Mobility map: It seems to me the lighter-purple "islands" in the seas of dark purple tend to be places where larger cities (unsurprising) or universities (something people might not think of). My county is light purple but we don't have a city of more than 15,000 - but we do have a university.
The county where my parents live is similar, though they DO have a city of some 100,000. In the eastern half of the country at least, it looks more like a rural/urban divide. The western half, I don't know as much about.
Nah, that's okay. I talk too much about myself here sometimes.
The whole "investment and must be perfect" thing is really more "my stuff" - I care far too passionately what people think of me, and also, some days it feels like my career is ALL I have (a definite downside to never having married or had children) and so if things are going badly there, it makes me question my entire life.
And I often feel like my diligence is the only thing I am above average at....so I lean heavily on that, perhaps more than I should, as evidence that I'm "okay."
The cost of retrofitting my house to be a lab would take a v. long time to recoup. Not to mention many places, zoning would prohibit that - there are places where zoning prevents stuff like house-churches because people don't want all the "strangers" parking in their neighborhood.
My house is too small, anyway. I'd have to buy a bigger place. And also, because of my personal issues, I would be unsettled having my students in the place where I eat, sleep, and relax: I'd rather rent a studio type setting somewhere.
Also, there are OSHA laws to be complied with, for things like the soils lab I teach. Compliance is doable in an institutional setting; it would be a real effort to keep up with all the paperwork and inspections on my own.
I think for lab classes there is an economy of scale having a dedicated facility has that doing it out of your own space would not meet. Different in the arts, perhaps, certainly different in humanities and music and the like.
(But even in the arts - stuff like pottery glazes have MSDS sheets, too)
My campus is actually going the opposite direction: unused office space is rented out to some small businesspeople. That makes sense, I think.
Ran out of editing time, but it is a two-way street, and sometimes it feels to me like the pendulum has swung so far to the "professor as servant of the student" model.
That may be my own stuff talking, and my own need to be "perfect," but after having a student be upset because he showed up at 6:45 am one day during exam week and I wasn't there (my office hours started at 8), it can be frustrating.
I suppose it boils down to: people make themselves hard to love, sometimes.
And not just adjuncts: people on the tenure track, if their evaluations aren't high enough, maybe don't get tenure, especially at teaching-heavy schools.
And the "accountability regime" is what makes my life the most miserable at times - all the paperwork we must fill out, the fact that a lot of things the students probably should be responsible for (e.g., monitoring their own grades rather than us having to push e-mail monthly reports to them) falling on us. At times it feels like a grand experiment in "how much additional work can a person take on before they crack" - like something out of Modern Times.
At one point they were asking us to write twice-a-year reports on our level of "community engagement" -i.e., what kind of volunteer work we did out away from campus. Because apparently there's some kind of accreditation check box for that. I found it slightly annoying because that half-hour or so I spent writing up that report could have been a half-hour I was working at the food bank or doing literacy tutoring or something. The problem with expecting heavy documentation of stuff is it takes time away from doing the actual stuff.
And editing to add, for Gabriel:
Yes. I tend to put "service to the students" at the head of my list - I hold all my office hours (unless, for example, my furnace is broken and I am having to wait at home for the repair dude, and then I have a note up on my door and the secretary has my phone number and will give it out)
The "contempt" of students is bad and shouldn't be done.
But at the same time, I have had students do stuff like request extra meeting times and then never show up when I made the effort to be there...
Oh, we COULD Uber-ize. The question is, is the loss in quality of skills of graduates worth the cost savings? Especially for STEM type classes or things like music, though music would also lend itself well to a more of an apprenticeship model (Well, probably everything in higher ed MIGHT, but I suspect an apprenticeship model would be even more expensive than current higher ed)
My father is a retired professor and whenever I worry at him about MOOCs and "everything going online," he reminds me about how IETV was going to be the wave of the future back in the 1970s. (Filming the prof and then broadcasting it to distance sites, or showing the films on local PBS). I am not quite as sanguine as he is about online education being no more successful than IETV was, but then again, he's drawing two pensions from two separate schools, and I'm out here still trying to make ends meet on my regular salary.
Honestly, my bar for "good customer service" is pretty low. The examples I give of "poor service" were the young woman at the makeup counter in the department store who raised a finger to me (the index, not the one you're thinking) to make me wait so she could finish what was pretty clearly a non-emergency phone conversation before helping me.
And the person at the make-up counter in another store, after I waited for 10 minutes for help and then started wandering off, yelled that she was "busy" and there "weren't enough people working"
(I go to Ulta now; I can buy my makeup without people having to get it for me)
And the woman in the department store who was too busy having a conversation with a co-worker and made me wait five minutes, with her back turned to me, before ringing up the coat I was buying. Again, from what I heard, it sounded like a gossip-conversation, not an essential one.
