Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

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.