I am distressed. The Uni I have been working for as an adjunct is taking a turn for the worse. Under Student Retention I am being asked to accept ridiculous amounts of late work, allow rewrites for plagiarism, and even to check with the Dean before I submit grades if students are failing which stinks of grade fixing to me. I am a lowly adjunct so I know no one "asks" me to do anything and it is code for "do it".
On one hand I want the little mouth breathers to learn something, deadlines, codes of conduct, basic professional skills! Yet I see the writing on the wall. I want to scream "don't you see what this will do to the universities reputation when they enter the workforce completely unprepared?" What do you do when you feel your ethical boundaries are being pushed and the students are actually be done a diservice by Administration?
Scratch the President's Jaguar with a key.
ReplyDeleteAll this is truly disgusting, and I'm sorry to hear it. I'm surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen even more frequently. Such devolutions show exactly why adjuncts need the same academic freedom and professional protections as "regular" faculty -- the need for unionization, in other words. A tough situation for adjuncts who care about standards and just plain old common sense. Fortunately, I'm an adjunct who's unionized, so I can (and do) stick to standards more easily than the non-unionized, but I still always have to keep an eye open for possible issues.
ReplyDeleteI do what's right. Period. At least for stakes like this. No one has a flamethrower to my kid's head. No one's going to die. They can't be paying you enough as a lowly adjunct to compromise reasonable standards. So, fuck 'em.
ReplyDeleteBut I will give you some reasonable advice. Don't hit anyone over the head with the fact that you're doing what's right. Just do it. Being "asked" to accept something is not being told to. Smiling and nodding and and seeming to agree, and then never doing what people won't come right out and tell you to do anyway, will get you quite far. Because if you don't accept the late work, then the student will have to go back again to the chair/dean, and then the dean will have to get in touch with you again, etc. Half of getting through these types of situations is just knowing the art of stalling. At some point one of these people will get tired. Just be sure it's not you.
Remember as well that most of the people making vague unfair requests can change a student grade themselves at will. And if the uppy-ups do that, that's their business and on their head.
I have policies. But I have no power over the dean or the vice-president or the president of the school. They can go into my grades if they see fit and change any one of them.
And if they do, that's their business and they have to live with it. I've done my job.
You may be afraid of losing yours. But again, are they really paying you enough to be their bitch? As an adjunct you're already their bitch. Don't bend over any more than necessary.
Omigod I've fallen in love with Stella all over again.
ReplyDelete@Stella I needed to hear this, thank you!
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ReplyDeleteMake sure YOUR standards are clearly lined out on your syllabus. I also include a highlighted statement that says if a student continues in my class, it means he or she has read, understands, and will abide by everything in that syllabus. If some little flake whines about being flunked for cheating, tough shit. He/she has done been warned.
ReplyDeletePeruse the policies printed in your uni's catalog. Here in the State of Denial, ONLY faculty may assign or change grades, short of a formal grade grievance resolved in the student's favor. These formal grievances only allow for fraud or bad faith, hard to prove even if true. If an administrator changes a grade without faculty permission, that administrator is in deep shit with the State. Maybe your state has a similar provision.
ReplyDeleteIf all else fails, you can claim ignorance. "I never received the email about the new policy Dr. Dean." If it works for the snowflakes, why not for faculty?
BTW, does anyone else suspect Strelnikov's account has been hacked again? Keying the President's car is too low-key (yes, pun intended) for the real Strelnikov.
ReplyDeleteI'd say follow Stella's (and Annie's and Pat's) excellent advice for the moment/semester, *but* also look for an exit strategy. There's a real possibility, I fear, that "retention" will become the new standard for contract renewal (replacing or joining student evals), at least in some places, and that those who don't achieve it by any means necessary will find themselves without jobs. Or you may just find that sticking to your standards makes your job so miserable that you want to leave -- and, to riff on Stella's question, are they really paying you enough to add any additional stress to the job? It sounds to me like the ship has a slow leak rather than an iceberg-size whole, but it's sinking nonetheless, and it makes sense to act accordingly.
ReplyDelete"hole," not "whole" -- it's late.
ReplyDeleteYes, I actually wrote that bit of snark just to be an a-hole....Seriously, the fools running the institutions do not see that they are shooting themselves in the foot if they let the standards slip. As it is the value of an average BA/BS is being eroded away by the sloppiness mandated by the "don't rock the boat" admin; if the Masters is the Bachelors of the future then Higher Education in America is sunk, because as I see it, the student loan sector is going to explode because they are near 1 trillion in debt, and much of that is (bad) defaulted loans. Student loans are the leading form of debt in America today....when the bomb goes off and the SL market implodes, many of the institutions we complain about will be empty shells. If they can't save the system, at least make the degrees useful; don't let it be shit factories turning out a shit product.
ReplyDeleteIs this your President?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skPIHS19yxA
Good advice across the board here. Strelni's got it about the future. That's why I am saying "Yes, massa" and doing some of my own thing anyway for another year or so while I prepare to bail. Then I'm gone.
ReplyDeleteMy passive aggressive way of dealing with this is to turn in semester grades obscenely late on a routine basis. "well I was almost done and then this came in" and I gesture with a foot tall stack of late papers turned in the afternoon of the day grades were due, sometimes the morning AFTER.
ReplyDeleteTo mix it up, next semester, since I have no classes with final exams, grades will be submitted the SECOND the online grade submission form is turned on. Then I'll just shrug that grades were already done as late material comes in.
I <3 Stella and Wombat!!! Do exactly that.
ReplyDeletePlease do me a favor - get the grades in on time. The 'flakes are on me about a nanosecond after the grade-entering-thingy is turned off.
ReplyDeleteFail 'em if they earned, send the plagiarist to me for my evil eye, and keep the faith. Your dean doesn't deserve to be dean.