Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

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.