Oh, hey, here's some misery...

The faculty union at Orange Coast College is squaring off against a student who shared a secret recording of a professor's in-class comments about Donald Trump on social media.

The recording starts mid-sentence; the professor was apparently responding to a student who asked her to her to "talk about how she felt" about the election.

The recording was published on Facebook, and a student group has now filed a formal complaint against the professor.

The student might be in trouble too; secretly recording the class was apparently a violation of the student code of conduct, the California Education Code, and the course syllabus.

The comment section is the usual parade of geniuses.

I'm just thankful that whatever my own misery, at least it doesn't include my unsatisfied customers students suddenly having a platform to complain about me on national news.

Frankie

Here, have a free audiobook. While supplies last.

The Case of the Defunct Adjunct audiobook is up now. You can hear a sample on the Audible page. 

If you'd like to listen to the rest of it, email me and I'll send you a code. (You can listen with free Audible software; you don't need a subscription.) 

Forced to attend the Student Retention Office's summer retreat, Professor Molly brings her game of buzzword bingo to fend off boredom. When a serial harasser collapses face-first into his haupia cheesecake, the event goes from dull to disastrous.

Now Molly has to fight to keep her best friend out of the worst kind of trouble — and herself off the unemployment line.

Frankie

Heroes and villains

Let's play "guess the other side of the story!" 

Recently, IHE's Confessions of a Community College Dean column presented a question from an anguished administrator who was worried that the math faculty were poised to "do tremendous and potentially irreversible harm to both students and the institution."

Irreversible harm? That sounds pretty dire, doesn't it? Almost unbelievable, in fact. 

Let's break this down:

Students at our community college struggle with math, a phenomenon common to many students, community college and otherwise.

Fair enough.

 Recently, our math faculty completely revamped the curriculum and implemented a new placement test (the latter with disastrous results and the exam was pulled). 

The placement test straighforwardly and accurately indicated that many students were not ready for college-level math. Administrators realized that the effect on their throughput and completion benchmarks would be "disastrous" and unilaterally put the kibosh on the math faculty's placement test.

Some of the parameters within the new curriculum are antithetical to student success.

Despite the setback of having their placement test yanked, the math department still refuses to hand out a passing grade and a trophy to every student.

 For example, in order to move from one 7-week class to the next, a student must pass an exit exam with a score of 70%. If she does not, she will earn a D or F in the course, regardless of her status prior to that test.

Competency-based assessment is all very well as long as students are not required to demonstrate actual competency.

Faculty own the curriculum; that point is never questioned. 

This AAUP-appeasing boilerplate must be repeated out loud every so often. It is about as meaningful as the corporate annual reports that proclaim, "our people are our greatest asset" right before trumpeting the cost savings realized by laying off thousands of workers.

However, what if the faculty decisions stand to do tremendous and potentially irreversible harm to both students and the institution? If other faculty approve the curricular changes in the shared governance process, what are the reasonable options that can also avoid irreparable damage to the relationship between faculty and administration?

"Shared governance" is all very well as long as faculty don't act like they own the curriculum.

Anyone have a more charitable interpretation? 

Frankie

Thirsty: Peak CS?

I'm admittedly observing from a biased viewpoint, since most of my teaching load consists of  sections of Writing for Scientists, but it seems to me that more and more of my students are majoring in Computer Science (and, as I noted in a comment on Frankie's post below, they all seem to be obsessed with Big Data, though always with good intentions; whatever majors college students choose, a good many of them seem to have hopes of saving the world, as well as making some money, via the profession of their choice, which is both touching and encouraging.  They also remind each other regularly of the ethical issues involved in collecting data -- also encouraging).  In some ways, this makes sense; computers are, after all, essential to all kinds of activities these days, and my university has a growing engineering school (I suspect a lot of universities have growing engineering schools). 

