10. You have to come to work, stay at work, and do things in person.
I've been teaching at this place for 31 years now. COVID, along with Zoom, has degraded the culture because so many faculty members decided they preferred staying home. These used to be so many more chance interactions—in particular interactions faculty from different disciplines—and now the hallways are relatively empty. Many faculty members are only here when they have to be.
And then there is the Zoom meeting. You can tell that some of those faces are looking at a different screen while pretending to pay attention, or their eyes downcast, playing with their phone. But even when everyone is engaged, it's just not the same as meatspace. It's robotic, non-human—"remote", you might say. I can't stand it.
I get it: human nature. You can rationalize that you're still getting the job done, so why drive your car through bad weather? Why leave the comfort of your kitchen table? I think people rationalize away something clearly visible: we are disconnected from each other, as compared with 10 years ago. I think the negative effect on the sense of academic/collegial community is strong.
I feel this big time at my institution. In our last contract we were able to negotiate a reduction in the pathetically low office hours we already must keep. Additionally most full time tenured profs are teaching at least 2 courses per semester entirely online asynchronous. So the need to be present on campus diminishes as well. I know full time faculty in my own department who are physically on campus 1-3 hours max per day and typically just 3-4 days per week. These are not just senior faculty with one foot in retirement. This is also the behavior of junior faculty just starting the tenure track process. The rot is there from the beginning the culture of the institution inadvertently supports it.
I'm looking for a rule to address a problem I heard described by an Ivy trustee some years ago. That year, the school graduated one German major and had three tenured faculty in German. So my rule goes something like "Your tenure expires when your services are no longer needed."
Well, since I have "another job" and a side business ... it's not even close. There are too many problems for this situation to be fixed easily and I think the disruption that's already under way is probably essential. There are too many activities that go on in academia that have nothing to do with teaching and learning, including actual beneficial research as opposed to bullshit sex abuse or powertrip factories, and too few core activities. I've mentioned what happened to me before, and you're "anonymous" whereas I am totally public, a published author of 50 books, a constantly working writer for over 30 years and a former faculty member at 4 different So Cal community college districts with top evaluations up until my last semester at Saddleback College in fall 2019. I started teaching at Chapman University, by the way, and I outlasted all the other MFA student teachers by 2 yrs because "everybody liked me." A graduate faculty member who fits the description you have for the non-qualified/non-committed tenured faculty threw a book at my head during a seminar, by the way. It was unprovoked. My best guess was he was still mad at me because his idol John Fowles talked at length to me, not him, during his visit a couple of weeks prior. It might have been because Fowles and I shared many interests in natural history and shocker ... I'm a real writer! So here's some mindfood for you: I am old enough to come from the days when sci fi was vilified by "the academy" and I even experienced it myself in grad school, where another instructor similar to the book-hurling Fowles acolyte, a PhD in "Creative Writing" who absolutely ordered staff around and slept with an endless series of grad assistants, said loudly in a social setting with many other faculty and grad students present, "You're a pretty good writer. Why do you want to write that sci fi crap?" This was like 1998! Anyway ... I haven't really written much of that sci-fi crap for the past ten years - but what I did write at that time and through the early 2000s has all come true. The only thing that hasn't is "human mutational virus" and really, if we count COVID (all viruses have mutagenic properties) yes - it has. I wasn't the biggest Vonnegut reader back in the day but everything that guy wrote is not only factually true or coming true, it's spiritually and culturally true. One of my friends (I'm friends with the Stoics) is like "You don't have to have an opinion on every topic" - but academia is where a gifted, socially-appropriate student and faculty member (me) was screwed over and directly harmed in countless ways just because I wanted to first, study and obtain bachelors degrees in my area of interest; and second - decided after years of working in the private sector with 2 BAs - wanted to return to school, get a master's degree, and teach and write. I did achieve that goal. But I can promise, all the publications advertised by Chapman University's graduate writing program are "me." Whatever they say. Whatever the award or publication except for a poet with 3 chapbooks is me. They actually phrase it to make it sound like there are many, many students doing this. But - it's me. So here I actually enjoy teaching for 20 years, and I purposely selected to teach at Saddleback because the students ... wait for it ... wanted to be there! I even enjoyed teaching at 6 AM and Saturday and Sunday classes because ... the students wanted to be there. Me too, and I wanted to become a better teacher to help them and vice-versa. Well, here come life's twists and turns and all the bad things I witnessed over the years and everything so mildly and academically documented here (I was personally insulted at my last faculty event at Saddleback where not only did I have to sit through an unqualified person who fits your 'rich husband' description gave a presentation on 'diversity' using powerpoints and student emails! - and then we had lunch and I sat across from an older British woman who'd just been hired and not only was this an example of clueless rich who never held any real job, this one flew against the UK stereotyped and sprayed me with food as she talked with her mouth open, asking why any teacher could possibly be homeless? Why didn't they just get a place to live?). Everything I say is true. Young women are routinely preyed upon and at my former disowned undergrad alma mater, some of the predators are female faculty who prey on the young women, not just men. It may even predominate there, as the school has actively sought to recruit lesbian "scholars" and also to admit transgender and lesbian/queer students and focus on their social interests and needs. So, with all this in mind, exactly who will want to attend schools like this in the future? I mean like "NOW" future as in Fall 2026. Who will want to pay $90K+ a year to be "educated" in such an environment? What "studies" from labs headed by sex offending perverts like Lawrence Krauss will have value? There is SO a reason why I am working for xAI right now. And it's because I might be an "okay" writer of that slimy sci-fi shit. What a fucked up mess and it's WAY beyond these viral lists of 10 items. "What we have here, is a failure of the imagination." Enjoy!
