‘There’s a task I’m not interested in doing, and I’m wondering if there’s a website into which I can paste text and have it generate output for me, but I am too lazy to do my own research on this topic. And I 100% do not see the irony here whatsoever.’

I totally get it for R1 schools: Professors are hired because they're excellent researchers, that's what they do, and they don't have time to spend hours on consistent formatting, making nice figures, or thinking about how to organize material in a way that's helpful to students. And if they do, no one will give them credit for it in their evaluations, or worse, it might even raise a few eyebrows about why they are spending their precious time on these things. I get it, I get it, I get it.

But at SLACs or PUIs I mostly see the same thing. I am not a designer, I am not an artist, I am just a assistant professor at a SLAC, but even here I seem to be one of the very few who care about applying best design principles, creating figures that actually fit with the rest of my presentation instead of screenshotting the first related figure found on google that might use different naming conventions. Even formatting equations correctly in math heavy classes (e.g., indices not in math font if they are not a variable) seems to be too much to ask for many.

And yes, my students notice and say that it helps a lot. Yes, it takes a lot of time, probably 5-10 hours more per week during the first few weeks of a semester, but at the end of the day, good teaching is what this job is all about.

My perspective also seems to be supported by cognitive load theory, but maybe I have a blind spot somewhere and there are good arguments for not doing what I do - or is it really just laziness?

Our profession presents unique challenges to having type one diabetes, so just wondering how y’all are doing and if you share your condition with your students?

I am curious ability what’s happening in the human services field. So much work in this field is based on inclusion, accessibility, and more. Psychology, therapy, mental health, social work, disability, education, etc.

How are professors in these fields feeling these days and have your universities asked you to remove anything related to DEI?

I’ve heard talk about a general strike in the US on May 1st, but not sure if it’s actually being planned or what…

In a recent all-faculty meeting with university leadership, several faculty members asked the leadership to reveal the demographic composition of the faculty who will be let go at the end of the school year. This seems to be part of an ongoing conflict in which the faculty are accusing the leadership of secretly targeting a particular demographic. The leadership is refusing for privacy reasons, and they claim that this type of information has not historically been published. The aggrieved faculty do not accept this reasoning and assert that the real reason behind their refusal is an attempt to conceal discrimination.

Do you think the leadership's reasoning about protecting privacy makes sense to you? Have you ever seen information like this published at your institutions?

My state is staring at a multi-billion dollar budget deficit. And, as such, my public R1 university is going to have it's budget slashed (this is on top of the budget reduction we are already facing due to some of Trump's budget cuts).

This got me thinking: "If I were in charge of a DOGE-like agency at my university, what would I cut?"

My first thought would be to cut Academic HR, which basically just makes hiring a giant pain in the ass for every department they interact with. I'd also cut a program my university has for faculty advancement; I have attended a few of their events and they were a complete waste of time. In general, I'd focus on closing most on the non-academic departments/offices/programs.

What are some examples of things you would cut at your university?

EDIT: for those of you that are triggered by the acronym "DOGE", note that my questions asks: what are examples of things YOU would cut?

I gave some research assignments to students at the end of the semester. I checked all of them using ZeroGPT and ChatGPT. ChatGPT flagged around 90% of the assignments as being more than 50% AI-generated. ZeroGPT flagged fewer assignments as AI-generated. I was surprised to see the assignments of a few students—whom I consider very focused on learning—being marked as AI-generated. They also protested their grades and claimed that they did not use AI.

Should we trust the results of ZeroGPT and ChatGPT? Is there any other tool with better accuracy?

It can just sit on canvas ungraded, and when someone questions why I didn’t grade it, I can tell them I think it’s AI and I don’t want to.

Greetings fellow faculty - a group of students in the graduate program (MArch) I teach in have gone on 'strike' against several other courses they are enrolled in. They are making accusations that there is too much attention demanded during classtime and the quality of instruction is not of value to them. The faculty involved have always been well regarded in the program. I don't know many more details. The Chair of the department is going along with the strike and trying to meet the demands of the students, without considering implications of the history and integrity of the program, the precedent they are setting for other classes or the faculty experiences in the classroom. We all know that attention, interest and engagement of students has been declining but it seems normal to have some expectations of the students.

Has anyone heard of students 'striking' before and refusing to go to class? I'm worried of the precedent it sets before I get these students. Do we just cave for any demands?

I’m puzzled by a student paper. They submitted it on time. I read it and it’s not great but ok. I go to check the references and I can’t find them. I look up the journal they cite, and that volume and issue is not the paper title. I email them and they email back saying they are out of the state but that they used owl Purdue citation engine to do the references. They then send me links to the references and they do exist, sort of. One is a blog post but in the citation it’s in a journal. One is in Spanish. Another seems to be an unrelated paper.
So my first question is, can the Purdue citation maker just make up stuff? I haven’t really used it but it looks like you paste in the web address and it makes a citation.

My suspicion is that the references are AI hallucinations. But some seem partly real. Could this be an innocent mistake on the students part?

They also said they used Chegg to proofread and edit. I wasn’t aware that Chegg provided that service. Is this a valuable service? Is it an unacceptable use of AI? Or is it just a grammar checker?

Am I missing something? The references are not cited in the paper by the way. Also no images.

I was mostly convinced that the references were fraudulent but now I’m not sure.

