Category: The Happy Academic

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Sad Professors

Jay Caspian Kong’s New Yorker article “The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.” is about, well, some professors in “despair” about teaching in the age of AI. This is a late May 2026 entry in Fault Lines, Kong’s “weekly column on politics and the media,” which has lately been a lot about AI and higher education.

Kong says he’s been talking to “academics and instructors at the college and high-school level” whose teaching has been disrupted by AI. “They talk about a sense of loss and of despair, because the one thing that brought them meaning has been erased, or blotted out, by the arrival of A.I.” After introducing his article by discussing a Substack post by J.S. Peters called “Grieving what we’ve Gained (Or, the time I cried in front of my students about AI),” he shares reflections from a dozen faculty, including Peters, about how AI has changed things for them.

If you are teaching college or high school in this new age of AI, I’d recommend reading it.  I don’t agree with a lot of these faculty, but I can certainly relate to what they’re feeling. But lots of things that have caused the despair these professors are describing have nothing to do with AI. A couple of these reflections mention the enrollment cliff and COVID, but I think we need to go back to the mid 2000s for additional causes that have made the work of academics a lot less pleasant: the emergence of the iPhone and social media, both engineered to addict users, especially younger users; the chaos of the first Trump administration, including COVID, George Floyd’s murder, January 6; the increasingly obvious climate crisis our students will inherit; the chaos of the current Trump administration which we’re all experiencing right now; and the runaway costs of attending college in the first place, which seems to have reached a tipping point where a lot more students (and their families) don’t think the return on investment is there anymore.

And then came AI. Plummeting enrollments have hit EMU very hard, and the impact of that– fewer students = fewer opportunities to teach advanced classes, budget cuts everywhere, the beginnings of reorganizing the College of Arts and Sciences, and the not nearly as hypothetical whispers of what if Michigan decided to close some of the many regional universities in the state (including EMU)– has had a much more significant impact on what it means for me to be a professor now than any of this AI stuff. AI is merely the shitty sauce on top of the already shitty sandwich. (I mean shitty here as an adjective, but you can read that differently if you want).

Anyway, the despair these faculty are feeling about AI boils down to the depressing ways students are using AI to cheat and bypass learning. Kong quotes Peters explaining how she had to change her assignments in an effort at making them “AI-proof.” Then this:

[W]hen she presented these new expectations to her students, something unexpected happened. “A wave of sadness washed over me, and I actually got choked up in front of the class.” Peters writes. “‘Before AI,’ I told them, ‘Students used to work hard to come up with their own ideas. I’d help, and they’d struggle, but they’d come to something that was their own. That doesn’t happen anymore and I grieve that.’ ”

I get the sadness. But– and perhaps I’m too cynical after teaching a ton of freshman composition, which is arguably “ground zero” for the never-ending battle against plagiarism–while I am sure that most of Peters’ students embraced the struggle she now feels is lost because of AI, I am also sure that some of her students used to cheat before AI as well.

As I’ve written about many times before, I have never had a lot of “pants on fire” cheating because teaching writing as a process requires students to show their work– the drafts they share in peer reviews, the research they are conducting, etc.– and I never have “one shot deal” paper assignments. Cheating by making fake drafts and the like is more work than just doing the assignment. And, as I have also written about many times before, students cheat when they are desperate and think they are going to fail, and because these students are not usually the sharpest knives in the drawer, it is fairly easy for me to spot.

That said, Peters and the rest of these sad professors are correct that more students are trying to cheat in small and large ways with AI, I think for two reasons: AI is seductive (“you mean all I have to do is push this button and I can be finished with this stupid assignment?”), and the line for what counts or doesn’t count as cheating is fuzzy. Before AI, I had to deal with a few plagiarism issues in each section of freshman comp I was teaching, and most of those were citation mistakes rather than purposeful cheating. I rarely had any cheating issues in the advanced classes. In the last couple of years, I’ve seen two or three AI cheating issues per section of composition (and I failed on the a couple of those students), and there were a couple of AI cheaters in the upper-level class I taught last year that was about AI– and they failed too. If I had a “zero tolerance” AI policy (which is impossible to enforce), then I’m sure I would have a lot more cheating problems.

As a result, I’ve had to change the way I teach writing in two significant ways. First, I talk with my students about AI a lot because it has become one of the major topics of the courses I’ve been teaching lately, and because the absolute best way to encourage students to cheat in small and big ways with AI is for a teacher to never say anything about it. And I think teachers need to be explicit with their students about how using AI to do too much of the work a) defeats the whole point of trying to learn something in a class, and b) generally doesn’t work that well.

Second, I now use software and other enforcement mechanisms to police/detect AI cheating. This is new for me, but it is not at all new for writing teachers to use software– notably Turnitin— to detect plagiarism. I have never used Turnitin because of a host of ethical issues, because I don’t like presuming my students are guilty until proven innocent, and also because I never thought the software worked that well. The way Turnitin detects plagiarism is by comparing a paper with the other papers in its database. That works fine if the student is plagiarizing another student’s paper already in the database, but it does nothing to effectively detect when a student lifts a chunk of text from an article, or if a student gets someone else to write the paper. So Turnitin seemed unnecessary to me.

With AI, I feel like I’ve had to change my mindset to trust but verify, and that’s kind of sad.

As I described in this post, I have required students to use Google Docs in my writing classes for many years now, and long before AI came along. I started doing this because of compatibility issues with word processing programs, because it’s really great for collaboration/peer review activities, and because it helps me grade revisions by examining the document’s version history.

The version history is also useful for detecting signs of plagiarism and/or AI cheating. For example, when a Doc’s version history begins with a blank page, and then, time-stamped just a few second later, all of the text appears all at once and with no mistakes, I can tell the text came from someplace else. There are also a variety of Google extensions tools that can extract A LOT more details out of a Google Doc’s history. Lately, I’ve been using Process Feedback, which is a free extension that generates a report on the writer’s process: when did they make edits, how many words a minute they typed on average, and when they copy-pasted 25 or more characters all at once.

When I have confronted students about what I think is AI cheating that just appears like this, they will often say something like “Yeah, I messed up. I forgot we were supposed to use Google Docs and I wrote the paper in MS Word and then copied it into a Google Doc. Sorry about that.” I’m sure that is sometimes true– much in the way that sometimes dogs do eat homework– but I also know that some students were lying straight to my face. Last semester, I confronted one student who gave me this excuse and asked this person to share with me their Word file; they confessed it was actually AI all along.