But it still seems a bit unbalanced, even within the science realm, especially when I consider that 10-15 years ago everybody seemed to be going into nursing and other health professions (partly because of forecasts of a coming shortage of nurses,  which sounded ominously familiar to this possessor of a Ph.D. funded by people who projected a shortage of humanities Ph.D.s, and, from what I've heard, the nursing projections had similar outcomes -- the work was there, all right, but a lot of it got outsourced and/or rearranged so that lower-paid people could do more of it).  It's not as if the baby boomers got younger, or less in need of help/replacement, in the last decade+ (though the CS folks have solutions for that, too: those that aren't obsessed with Big Data are obsessed with self-driving cars -- which of course would be useful to seniors, though students always seem rather surprised when I point that out -- or robots, including care/assistance robots). 

And of course as a humanities proffie (albeit one who teaches almost exclusively gen ed classes), I'm aware of the declining number of humanities majors, even as I see occasional calls for people with the flexible skills built by pursuing such majors, and wonder if the pendulum might just swing our way one of these days (probably long after my retirement). 

But for the moment, I'm wondering whether others are seeing a rise in CS (or similar) majors, and/or see other cyclical patterns in choice of major?  If so, what do you think drives those cycles?  And do they serve students well, or just contribute to the number of un/underemployed, and so dissatisfied, investors in a college education (formerly known as college grads)? 

--Cassandra

Scavenger hunt!

Here's another edu-disrupto-preneur piece claiming that "increasing affordability, quality, and student success all at once" is not only possible, but can be done in a "financially sustainable" way.

Yes! The only things stopping us are "inertia, finger-pointing, and buck passing." If we can stop being so lazy and pessimistic, we can magically achieve what no institution in has ever done before, for the first time in millennia! We can defy gravity, create perpetual motion, and spin straw into gold!

Your assignment:

Find one single substantiated fact in this article.

Just one. 

Bonus points if you can resist the urge to insert [citation needed] after every sentence.

Frankie

We all have secret stashes of Magic Teaching Dust and if we just agree to use it, everyone will graduate and get the top jobs and everything will be fine

So I just stumbled across yet another well-meaning (let's assume) article full of suggestions for "improving" college education in order to magically increase graduation rates.  Here's what the fresh thinkers at third way tell us we need:

Better Teaching & Supports: Every school with a graduation rate of less than 67% should develop and implement a plan to increase student completion, including improving classroom teaching by professors and adjuncts .

That's right, "improve" classroom teaching. Never mind how, exactly. Do we have to tell you everything? What's that, up to 87% of the variance in graduation rates is explained by the student, not the institution? Pfft. Show your fancy numbers to someone who cares.

Pell Floor: High-performing schools should be encouraged and incentivized to accept and educate far more low-income students.

Because accepting more low-income students will do wonders for graduation rates. That explains why top-tier universities insist on enrolling so many of them!

Open Data: We must end the opacity of college-specific outcomes data to help students, parents, and policymakers discern whether schools are succeeding or failing.

But not the kind of data that show that graduation rates can be reliably predicted by student characteristics.  Or the kind that show that where someone went to school explains only around 5 percent of the variation in their earnings  (p. 49). 

This article is from 2016. As is this one, damning nonselective public universities as "dropout factories" and demanding to know why, say, Alabama State University (average ACT 18) doesn't have the same graduation rate as UCSC (average ACT 27).  (Hey, guess what: No school with Alabama State's student academic profile has a 6 year graduation rate higher than 48%.)

I don't have some jar of Magical Teaching Dust hidden away, to be deployed only after I have been sufficiently hectored by fresh-thinking disruptopreneurs. I am already, believe it or not, doing my best. 

Here's an idea: How about disrupting poverty? 

- Frankie

So are those trips to the MAC counter tax-deductible now?

Once again, it pays to be pretty [1].

​Not only do more-attractive teachers get better evals, it seems their students pay closer attention and learn more:

Participants listened to an audio lecture while viewing a photograph of instructor. The photograph depicted either a physically attractive instructor or a less attractive instructor. Following the lecture, participants completed a forced choice recognition task covering material from the lecture. Consistent with the predictions; attractive instructors were associated with more learning.

Can't wait to see what this is this going to do to our professional-development curriculum. 

Frankie

[1] and male; an "unexpected" finding of the study was that the male instructors received better ratings than the female instructors, although the students' performance on the recall test did not differ by instructor gender. 