I get annoyed when the assumption is I have infinite time for things like waiting for someone to help me - I get a few minutes at a busy time but 10 or more when the store is not busy? I'm gonna walk out of the store.
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I'm probably TOO invested in my institution, and my usual response to the stressors of my position is to work even harder or, deep inside myself, curl into a little ball and rock back and forth. I tend to worry too much about how I look to other people and have too much concern about seeming "perfect" which has the side effect of too many people apparently thinking I have things under control, which I so do not.
I've long said academics need to be coupled with someone outside the academy. Not because of the "two-body problem" so much as a person NEEDS that outside-the-academy perspective. One of my big problems is I get so deep within my head that problems at work start to look like the ONLY problems and INSURMOUNTABLE and it would help if, for example, I shared living quarters with a plumber who could regale me with tales of the crap (literal) he had to deal with in a day, or something like that.
Online labs are a thing. I think it will come down to whether or not people are willing to give up the competency lost in not actually manipulating whatever the thing is in a "real" lab for the cost-savings of online labs.
We get transfer students who took their intro-level courses all online, including simulated labs. Their lab technique is generally terrible, and I find I have to go back and do a lot of re-teaching of stuff like "No, you do not use a beaker to measure out a quantity of liquid; they are not sufficiently accurate" and "this is how you use a pipetter"
They are also very unsure of themselves working with "stuff" and I think that doesn't bode well for their future employment if they have to work with 'stuff." I have a colleague who says he can tell which students played with Lego as a kid (or similar) and which did not by comfort level with trying stuff...
I wouldn't go to a doctor whose basic experience was all online, but I don't know that we'll be able to check that in the future.
A few years ago a lot of people here were saying we needed to move heavily into the realm of MOOCs. Never mind that the point of a MOOC is that a "superstar" at a big name school can do it better and cheaper than we could, and of course people will go for the big name. And then the Eeyores came out pointing out that MOOCs will mean massive unemployment for the non-superstars like us.
I dunno. I fall somewhere closer to Eeyore than I do to Tigger on that spectrum and I just hope I can see teaching in person through until I hit 60 and can retire.
I admit I'm kind of shirty about the whole "comfort giving" thing because a few semesters ago, they sent around an e-mail requesting faculty volunteers to serve "breakfast at midnight" to students during exam week. Never mind that faculty have their own exam-week stress (it was a fall semester so I had 20-odd computation and essay intensive biostats exams to grade, on top of the more-objective ones in my other classes). My bigger objection was the expectation that I'd willingly give up that kind of sleep, and that (as a single, live-alone woman) I'd be comfortable driving up to campus late at night, parking the distance from the cafeteria I'd have to park, walking there, and then walking back to my car.
I ignored the e-mail. They didn't ask next semester and I'm wondering if that's because they had too few volunteers.
There are some folks on my campus who are very fast to go "You know what would be great? If the faculty just did X" where X is some time-consuming thing outside of our regular duties/hours or that requires us to invest our own money to make it happen. There's no consideration that faculty get tired too, or have budgets they have to stick to, or maybe have stuff going on outside of campus life.
I've been on a few search committees and found myself amazed at the people who were not really qualified for the job (e.g., someone who was a cell and molecular biologist applying for a spot that required someone with experience in ornithology and mammalogy and who had done field research). The only thing I can say about this is it makes it easy to reject them and justify why to our EEOC officer.....
I applied to about 30 positions. I got lucky, though it was also nearly 20 years ago when tenure lines were still more common. (I got three offers, took the best one)
At my uni, a series of budget cuts and just a general spiralling down of funding and enrollment, while trying to keep tuition in check, means many, many departments are understaffed. Mine is, and it's not even as bad as some (we are short two full-time people. There are some classes that get taught once a year or once every two years that perhaps could be taught every semester, and there are the floating overloads).
I dunno; I chalked it up to "the gradual crappification of everything" but then again, you're right, there has to be some cause, but I don't know what it is. Maybe the dilution of the value of a degree? Maybe the loss-of-confidence by the general public, when they see (for example) people with Master's degrees working (not by choice) as baristas?
There also has been a lot of mission creep in the academy, which might be related to the "are you doing the task" question: we do a LOT more "hand holding" and lifestyle stuff for the students than when I was a student. I can't tell for sure if that's the difference of 30-some years of time or the difference between a Public Ivy (my alma mater) and the commuter/underserved groups school I teach at now.
I do know no one did any kind of "exam week stress relief" activities for me when I was a student. I think a couple people in the dorm organized an ad hoc primal scream session one evening, but that was about it.
