Posting Hall of Fame

[ciao_yall]

The admins I'm talking about aren't a bunch of phonies or incompetents.  They're all good people, as far as I know.  But in their line of work you seem to get pushed to follow a new fad every couple of years.

When you're trying to solve problems that you don't have the resources to make even the slightest dent in, you end up injecting yourself with bleach quite often.

[apl68]

From the "Academic Freedom and Cancel Culture" thread:

I didn't even know therapy goats were a thing.

[mamselle]

Per: FirsProf

From: Ways to end the quarter/semester when everyone is over it.

I ask students to reflect on the semester and share out...

1) Their biggest surprise
2) The most important thing they learned

1)  My biggest surprise this semester
Prof. ciao_yall really meant it about no extra credit!


2)  The most important thing I learned this semester
There's stuff in the syllabus that you actually need to know to do you work on time.  Who knew?

M.

[mamselle]

I don't think accommodating people's concerns about COVID safety needs to be a landslide towards people shirking all their duties.

COVID diagnoses and hospitalizations are on the climb in many places in the world -- places where the BA.2 variant is predominating, which is what's about to hit the U.S. We're at ~700 deaths per day, which is still not great, and seems likely to head upward again soon. And there are a lot of conditions that the ADA doesn't count as "serious," but which predispose people towards worse outcomes: being over 60, being overweight (= 68% of the U.S. population), asthma, etc. – or all of the above at once.

And there are many people who are caretakers for the immune-compromised: caretakers for people undergoing treatment for cancer, or for people who've had organ transplants. Or they simply have children too young to be vaccinated. Or they have children who are too young to be vaccinated and who have health vulnerabilities. None of those categories qualifies for ADA accommodations, but all of them have real and serious incentives to be cautious. You will get more cooperation from faculty if you recognize these possibilities. And they should not have to describe their health conditions or those of their family to warrant flexibility on the part of their administrators.

I'd suggest dividing up the responsibilities. Some people can do the in-person stuff; other people can do not-in-person stuff. Students can be advised via Zoom. As we've seen in the past two years, a whole lot of functions of the university can be delivered without requiring everyone to show up in person for everything. And offering Zoom options for students is also an equity and inclusion issue -- those students themselves may be caretakers for the immune-compromised, for children too young to be vaccinated, or for children too young to be vaccinated who are immune-compromised. None of those categories is rare.

So figure out some way that the faculty who are reluctant to show up in person can contribute meaningfully to the functioning of the department while staying remote. Assign them the troublesome assessment report or the library status report or whatever. Assign them the Zoom advising function. Figure out ways in which everyone can contribute.

And then figure out ways to make the office situation work. Presumably if they were using their offices, you wouldn't be telling them that they're the reason that 4-6 graduate students have to be shoved into a small office. So they're not the sole cause of this problem. I think the way to go here is to raise the matter at the next department meeting, get the department's suggestions, and vote on it as a department. Maybe the people who want to stay remote should let others inhabit their offices (with or without the original person removing their stuff) for a two-year period. Maybe there should be a rule that if they don't hold regular office hours for X amount of time (six months? one year? two years?), they lose their office. Maybe some other arrangement. Let the faculty figure it out and vote -- then there will be buy-in and it is less likely to be seen as unfairly handed down from on high.

From the point of view of one of those people with conditions that the ADA and that the university does not consider "serious," but which cause me to remain cautious, here is my take on the situation. For the past two years I have been knocking myself out to keep things going here. When the pandemic struck and the university decreed, I converted all my courses to online, and even though I've taught some of my load online for years and know how, it was a massive time-suck. I've tried to stay alert to student issues, from not knowing how to navigate online courses to family deaths from COVID from pandemic-related loss of jobs and income, meaning I've been extra flexible on deadlines, assignments, and mentoring. I've gone the extra mile to keep our grad students afloat. I've bought about a zillion masks and handed them out to students, and poured a lot of my own money into extra precautions and equipment, from fans for classrooms to microphones for online teaching. I've managed the faculty in my programs who were navigating all of the same thing, while having their own crises of family health, personal health, etc. I've coped with a mountain of bureaucracy loaded on me by all this, plus all the regular bureaucracy which was already too much. Zero acknowledgement for all this, of course, other than a campus-wide email from the president about how excellent we all are. And now, because I don't want to show up in person to meetings that could equally well be done remotely, the university is regarding me as a slacker. After two years of knocking myself out to keep them afloat. 

Does this attitude make me want to continue going the extra mile for the university in any way whatsoever? Not – one – bit.

So my moral is: be sure you're not causing yourself problems down the line, by treating the cautious faculty as if they're shirking, when I would bet that (acknowledged or understood by you or not) they have also been going the extra mile for two years, and are already beyond exhausted.

M.

[Hibush]

The HLC would have gotten around to it sooner, but the HLC first had to make sure that Union's SLOs were standardized and measurable, unit faculty were collecting lotsa data about learning, unit heads were making reports, deans were making reports of reports, Academic Affairs were making reports of reports of reports, and everyone was closing the feedback loop and muttering some stuff about Bloom's Taxonomy.