The Fora: A Higher Education Community

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!

Most schools that are "competitive" (anything not open admission) are begging for students. So, for a school like mine AA doesn't really matter for admissions, though it probably did matter, say 30-50 years ago. Also, it still matters for hiring.

I'm not saying we're "post racial" by any kind of long shot. I am just saying that if we could get permanently to 1200 students by a large increase annually in all minorities, we'd take that in a heartbeat. Some ancient alums might finally die of a heart attack when they see that, but screw them.

But...if you get into the "highly selective" category, then there could be (and apparently are) some issues in maintaining the previous level of admitted talented minority students.

Maybe Harvard is "virtue signaling" with their policies on admitting minority students over the years, but the actual numbers of graduated minority students do add up over time. 

Due Date Saga - ep 3:

It is 3d past the add/drop deadline.  A new student has emailed me  to inform me she joined on the 18th and to request that I open up everything she missed.  I am left to ponder why you would join at the very last moment and then NOT reach out to the professor until 3d have passed.

Also, 3 students have now let 11 due dates pass without doing anything.

It would be cheaper if they took the $1k for the course, gave me $400 and kept $600 for themselves, then to burn it like this.

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.