That is what is causing these professors despair, and I don’t like it much when students lie to me either. Plus checking through document histories (not to mention clicking on links to research to make sure it’s real, checking quotations to make sure they are real, etc.) takes me more time and work.  But again, this might be a result of having plenty of students over the years who have lied to me about one thing or another. This is not something that is new for me, nor is it something that causes me a lot of despair at this point. It’s just kind of sad.

Several of these reflecting professors expressed very grim outlooks about their specific futures and of all of academia as well. I share those feelings and concerns, but less about AI and more about <gestures broadly> everything else . If I had just turned 40 (rather than 60), I like to think I would be trying to get out of academia and onto a second career of some sort.  But now that I have (likely) fewer than double-digits before I’m able to retire, I’m pretty sure I can ride out whatever happens next.

And one last tangent/point: these reflections of despair and my own frustrations do remind me a bit about an R.E.M. song that is on the not great album Up called “Sad Professor.” That song ends:

Everyone hates a bore
Everybody hates a drunk
Everyone hates a sad professor
I hate where I wound up
I hate where I wound up

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Workin’ 9 to 5 (sort of) and Other Adventures of All FY Writing/All the Time!

As I blogged about earlier this year, I’m doing something this semester that I have never done as a tenure-track professor: I’m teaching a full load (three sections) of first year writing. I’ve had semesters where I’ve taught multiple sections of the same class, but I think the last time I did that was in the early 2000s where I taught two sections of a 300-level course while also having a course release to  do quasi-administrative work. As I explained earlier, my current schedule is a fluke based on the circumstances this semester and I jumped at the chance to just teach first year writing. In other words, this was my idea: I wanted to have one prep for a change of pace, and I also like to teach first year writing.

(Incidentally, when I was hired at EMU in 1998, my primary teaching assignments were an earlier version of this 300-level course and a graduate course on teaching with computers. Times and curriculums have changed and I haven’t taught that 300 level class in eight years and that grad course in at least 15 years, maybe more).

Having only one course to prepare– as opposed to three different classes– has been nice, and it’s especially nice that it’s first year composition, a course that I have literally been teaching regularly in my dreams for most of my life at this point. I’ve been able to keep all three different classes on the same schedule, so with a bit of tweaking and customization for each section, it still is one prep. And not surprisingly, one prep is easier than three.

The downsides? Well, all three of sections are f2f (as is the case with all of the first year writing courses at EMU) and all three sections are on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Now, I haven’t taught three f2f classes since I started teaching online for part of my load, and that was almost 20 years ago. I also haven’t taught this early for a while (my first section is at 9:30 in the morning), and I haven’t taught back-to-back sections with no break between in a long time either. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I am in the office by 9 am and working pretty steadily until I’m done at 5 pm.

Because those days end up being nothing but teaching and preparing for teaching, I have also had to come into the office a lot more on other days during the week. I ran into an especially intense stretch in late January/early February when I had conferences with all 60 (or so) of my students– along with having a bunch of other “life” appointments and family stuff. I was on campus and mostly in my office for just about two weeks back then, and almost all day each of those days.

I realize this isn’t a work schedule most people would complain about– and I’m not complaining, at least not exactly. It’s just a very different rhythm from teaching a mix of f2f and online. The upside of teaching a mix of f2f and online is it gives me a lot more scheduling flexibility for when I do things. I do most of my online teaching while at home and in pajamas or sweats, plus I can take a break once in a while to do laundry or something else that needs to be done around the house.

But if I’m not disciplined about scheduling myself about when I do the work– planning, grading, and interacting with the class discussion boards– teaching asynchronously online can become an all day/all night thing where I’m constantly working in a not so efficient multitasking kind of way. So while teaching f2f means I’m spending a lot more time on campus, it does create at least more separation between life and work. That’s a good thing.

And I do like teaching f2f– not really more than teaching online (I like doing that too), but I like it. I like the live performance of f2f teaching and after having taught a zillion sections of first year writing, I have a refined schtick. I like putting on the show three times a day right in a row.

I’ve also been struck by the differences in these three sections. It’s not news to me that different groups of students taking the same course can have very different personalities, dynamics, and responses to readings and assignments. But teaching the same thing to three different classes (back to back to back) makes this very visible. Without getting into any details, it’s pretty clear that these different sections are not equally capable.

It does get a little boring doing the same thing three times in a row. If I’m scheduled to teach three sections of first year writing again like this, I would probably be okay with it. But I think I’d prefer two preps with an online class in the mix. Get back with me when I’m at the end of the semester to see if I feel the same way.

 

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Hot Chancellor Porn! (or, another interesting test of free speech, academic freedom and tenure)

There have been many stories in the last day or so about UW-LaCrosse’s chancellor, Joe Gow, and his wife Carmen Wilson (she had an unpaid position), and how they were fired after the Wisconsin system regents learned of their enthusiasm for sharing homemade porn online. I think this one from The New York Times sums things up well:  “University Chancellor Fired After Making Pornographic Videos With His Wife.” Here’s a longish quote:

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. [Joe] Gow and Ms. [Carmen] Wilson said that they believe they were fired over the videos, which included sex scenes together and with others under the username Sexy Happy Couple. Both said they felt it was wrong for the university to punish them over the videos, arguing that doing so infringes on their free speech rights.

“It’s not what we’re about in higher ed, to censor people,” Ms. Wilson said. She added that the videos are only available to those who are looking for such content. “If they seek it out, they’re free to do so,” she said.

Mr. Gow, 63, said he and his wife, 56, have made videos together for years but had decided recently to make them publicly available on porn websites and had been pleased by the response. They said they never mentioned the university or their jobs in the videos, several of which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The couple also has made a series of videos in which they cook meals with porn actors and then have sex.

“We have that show, ‘Sexy Healthy Cooking,’ where we interview performers and really humanize them in ways that you wouldn’t get in their other work,” Mr. Gow said. “It’s an interesting process, and the people that we work with are completely professional, and very great to work with.”

