Readit News> Professors are not (at least not supposed) to be a decoration in a University.
Our names and reputations are nothing more than an enticing line in a marketing pitch. A way to say "You could be taught by a Nobel prize winner!"
My college's pitch for me is "This person worked for Beyonce and made AAA games! They'll get you a job!"
As the article stated, college in the US is now transactional. Put money in, get degree out. Put lots of money in a famous-name college, get more opportunities in the US labor market. They are not students anymore, they are customers buying a product. The product they are paying for is a piece of paper that gives better access to the US labor market. The US labor market increasingly expects a college degree even for even the most asinine roles.
When you're spending 5-to-6 figures and 4 years of your life for access to the entry-level US labor market, you are a customer, and learning and integrity take a backseat. When an institution cares the most about growth and profit, they are a business focused on increasing their capital. This is not to say that capitalism is bad, just that the incentive structure shifts from educational outcomes to revenue-per-student. In fact there is an explicit term for this, Full-Time Equivalent, or FTE. More FTE = more money = institutional growth.
> You have all the leverage
I do? Are you sure it's not the person who pays my paychecks, guarantees my health insurance, and can fire me at the end of the year since contract renewals are annual? Are you sure that the leverage and 'forcing management' that you say I can do isn't dependent on union support for an action I wish to take, since being unionized means I waived my right to individual actions?
It would be appropriate to say "The union should have all the leverage." This is because the union has an exclusivity agreement with the college, such that you cannot have non-union instructors teaching at the college. However our union is extremely weak, and struggles to take even the most basic opposition stances against the college. Our collective bargaining team gets weaker at negotiating every year; IT/CS professors took a $5000 pay cut this year because the union gave up our salaries during negotiation. Also worth noting that the college is hinting that they will not longer work with the union in the next contract negotiation, and move to individual instructor negotiations. This will enable them to lay off all tenured instructors and re-hire them as part-time adjuncts with a 70% pay cut. They just fired me, and they have told me they plan to extend that exact offer if I want to continue directing the program. I have already accepted a role elsewhere.
People who aren't in education generally read that tenure means "Job for life." and "They can't fire you". Maybe in the 20th century, but tenure doesn't work the way anymore, and hasn't since the 2000s. There's also a ton of politics. In the event of a union it is the union vs the college, not you vs the college. You have no individual leverage, you are dependent on union support.
> When workers have leverage they unionize and can force management.
Force them to do what? We ARE unionized; we are members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Since we are unionized we waive our right to individual arbitration, and individual protests or strikes (Wildcat Strikes) are explicitly illegal. We must go to the union, tell them the situation, and they decide if they wish to pursue action against the school in solidarity. If the union decides to not pursue action we cannot go alone. Conversely, if the school calls a 'state of emergency' they can take actions without union approval and with the union waiving their ability to object to actions, and eliminating their leverage.
And a state of emergency is exactly what they called this year. They did it in response to this https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/09/25/s... which is going to put them $5.5 million in debt in the next 3 years. They have told the union "We don't care, sue us. If we don't do this, we shut down, and everybody loses. If you sue us or strike, we shut down, and everybody loses."
The union has stated they do not plan to take action, but have sent many strongly worded emails ending in "In Solidarity" or "Union Strong". This isn't to say that unions are bad, in fact I'm very pro union. This is to say that not all unions are equal, and leverage is actually dependent on the union's overall strength and the overall power dynamic.
Your comments suggest that I am at fault here, and not my employer nor my union for taking inaction at the issues I've raised. I am proud to say that as a unionized public employee our collectively-bargained contract is publicly available for view online. If you are curious I am happy to send a link to you. You will quickly realize that it is two groups constantly speaking for you, you have very little recourse or individual agency, and the 'leverage' you claim I have or should have as a union does actually not exist.
Glad to be leaving this college.
> My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.
They (the prof class) created this situation. They could have upheld their standards and seen the number of students go down but they preferred to fill their classrooms at the expense of quality.
This is like a manager who is complaining that no one can code while offering McDonalds hourly rates.
I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role."
In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome?
At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts.
As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.
As for the impact of screen time on reading ability, it's important to discuss what literacy means from an educational standpoint. Literacy is much more than "Can you read the words on the page, or speak them aloud"; modern literacy is broken into understanding prose, documentation, and quantitative analysis. This is why when the article says "US children are falling behind on reading" they mean "1/3 of Eighth graders could not make an inference on a character's motivation after reading a short story" and similarly did not know that 'industrious' means 'hard working'.
Since you've asked about screen time, it's not so driven by 'screen time' as it is by the activity performed with screen time. When you say screen time, are you referring to someone reading a book on a Kindle, or doomscrolling on the social media of their choice? Both have been very well studied, with a wealth of publications on their impact.
The tl;dr of the research: Both have words on the screen, yes, but one (reading on a Kindle) is shown to have positive effects on literacy while the other (consuming social media) is shown to have detrimental effects across the board (not just limited to decreased literacy performance). Notably (and a point discussing the 'resources' in terms of time and energy investment), parents co-viewing content with their child has been suggested to improve overall language abilities, children who are left to their own devices (pun intended) experience poorer vocabulary acquisition and retention. [1]
1. Effects of Excessive Screen Time on Child Development: An Updated Review and Strategies for Management https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10353947/
* P.S. I read manga and play video games in Japanese to study and practice the language. It's been incredible for reading speed and basic comprehension, but I'm still years of daily effort away from reading legal documents.
