Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

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/

(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