Now, not that I’m suggesting that anyone actually do this– not at all! not for a second!— but if one were to, hypothetically, google “Sexy Happy Couple” or “Sexy Healthy Cooking,” one just might get a sense of what Gow and Wilson are talking about. Or if someone went to a fairly well known and provocative website that has a name that rhymes with “corn tub” and do a search there, that someone might even get a more detailed view for free.

Gow and Wilson are correct: their videos have nothing to do with their work, and  you have to actively seek out their “cooking demonstrations.” It’s different from what happened with EMU’s former associate provost, Michael Tew, who was convicted for driving around Dearborn in a Jeep Wrangler while naked and whacking off, all with the windows and sunroof open. Tew was charged and convicted of indecent exposure– and imagine being stuck in traffic next to that guy. In contrast, you do have to go looking for these videos, and I agree that whatever happens between consulting adults and a salad spinner in the privacy of their own home is their own business.

Anyway, Gow and Wilson were both removed from their positions– though Gow is on a paid administrative leave and Wilson had some kind of “special assistant” position and was never a paid employee anyway. Gow and Wilson are arguing that they were fired for exercising their rights to free speech. In an interview published in USA Today (perhaps not surprisingly, neither of them have been shy about telling their story), Gow said “he decided to test that commitment [to free speech] since he had planned to leave the chancellorship soon anyway. ‘I felt a little bit more open about ”let’s raise these free speech issues and see how the board responds,” and now we know,’ he said.”

Like most college chancellors/presidents, Gow was also a tenured professor– in the Communications department. So what Gow was planning on doing was to return to the faculty, presumably to teach. And to be clear: Gow was fired as chancellor, but they couldn’t fire him from the faculty because he has tenure. At least not yet– the UW system regents has hired a law firm to figure out if they can strip him of tenure and kick him out for good.

It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.

Typically (and I’m assuming this is the case with the UW system), tenured faculty are the only ones who have this kind of job security as it relates to free speech in the name of academic freedom. Tenured professors like me are happy to remind anyone and everyone of the importance of this kind of academic freedom for all kinds of reasons, but especially to foster the pursuit for knowledge. People don’t make new discoveries, write new plays, paint new things, or experiment with new ideas if they are afraid they’ll get fired or in trouble for saying the wrong thing. But I think it’s also important to remember that these protections do not exist unconditionally for anyone else on campus.

Students can be punished in all kinds of ways for speech acts, and Gow’s and Wilson’s case might very well be an example of that. If a bunch of students were filming porn in the dorms and they got caught, they might very well be expelled. Staff and administrators don’t have the same level of job security, and that is especially true with administrators.

Administrators can have a “real life” outside of the job, of course. They can have an active online presence, have a homemade YouTube cooking show, maybe even be in a band (as Gow and Wilson were, apparently). But unlike faculty, administrators are “at will” employees. They risk their jobs when they publicly criticize the university, or when they do anything else that might be considered, well, freaky. That’s why EMU’s Michael Tew was relieved of his duties as associate provost, and it’s also why Gow didn’t make his lifestyle public before he was ready to step down from the job.

But firing him completely, that’s different. Unlike EMU’s naked driving enthusiast, Gow and Wilson didn’t do anything illegal. I’m not especially interested in watching their show, but that’s obviously a speech act that deserves protection. So no, I don’t think Gow should be removed from his faculty position, and I think this is a clear example of why tenure matters.

Should Gow and Wilson been allowed to stay in their leadership positions? I honestly don’t know.

One of the questions I’ve always had about academic freedom is why are tenured professors the only ones on college campuses who have this? After all, students, staff, and administrators are all people who are (in theory) pursuing knowledge in one form or another. Why don’t they have the same level of freedom to say what they want? And what’s wrong if the guy in charge of the university and his wife post (and sell) porn videos online that no one at that university ever has to look at?

But on the other hand, it does create an awkward situation. I don’t think I’m a prude and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with porn that is consensual and that doesn’t involve minors. But it might be kind of weird to work with or take a class from either of these two now, especially if you did that google search I warned you not to do.

At the end of the day, I predict there will be some kind of “negotiated” settlement. I think that’s what happened with Tew at EMU. He was immediately removed as the associate provost, but as I understand it, he actually wasn’t fired entirely but instead returned to his faculty position– sort of. He never actually taught a class or anything; I believe he went on leave and he was allowed to retire.

My guess is that after this story is no longer in the news cycle, Gow and Wilson will make some kind of deal that will allow them to more gracefully exit the institution and retire, which would give them more time to devote to their hobbies anyway. A win-win situation, perhaps?

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A Belated “Beginning of the School Year” Post: Just Teaching

I don’t always write a “beginning of the school year” post and when I do, it’s usually before school starts, some time in August, and not at the end of the second week of classes. But here we are, at what seasonally always feels to me a lot more like the start of the new year than January.

This is the start of my 25th year at EMU. This summer, I selected another one of those goofy “thanks for your service” gifts they give out in five year increments. Five years ago, I picked out a pretty nice casserole dish; this time, I picked out a globe, one which lights up.

I wrote a new school year post like this was in 2021, and back then, I (briefly) contemplated the faculty buyout offer. “Briefly” because as appealing as it was at the time to leave my job behind, there’s just no way I could afford it and I’m not interested in starting some kind of different career. But here in 2023, I’m feeling good about getting back to work. Maybe it’s because I had a busy summer with lots of travel, some house guests, and a touch of Covid. After all of that, it’s just nice to have a change of pace and get back to a job. Or maybe it’s because (despite my recent case) we really are “past” Covid in the sense that EMU (like everywhere else) is no longer going through measures like social distancing, check-ins noting you’re negative, vax cards, free testing, etc. etc. This is not to say Covid is “over” of course because it’s still important for people to get vaxxed and to test.  And while I know the people I see all the time who are continuing to wear masks everywhere think lowering our defenses to Covid is foolish and it is true that cases right now are ticking up, the reality is Covid has become something more or less like the flu: it can potentially kill you, sure, but it is also one of those things we have to live with.

Normally in these kinds of new school year posts, I mention various plans and resolutions for the upcoming year. I have a few personal and not unusual ones– lose weight, exercise more, read more, and so on– but I don’t have any goals that relates to work. I’m not involved in any demanding committees or other service things, and I’d kind of like to keep it that way. I’m also not in the midst of any scholarly projects, and I can’t remember the last time that was the case. And interestingly (at least for me), I don’t know if I’ll be doing another scholarly project at this point. Oh, I will go to conferences that are in places I want to visit, and I’ll keep blogging about AI and other academic-like things I find interesting. That’s a sort of scholarship, I suppose. I’d like to write more commentaries for outlets like IHE or CHE, maybe also something more MSM. But writing or editing another book or article? Meh.