From the mouths of babes

"Everybody gets tested on the same standards. It's just not fair"

--A fourth-grade teacher, quoted in an article on the
unfairness" of Common Core reading standards.

"We take the test to see how teachers have teached their kids, like if they've teached them nothing and they don't know any answers, teachers get rated and they might get fired because they might not be doing their job...It's creepy because you try your best, but some kids just can't learn, and a teacher will get fired because of those kids."

--A ten-year-old student quoted in the same article.

The first quote struck me as an eyeroll-inducing example of ed-school doublespeak; the second quote, on the other hand, explained the "unfairness" angle clearly. 

I think I'd like to see more ten-year-olds writing about education. 

Frankie

On commiserating versus punching down

So our blog has been accused, not for the first time, of "punching down."

Are we guilty? 

I'm going to say no, we're not. And here's why. 

Looking through our history,  I can't find a single example of anyone here "giggling at the fat girl during recess." We don't poke fun at students' physical appearance, disability, financial situation, or even plain ignorance.

Fancy ignorance, now that's another story. 

Stubborn, unrepentant, self-absorbed, evidence-resistant, snowflakey ignorance is what we deplore. Especially when it's enabled by knavish administrators, hamfisted trustees, cool-prof colleagues, ed-tech hucksters, and pushy parents. 

Rampant snowflakery erodes trust, squashes morale, and forces us to construct syllabi the size of mortgage applications. We may not be able to fix it straightaway, but at least we can call it out. 

Frankie

More writing misery, plus a little spot of cheer from Frankie.

Unlike Cassandra, I'm not teaching a summer class, so for the time being I'm not obliged to read papers that start with "In today's modern world, ethics is a big problem" or "Dictionary.com defines 'ethics' as 'moral principles that govern a person's or group's behavior.'" or "Throughout history, mankind has considered ethics to be a big problem."

I am, however, the administrator of our online resume book. Students upload their resumes, and it is my duty (and pleasure! Really! At least most of the time!) to provide feedback and suggestions for revision, in order to maximize our students' chances of getting a seat in the brutal and bloody game of musical chairs that is the current job market. 

Well, yesterday I got a resume that was...amazing to behold. 

Five pages. Comic Sans MS font (yes, really) in two colors. An objectives statement that was 100% word salad. Clip art of flowers. 

I did not post the resume as written, but instead (because I care!) spent half my morning crafting a series of gently-worded suggestions for improvement, including a short list of recommended fonts and a customized objectives statement derived from a painstaking exegesis of the coherent portions of the resume.

Why? I don't know. Because I'm a sucker? 

The student immediately submitted a revised resume and already has two job interviews set up. 

HAHA JUST KIDDING

She wrote back, "Thank you for your feed back however I honestly believe there isn't an exact structure to formulate a resume."

Okay, then. Best of luck with that. 

========================================================

Now here's the tiny bit of cheer I promised in the title. My murder mystery, The Case of the Defunct Adjunct, will be free on Kindle worldwide July 27-29, along with over 40 other mystery, thriller, and suspense novels. And to the best of my knowledge, not one of them contains the phrase, "In today's modern world..."

Frankie

We can be replaced, quatre cinq

No, I'm not reporting the the lack of buoyancy of a certain feline. I'm just unsure of how many posts we've had recently on the subject. Let's see: there was
Making the best of Clinton's new higher-ed plan from Frankie,
and
Our robo-proffie replacements: What could possibly go wrong?
also from Frankie (perhaps I sense a pattern), so that's un et deux, and there was possibly a third or fourth in there somewhere but I'm too lazy to find it (them), so mine is, well, you know, but it's not even a link to an article, it's to another blog (!) that's how fucking lazy I am right now (and pressed for time, but l prefer to think of myself as lazy than having the busiest summer of my life, because that would just be depressing).

The article: Meat Widgets and the End of College

Flava: This, in short, is a lousy idea.

Commentary: I agree. Good post!

---from OPH (almost too lazy to sign, but not quite)

Our robo-proffie replacements: What could possibly go wrong?

