Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

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