Also there's SO MUCH MORE paperwork we all have to do. Not just profs; staff and admins too.
The problem I see with things being "contingentized" - it's the difference I see between shopping at the wal-mart and driving to the quilt shop a couple towns over where the owner is usually the person behind the cutting table and cash register.
If you don't have "investment" in a system, if you know you could be let go for no good reason (we had people who were fired "without cause" during the last round of budget cuts, including a colleague of mine who had been there longer than I had but who had never sought tenure), you may be less eager to "go the extra mile."
Customer service in the US has suffered in my lifetime. I don't think that's a controversial statement. What has changed is that people working as clerks or cashiers or stockers or whatever have fewer colleagues (more work added on to each person), the jobs are seen as more "disposable," they are seen as more "disposable." I've gotten frustrated more than once with someone who either didn't know how to help me because they were poorly trained, or who didn't want to provide help because they were disinvested in their job because they were making minimum wage without benefits and reported to a faceless and ever-changing train of managers.
I don't know. Part of this may be middle-aged me going "But didn't the grass use to be greener" but I do think a lot of things have gotten worse and I can't quite pinpoint how or why.
(And I try not to have "Swagger." I agonized mightily over the furlough days - I took Good Friday, already a day we got off, as one, and took afternoons when I had no classes as others. I wound up grading during them even though we were told we weren't "allowed" do do work, because otherwise, how does the work get done? People have accused me of still having the "scared grad student" mindset because I won't do things like cancel office hours....I prefer to think of it as "I don't want to screw over the students" because the students are the ones I'm here for. I could do without the pronouncements and like of some of the higher-ups here, but I try not to snark about it to the students...)
There's also the so-called "Two-body problem" (as some academics jokingly describe it) for coupled people. It works better if one partner is in a more portable career (like being a businessperson: one of my colleagues married and her husband opened up a variant of the business he had been running elsewhere locally). But for couples where both partners are academics, it can be bad. In the past, some schools would make the effort to find a position for the second person, but nepotism rules have got stricter and budgets tighter.....so one partner often has to decide to have a different career, or be a "freeway flyer" or something equally unattractive.
I am single, and I am living somewhere that is in some ways less-than-ideal for me, but at least I have a job. (I am both educationally - ecologist - and constitutionally unsuited for the corporate world)
Sadly, I wouldn't recommend anyone go into academia right now, unless they're a super-super-super star who can write their own ticket and is planning on a career in research that has clear and immediate applications, like engineering or cancer-treatment or something related to energy.....
I'm a tenured prof, in my 40s, at a teaching-centered school. (My courseload, until very recently was 4/3/2 - last summer, because of low enrollment and budget cuts I got paid at the adjunct rate, exactly half my normal pay, for summer, and I said I wasn't teaching summer again unless I could be guaranteed "full" classes that would get me "full" pay.*)
But yeah. I find the argument being made "it's the tenured profs' fault" or, more commonly, "The tenured profs have to step up and fight for the adjuncts because they have job security and we don't." Mmmm, yes, true: but if an administrator really comes to hate you, they will find a way to make your life hellish even if you have tenure, or they sometimes DO find a way to trump up something against you. And also, some of us tenured folks are essentially running like crazy to stay in the same place and just don't have the energy to take on ANOTHER fight - on my campus we were fighting for our existence last year (that may be a slight exaggerations, but it sure *felt* like it)
I don't know. It's a problem. Adjuncts are less committed to the department because they don't have job security and the pay is generally terrible (and there are no benefits: most campuses keep their adjuncts at or under the "magic" 29 hours work per week so they don't have to pay for health insurance). And in the sciences, at least, it can be very hard to get qualified adjuncts - I have heard of adjuncts just leaving mid-semester because they got a better job as a dental hygienist or something like that, and leaving the students hanging (and often leaving one of the full-time tenured people to play catch-up for them, on top of their own classes).
In my own department we have worked very hard to avoid adjuncts even though that means there's a floating overload that comes to rest on a different full-time person each semester. (And I am taking on a new class this fall that I have never taught before and am not 100% qualified to teach: pray for me)
I don't know. Higher ed is a mess right now and on my bleaker days I wonder if I'll make it to retirement age (I could retire in 12 years at the earliest) with my job intact. (And I say that as a tenured person). I suspect there was an over-expansion of higher ed in the past 60 years or so (and I say that knowing full well that my job might not exist without that expansion). I suspect a correction is coming, and I just hope to God it comes after I retire, or that I'm somehow insulated by being at a small school known for "affordability."
I love teaching but what's going on in higher ed makes me sad. It's not how it used to be, not even like it was the not-quite 20 years ago I started teaching.
