is bless that column in the excel sheet that is for "homework" because lord knows I do not grade homework and that column will allow me to jiggle a grade if I need to.

my students can opt for pass/fail and this semester I'm much more likely than in past ones to help nudge them over the 'pass' margin.

They can only take one class pass/fail at this institution, which seems objectively bizarre to me.

I went to a college where that was ALWAYS an option. In fact, you could just "Credit/No Entry" a course, and if you failed it, it would be as if you were never in the class at all.

at other places I've been you could do pass/fail but only if you set it up that way from the start; here right now students here can take the class as normal and decide at the very end if they want the actual 0 - 4.0 grade or a satisfactory/not satisfactory.

i actively found ways to nudge every person at least to a passing grade. it helped to just decide that deadline are there as guidelines to keep ppl generally on track, not as justifications to chip points away here and there. at least this semester. so i went back and removed late penalties from the entire spreadsheet, and then was very willing to round up any grade that was reasonably close to the next tier, etc.

like... we just have so much less a sense of what's going on with them than normally. someone who just looks, assignment-wise, like a disinterested student who slacked off and stopped doing the regular weekly homework, could actually be someone in a really dire situation. of course, that's possible in any semester! but i just have so much less information. at least one guy who i couldn't really get a bead on, it turns out his grandparents were in the hospital with COVID. couple of kids who started really strong and then fell off, it turns out they had health problems, one had COVID in their immediate family. so who knows if somebody else is dealing with something as bad or worse, but isn't telling me?

also, almost all of my turkish and east asian students had huge internet issues that i sincerely believe kept them from participating in section the way they normally would. so should I give them low participation grades just so i can "reward" the people who navigated Zoom well and were really talkative? that didn't feel right either, so i just said eff it and gave everybody full participation grades. IMHO, it doesn't take anything away from my A students for there to be a greater number of A- students than usual, or Ds that "would have" been Fs.

basically, i say give the benefit of the doubt. if they're actually really disengaged students, that can get detected and come out in their grades some other dang semester, y'know?

I like it. Sounds like principled, compassionate educatin’ to me.

Thanks, Doc. I am giving the benefit of the doubt to most students... To be honest, I really like this student, but their writing is incomprehensible. In fact, it's so bad that it made me do research into their background, because no student who writes like this should have been able to pass Comp. But they're a transfer, and the institution lowered standards this semester for transfer students in particular. The problem is that they need the grade in order to graduate on time, and they don't have money for summer courses, etc. It's a stupid bind to create for myself— do I pass the student with the lowest grade possible, grade on effort (which is there) rather than content, etc? I think for this particularly student, I've got to really just grade on effort.

In other news, it seems like there might be a course for me in the spring, which would be a godsend, since this medical editing gig I just started is FUCKING BORING ME TO DEATH.

As a former comp teacher, I can say that I've passed a few students with pretty terrible writing skills because they showed up and did the work - and maybe even improved, just not to the standard you'd want in a university class.

I cannot say the same— definitely have had students show up, do the work badly, and not pass. But things are slightly different now.

What I'm trying to get at is this student doesn't really seem to have a grasp on basic sentence structures.

does your school have any kind of system where you can flag the student for advising/counseling? we do, it still feels a little weird to me but in an ideal world, if the person who acts on the flag is someone whose job is to reach out thoughtfully to help the kid, it can mean that someone who's really struggling in whatever way doesn't slip through the cracks. may just be buck-passing, idk.

I would get in huge trouble with my supervisor if I failed students and they complained, even if they'd plagiarized every single thing they wrote. Much easier to pass them with a C- than to risk not getting hired back next semester.

Does your university have developmental/remedial comp classes? Students like that occasionally slipped through the cracks and made it to my English 111 class, but usually they got stuck in DEVE 070 or whatever.