I totally hear you on this: "There are too many problems for this situation to be fixed easily and I think the disruption that's already under way is probably essential." Although I love being in a classroom discussing meaningful ideas with serious students (which I did for 25 years), I chose to walk away from academia in 2020.
What informed your choice, Carrie-Ann? Mine was forced. SOCCCD's union had finally passed a rule that part-time instructors would get guaranteed assignments based on seniority and guess who was the most senior? The good instructors who'd hired me years before had all retired leaving a really sad, incompetent department of lazy, entitled fulltimers, dozens of adjuncts, and other departments, even worse. This all turned out great for me and my husband. But I look at how my students have struggled, my daughter and all her friends - I feel it is all interconnected. It is a malaise, a cultural disease, a failure of the imagination.
I chose to walk away from a tenured position as an associate professor of philosophy and department chair. There were many factors brewing for years. Without writing a book about it, I would summarize the core reasons as:
(1) The pernicious politicization of higher ed where some vocal professors and their students wanted to substitute indoctrination and activism for education and scholarship. This was extremely toxic in creating chilling effects in classroom discussions and faculty meetings alike.
(2) Increasing unpreparedness of incoming students, with increasing numbers of them not being able to write a coherent sentence or paragraph and barely able to read a short essay. They were being set up for (expensive) failure by a K-12 system that told them they were qualified to graduate from high school.
(3) Massive grade inflation. I was one of the few faculty at our small private liberal arts college who insisted on fighting grade inflation, which I got chastised for laterally and from above.
(3) Administrative bloat, with every new position and office trying to justify their existence and high salaries by coming up with some puffed-up initiative. That translated to more meaningless paperwork for faculty to document everything numerically in relation to "Bloom's taxonomy." I had a 4/3 course load (as department chair, mind you), and the amount of admin work was creeping up to 50% of my time, which would have been far better spent on meeting with students during office hours to go over their rough drafts (and actually getting more than five hours of sleep per night).
(4) Connected to all of the above, but especially (3) is my health. I was mentally and physically exhausted.
"Increasing unpreparedness of incoming students, with increasing numbers of them not being able to write a coherent sentence or paragraph and barely able to read a short essay." I could get them up to paragraph to essay level and reading Oliver Sacks in 16 weeks. That took 20 years of solid work and figuring out how to teach actual work and critical thinking. I'm glad to know you, Carrie-Ann, and I can recognize real character when I see it. Only a tiny number of people would be able to make your choice, for your good reasons. It is a true tragedy, what has happened. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Iain McGilchrist (and it's heavy in its own way - exemplified by the very problems it identifies!). A relentless focus on unimportant details and minutiae to the expense of real work. The weight of administrative nonsense combined with horrible K-12 problems ... and then we add the criminal/subversive behavior. Those are not things worth "saving" at all. Not in any way. I am urged by present circumstances to write about ways to move forward - and health and well-being for each of us is a solid start. I'm sorry you missed so much sleep and became so exhausted. I very much hope you're better now.
The People Who Who Never Leave School are worth shining a spotlight on. I think there is a link between this growing phenomenon and that of the Feminization (emphasis on feminine, which can refer to both women and men) discourse. School is safe and generally favors conscientious rule following and adherence to bureaucratic principles. There is nothing wrong with being feminine, and there is nothing wrong with some schools being organized around these principles, but I'm inclined to believe that much of the societal discontent with higher Ed is that the People Who Never Leave School have organized most/nearly all these institutions around their own proclivities / predispositions.
While it would be unfair to say that graduates and the public don't benefit from these institutions, it is fair to question whether these institutions are now benefiting the People Who Never Leave School far more than the former. And why the monopolization / homogeny?
