Recommended reads #107
“Rather than teaching students to fail, I want them to learn to define their own personal rules for the game.”
A sense of duty to teach climate change. (Amy Harmon of the NYT has another spectacular piece.)
Teach by releasing your hold on your high status.
Mills College lays off some tenured faculty and eliminates low-enrollment majors from the curriculum, claiming financial exigency. Targeting low-enrollment majors. Which in the absence of further details, I find somewhat credible given the straits that small private colleges are in as tuition continues to climb and exorbitant loans seem less advisable.
Trinity College is putting a professor on leave because he used his academic freedom.
Strategies that campuses are taking to address low enrollment.
Just reminding you that I brought up the small private college financial bubble last year.
“Very selective colleges’ flexible understanding of ‘diversity’ squares the circle between helping those less fortunate and giving one’s children a leg up. The key is that ‘official measures of campus diversity’ have turned into “unofficial markers of institutional prestige in the little universe of elite higher education.” (This piece is from the National Review and the guy who writes this clearly has a broader agenda that I wouldn’t support. But some things here hit close to home.)
The Evergreen State College implosion
Humanities majors are the future of the tech industry. (The article calls them “liberal arts majors,” which doesn’t seem to make much sense given the content of the article.)
McSweeney’s has a piece called “Please consider supporting our Patreon campaign,” and it isn’t a humor piece. They also have a humor piece, “11 ways that I, a white man, am not privileged.”
Those imperiled biological collections from the collections at the University of Louisiana-Monroe have found a home, sort of? The fish collection is going to “a consortium of institutions headed by Tulane University.” Which means, I guess, that the collection is going to become fragmented? I don’t know any more about this (and if anybody who does could comment, that’d be wonderful), but this isn’t encouraging. I suppose it’s better than having a provost threaten to throw them out, I guess.
How Yale let a sexually harassing professor move to a new position while keeping entirely mum about his offenses. This piece about passing the trash is important for anybody involved in the academic hiring process.
This story paints a tragic and clear portrait for administrators of universities who are failing to actually give a shit about their students when they accuse people of sexual misconduct. This will break your heart, and this is why you should read it.
If you haven’t read this Pro Publica shocker about how Facebook fails to protect groups that are listed as “protected classes” by using guidelines that are both consistent and bizarre, it’s a must-read.
Can you use a blog to become a science journalist nowadays?
The colonial origins of tropical field stations (I haven’t read this yet, because I don’t have access, but still looks worth sharing on the outside chance that some of you might be able to.)
Pregnant in the field. (Another one of those times when news orgs write up stories based on a twitter hashtag.)
Last set of links, I included a compendium with the raw (in multiple ways) responses to a question about crappy things said about women academics. Here’s a synthesis and analysis from Gina Baucom.
“It’s perplexing how we can be committed to data but unwilling or unable to act on it. How we can love learning, but when confronted with pedagogical knowledge, we step away.”
The latter half of this profile of Sherman Alexie is really interesting, and if you’re not familiar with him, the first half is informative.
Have a great weekend!