(xpost to self - we're also supposed to do it if students are at risk of failing at the midterm, so their advisor knows that's happening, can see if it's happening in multiple classes, and hopefully put together some bigger picture problems the kid is dealing with, or whatever? the loop isn't really well closed though in that i don't always know what ends up happening.)

ugh yeah the plagiarism thing. at one institution the word on the grapevine really was that if you fail someone for plagiarism, it'll be more a hassle for you than for the plagiarist.

actually did not even fail my plagiarists this semester!! D's all around. one was super egregious, very obviously had used an automated thing to run sentences through a thesaurus so that copy-pasting would be less detectable.

Oh yeah, if my students plagiarized on the final paper (worth 30% of the grade), I was expected to give them an Incomplete and make myself available to work with them for the next year to get the work in. Which led to me getting irritated emails from my former supervisor after I had left the university and was teaching in another state, because a student had all of a sudden decided to turn in her late work and I wasn't grading it fast enough for her.

The students who just didn't turn in the paper, OTOH, I was allowed to fail. So if you couldn't get your work done, the smart thing to do was plagiarize; either you'd pass the class or get a free year-long extension.

The issue is that with the pandemic and campus closed, a lot of those resources are curtailed. I can make it absolutely necessary for comp students to go to the writing center for assistance, but for a 2000 (aka 200 level) literature class, I don't have that authority. I can simply suggest it, which I did.... But again, online consults with limited hours for a student who is working full-time? It's a hard road.

They turned in revised or more complete versions of their work. If they're any better than previous efforts, a C- it is.

@ Lily - yup we also have the effective secret cheat code: if you want two more weeks for a paper, just plagiarize! we'll give you the chance to do it over again to learn the lesson! but i don't think any student actually knows this is what's gonna happen until it does, and we DO flag it in that system and somewhere there's an academic integrity office that would notice if they've done it more than once, maybe. mainly I just hate having to review a second paper after catching, checking and documenting the plagiarism made the first one already take four times as long as commenting on a regular paper. sigh.

If some company were to write AI software that could automate the process of reviewing papers for internet-based plagiarism, flag the passages it considers plagiarized along with link(s) to the source(s) it has identified, so the teacher could quickly evaluate the extent of plagiarism, if any, then that company could easily sell a few million licenses and make a mint.

There has been such software for a decade at least! But it's been expensive. The university I joined in September is the first one I've worked at that has a license to one of these, and I've been using it.

One term maybe 10 years ago, I caught 17 students plagiarizing in a single course. It got written up in Readers' Digest! Every university I've worked at has given the benefit of the doubt to faculty over students, though it's possible that the decisions were reversed upon some higher-level review to which I wasn't privy.

Over time I've adapted by choosing texts to which I could find no reference online. Then asking students to write about those texts is more secure. I've also favored more in-class writing when giving basic prompts like "explain this text", leaving for homework more individualized semester-long projects.

It's been a lot of work.

I had access to one of those detectors, Turnitin, in a previous teaching gig. It did double duty as an online classroom/submission portal so it wasn't just nakedly "you have to submit your papers this way so they can be scanned." One upshot is that it can also tell if students are copying from other students in a different instructor's section. It had plenty of limitations, but it certainly could catch the most nakedly obvious C&Ping from Wikipedia and online articles... and would auto-highlight the passages, super helpful. If plagiarists were industrious enough to plagiarize out of an old book, it probably wouldn't catch that, but that's pretty rare anyway.

the worst institution i ever worked at, p4c3 university in nyc, had a faculty that was OBSESSED with running every through turnitin, just a fully paranoid fixation on the idea of a student getting something over on them.

now i work at a much fancier design school and no one gives a fuck

in my view, if a student successfully plagiarizes, they really are taking a slot away from someone else who didn't get in the program but would have done the work for real... and yet, if preventing this rare case ends up driving everything, then you arrive at a state of suspicioning and policing your students that does not lend itself to anything else good or constructive. the main problem is that the more engaged, restorative-justice attitude towards these things, which i believe in philosophically, also ends up being a bunch more work for the instructor which is never really compensated, lauded, or spelled out as an expectation.

in professional development courses for the military and civil service, wherever writing assignments are part of the grading, HUGE emphasis is placed on catching out plagiarism, I think because the students/trainees are all expected to adhere to a higher level of ethics than the “average” student at your institution of higher learning. I’m pretty sure they all use Turnitin religiously. And if you get caught it’s like an instant fail because it means YOU LIED which is like right up there with only sort of defending and upholding the Constitution, making you literally the worst.