(*It is ALMOST as much effort to teach 6 people as it is, for example, to teach 15. You put in more effort in grading but in terms of preparation and wear-and-tear it's the same. So it's not worth it to me to work 40 hours a week for about $700 a month take-home pay when I could work on research or do editing work or something else that either earns the same amount for less work (editing) or that will advance me in some way (research)
Yeah, and in the age of clickbait, I think crime stories - especially dumb crime stories - are used more. My local news last week spent about a minute on talking about burglaries in a town south of me, and then lavished five minutes on some idiot "Florida Man" crime story (This is NOT a station based in, or anywhere near, Florida). Newsertanment, I guess.
Seems a rather blunt instrument to me, but then again, maybe in our culture the best we can hope for for some "disconnected" people are blunt instruments.
(I'd hope if I ever lost touch with reality that my co-workers or fellow church members would care enough to drag me in somewhere for a consult but I also know for some people, one consequence of mental illness is that they seem to lose all their social ties)
It seems to me that crime is rising in my area - a lot of it related to addiction; people burgling or outright robbing so they have funds for their "fix." (Here it seems to be meth rather than opioids, but that may be my perception from the news & talking to a friend with a son in law enforcement. And yes, her son is a deputy sheriff and she says he says crime has gone up; he has more calls now, and it's not related to slightly higher population here)
I dunno. I guess I'd rather be burgled (when I wasn't home) than robbed (either on the street or when I was home). But I'd rather be either than raped or murdered, and those don't seem to be going up, at least in "non domestic" situations. ("Domestics" are still bad here. There was a case this weekend of a local mayor shooting - or shooting at, it's unclear - his boyfriend over an argument over, if I read the news right, soda....)
I've said if a miracle ever happened and I WAS getting married, my "reception" would be an outdoor barbecue with lawn games (e.g., badminton) because the very words "selecting a DJ" makes me come out in hives.
I once mentioned my hypothetical barbecue reception thing to a person I know and she was aghast - how TACKY! (it would have been "catered meat and a few sides, bring a side or dessert to share") but most of my good friends thought it was an awesome idea. So either that one person had a stick up her fundament, or all my friends are as tacky as I am.
I would be happy to go to a wedding that didn't have a reception. I would consider it in no way losing face for the couple. (it would also obviate the need for a "plus one" for me, something that is always problematic, because receptions tend to have dancing and weddings don't).
My brother and sister in law did their wedding and reception (just a dinner, no other stuff) on the cheap and it was fantastic. And they're still happy together some 18 years later, and I suppose that's what really matters.
Fa1: Yeah, I think that's true. My parents were strict in some ways (and they tried to model good/moral behavior to us - I still remember the time my mom turned around immediately and drove back to the bank when she realized the cashier gave her a good bit more money than what she was cashing the check for. The cashier was nearly in tears when my mom explained and returned the money - she said she could have been fired if her drawer came up short. That was an early and powerful lesson to me in how seemingly 'victimless' actions often aren't)
They were strict, but there were other things they were lax on with my brother and me. Like, if what they were serving for dinner was something we disliked or just didn't want to eat, we were welcome to make ourselves a peanut butter sandwich and sit at the table with them and eat it. (We had to eat the vegetables, though). I had friends who either were forced to sit with the hated food until they ate it, or were sent to bed hungry.
I also confess, as a goody-two-shoes kid, I used their strictness as an excuse at least once, when friends were planning to ditch school or something: "Oh, no. You know my parents. They'd KILL me if they found out." (Probably not, but it was an easy way to have an appeal-to-authority to say "no, I don't want to do this")
Uuuuggggh. So now I'm back to driving to work in what feels like the dead middle-of-the-night for at least a month. (I loathe DST. Even in high summer I loathe it because it's not light enough early enough, but it's often still light when I want to go to bed.)
The only mitigating factor for me is that next week is Spring Break, so at least I can slowly claw back that hour of sleep over the course of the week. (It's going to be a mostly-working break for me; I have a new class to prep for the fall and I am already stressing about it: Environmental Policy and Law, which I am far from an expert in, and also, when the last person who taught it handed the materials off to me - shortly after Trump's election - she said "Good luck, you'll need it!" and walked off laughing.)
On “Morning Ed: United States {2017.03.16.Th}”
Mobility map: It seems to me the lighter-purple "islands" in the seas of dark purple tend to be places where larger cities (unsurprising) or universities (something people might not think of). My county is light purple but we don't have a city of more than 15,000 - but we do have a university.
The county where my parents live is similar, though they DO have a city of some 100,000. In the eastern half of the country at least, it looks more like a rural/urban divide. The western half, I don't know as much about.