The Reading Teacher 47, 1993-1994 https://archive.org/details/sim_reading-teacher_1993-1994_47...
The problem with education is a lack of funding. Many of the funds you speak of expired without use, and another 13-20 billion is set to expire this year.
What happened? Schools cut staff hard during the pandemic. At my particular school, faculty and staff were laid off in droves or accepted furloughs (20-60%) to keep their role at severely reduced pay. Among the fired were grant managers, the people who figure out how to use ESSER funds. When these huge windfalls (ESSER) came in, it also came with restrictions on how to use the funding. Unfortunately nobody at my school knew how to navigate the process anymore. The school tried to hire people back, but nobody applied because who wants to be underpaid working at a failing school that runs more rounds of layoffs than a major tech company?
It is now the end of ESSER. My school is $2 million in the hole, they are about to cut another 25% of staff (including me), and they spent only a tiny amount of the allocated funds because they fired their grant manager in 2021. My salary has already been cut $5,000. What little they figured out how to spend was used trying (and largely failing) to renovate our decaying and crumbling buildings. Those buildings have broken HVAC, networks, outdated teaching equipment, and burnt out projectors. Not exactly an inspiring teaching environment.
Around this time I was also involved in a startup providing online language and reading tools (Bamboo Learning). During ESSER we secured contracts with major school districts (Los Angeles, Rochester NY, Arizona, Texas). Something to the tune of 50,000-150,000 licenses. All of them trying to burn the ESSER funds. They couldn't figure out how to access the money and asked us to grant the licenses now and they'd pay us later. We couldn't afford that, and our investors wanted to see income before moving us into a Series B. We starved out in 2023 and closed before any of the districts figured out ESSER.
Admin is a common finger to point at, "we pay them too much money!", and yes I do not have positive opinions of any admin beyond my immediate dean. However the problem with ESSER isn't bloated admin, it's educators leaving enmass to work for literally anyone else.
Extremely bleak, yes, and it isn't set to get any better. However while the broad public argues over some nebulous problem, our schools will fail and close.
Either way, Im looking forward to February's "Who's Hiring" thread.
Maybe it’s me who is out of touch, but how is that the author’s honest take away? That low interest rates make people better managers?
I’m not buying it. It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers. At which point, you’re probably not concerned about employee satisfaction to begin with.
But it does. Even something as simple as writing a thank you email has an opportunity cost. In that time a sales person could initiate a new call, or an engineer could write another paragraph on a design doc.
It's why engineers having free coffee, or even BYO coffee, is such a bellweather. When the free coffee goes, the good times go with it. It costs the company nothing to let engineers BYO coffee, yet my friends and I have been with many a company that eventually set up a small coffee shop or a pay-per-cup coffee machine and go around confiscating employee-brought coffee machines. Historically they cite a "fire hazard" or some similar safety issue.
> That low interest rates make people better managers?
It's not entirely wrong. Higher interest rates reduce investment frequency and amount because it increases the risk and opportunity cost. When interest rates are low it's easier to justify to investors/board members that diverting some capital to employee value and satisfaction. When interest rates are high, things like the aforementioned thank you email becomes an inefficiency, reducing your attractiveness to investors. An extra 2% on a 10MM loan is 200k, and someone's gotta provide that additional revenue. Suddenly free coffee, unsupervised/unmonitored work (like remote), and thank you letters don't provide direct increased revenue while a sales call or design doc could.
E.g. How do existing shareholders get paid out? What happens to shorts? Treasury shares? Options? RSUs?
It seems like it would be extremely complex.
One of two things happen: a stock-for-stock exchange at a ratio (like 2 Blizzard becomes 1 ATVI stock), or a complete buyout and liquidation of the acquired company's stock.
In the latter, you are basically sent a check based on the sale price agreed upon by the two companies. In the case of Nordstrom, shareholders receive $24.25 for each unit of stock they hold. The downside is you pay capital gains on it. In the case of my friend at Splunk, she is left with a horrifying tax bill that'll be in the upper-5 to lower-6 figures.
What also happens is once the share price is agreed upon, the stock is priced in. As a result there is little point in shorting as the stock's price moves very little.
It's just that "normal" housing in the US is what's only attainable to the very rich and only because they inherited it, in most of Europe let's say: even 1% won't be able to buy an equivalent of median new US single family house, in EU - that 1% probably owns a similar or somewhat better house but simply because they bought or built it generations before.
This "fact" about MIT cancelling the Elsevier subscription is often cited but in isolation, it's misleading because it makes seem like MIT students and faculty don't even need Elsevier articles. That's not true.
What happened is that MIT switched to a pay-per-article or library loan method: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/how-to-access...
MIT in providing some other access methods to the same Elsevier articles for their researchers -- at the cost of some extra inconvenient steps -- is actually proving the opposite of the anti-publisher stance: The Elsevier publisher's articles are still valuable to us.
It's the subscription they cancelled and not the articles.
Correct. Before the UC system also cancelled their subscription with Elsevier they reported paying $11 million annually.
> The Elsevier publisher's articles are still valuable to us.
Yes, but not $11 million/year with a 3 year lock-in. UC reported (at the time of ending the contract) that they have a perpetual license to ~95% of relevant work on Elsevier, so that $11 million/year went to access 5% of Elsevier's library.
What we do see is publishers shifting to open access (OA), which appears to result in lower Uni costs, but shifts the expense burden to researchers. Researchers in the UC system are now asked to use grant funding to help pay OA APC fees.