Student emailed me saying that he couldn’t get in to a lecture for his extra credit because he “wasn’t sure if the location got switched or if I was supposed to jump over the gate to get in, idk.” The humor here is that he meant to send this to a different professor. I emailed him back saying this, and he replied “my bad i have my professors on speed dial and i hit english instead of history, lol” Out of curiosity, I looked up this lecture and it’s this coming Tuesday. He showed up to campus on a Saturday in the pouring rain for no reason.😭 The breakdown in comprehension and communication across the board is enraging most of the time, but I found this one to be pretty funny. He also attached a one minute long video of him explaining that he couldn’t get past the gate😹

I used to teach in a relatively well-known university as an NTL. Due to the overlap of the topics, I could also associate with two other colleges within the university. I moved out and got into a good place with a better salary and career transition.

In the past 3 months, two students from the old department who have never seen me before have reached out to my new university email requesting my teaching material and "instructions" since they can no longer enroll in my class.

It would be ridiculous for the student to assume that I will not only share the material but also provide them with learning plans.

I decided not to respond, but it was bonkers for me to see multiple emails like this.

Words of affirmation/commiseration are appreciated, but good advice would really help!

I have a student who is failing my class. This week they started coming to office hours to try to catch up and I noticed that they are pretty severely intellectually disabled. Can't do algebra at all, forgets things I explain to them within minutes, etc. My attitude about students that are simply incapable of pursuing higher education was something like "do your best to help them, but stop taking their money if they are shown to be incapable of passing their classes."

The weird part about this: they are a junior in an engineering major. I had to explain fractions to them multiple times this week, but some other professors let him pass calculus 1 and 2. I suspect what's happening is that this student is retaking classes until they find a professor willing to pass them. They said they fail classes frequently and expect to graduate in 7-8 years instead of 4 (not sure how their GPA is above 2.0).

The problem is that now they are going to run into a brick wall... there is no way for them to pass my class, and no alternative professor to run to next semester. I just have this awful picture in my head of a student failing my class semester after semester and my class being the only thing keeping them from graduating without any conceivable way for them to get through it. I am pretty convinced they simply don't have the mental capacity to pass my class.

It’s the time of the semester where I let some students know they’re too far behind to pass a class. I nag nag nag about homework from day 1, but I still have students who attend class then submit no assignments.

I emailed a few students to let them know they might consider dropping so they will have a W ( withdrawal) on their transcript instead of an F.

A student wrote back and asked if they could go back and do missing work to try to pass. They need to complete the class this semester. I calmly explained that it’s too late because I don’t have time to grade old work AND they failed the test on that material so they haven’t learned it.

The student was polite but I am still crabby because grading is time intensive. 😏

UPDATE: the student understands the situation now and is dropping the class. I always have some sympathy for a student who cannot pass but hopefully they will retake the class and focus on assignments next time.

Career advice would be appreciated please. My sense is that it would be risky to try to move into a TT or tenured STEM position at an R1 at least for the next 4 years?

My field mandates federal grants for tenure, and I am seeking info from those of you at R1s whether TP committees have relaxed the grant requirement given the current situation?

I'm currently TTAP at an R2. My federal grant was retracted last week, but ultimately it matters less for me at an R2 and I will likely be tenured. The grant retraction was not too surprising since at least 50% of my research agenda are topics that contain banned words or issues the government doesn't believe exists.

I believe I have a strong record and I had everything ready to try for an R1 since I really wanted a better research environment and worried about steep enrollment declines at my R2, but it seems the bigger gamble would be if I tried to transition upwards to R1 without tenure.

I'm an adjunct Art and Design professor and a wood/metal shop tech. My undergrad education was in Fine Art and my Masters was a furniture- focused design curriculum-

This is to say MY perspective on these fields and teaching in them is that competence in physically designing and making objects, CRAFT, is extremely important and cannot be left behind just because contemporary art is open-ended with regard to craft, and the industry standard for Design/Architecture has become software and CNC prototyping.

During my education, I wasn't exposed to this issue so much, as my faculty had backgrounds in making, but since taking my previous and current positions I've been floored by the culture around making at some institutions. Many students treat craft skill-building, any kind of physical making, prototyping, research of materials and techniques, as secondary, a hassle, or beneath them.

Faculty or faculty hiring decisions reinforce this. I've seen whole art departments where almost no one makes work or teaches using hard/classical art skills; Design and Architecture heads who haven't made anything physically in years, and put down the work of students and faculty that do. (What prompted this post was hearing from another professor that their 4th-year capstone student has been told by our department head that "I've never seen a successful furniture design project")

Of course I don't say all of this to mean we must all be old-timey craftspeople, oil painters, stonecarvers, designer sketching on drafting tables, architects drafting and making models by hand, etc.

I'm concerned for my field- especially in the age of ChatGPT, decreasing student literacy, COVID students with poor learning/math/writing skills- if we can't read, we can't write, don't care about theory, AND we can't make anything, what are we!? Do others in this field feel similarly? Or am I simply biased towards physical making? I'm aware that many job seeking students will not need to know all of these things as they enter the job market, but it feels as though we lose something by leaving physical making behind.

Also, does this issue extend to other fields?

I am on a tenure track at an R2 institution, and our program is applying for ABET accreditation this summer. I was wondering what is expected (in terms of time commitment) from a junior faculty member in your institution. There seems to be a lot of workload and documentation, and considering that I am on a 9-month salary, I wanted to do what is considered to be the "norm" and expected as my service during summer, but also not extra!