On “Don’t Blame Me!”
Nah, that's okay. I talk too much about myself here sometimes.
The whole "investment and must be perfect" thing is really more "my stuff" - I care far too passionately what people think of me, and also, some days it feels like my career is ALL I have (a definite downside to never having married or had children) and so if things are going badly there, it makes me question my entire life.
And I often feel like my diligence is the only thing I am above average at....so I lean heavily on that, perhaps more than I should, as evidence that I'm "okay."
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The cost of retrofitting my house to be a lab would take a v. long time to recoup. Not to mention many places, zoning would prohibit that - there are places where zoning prevents stuff like house-churches because people don't want all the "strangers" parking in their neighborhood.
My house is too small, anyway. I'd have to buy a bigger place. And also, because of my personal issues, I would be unsettled having my students in the place where I eat, sleep, and relax: I'd rather rent a studio type setting somewhere.
Also, there are OSHA laws to be complied with, for things like the soils lab I teach. Compliance is doable in an institutional setting; it would be a real effort to keep up with all the paperwork and inspections on my own.
I think for lab classes there is an economy of scale having a dedicated facility has that doing it out of your own space would not meet. Different in the arts, perhaps, certainly different in humanities and music and the like.
(But even in the arts - stuff like pottery glazes have MSDS sheets, too)
My campus is actually going the opposite direction: unused office space is rented out to some small businesspeople. That makes sense, I think.
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Ran out of editing time, but it is a two-way street, and sometimes it feels to me like the pendulum has swung so far to the "professor as servant of the student" model.
That may be my own stuff talking, and my own need to be "perfect," but after having a student be upset because he showed up at 6:45 am one day during exam week and I wasn't there (my office hours started at 8), it can be frustrating.
I suppose it boils down to: people make themselves hard to love, sometimes.
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Yes.
And not just adjuncts: people on the tenure track, if their evaluations aren't high enough, maybe don't get tenure, especially at teaching-heavy schools.
And the "accountability regime" is what makes my life the most miserable at times - all the paperwork we must fill out, the fact that a lot of things the students probably should be responsible for (e.g., monitoring their own grades rather than us having to push e-mail monthly reports to them) falling on us. At times it feels like a grand experiment in "how much additional work can a person take on before they crack" - like something out of Modern Times.
At one point they were asking us to write twice-a-year reports on our level of "community engagement" -i.e., what kind of volunteer work we did out away from campus. Because apparently there's some kind of accreditation check box for that. I found it slightly annoying because that half-hour or so I spent writing up that report could have been a half-hour I was working at the food bank or doing literacy tutoring or something. The problem with expecting heavy documentation of stuff is it takes time away from doing the actual stuff.
And editing to add, for Gabriel:
Yes. I tend to put "service to the students" at the head of my list - I hold all my office hours (unless, for example, my furnace is broken and I am having to wait at home for the repair dude, and then I have a note up on my door and the secretary has my phone number and will give it out)
The "contempt" of students is bad and shouldn't be done.
But at the same time, I have had students do stuff like request extra meeting times and then never show up when I made the effort to be there...
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Oh, we COULD Uber-ize. The question is, is the loss in quality of skills of graduates worth the cost savings? Especially for STEM type classes or things like music, though music would also lend itself well to a more of an apprenticeship model (Well, probably everything in higher ed MIGHT, but I suspect an apprenticeship model would be even more expensive than current higher ed)
My father is a retired professor and whenever I worry at him about MOOCs and "everything going online," he reminds me about how IETV was going to be the wave of the future back in the 1970s. (Filming the prof and then broadcasting it to distance sites, or showing the films on local PBS). I am not quite as sanguine as he is about online education being no more successful than IETV was, but then again, he's drawing two pensions from two separate schools, and I'm out here still trying to make ends meet on my regular salary.
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Honestly, my bar for "good customer service" is pretty low. The examples I give of "poor service" were the young woman at the makeup counter in the department store who raised a finger to me (the index, not the one you're thinking) to make me wait so she could finish what was pretty clearly a non-emergency phone conversation before helping me.
And the person at the make-up counter in another store, after I waited for 10 minutes for help and then started wandering off, yelled that she was "busy" and there "weren't enough people working"
(I go to Ulta now; I can buy my makeup without people having to get it for me)
And the woman in the department store who was too busy having a conversation with a co-worker and made me wait five minutes, with her back turned to me, before ringing up the coat I was buying. Again, from what I heard, it sounded like a gossip-conversation, not an essential one.
I get annoyed when the assumption is I have infinite time for things like waiting for someone to help me - I get a few minutes at a busy time but 10 or more when the store is not busy? I'm gonna walk out of the store.