(Note that this could all change on a dime.)

So that leaves teaching as my only focus as far as “the work” goes. I suppose that isn’t that unusual since even when I’ve got a lot going on in terms of scholarly projects and service obligations, teaching is still the bulk of my job. I’ll have plenty to do this semester because I’ve got three different classes (with three different preps), and one of them is a new class I’m sort of/kind of making up as I go.

Still, it feels a little different. I’ve always said that if being a professor just involved teaching my classes– that is, no real service or scholarly obligations– then that wouldn’t be too hard of a job. I guess I’ll get to test that this term.

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On Leaving Academe & “Dead Wood” vs. “Old Growth” (or farewell, W. Pannapacker)

I met William Pannapacker in 2014 at the HASTAC/digital humanities conference at Michigan State, at a reception if I remember right. We only talked for a few minutes, exchanging stories of blogging from the “old days” and some of his columns for The Chronicle of Higher Education when he wrote under the name Thomas H. Benton, which always struck me as sounding less like a pseudonym than his actual name of Pannapacker. So after a seven or so year break, I was happy to see what I assume will be his last column, “On Why I’m Leaving Academe.”

It’s surprising he’s opting out because Pannapacker has a sweet gig. Besides being a tenured full professor, he has been an administrator since 2020, the “Senior Director of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Programs and Initiatives” at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.  Pannapacker explanations for leaving academia are similar to those who have written similar columns in recent years. He writes about the demise of the humanities, the changing demographics that have contributed to falling enrollments everywhere (and that’s even more true at very small and private liberal arts colleges with a explicit religious mission, like Hope College), and the difficulties of being able to just “keep up” with the field. Etc.

As usual, I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with him throughout this essay, but I wanted to write a bit about his perceptions that he’s part of “the problem” as a senior and tenured professor. He writes:

At this point in my career, at age 53, the costs of employing me are becoming greater than what I am likely to contribute. I am an impediment to solvency, diversity, and innovation for my institution. Tenure could keep me in this position until my 80s, while most new doctoral graduates went jobless. Tenure should not have become a lifetime appointment for a shrinking percentage of the profession subsidized by everyone else.

It’s not fair. And it is rife with professional hazards for those who receive it. Administrators talk about “dead wood,” and professors talk about “golden handcuffs.” If you’re an aging professor, like me, why not choose to set yourself free to explore more-challenging possibilities?

As I wrote about last month regarding EMU’s faculty buyout offer, I can relate to the midlife crisis fantasy of leaving academia for a different career, though after I thought about it for fifteen minutes, I concluded that’d be a terrible idea. The only other “careers” I’m interested in at this point are lottery winner and/or retiree, and the last thing I want to do is “explore more-challenging possibilities.” Though I bet Pannapacker didn’t take this leap without having a new job already lined up. Perhaps he is going to end up in some sort of humanities/arts grant writing position in his newly adopted city of Chicago. Good for him if that’s the case.

He’s right about the “golden handcuffs” of tenure in the sense that it is almost impossible for senior tenured faculty like me and Pannapacker to move on to a different university even if we’re willing to give up tenure and take a big pay cut. There are just not a lot of senior level faculty positions offered in any given year, and I couldn’t get a job as an assistant professor in my field someplace else because the hiring committee would think “Why would this guy apply for this job? There must be something wrong with him.” I know this is the case because I’ve been on several hiring committees and that’s what has happened with candidates like that every single time.

But I also think a lot of what Pannapacker is saying here is wrong.

First off, saying he’s stepping out of academia and thus improving the lives of graduate students and supporting the good work of the institution is the kind of virtue-signaling few of us can afford. We all have bills to pay. Second, there’s a BIG difference between a professor in their 50s who is perhaps disengaging a bit and someone who is in their 70s or 80s who should have retired long ago. My students remind me every moment that being in my fifties means I’m old, but c’mon, not that old. Besides, the era of automatically replacing a retired/leaving tenured professor with a new tenure-seeking professor ended about 20 years ago. If Hope hires anyone to replace Pannapacker, it’s most likely going to be a non-tenure-track or part-time job– not exactly coveted positions.

Then there’s the “dead wood” thing. I like to describe myself as beginning the dead wood/no longer giving any fucks stage of my career, but I’m of course mostly kidding. As I mention in my previous post (and as I’ve “vague-booked” on Facebook and elsewhere), I’m making a point of opting out of situations and meetings to avoid the toxicity that flows freely amongst some of my colleagues. But all that really means is I’m skipping a lot of meetings and I’m not putting my name in to be on any sorts of committees. Since I spent years doing that work, I kind of feel like I’m getting out of the way to give some of my other colleagues a chance to do these service and quasi-administrative things. I’m still active as a scholar and still taking teaching seriously, so I guess I’m less dead wood than I am an “old growth” tree of some sort– nothing like a Sequoia, but like some kind of scraggly shrub that somehow is still there after decades of forest fires and floods. So sure, there’s a difference in the amount of work I’m willing and able to do now versus when I was in my 30s or 40s, but that doesn’t mean I should be put on an iceberg and shoved out to sea.

I think the real definition of a dead wood professor is someone who is so checked out they are a burden and they drag down everyone else around them. The example that immediately comes to mind for me is a guy here who was finally forced into retirement a couple years ago. I will skip the details, but trust me: anyone reading this who has been a professor in my department in the last 20 years knows exactly who I’m talking about.

Now that’s dead wood, and I’d argue that the correlation between age and being dead wood is fuzzy. People are more likely to become a detached burden on their colleagues and students after they’ve been on the job for 20+ years, but correlation is not causation. I’ve met and worked with people who are as active and involved well into their 70s, and I have met and worked with people who started “dying” in their thirties the moment after they got tenure.

Or maybe Pannapacker is taking this satirical advice from McSweeney’s too seriously:

Retirement is not about money or age but the annihilation of any sense of purpose and meaning in your professional life. Once you accept this, you will quickly see how retirement really is for you. And we have greatly streamlined the process. To retire, all you need to do is find a quiet corner of a building (but not mine!) and say, out loud, in a determined voice, “I retire and release the university from all current and future financial obligations!” Being already in your head, I will hear you very clearly. Then you can let out a small whimper and crumple to the ground in a heap of deflated good intentions.