Then of course after graduation everyone goes back to their staff jobs where their elected or politically appointed bosses are often completely unconcerned with such things (lol Biden) and copying each other’s homework is considered a best practice because it’s a smart way to get stuff done and who’s going to read this crap anyway.

I've only had issues with Turnitin catching students copying papers by their friends, since it also works across Turnitin submissions at one's institution.

Did have an incident this fall where another prof found a student had copied the paper of a student of mine from last spring. My student eventually had to withdrawal from the class because of attendance issues (prior to the pandemic) and just unbelievably bad papers, stuff that wasn't even put through spell-check, just sloppy crap. And they gave this paper to a friend of theirs to use this fall. Remarkable, in my mind— I never would have thought to have done anything like this, ever.

Awkward…

https://www.chronicle.com/article/dead-man-teaching

yeah I saw that story, pretty funny / lame on the uni's part.

any thoughts here on the Kansass tenure business? I used to teach there & one big reason for getting out was how cavalierly my colleagues treated a similar threat in 2008 and refused to say that they'd do anything to protect untenured tenure-track faculty from culling.

I would expect tenure to be a hot-button item here now that very few tenure-track faculty remain on the board. For my part I think efforts to preserve tenure for university faculty without concomitant job security reforms for workers in nonacademic fields are doomed to failure.

Tenured faculty never seem huge on solidarity with the immiserated ranks of adjuncts and grad students making their 2/1 teaching loads possible

ime that varies by school/department. in general the tenured faculty i know supported our grad worker union - signing public letters, inviting union reps to speak at conferences they were hosting, accepting invitations to speak at union rallys during our strike, etc.

ime it varies so much on how many of each camp there are, what kind of classes get taught by which department in which college or other administrative unit, what sort of union situation there is for nt faculty, etc.

my wife is tenured and i am not nor will be so i have access to both sides of it which can be good and bad

IME the the tenured profs are the most useless shits to ever breathe air while NTTs, adjuncts, and grad students make their useless research possible. They wouldn't even support a resolution calling for year-long contracts for adjuncts, and meanwhile, they ask advice on how to teach from those same adjuncts.

Like you're tenured and you don't know how to teach Foucault? Maybe I should have your job then instead of begging my husband not to quit his job so we can keep his good insurance.

Charming as ever.

fuck off islamophobe

Creative too!

It's amazing how tenured profs such as yourself will rally around their colleagues at other institutions, even when those colleagues are demonstrably bad at their jobs and act terribly toward the people who make their jobs possible.

my wife is tenured and i am not nor will be so i have access to both sides of it which can be good and bad

― joygoat, Monday, February 1, 2021 2:06 PM (two hours ago)

similar situation here. I'm currently a phd student but in the past have been university staff and the differences in both cases were/are instructive. Also, she was adjunct & staff for 6 years before getting a tt job, so we've held various perspectives over the years.

It's nowhere near perfect, but I'm glad at my current Canadian institution the full-time faculty, part-time faculty, and TA/RAs all have separate unions. The contrast with past US institutions is remarkable. I am deeply disgusted when I see full-time/tt faculty opposing unionization

Or refusing to support their NTT and adjunct faculty in any meaningful way— many belong to the union, but seem to believe that solidarity should only be shared among themselves.

Including TT and NTT faculty in the same union is a joke afaic, the power differential is ludicrous.

the table is the table, the way you talk to me on here is shitty. In this thread you’ve called me one of “the most useless shits to ever breathe air” and an Islamophobe. What are you hoping to gain by this? The second is untrue and the former, well, if that’s what you really think, why engage with me at all? Or with my tenured Muslim colleagues, with whom I work daily? And why do you think you know me so well that you think I’m not fighting for my untenured colleagues? We don’t have to live out the thread’s title in here!