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I'm probably TOO invested in my institution, and my usual response to the stressors of my position is to work even harder or, deep inside myself, curl into a little ball and rock back and forth. I tend to worry too much about how I look to other people and have too much concern about seeming "perfect" which has the side effect of too many people apparently thinking I have things under control, which I so do not.
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I've long said academics need to be coupled with someone outside the academy. Not because of the "two-body problem" so much as a person NEEDS that outside-the-academy perspective. One of my big problems is I get so deep within my head that problems at work start to look like the ONLY problems and INSURMOUNTABLE and it would help if, for example, I shared living quarters with a plumber who could regale me with tales of the crap (literal) he had to deal with in a day, or something like that.
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Online labs are a thing. I think it will come down to whether or not people are willing to give up the competency lost in not actually manipulating whatever the thing is in a "real" lab for the cost-savings of online labs.
We get transfer students who took their intro-level courses all online, including simulated labs. Their lab technique is generally terrible, and I find I have to go back and do a lot of re-teaching of stuff like "No, you do not use a beaker to measure out a quantity of liquid; they are not sufficiently accurate" and "this is how you use a pipetter"
They are also very unsure of themselves working with "stuff" and I think that doesn't bode well for their future employment if they have to work with 'stuff." I have a colleague who says he can tell which students played with Lego as a kid (or similar) and which did not by comfort level with trying stuff...
I wouldn't go to a doctor whose basic experience was all online, but I don't know that we'll be able to check that in the future.
A few years ago a lot of people here were saying we needed to move heavily into the realm of MOOCs. Never mind that the point of a MOOC is that a "superstar" at a big name school can do it better and cheaper than we could, and of course people will go for the big name. And then the Eeyores came out pointing out that MOOCs will mean massive unemployment for the non-superstars like us.
I dunno. I fall somewhere closer to Eeyore than I do to Tigger on that spectrum and I just hope I can see teaching in person through until I hit 60 and can retire.
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Lawsuits. That's what I'm blaming it on.
I admit I'm kind of shirty about the whole "comfort giving" thing because a few semesters ago, they sent around an e-mail requesting faculty volunteers to serve "breakfast at midnight" to students during exam week. Never mind that faculty have their own exam-week stress (it was a fall semester so I had 20-odd computation and essay intensive biostats exams to grade, on top of the more-objective ones in my other classes). My bigger objection was the expectation that I'd willingly give up that kind of sleep, and that (as a single, live-alone woman) I'd be comfortable driving up to campus late at night, parking the distance from the cafeteria I'd have to park, walking there, and then walking back to my car.
I ignored the e-mail. They didn't ask next semester and I'm wondering if that's because they had too few volunteers.
There are some folks on my campus who are very fast to go "You know what would be great? If the faculty just did X" where X is some time-consuming thing outside of our regular duties/hours or that requires us to invest our own money to make it happen. There's no consideration that faculty get tired too, or have budgets they have to stick to, or maybe have stuff going on outside of campus life.
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I've been on a few search committees and found myself amazed at the people who were not really qualified for the job (e.g., someone who was a cell and molecular biologist applying for a spot that required someone with experience in ornithology and mammalogy and who had done field research). The only thing I can say about this is it makes it easy to reject them and justify why to our EEOC officer.....
I applied to about 30 positions. I got lucky, though it was also nearly 20 years ago when tenure lines were still more common. (I got three offers, took the best one)
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At my uni, a series of budget cuts and just a general spiralling down of funding and enrollment, while trying to keep tuition in check, means many, many departments are understaffed. Mine is, and it's not even as bad as some (we are short two full-time people. There are some classes that get taught once a year or once every two years that perhaps could be taught every semester, and there are the floating overloads).
I dunno; I chalked it up to "the gradual crappification of everything" but then again, you're right, there has to be some cause, but I don't know what it is. Maybe the dilution of the value of a degree? Maybe the loss-of-confidence by the general public, when they see (for example) people with Master's degrees working (not by choice) as baristas?
There also has been a lot of mission creep in the academy, which might be related to the "are you doing the task" question: we do a LOT more "hand holding" and lifestyle stuff for the students than when I was a student. I can't tell for sure if that's the difference of 30-some years of time or the difference between a Public Ivy (my alma mater) and the commuter/underserved groups school I teach at now.
I do know no one did any kind of "exam week stress relief" activities for me when I was a student. I think a couple people in the dorm organized an ad hoc primal scream session one evening, but that was about it.
Also there's SO MUCH MORE paperwork we all have to do. Not just profs; staff and admins too.
On “Morning Ed: Europe {2017.03.14.T}”
The "stick a wizard in it" one makes me more wonder if there's an old knight hanging out somewhere there, warning people to "choose wisely."