In any event, good luck in Chicago and beyond, William! Back here in academe, I’ll keep the lights on for you– at least for another 10 years or so.

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Is it August Again?

It’s another August, which means a shift into thinking about the new school year and shifting back into “working.” After some of the events of this summer, after some of the challenges of the 2020-21 school year, after EMU offered faculty a buyout deal I briefly considered, and after the faculty agreed to terms of a very mediocre contract extension, I think I’m getting close to ready for fall and my research fellowship in winter 2022.

There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph.

I haven’t taught in the summer for five years now, mainly because my wife and I have gotten to a point where we can afford it. I used to be quite a bit more defensive about having so much free-time in the summer, but I have gotten to an age and to a point in my career where I feel like I’ve earned the break. So yeah, I’ve done a bit of work this summer, but mostly not. We went to Vegas and up north, we’ve had some fun slowly emerging into a post vaccinated world (restaurants! movies! shopping!), we’ve had some life challenges I’m certainly not going to write about here, and we’ve had a lot of chances to admire our lovely gardens and yard. So sure, it hasn’t been all great and I grow increasingly annoyed about Covid and dumb-assed unvaccinated people, but overall not too bad. Better than last year, that’s for sure.

The 2020-21 school year was obviously a challenge for everyone everywhere (oh yeah, COVID!), but what I’m thinking about here are the local circumstances and departmental politics and how it impacted me. I had a conflict with an asshole of a colleague, and when I tried to find a satisfactory resolution to this dispute by working through my department head, the university’s director of academic human resources, and with the administrator of the faculty union, nothing happened. All of these people said that when it comes to conflicts between individual faculty members, there are no rules. That was pretty much a last straw moment for me. I’m not sure how this is going to play out over the next year or two, but I believe it’s fair to say that I’ve officially entered the “do not give any fucks”/dead wood stage of my career.

So when EMU announced a buyout plan and I was eligible for it, I did some pondering. The deal is two years of salary (paid out over those two years) plus 18 months or health care coverage. Alas, it isn’t right for me. If I was 10 or so years younger and the circumstances were like they are right now, I might have considered it, especially if I had a better sense about what I would want to do for a job/career outside of academia. If I were 10 years older and thus fully eligible for retirement, I would have taken this deal in a heartbeat. But at 55? Too old to start something new, too young to retire.

In a Facebook discussion recently, another faculty member at EMU said he “pitied me” for “having to work at a place I hate,” for not having “the courage to leave with even a generous buyout offer,” and that I had “plenty of career options” and if I hated it here so much, then I should just go get a new job at a better university. I think the person who said these things is clueless. Besides, I don’t hate EMU. The university has disappointed, angered, confused, and frustrated me over the years in many different ways, but so what? All employers– certainly all universities!– disappoint and frustrate employees at some point, and that is even more true for old-timers like me. But I’ve never hated the place.

And who else is going to pay me as much money as I make to only work about 8 months out of the year and mostly while at home? I still like to teach, so given that I have to do something to pay the bills, teaching is a pretty good option. Obviously, I still like to write a lot, and if I could do nothing but write whatever and whenever I want, that’s what I would do– and it’s what I plan to do in retirement, too. So sure, I would retire now if I could afford it, but that doesn’t mean I hate my job.

What puzzles me is the number of colleagues I have who are at retirement age– that is in their mid-60s or in many cases quite a bit older– and who have plenty of money but who are not taking this buyout offer. To each their own of course, but I think a lot of these folks don’t want to retire quite yet because they aren’t sure what they would do with themselves. I have no such worries. Besides not teaching in the summer for a while, I’ve also been lucky over the last seven years or so to have had a sabbatical and a couple of semesters off of teaching (“Faculty Research Fellowship”), and that’s made it possible for me to publish Invasion of the MOOCs, More Than a Moment, and a variety of other things. It’s also given me the chance to essentially have a series of “practice” retirements. So personally, I’m ready for the real thing.

Speaking of which: I’m very much looking forward to having been awarded another FRF for winter 2022, which means that after this fall semester, I’ll be mostly free to do what I want from mid-December 2021 to mid-August 2022.

Oh yeah, two last things to unpack from that first paragraph: once again, the faculty union and administration agreed to kick the contract down the road again for another year, though there are some changes that might (maybe? sort of?) completely undo the equivalency nonsense and restore some order to teaching loads.  But this is only a one year deal, so who knows how this will ultimately work out.

And teaching: I have a selection of “the usual” this fall. My most challenging prep is a class I haven’t taught since 2018, “Writing for the Web,” and my version of the class three years ago was getting a little out of date back then. I’m making some changes to the other two/gen ed writing classes I’m teaching, but these are more ready to go.

I’m also once again going to be teaching entirely online. Way back in January or February of 2021, faculty in my department were asked if we had a preference for the fall 2021 term, to teach on campus or online. I basically said I’ll do either, though I also pointed out that it’d be a whole lot easier to schedule classes for f2f and then convert them to online if necessary than it would be to do the other way around. But given the fact that I’d just as soon stay away from both the assholes and Covid, another semester of all online isn’t such a bad idea….

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The Don Rickels approach to campus security

Earlier this week, there were a couple of news stories out about the faculty union at Oakland University (which is about an hour north of here in Rochester Hills, Michigan) buying and distributing hockey pucks to faculty, staff, and students as a defense against an on-campus shooter. I learned about this at nine or ten Thursday night, after a long day and while I was thinking about going to bed. Being a little sleepy and fuzzy-headed, I assumed this was some kind of joke. But no, this is very real.

Then I thought “well, this surly must have been the bone-headed idea of some administrator or campus security person or both.” Nope. The Oakland University faculty union’s executive committee took part in an on-campus active shooter training session, and part of that training is about throwing stuff at a would-be shooter. The Oakland University Chief of Police mentioned hockey pucks as an example.

“We thought ‘yeah, that is something that we can do,'” [Tom Discenna, president of the American Association of University Professors] said. “We can make these available at least to our members and a fair number of students as well.”

