The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on Today at 07:23:57 AMI'd like to finish up the review, and start on the sample proofing for T1 and one of two new referee reports.

Book review done, minus a last read-through. Sample proofing done. Read one of the referee items, and have to sit on it for a bit. Read a chunk of the other.

'miserably incompetent', perhaps, but it also may well be that the students have been told to do this sort of thing by their parents.  It is also true that one of the very most glaring weaknesses seen in most American high schools, public and private alike, is that they generally do a craptastic job prepping their seniors for college.

apl, does your congregation have a formally-written statement of procedures and policies associated with the searching for and retaining of, a new pastor?

0% is criminal. You should push back against that. Advertising is probably a nonstarter though - seems to fall on the authors these days.

I'm in a 2-hour Zoom committee meeting where people are talking about establishing goals for next year and how these fit with other committees' goals.

Except every committee, including this one, has really vague goals.

The result is that we are rewording their goals so ours are also vague but slightly different.

Quote from: pgher on Today at 09:13:45 AM

Quote from: apl68 on Today at 07:25:49 AMI've been serving for several months now on our church's pastoral search team.  Lots of long meetings there, and a lot of work outside the meeting.  It's somewhat analogous to a tenure-track position search, where your institution is counting on the searchers to take their time and do their due diligence to find the best possible fit.  So the time and effort are justified.  It does get a little frustrating now and then when we keep having to repeat things because some members don't seem to be listening.

We do have other committees at church that give the impression of existing and meeting mainly so we can say that they exist and meet.  So many churches have gotten loaded down with massive amounts of busywork that have little to do with fulfilling the church's actual mission.  It's not just an academia problem.  It seems to be one of those general tendencies of human organizations.

I'm a church officer and a department chair. The similarities are astounding. Both academia and churches are basically volunteer organizations.

and academic professional societies

I heard an owl hooting this morning at the beginning of my morning walk.  Sometimes owls for some reason hoot in a more extravagant manner than usual.  This bird sounded cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.  Wonder what brought that on?

Quote from: Sun_Worshiper on Today at 08:46:48 AMThe top journal in my field desk rejects around 60% of submissions and I know of journals in an adjacent field that are at more like 70-75%. I get it, since they get thousands of submissions every year and many are not worth a reviewer's time, but it also concerns me that editors are making these calls unblinded and, I suspect, in a somewhat slapdash fashion much of the time.

FWIW, MyWord, many of the journals in at least one area you submit to have rejection rates of 95-97%. And yes, desk rejection rates of 60%+.

=/

I was very pleasantly surprised and encouraged by a virtual appointment with my new dean this morning. I wasn't completely dreading it, but it involved a plagiarizing student from summer who'd filed a grade appeal; I and my chair had denied it on solid grounds, but in the past, our deans have been happy to overturn such denials. This one agreed with my evaluation and grading of the student; if anything, she even more hardcore than I am!

It's nice to have a dean who has your back. This is only the second good dean I've had in 20+ years here; I hope it's a good sign of things to come as I head toward retirement in the coming years.

Good morning!

Somewhere past genius with pangram so far.  Yesterday we had team QB, and I think I needed bigeye, eyelet.

No luck on LB.  Congrats!

Happy solving!