10. You have to come to work, stay at work, and do things in person.
I've been teaching at this place for 31 years now. COVID, along with Zoom, has degraded the culture because so many faculty members decided they preferred staying home. These used to be so many more chance interactions—in particular interactions faculty from different disciplines—and now the hallways are relatively empty. Many faculty members are only here when they have to be.
And then there is the Zoom meeting. You can tell that some of those faces are looking at a different screen while pretending to pay attention, or their eyes downcast, playing with their phone. But even when everyone is engaged, it's just not the same as meatspace. It's robotic, non-human—"remote", you might say. I can't stand it.
I get it: human nature. You can rationalize that you're still getting the job done, so why drive your car through bad weather? Why leave the comfort of your kitchen table? I think people rationalize away something clearly visible: we are disconnected from each other, as compared with 10 years ago. I think the negative effect on the sense of academic/collegial community is strong.
I feel this big time at my institution. In our last contract we were able to negotiate a reduction in the pathetically low office hours we already must keep. Additionally most full time tenured profs are teaching at least 2 courses per semester entirely online asynchronous. So the need to be present on campus diminishes as well. I know full time faculty in my own department who are physically on campus 1-3 hours max per day and typically just 3-4 days per week. These are not just senior faculty with one foot in retirement. This is also the behavior of junior faculty just starting the tenure track process. The rot is there from the beginning the culture of the institution inadvertently supports it.
Having ~20 more years in the academe than you, this is how I envision most Zoom meeting participants:
I'm looking for a rule to address a problem I heard described by an Ivy trustee some years ago. That year, the school graduated one German major and had three tenured faculty in German. So my rule goes something like "Your tenure expires when your services are no longer needed."
Well, since I have "another job" and a side business ... it's not even close. There are too many problems for this situation to be fixed easily and I think the disruption that's already under way is probably essential. There are too many activities that go on in academia that have nothing to do with teaching and learning, including actual beneficial research as opposed to bullshit sex abuse or powertrip factories, and too few core activities. I've mentioned what happened to me before, and you're "anonymous" whereas I am totally public, a published author of 50 books, a constantly working writer for over 30 years and a former faculty member at 4 different So Cal community college districts with top evaluations up until my last semester at Saddleback College in fall 2019. I started teaching at Chapman University, by the way, and I outlasted all the other MFA student teachers by 2 yrs because "everybody liked me." A graduate faculty member who fits the description you have for the non-qualified/non-committed tenured faculty threw a book at my head during a seminar, by the way. It was unprovoked. My best guess was he was still mad at me because his idol John Fowles talked at length to me, not him, during his visit a couple of weeks prior. It might have been because Fowles and I shared many interests in natural history and shocker ... I'm a real writer! So here's some mindfood for you: I am old enough to come from the days when sci fi was vilified by "the academy" and I even experienced it myself in grad school, where another instructor similar to the book-hurling Fowles acolyte, a PhD in "Creative Writing" who absolutely ordered staff around and slept with an endless series of grad assistants, said loudly in a social setting with many other faculty and grad students present, "You're a pretty good writer. Why do you want to write that sci fi crap?" This was like 1998! Anyway ... I haven't really written much of that sci-fi crap for the past ten years - but what I did write at that time and through the early 2000s has all come true. The only thing that hasn't is "human mutational virus" and really, if we count COVID (all viruses have mutagenic properties) yes - it has. I wasn't the biggest Vonnegut reader back in the day but everything that guy wrote is not only factually true or coming true, it's spiritually and culturally true. One of my friends (I'm friends with the Stoics) is like "You don't have to have an opinion on every topic" - but academia is where a gifted, socially-appropriate student and faculty member (me) was screwed over and directly harmed in countless ways just because I wanted to first, study and obtain bachelors degrees in my area of interest; and second - decided after years of working in the private sector with 2 BAs - wanted to return to school, get a master's degree, and teach and write. I did achieve that goal. But I can promise, all the publications advertised by Chapman University's graduate writing program are "me." Whatever they say. Whatever the award or publication except for a poet with 3 chapbooks is me. They actually phrase it to make it sound like there are many, many students doing this. But - it's me. So here I actually enjoy teaching for 20 years, and I purposely selected to teach at Saddleback because the students ... wait for it ... wanted to be there! I even enjoyed teaching at 6 AM and Saturday and Sunday classes because ... the students wanted to be there. Me too, and I wanted to become a better teacher to help them and vice-versa. Well, here come life's twists and turns and all the bad things I witnessed over the years and everything so mildly and academically documented here (I was personally insulted at my last faculty event at Saddleback where not only did I have to sit through an unqualified person who fits your 'rich husband' description gave a presentation on 'diversity' using powerpoints and student emails! - and then we had lunch and I sat across from an older British woman who'd just been hired and not only was this an example of clueless rich who never held any real job, this one flew against the UK stereotyped and sprayed me with food as she talked with her mouth open, asking why any teacher could possibly be homeless? Why didn't they just get a place to live?). Everything I say is true. Young women are routinely preyed upon and at my former disowned undergrad alma mater, some of the predators are female faculty who prey on the young women, not just men. It may even predominate there, as the school has actively sought to recruit lesbian "scholars" and also to admit transgender and lesbian/queer students and focus on their social interests and needs. So, with all this in mind, exactly who will want to attend schools like this in the future? I mean like "NOW" future as in Fall 2026. Who will want to pay $90K+ a year to be "educated" in such an environment? What "studies" from labs headed by sex offending perverts like Lawrence Krauss will have value? There is SO a reason why I am working for xAI right now. And it's because I might be an "okay" writer of that slimy sci-fi shit. What a fucked up mess and it's WAY beyond these viral lists of 10 items. "What we have here, is a failure of the imagination." Enjoy!