So far, the union has spent $2,500 on an initial batch of pucks. Each costs 94 cents to make and they are printed with the union’s logo, Discenna said. They are being distributed for free.

The union began passing out the pucks on Nov. 9. So far, 800 faculty members have them, and another 1,700 are expected to go to students. The university’s student congress has ordered an additional 1,000, he said.

I posted about this on the EMUTalk Facebook group and I was surprised by the number of people who thought this wasn’t a bad idea.  I mean, on the one hand, I suppose this is true: a hockey puck is a good size for throwing and it could definitely do some damage if it connected. (The OU Chief of Police also suggested billiard balls.) A friend/colleague of mine who went through an active shooter training at his synagogue told me that experience made him understand the importance of thinking about strategies for what to do, including fighting back as a last resort. So okay, I guess.

On the other hand, c’mon, really? Have we been so beaten down by the every week or so stories about active shooters that all we do now is shrug and think if I every find ourselves in such a terrible situation, I sure hope I have a nice heavy object to throw? Are we that far away from some version of sensible gun control laws that passing out hockey pucks seems like a pretty solid idea? Thoughts, prayers, pucks? WTF?

I don’t know if this makes things better or worse, but deeply buried in these stories is this:

Separately, the union is hoping the pucks can help bolster a fundraising campaign for interior door locks for university classrooms. Each one has an identification number for voluntary donations to the campaign. The union and student congress each have contributed $5,000 toward that initiative.

That’s the real story– or at least it should be. I’ve never been on campus at Oakland University, but assuming it’s like ever other college campus I’ve been on (including the one where I work), the vast majority of the classrooms do not have doors that can lock, certainly not with the turn of a deadbolt from the inside of the room. And let me tell ya: if there is an active shooter on campus while I’m teaching, the first thing I want is not something hard and dangerous to throw. The first thing I want is a freakin’ lock.

So really, this story about hockey pucks as a defensive distraction against a classroom shooter is actually a clever distraction from the real issue. Universities are not doing enough to make their campuses safe. They certainly aren’t investing in locking doors. If Oakland University (or any university for that matter) was actually serious about making its campus more secure, it’d spend less time promoting the Don Rickels defense and more time on something that might actually work, like a locked door that keeps the shooter on the outside.

Oh yeah, and sensible gun control laws, but I know that’s a fantasy.

 

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Semi-annual end of the summer/beginning of the school year resolutions: Time passes, bends, repeats

Thirty years ago this week, (give or take a week or two), I was preparing to teach for the first time as a graduate assistant at Virginia Commonwealth University. I had moved to Richmond in May 1988, shortly after I had graduated from Iowa, and that summer wasn’t exactly great. I could only find work for a few weeks with Clean Water Action, which essentially involved going door to door in various subdivisions within about an hour’s drive from downtown Richmond and asking for donations . Let’s just say the premise of the operation seemed sketchy, the money was poor, I turned out to be not very good at canvasing, and I ate a lot of Cheerios that summer– though fortunately, my old friends Troy and Lisa had actually moved to Richmond too and they fed and entertained me once in a while. In any event, some time in August that summer, I was probably in a workshop for new teaching assistants.

Twenty years ago this week, (give or take a week or two), I was preparing for teaching and work at my second (and presumably final) tenure-track position at Eastern Michigan University. Annette and I left Ashland, Oregon where I had been an assistant professor for two years at Southern Oregon University. People in Ashland thought we were crazy to be moving to Michigan because Ashland and that whole area of Oregon is stunningly beautiful. But there is no way Annette would have ever gotten a tenure-track job at SOU, there are no other universities or colleges within 100 miles of there, and truth be told, SOU was (and still kind of is as I understand it) a basket case of an institution. So in the late summer of 1998, we hired a couple of dudes to do most of the loading up of a U-Haul truck we drove east for four or five days with Will (not yet a year old) in a car seat between us while we sang round after round of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to keep him from being fussy. In any event, I was probably in some kind of faculty orientation thing some time in late August, a session where I remember meeting my fellow cohort hires, Annette Saddik and Jim Knapp, and where I spent a day I will never get back being “orientated” and learning about insurance. As I understand it, the new faculty orientation has expanded  to almost a week of these meetings.

And now here we are once again with another new (school) year’s resolution(s) sort of post. Time flies and repeats and bends. I visited Richmond (and my friend Dennis Danvers) for a day back in late May and had a lovely trip down memory lane, driving by old apartments and seeing the many ways VCU’s campus has changed. Troy and Lisa (saw them back in March) are now in Brooklyn, and before that they were in Chicago for almost 20 years (with a “stop” in-between for a year in California). I hear once in a while from people who were at SOU, but not much. Annette Saddik and Jim Knapp both left EMU a long time ago. Annette (as in my wife, not Saddik) has been a tenured professor in the department for a while now, and Will is starting his senior year of college with an eye toward PhD programs.

As I’ve written about previously, EMU is in the midst of what I will charitably call “challenges,” a combination of self-inflicted dumb administrative decisions, changing regional demographics impacting enrollments, and a lot of other problems happening all over the U.S. at similar universities. This is a time at EMU where faculty who are able move on to other positions at other universities ought to seriously think about doing so, or where faculty who can’t move on should have a strategy for riding out the storm.

I am in the latter category– not that that’s a bad thing.

I mean, the grass might be greener elsewhere (or it might not be), but Annette and I both have tenured positions and we live in a lovely community. I can’t complain about that. This fall, I’m not involved in any quasi-administrative duties for the first time since 2011, and I am looking forward to being “retired” from that work to focus more on teaching. I’m especially excited about the section of first year writing I’m going to teach where I’m planning on using as Bruce McComiskey’s Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition and where students will research something in the theme(s) of post-truth and fake news. It’s the most politically charged version of the course I’ve ever taught, but at this stage of my career, I think I can handle/navigate it, and I think McComiskey makes a pretty compelling argument about how we live in a time where teaching students about this is incredibly important. So wish me luck on that front.

