Harvard student to her peers: read
Rural education shrinking
From The Washington Post, “Rural students’ options shrink as colleges slash majors.”
Fourteen lines? tl;dr
“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”: from an Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”
“Is Reading Over for Gen Z Students?”
Listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos — two suggestions offered in this podcast — don’t replace the work (and joy) of reading. Podcasts and YouTube videos might, on occasion, supplement the work (and joy) of reading in worthwhile ways. But without the reading, what’s the point? If instructors are unwilling to assign “an entire novel,” exactly what are podcasts and YouTube videos supposed to be supplementing? And what happens when the work of listening and watching becomes odious?
Generative AI, trust, and distrust
At Inside Higher Ed, Jacob Riyeff writes about generative AI and its effect on teacher-student relationships. What breaks his heart, he says, are the ways in which AI makes it difficult for him to trust his students.
“AI and the Death of Student Writing”
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lisa Lieberman, a community-college instructor, writes about “AI and the Death of Student Writing.”
Reading or not in college
The limited ability of many students to read and write about complex or lengthy texts is a sad and still largely unacknowledged fact of college life.
“AWOL from Academics”
In Harvard Magazine, Aden Barton, a Harvard undergraduate, writes about what it’s like to be “AWOL from Academics.”
Feedback in e-mail
I’m no power user, but I always find something of interest when I listen to the Mac Power Users podcast. This morning, listening to episode 740 while out on a walk, I was happy to hear a tech person confirming the wisdom of one of the bits of advice — to reply and say thanks — in my post How to e-mail a professor.
Struggling to read
Adam Kotsko writes about the decline in college students’ reading ability.
Grand old plays and sewing machines
The student as customer.
Trump as student
When I hear Donald Trump dodge and lie, I sometimes imagine what it might have been like to have him as a student.
PBS at WVU
“I think the level of reputational damage that the university is going to take will not be survivable. I don’t think that this will be a viable research university in five to ten years. And it essentially means that there’s no real tenure here anymore. And so nobody is going to come teach here unless they have absolutely no other choice.”
Recently updated
Enrollment at Emporia State University drops sharply.
Dickinson State is the new WVU
Steve Easton, president of North Dakota’s Dickinson State College (and critic of tenure) is looking to cut and cut and cut.
West Virginia University cuts
E. Gordon Gee and friends, destroying a flagship school.
Games and books
Video games, all day. But we still have a library.
Gender and evaluations
From Inside Higher Ed: “Two new studies show how bias against women in student ratings operates over time, worsening with critical feedback and instructor age.”
Students petition; deans fire
The New York Times reports on Maitland Jones, a professor of organic chemistry at New York University, who was fired after a quarter of his students signed a petition claiming that the class he taught was too difficult.
College advice
From Imani Perry and my daughter.
College enrollment down
“While elite colleges and universities have continued to attract an overflow of applicants, the pandemic has been devastating for many public universities, particularly community colleges, which serve many low- and moderate-income students.”
Teaching for free
Prompted by the now-infamous listing for an unpaid teaching position at UCLA, The New York Times looks at the realities of academic labor: “The unspoken secret had been fleetingly exposed: Free labor is a fact of academic life.”
RTF$
“Tucked into the second page of the syllabus was information about a locker number and its combination. Inside was a $50 bill, which went unclaimed.”
Pannapacker on academic woe
William Pannapacker will soon be leaving academia. He writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education about being “Tenured, Trapped, and Miserable in the Humanities.”
“Individually wrapped treats”
These guidelines call for considerable diligence on the part of the faculty member, who must monitor masking (a COVID-era form of “taking attendance”), place and pay for orders, and distribute gift certificates or individually wrapped treats, but not in the classroom. Or maybe the faculty member can palm the work off on a TA. I think of the absurdity of students lining up, six feet apart, maybe in the rain, to receive their individually wrapped treats. Here ya go.
What, no candy?
“The University of Texas at Austin told professors that they could offer nonacademic rewards, like cookies, to cajole students to wear masks. (A university spokeswoman, Eliska Padilla, said this was informal, not an incentive program.)”
Recently updated
More on an eighty-eight-year-old professor’s last day in a classroom.
Teaching the unmasked
An eighty-eight-year-old professor encounters a student who refuses to wear a mask.
Alan Alda now and then
Alan Alda is now eighty-five. How did that happen? He was the speaker at my college commencement, Fordham College, 1978, forty-three years ago.
Euphemism in higher ed
“Recruitment parties for selective living groups.”