I called you an Islamophobe because I've read your posts on other threads.

I never called *you* a useless shit, I wrote "IME the tenured profs are the most useless shits to ever breathe air." You included yourself in that equation, I did not.

I admit to being hyperbolic— I have great respect for some of my tenured colleagues and friends.

But at the institution where I've spent most of my time, the huge number of NTT-but-pulling-a-4/4 faculty and contingent faculty do the majority of the teaching. Many of the tenured faculty seem to be upper-middle class people with kids who don't understand or care about their students. And many of them are terrified that showing a little solidarity with their non-tenured colleagues will get them in hot water, so they throw us under the bus on a regular basis.

Situations like the one I describe and those tenured folks who whinge endlessly about "having to read horrible poetry by dumb teenagers"— a complaint I've heard more than once from *tenured* creative writing/english profs— are evidence enough for me that many of the tenured faculty in my given field are running a grift, suck at their jobs, and are bad human beings.

I don't necessarily think you're one of these people. I just don't like your weird support of obviously Islamophobic policies of the French state.

As a friend who recently defended said to me on the phone, "I am glad that I have a job at a local high school and editing a journal, because all the academics I've met in all my years in academia are sociopaths"

Many of the tenured faculty seem to be upper-middle class people with kids who don't understand or care about their students.

many of the tenured faculty in my given field are running a grift, suck at their jobs

I'd say most of the "good" academics I know - the well liked teachers and colleagues, tenured or otherwise, who do all sorts of above and beyond work for their students and are genuinely interested in doing work that benefits society and are terrified as being seen as ivory tower intellectuals - are absolutely convinced they're running a grift and suck at their jobs. Conversely a lot of the real assholes think they're amazing and talented and the world revolves around the fact that they're extremely familiar with Chaucer or 18th century british history or whatever.

And not trying to be BUT NOT ALL PARENTS!!! here but a lot of the academics I know without kids (or those with kids who are obviously not interested in parenting) are fucking terrible at teaching and any sort of administration where they deal with students (grad / undergrad directors, advising, committee work) because they're hyper-focused adult-children who devote all their energy to whatever their interest is and resent anything that dares intrude into that space. The academics I know with kids, for the most part, have to strongly compartmentalize their life and work and tend to have a much greater sense of empathy towards the needs of others because kids constantly need empathy and people to do shit for them.

But really, I don't understand why anyone would be surprised that academia is just like any other workplace with different strata of power and money, some number of people who are really great and caring and good at their jobs, and a number who are incredibly lazy / malicious / entitled assholes who have failed or scammed their way upward.

Oh wow I don’t think having kids has anything to do with it but this conversation is not going anywhere productive imo. Idk what the purpose of it is.

As of Dec I got RIFed and am no longer tied to the higher ed grind, at least not formally. It’s a huge relief!

What an asshole, and I feel doubly ashamed due to the fact that the instructor is Romanian. Surely he remembers December 1989?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/19/canada-lecturer-myanmar-student-exam-web-blackout

I looked at the York U. subreddit after this went viral and this guy has been a monumentally hated asshole on that campus for a long long time

I can totally picture the type, too. An old school authority figure with no regard whatsoever for students or anyone who isn't his hierarchical 'better'.

https://edsource.org/2021/mills-college-announces-plan-to-close-triggering-debate-about-other-schools-futures/651489

Amazing:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/26/experience-i-tracked-down-my-impostor

that's great, but the headline is a bit misleading! surely this guy will pop up in the news again somewhere in a couple of years?

i want to know who the imposter is!

Look for the flowers on the backs of his hands, with the words ‘know more’ and ‘artefact’ written across the fingers.

geeta wrote this article about the mills college closing vis a vis the music department

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/arts/music/mills-college-music.html

interesting article about the student athletes recruited to attend New College in Florida:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/magazine/new-college-desantis-florida.html