Scholarship-wise, I’m beginning the last stages of a book about MOOCs I’ve been working on pretty much since Invasion of the MOOCs. It’s revised title is More than a Moment: Contextualizing the Past, Present, and Future of MOOCs, it’s being published by Utah State University Press/University of Colorado Press, and it should come out some time in 2019. Knocking on wooden things. I had said before that this might very well be my last “hurrah” as far as scholarly writing goes because I want to take a turn toward the more “mainstream” in terms of trying to write and publish more commentary pieces (like this one from Inside Higher Ed from March), and/or some more “popular” non-fiction or even fiction. Then again, I am also going to start putting together the paperwork/legwork for a different project that has the working (and in my head) title “Classroom Laptop Bans are Bullshit.” Plus, with what seems to be an increasing number of proclamations that blogging is “over,” this might actually be the right time to research them again. Stay tuned.

Otherwise, my new school year resolutions are similar to the ones I had last year:

  • Finish the book. Well, “finish.” There will still be production issues and copy editing and indexing and who knows what else, which is to say that the book won’t really be done until it is actually produced. But you know what I mean.
  • Go to the gym more (and generally try to diet, exercise, be healthy, blah-blah-blah).
  • Let it go/stay out of it/unplug from it/let others take it over.
  • Start enough of some new projects so that I can apply for summer and/or fall research support.
  • Blog more, which I realize is at odds with the “blogs are dead now” trend and all of that. But just like everyone else I know, I’m increasingly disillusioned with social media, and I kind of liked when I was blogging “reviews” of scholarly things I had read, in part because it often feels like there is a whole lot more attention spent on making scholarship rather than consuming it/reading it.
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The Problem of Refusing Service to Bad People: A Not Completely Right Teaching Analogy

Two wrongs don’t make a right. I’m against all policies that boil down to “we don’t serve your kind,” even when “your kind” are bad people. And like the education industry, I think one of the challenges of the hospitality industry is an obligation to serve everyone– up until they give you a good reason to not serve them.

Most of my students either lean kind of left (thanks to youth and many of them are coming from working class backgrounds in Southeast Michigan) or they are kind of apolitical, so this problem is more hypothetical for me than real. But if a student signed up for my class and it became obvious that he (and it would almost certainly be a he) was all about “Make America Great Again” and whatever, it would be a huge problem if I told him “look, you need to drop because I refuse to teach you, read your writing, or give you a passing grade no matter what you do.” I’d probably get in a lot of trouble and it would just be, you know, “wrong.”

But honestly, I’m not convinced I’m right about this analogy.

Look, I get it. I think these people are deplorable too. I completely sympathize with the owners and staff of the Red Hen restaurant refusing to serve Sarah Hucklebee Sanders and her people– because by all accounts (including from Sanders in her official government tweet) this wasn’t a situation of a group being “thrown out” so much as it was about the owner politely asking the group to leave and the group politely doing so. I don’t fault the owner for this, and if I had been in their situation, I might very well have done the same thing. I am okay with the public protests that have greeted these public figures when they’ve done stuff like go out to dinner or to the movies or whatever because they are horrible people doing horrible things and when they go into public, the public is allowed to express their feelings. That’s protest, and protest is never “polite,” and I think there’s a difference between people protesting outside the restaurant versus proprietors of a restaurant protesting. I’m a little less okay when the protest actually goes into the restaurant or movie theater, but still. Anyway, like I said, I get it.

And I’m not that interested in “civility” per se, though I think the “yeah, well, Republicans have done all kinds of uncivil things too like a baker refusing to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, so they deserve it” argument strikes me as a version of “I know you are, but what am I?” For me,  this isn’t so much “Us good liberal people should continue to be civil” but rather “Us good liberal people should try to not be stupid.” The conservative hypocrisy here is thick. But while the self-righteous feelings that come from refusing awful people like this service or yelling at them is satisfying in the moment, it’s ultimately kind of gross.

Plus there’s the bigger picture politics. These public shamings are like pouring gasoline on the Trumpster fire and they do nothing to change minds. Just the opposite. This is all part of the Trump chaos/bully playbook. The bully taunts his victim into doing something stupid, essentially “What are you gonna do? Wanna hit me? Huh? I dare you! Go ahead, hit me!” The victim lose their temper, hits the bully, the bully has the green light to be a bigger bully (because hey, who’s the victim here now), and that’s how the Democrats manage to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory in 2018. 

Plus plus this all seems to me to be just another example of how Trump is starting to make liberals crazy and turn on each other.  I’ve seen signs of this on social media with left-leaning folks being driven slowly insane by a never-ending news cycle dominated by a never-ending series of stories that are some version of “this affront against decency is completely unprecedented” and/or “Trump is going to kill us all.” I read Amy Siskind’s Weekly List.  I think Trent Reznor is right when he noted “the disregard for decency and truth and civility is what’s really disheartening. It feels like a country that celebrates stupidity is really taking it up a notch.” At the same time, there are just too many liberals trying to out-liberal each other, trying to create unnecessary distance amongst themselves over issues with which we fundamentally agree. I write these posts mostly for myself and the tens of others who read them, but there might be a few left-leaning folks reading this right now who think that I’m wrong because what I’m writing here doesn’t fall into the “party line,” so to speak.

And increasingly, I think that Trump et al are gleefully rubbing their hands together as these liberals argue with liberals and cackling “Just as we planned. It is all so easy…”

Anyway, all I’m saying is I think people on the left side of the spectrum– everyone from pretty middle of the road and old-school Democrats to “Bernie Bros” to folks on the more radical left– need to find ways to push back against the Trump administration while not taking the bait. That shit didn’t help Hillary in 2016 (though why and how she lost is a much more complicated matter of course), and it ain’t going to help the Democrats in 2018 or 2020. And that shit gets super real when things happen like Anthony Kennedy retires and you start to realize that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is freakin’ 85!

But back to where I started. Two wrongs don’t make a right, I’m against policies that boil down to “we don’t serve your kind,” and one of the challenges of both the hospitality and education industries is there’s an obligation to serve everyone who comes into the dining room/classroom. But also like I said, I’m not sure I even agree with myself about this.

For one thing, I don’t think it’s illegal to refuse service to someone because of their politics or who they work for, though I honestly do not know where the legal line is. It’s illegal (I presume) to refuse service to a person because of their race, but it is legal (I presume) to refuse service to that same person because you believe they are a shitty person. When it comes to teaching, I don’t know exactly if it’s illegal for me to kick a student out of my class before it even begins based on their politics or their boss or even their race, but it is certainly “wrong,” it would probably get me in trouble with EMU (there are limits as to what even a tenured professor can get away with), and it might get me on some sort of “liberal watch” right wing web site.