On “Don’t Blame Me!”
The problem I see with things being "contingentized" - it's the difference I see between shopping at the wal-mart and driving to the quilt shop a couple towns over where the owner is usually the person behind the cutting table and cash register.
If you don't have "investment" in a system, if you know you could be let go for no good reason (we had people who were fired "without cause" during the last round of budget cuts, including a colleague of mine who had been there longer than I had but who had never sought tenure), you may be less eager to "go the extra mile."
Customer service in the US has suffered in my lifetime. I don't think that's a controversial statement. What has changed is that people working as clerks or cashiers or stockers or whatever have fewer colleagues (more work added on to each person), the jobs are seen as more "disposable," they are seen as more "disposable." I've gotten frustrated more than once with someone who either didn't know how to help me because they were poorly trained, or who didn't want to provide help because they were disinvested in their job because they were making minimum wage without benefits and reported to a faceless and ever-changing train of managers.
I don't know. Part of this may be middle-aged me going "But didn't the grass use to be greener" but I do think a lot of things have gotten worse and I can't quite pinpoint how or why.
(And I try not to have "Swagger." I agonized mightily over the furlough days - I took Good Friday, already a day we got off, as one, and took afternoons when I had no classes as others. I wound up grading during them even though we were told we weren't "allowed" do do work, because otherwise, how does the work get done? People have accused me of still having the "scared grad student" mindset because I won't do things like cancel office hours....I prefer to think of it as "I don't want to screw over the students" because the students are the ones I'm here for. I could do without the pronouncements and like of some of the higher-ups here, but I try not to snark about it to the students...)
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There's also the so-called "Two-body problem" (as some academics jokingly describe it) for coupled people. It works better if one partner is in a more portable career (like being a businessperson: one of my colleagues married and her husband opened up a variant of the business he had been running elsewhere locally). But for couples where both partners are academics, it can be bad. In the past, some schools would make the effort to find a position for the second person, but nepotism rules have got stricter and budgets tighter.....so one partner often has to decide to have a different career, or be a "freeway flyer" or something equally unattractive.
I am single, and I am living somewhere that is in some ways less-than-ideal for me, but at least I have a job. (I am both educationally - ecologist - and constitutionally unsuited for the corporate world)
Sadly, I wouldn't recommend anyone go into academia right now, unless they're a super-super-super star who can write their own ticket and is planning on a career in research that has clear and immediate applications, like engineering or cancer-treatment or something related to energy.....
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I'm a tenured prof, in my 40s, at a teaching-centered school. (My courseload, until very recently was 4/3/2 - last summer, because of low enrollment and budget cuts I got paid at the adjunct rate, exactly half my normal pay, for summer, and I said I wasn't teaching summer again unless I could be guaranteed "full" classes that would get me "full" pay.*)
But yeah. I find the argument being made "it's the tenured profs' fault" or, more commonly, "The tenured profs have to step up and fight for the adjuncts because they have job security and we don't." Mmmm, yes, true: but if an administrator really comes to hate you, they will find a way to make your life hellish even if you have tenure, or they sometimes DO find a way to trump up something against you. And also, some of us tenured folks are essentially running like crazy to stay in the same place and just don't have the energy to take on ANOTHER fight - on my campus we were fighting for our existence last year (that may be a slight exaggerations, but it sure *felt* like it)
I don't know. It's a problem. Adjuncts are less committed to the department because they don't have job security and the pay is generally terrible (and there are no benefits: most campuses keep their adjuncts at or under the "magic" 29 hours work per week so they don't have to pay for health insurance). And in the sciences, at least, it can be very hard to get qualified adjuncts - I have heard of adjuncts just leaving mid-semester because they got a better job as a dental hygienist or something like that, and leaving the students hanging (and often leaving one of the full-time tenured people to play catch-up for them, on top of their own classes).
In my own department we have worked very hard to avoid adjuncts even though that means there's a floating overload that comes to rest on a different full-time person each semester. (And I am taking on a new class this fall that I have never taught before and am not 100% qualified to teach: pray for me)
I don't know. Higher ed is a mess right now and on my bleaker days I wonder if I'll make it to retirement age (I could retire in 12 years at the earliest) with my job intact. (And I say that as a tenured person). I suspect there was an over-expansion of higher ed in the past 60 years or so (and I say that knowing full well that my job might not exist without that expansion). I suspect a correction is coming, and I just hope to God it comes after I retire, or that I'm somehow insulated by being at a small school known for "affordability."
I love teaching but what's going on in higher ed makes me sad. It's not how it used to be, not even like it was the not-quite 20 years ago I started teaching.