A robo-security guard in Palo Alto has run over a toddler, surprising everyone who thought it was a good idea to have an armed, 300-pound robot rolling around a suburban shopping mall. Happily, 16-month-old Harwin Cheng escaped serious injury. This is not the first recent robot malfunction:

Last month, a robot known as Promobot IR77 escaped from a lab in Perm, Russia where it stopped in the middle of a local street, causing a traffic jam. Then, even after being reprogrammed twice, continued to try to get away.

Now it's no secret that the Disruptariat is itching to replace us with robots.  Which brings me to today's writing prompt: How will the introduction of robo-proffies go hilariously, tragically, amiss?  ("Maybe the StaplerHands 3000 wasn't the best choice for our intro astronomy class...")

Frankie

This week's Big Thirsty from Frankie. The good news: You're getting a 40% raise! The bad news: This brings you up to just over minimum wage.

More adjunct misery.

The University of Memphis has given its adjuncts their first raise in three decades, from $1,500 to $2,100 per three-credit-hour course. They probably won't be able to teach more than three because then they'd be eligible for health insurance. So they'll max out at $12,600 a year.

Why don't adjuncts just quit, as a commenter (predictably) asks?

I wonder. Even if everyone who would prefer a T-T position walked away, we'd still have a good supply of people who have real jobs elsewhere and enjoy picking up a class or two on the side (like the adjunct history professor who is employed full time at an investment company). Add to that the retired professors who are so eager to stay active that they are willing to teach for free, and we don't have a lot of bargaining power for underemployed Ph.D.s.

Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona has no campus. All its courses are online, and the overwhelming majority of instructors are adjuncts (22 full-time faculty and over 1,300 adjunct faculty). Not only have they not been shunned and shamed, their deliberate mass adjunctification has been lauded as a strategic success, saving 27% on per-student expenditures.

It seems to me that the most effective action would come from the accreditors, but what's their motivation? Accrediting teams are made up of administrators, who may not be in a position to throw stones. And why should they? (See Rio Salado, above)

Q: Is there a way out, or are we headed toward postsecondary teaching as a hobby for people who don't need the money?

- Frankie

Can we talk about something wonky?

Universal Basic Income. 

Clinton's just proposed free state college tuition. Which, great. If that goes through, maybe there will be some Federal dollars to make up for the decreases in state funding. But how much can free college really accomplish when a substantial number of matriculants arrive unprepared? When student characteristics account for as much as 87% of the variance in graduation rate, there's only so much an institution can do. Even the best-designed program, one that doubles the graduation rate, only gets you up to around 50%. Besides, most institutions aren't in a position to pony up an additional $4700 per student per year, even if such a program ultimately reduces the cost per graduate.  

And even if we knock down every possible obstacle (?!) in order to get university diplomas into the hands of as many people as possible, what happens at the other end? 

According to the folks at the New York Fed, "perhaps a quarter of those who earn a bachelor's degree pay the costs to attend school but reap little, if any, economic benefit." That's now, with 34% of American adults holding bachelor's degrees. Does anyone think that increasing the number of college graduates will make this better? 

In the words of the NYT:  The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job. It's necessary but not sufficient; graduates find that they've bought themselves a hunting license, not a golden ticket. 

Middle-class jobs are disappearing  "as industries with low average pay grow significantly and mid-range industries wither." Low-paying jobs are replacing midlevel ones. 

Obviously (it's obvious to me, anyway) this is an issue that higher ed can't solve by itself. And credential inflation isn't going to fix this. 

Universal Basic Income. It sounds intriguing to me, but I don't know enough about it. What do you think? What's the answer? 

- Frankie

Making the best of Clinton's new higher-ed plan from Frankie.

So Clinton just released what sounds like a truly horrible set of proposals for higher ed: 

• Opening up federal financial aid to "alternative providers"
• Providing (unspecified) incentives for actual colleges and universities to accept credits from those "alternative providers"
• Automatically awarding green cards to international students who graduate with advanced STEM degrees. 

Now, we Miserians are a can-do, optimistic bunch. Surely we can think of ways to make this nasty little potion of perverse incentives more palatable. For ourselves, anyway, if not for higher ed.