Hospitality businesses have other ways to refuse service– dress codes immediately come to mind– and it’s also reasonable for these kinds of businesses to ask people to leave if they start behaving badly. I have thrown students out of my classes for bad behavior, though not often and I’ve never taught someplace where there is some kind of dress code (and there have been some controversial stories recently about what can go spectacularly wrong with dress codes in college courses).

Then again, I might be wrong about this.

I wish we lived in a time where we didn’t have to deal with any of this nonsense.

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Two Thoughts on “Volunteer Faculty”

It must be after the end of the school year because why else would I have the time and/or motivation to write not one but two blog posts in less than one week! In any event:

Just the other day, an associate dean of some sort at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale sent around an email to department heads (available in full in a variety of places, including here on the blog School of Doubt and also via “The Professor is In” Karen Kelsky’s Facebook page) floating the idea of “voluntary” adjuncts to help do some various kinds of academic work for free. Supposedly, this came from the SIUC alumni association, and the renewable “zero-time adjunct graduate faculty appointments” to do stuff like:

…service on graduate student thesis committees, teaching specific graduate or undergraduate lectures in one’s area of expertise, service on departmental or university committees, and collaborations on grant proposals and research projects. Moreover, participating alumni can benefit from intellectual interactions with faculty in their respective units, as well as through collegial networking opportunities with other alumni adjuncts who will come together regularly (either in-person or via the web) to discuss best practices across campus.

I have to say my first reaction to this was “this must be a joke and/or hoax,” because it kind of had the markers of “fake news:” an outlandish story that is also very easy for people to believe, especially people who are already upset about the decrease in tenure-track positions and the rise of increasingly bad part-time adjunct positions. But it was/is real, though, as SIUC tries to clarify here, it’s an experiment not meant to replace teaching faculty and all that.

Needless to say, the response from academics who actually have to get paid to do work was not positive. I think John Warner exaggerates more than a tad when he suggests that we should mark April 24, 2018 as “the day public higher education was lost,” but I get his point. The mere suggestion that the work that faculty (both on and off the tenure track) do can be done as well by eager volunteers was enough to piss a lot of academic-types off, and with some justification. I do this work because I love it, but I’m not a volunteer.

So, toward that end (especially for readers who have already read and thought about these SIUC statements and reactions like Warner’s), I thought I’d offer two somewhat related thoughts:

First here’s an overly optimistic, generous, and forgiving reading of this call for “0% adjuncts”  (and I freely admit this is probably too optimistic, generous, and forgiving). Maybe what the SIUC administration was trying to do was to systematize a way for qualified alumni to “give back” to SIUC, and to do so in a fashion that gives these alum credit for their volunteering. So, let’s say that I had a PhD from SIUC and for whatever reason, I was interested in/being recruited to be on a couple of dissertation committees for current students. I guess if I was a 0% adjunct faculty member, I could then do that. Maybe?

Now, I don’t really know why SIUC needs to go through this rig-a-ma-roll. I mean, I’ve been a reader on a dissertation for another university and I didn’t have to do any kind of appointment gymnastics; maybe it’s different at SIUC. Maybe there are some alumni in some departments who perceive this as perhaps helping them in their current positions and/or to find better positions. But again, I don’t really know.

As a slight and related tangent though, faculty do end up working for “0%” on a lot of different things. People who do review work for journals generally do not get paid for that labor, and people who review books before publication don’t usually get paid very much (if at all). I’ve been paid before to do tenure reviews, and I have agreed to do one this summer for free as a favor. So extending the invitation for this kind of volunteer work to alumni serving on various committees is perhaps a misplaced reading of the next logical step.

Also related (and overly generous and forgiving on my part): perhaps the goal here is to go back to the work adjunct faculty are supposed to be doing. I think in an ideal world, all adjunct faculty in all fields would be professionally active in whatever they do and they would teach a course or two at a university mostly as a way of “giving back” to the profession and the institution. I have a friend of mine who has been a journalist for several decades and he teaches a bit part-time about reporting, and I think this is his view of the value of this work. I am imagining a scenario where a doctor or a lawyer or a similar professional teaches a course at the university, again to give back and to share their “real world” expertise.

Of course, this is not what most adjuncts are now.

Second, I am reminded of the advice I have heard about freelancing: never work for free. I’ve never made any real money freelance writing (though one of my goals in the next few years is to try to make as much money freelancing as I used to make teaching in the summer; we’ll see what happens). But one of the main pieces of advice I’ve read/heard from freelancers is you should not ever agree to work for free. Here’s a long piece about by Yasmin Nair from a few years ago, pointing out that some big organizations (like HuffPo) only pay (at least some) of their freelancers with “exposure.” Maybe that’s useful if you’re just starting out or if you have a message you want to get out to the world; but otherwise, it’s not worth it. And it’s especially not worth writing for free for entities/publications that make money in part by not paying for content.

Now, I think this is easier said than done in a couple of different ways. For one thing and as I already mentioned, academics do a lot of work not necessarily “for free” but for little or no compensation. If we stopped doing not directly (or poorly) compensated work like writing articles, writing books, giving conference presentations, reviewing for journals, editing journals with minimal resources, reviewing tenure cases, sitting on dissertation committees, and so forth– the wheels of the academic machine would grind to a halt.

For another thing, what am I doing right now? I’m not getting paid for this. It’s worth it to me because I write in this space to get stuff out of my head and (potentially) out to interested readers, and there have been many things I have been able to do– some of which even paid me!– as a result of the writing I do here. The same goes for the book I’m working on right now: I’m never going to make any real money from it– at least not directly. But besides personal satisfaction and another item to put into my (already full) tenure and promotion basket, maybe this work will lead to some other opportunities, some of which might actually translate to compensation or even money.

So I’m not saying that there are no reasons to work “for free” in academia, and the line between working for free and not is a lot more fuzzy than whether or not a check is in the mail for that work. Nor am I suggesting that this ham-fisted proposal for 0% adjuncts ought to be read as just “normal business” because it is clearly not that. But I am saying that the conditions and practices of academics doing work for free (or at least not for money) was not invented by this odd email.

What’s even more sad is I am quite sure that there are SIUC alumni with terminal degrees who are so desperate to do something– anything!– to find some way into an academic position, and that includes signing up to be a 0% adjunct.