(*It is ALMOST as much effort to teach 6 people as it is, for example, to teach 15. You put in more effort in grading but in terms of preparation and wear-and-tear it's the same. So it's not worth it to me to work 40 hours a week for about $700 a month take-home pay when I could work on research or do editing work or something else that either earns the same amount for less work (editing) or that will advance me in some way (research)
On “Morning Ed: Crime {2017.03.13.M}”
Yeah, and in the age of clickbait, I think crime stories - especially dumb crime stories - are used more. My local news last week spent about a minute on talking about burglaries in a town south of me, and then lavished five minutes on some idiot "Florida Man" crime story (This is NOT a station based in, or anywhere near, Florida). Newsertanment, I guess.
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Seems a rather blunt instrument to me, but then again, maybe in our culture the best we can hope for for some "disconnected" people are blunt instruments.
(I'd hope if I ever lost touch with reality that my co-workers or fellow church members would care enough to drag me in somewhere for a consult but I also know for some people, one consequence of mental illness is that they seem to lose all their social ties)
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It seems to me that crime is rising in my area - a lot of it related to addiction; people burgling or outright robbing so they have funds for their "fix." (Here it seems to be meth rather than opioids, but that may be my perception from the news & talking to a friend with a son in law enforcement. And yes, her son is a deputy sheriff and she says he says crime has gone up; he has more calls now, and it's not related to slightly higher population here)
I dunno. I guess I'd rather be burgled (when I wasn't home) than robbed (either on the street or when I was home). But I'd rather be either than raped or murdered, and those don't seem to be going up, at least in "non domestic" situations. ("Domestics" are still bad here. There was a case this weekend of a local mayor shooting - or shooting at, it's unclear - his boyfriend over an argument over, if I read the news right, soda....)
On “Linky Friday: Home Ec”
I've said if a miracle ever happened and I WAS getting married, my "reception" would be an outdoor barbecue with lawn games (e.g., badminton) because the very words "selecting a DJ" makes me come out in hives.
I once mentioned my hypothetical barbecue reception thing to a person I know and she was aghast - how TACKY! (it would have been "catered meat and a few sides, bring a side or dessert to share") but most of my good friends thought it was an awesome idea. So either that one person had a stick up her fundament, or all my friends are as tacky as I am.
On “Soccer Ball Kitty Demonstrates Her Strength”
Seems to me Soccer Ball Kitty might be that type.
On “Linky Friday: Home Ec”
I would be happy to go to a wedding that didn't have a reception. I would consider it in no way losing face for the couple. (it would also obviate the need for a "plus one" for me, something that is always problematic, because receptions tend to have dancing and weddings don't).
My brother and sister in law did their wedding and reception (just a dinner, no other stuff) on the cheap and it was fantastic. And they're still happy together some 18 years later, and I suppose that's what really matters.
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Fa1: Yeah, I think that's true. My parents were strict in some ways (and they tried to model good/moral behavior to us - I still remember the time my mom turned around immediately and drove back to the bank when she realized the cashier gave her a good bit more money than what she was cashing the check for. The cashier was nearly in tears when my mom explained and returned the money - she said she could have been fired if her drawer came up short. That was an early and powerful lesson to me in how seemingly 'victimless' actions often aren't)
They were strict, but there were other things they were lax on with my brother and me. Like, if what they were serving for dinner was something we disliked or just didn't want to eat, we were welcome to make ourselves a peanut butter sandwich and sit at the table with them and eat it. (We had to eat the vegetables, though). I had friends who either were forced to sit with the hated food until they ate it, or were sent to bed hungry.
I also confess, as a goody-two-shoes kid, I used their strictness as an excuse at least once, when friends were planning to ditch school or something: "Oh, no. You know my parents. They'd KILL me if they found out." (Probably not, but it was an easy way to have an appeal-to-authority to say "no, I don't want to do this")
On “Weekend!”
Uuuuggggh. So now I'm back to driving to work in what feels like the dead middle-of-the-night for at least a month. (I loathe DST. Even in high summer I loathe it because it's not light enough early enough, but it's often still light when I want to go to bed.)
The only mitigating factor for me is that next week is Spring Break, so at least I can slowly claw back that hour of sleep over the course of the week. (It's going to be a mostly-working break for me; I have a new class to prep for the fall and I am already stressing about it: Environmental Policy and Law, which I am far from an expert in, and also, when the last person who taught it handed the materials off to me - shortly after Trump's election - she said "Good luck, you'll need it!" and walked off laughing.)
On “Science and Technology Links 3/9: The Color of Magic Laser Bubbles”
Sigh. So maybe I become a vegetarian, then.
Or I buy a big plot of land and raise my own cattle, and have a butcher on call.
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