Here's my plan, should this come to pass: 

Aunty Frankie's Surf-n-STEM Academy.

As a Disruptopreneur Alternative Provider, I don't need to bother with unfashionable, buzzkill-y things like ABET accreditation, dorms, classrooms, faculty, or learning objectives. 

No GRE? No problem! My advanced STEM degrees will be available to anyone who has the foresight and out-of-the-box thinking required to pony up a hundred and fifty grand. (Sure, it's about twice the industry average, but can your snakehead get you a guaranteed green card? Didn't think so!) Because my Surf-n-STEM Academy will have a MOOC option, there's no uncomfortable transoceanic travel required, Residency requirements and ID verification are so last-century.

And best of all, it'll qualify for federal financial aid!

Anyone interested in investing? 

Frankie

(P.S. I did consider one other disruptovative option, setting up a mostly-online school with a 68:1 adjunct-to-full-timer ratio, but that just seemed too evil.)

Let's talk about "CONSTRUCTIVE student evaluation of professors."

Inspired by the recent flashback post, I headed over to you-know-where. After spending just a few minutes on the site, I had a pretty good idea of how we can all "improve" our "teaching."

Don't be that professor who "asks for papers" or tells students to be "organized."  Too divisive and controversial.

(You should be able to click on each graphic to see it in a larger size...)

Don't let this be you! 

Instead, let class out early.

And do more squats. 

There, I just saved you hours of professional development in-service.

You're welcome.

Frankie

Today in Astonishing News That No One Could Have Predicted: Performance-based funding doesn't work.

Let's reward universities for improving their graduation rates. That'll get 'em moving. Right?

Universities in Pennsylvania did not produce more degrees even after operating under performance-based funding for nearly a decade, according to the report. Indiana schools also have failed to measurably boost degree production while at the same time becoming more selective and less diverse. And even after Tennessee ratcheted up financial incentives, universities there did not improve their graduation or retention rates, according to the paper.

In fact, 

States that tie higher education funding to performance have it all wrong, report says A new paper argues that performance-based funding models are reinforcing disparities within higher education and doing little to move the needle on completion. Thirty-two states have funding systems that allocate money to institutions based on performance measures. (Washington Post, May 26)

"Tying funding to performance favors state flagships and other well-heeled schools to the detriment of institutions that could use the most help, the report said."

What a surprise.  Institutions serving students who are not wealthy or well-prepared are at a disadvantage? It's almost as if "graduation from college can be predicted based on student characteristics known before they begin their studies."
But by all means, keep punishing institutions for things that are out of their control.  Because Accountability or something.
--Frankie

From Frankie: Note to self for fall--All grades will now be based on in-class, proctored exams.

It's one thing to hire a company that will take your online course for you. But it takes a certain level of chutzpah to solicit freelance writers to do your homework for you, including the professor's warning about plagiarism. 

Get Your Final Exam Party Planning In Gear. Another Requested Flashback. 5 Years Ago.

As I headed to my office with a briefcase in one hand, and a large box I pushed with my feet along the hallway, I started hearing Frankie Avalon - no, really - music coming from an open classroom door. It got louder as I went, and when I got there and looked in, I saw my colleague, a pleasant and lovely woman of 50, dancing in the middle of her classroom with about 15 students.

The rest from "Out of Touch Olivia."

Hey, let's redesign our logo!

This item, about Emerson College's new logo, got me thinking. 

Is there any endeavor more uniformly doomed than the logo redesign? It seems if you're a university and you want to spend a lot of money and make no one happy (except the design firm, I suppose) this is the best way to do it. 

A cursory search through the IHE archives brought these up:

Wright State spends a quarter million dollars  to remove Wilbur Wright from the logo

University of Dayton gets a new "Dayton Flyers" logo with a winged letter "D" 

The University of California's innovative flushing-toilet logo gets 30,000 people to sign a petition protesting it

Then we have Drake University's D-plus campaign, (not strictly a logo but an unfortunate graphic)

Does this ever work out well? Does anyone have a story of a successful logo redesign? 

Frankie