I totally hear you on this: "There are too many problems for this situation to be fixed easily and I think the disruption that's already under way is probably essential." Although I love being in a classroom discussing meaningful ideas with serious students (which I did for 25 years), I chose to walk away from academia in 2020.
What informed your choice, Carrie-Ann? Mine was forced. SOCCCD's union had finally passed a rule that part-time instructors would get guaranteed assignments based on seniority and guess who was the most senior? The good instructors who'd hired me years before had all retired leaving a really sad, incompetent department of lazy, entitled fulltimers, dozens of adjuncts, and other departments, even worse. This all turned out great for me and my husband. But I look at how my students have struggled, my daughter and all her friends - I feel it is all interconnected. It is a malaise, a cultural disease, a failure of the imagination.
I chose to walk away from a tenured position as an associate professor of philosophy and department chair. There were many factors brewing for years. Without writing a book about it, I would summarize the core reasons as:
(1) The pernicious politicization of higher ed where some vocal professors and their students wanted to substitute indoctrination and activism for education and scholarship. This was extremely toxic in creating chilling effects in classroom discussions and faculty meetings alike.
(2) Increasing unpreparedness of incoming students, with increasing numbers of them not being able to write a coherent sentence or paragraph and barely able to read a short essay. They were being set up for (expensive) failure by a K-12 system that told them they were qualified to graduate from high school.
(3) Massive grade inflation. I was one of the few faculty at our small private liberal arts college who insisted on fighting grade inflation, which I got chastised for laterally and from above.
(3) Administrative bloat, with every new position and office trying to justify their existence and high salaries by coming up with some puffed-up initiative. That translated to more meaningless paperwork for faculty to document everything numerically in relation to "Bloom's taxonomy." I had a 4/3 course load (as department chair, mind you), and the amount of admin work was creeping up to 50% of my time, which would have been far better spent on meeting with students during office hours to go over their rough drafts (and actually getting more than five hours of sleep per night).
(4) Connected to all of the above, but especially (3) is my health. I was mentally and physically exhausted.
"Increasing unpreparedness of incoming students, with increasing numbers of them not being able to write a coherent sentence or paragraph and barely able to read a short essay." I could get them up to paragraph to essay level and reading Oliver Sacks in 16 weeks. That took 20 years of solid work and figuring out how to teach actual work and critical thinking. I'm glad to know you, Carrie-Ann, and I can recognize real character when I see it. Only a tiny number of people would be able to make your choice, for your good reasons. It is a true tragedy, what has happened. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Iain McGilchrist (and it's heavy in its own way - exemplified by the very problems it identifies!). A relentless focus on unimportant details and minutiae to the expense of real work. The weight of administrative nonsense combined with horrible K-12 problems ... and then we add the criminal/subversive behavior. Those are not things worth "saving" at all. Not in any way. I am urged by present circumstances to write about ways to move forward - and health and well-being for each of us is a solid start. I'm sorry you missed so much sleep and became so exhausted. I very much hope you're better now.
The People Who Who Never Leave School are worth shining a spotlight on. I think there is a link between this growing phenomenon and that of the Feminization (emphasis on feminine, which can refer to both women and men) discourse. School is safe and generally favors conscientious rule following and adherence to bureaucratic principles. There is nothing wrong with being feminine, and there is nothing wrong with some schools being organized around these principles, but I'm inclined to believe that much of the societal discontent with higher Ed is that the People Who Never Leave School have organized most/nearly all these institutions around their own proclivities / predispositions.
While it would be unfair to say that graduates and the public don't benefit from these institutions, it is fair to question whether these institutions are now benefiting the People Who Never Leave School far more than the former. And why the monopolization / homogeny?
3.5 academia must be willing to name which groups are currently excluded or discouraged and which are not.
there’s no fixing academia as long is a credentials factory for the ambitious, not a refuge for the curious.