Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

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,