Month: October 2019

True Fact:  According to the Boston-based Online Learning Consortium, college professors are vulnerable to “neuromyths,” which are erroneous beliefs about learning that are based in misunderstandings of how the brain functions (e.g., the mistaken belief that a student learns best when taught by an instructor who employs the student’s preferred learning style).  

As it turns out, faculty neuromyths are not confined to their perceptions of students.  Here are some other examples:

“My department chair hates me!”  Reality:  Your department chair doesn’t hate you.  There’s a big difference between your chair hating you and your chair simply not caring about you.

“My dean hates me!”  Reality:  Actually, this one is true.  Sorry.

“The Provost has no idea who I am!”  Reality: The Provost does know who you are, but, as is the case with your department chair, doesn’t care.  

“The custodian is stealing change from my coin dish when he cleans my office!”  Reality:  It’s much more likely that your underpaid, non-unionized graduate assistant is doing this. 

“The reference librarians gossip about me behind my back whenever I visit the Circulation Desk!”  Reality:  You know that librarians are notoriously quirky.  They’re probably just sharing naughty limericks about the Dewey Decimal System.  It has nothing to do with you.  

“Servers in the Faculty Dining Room give me smaller portions at lunch than they give my colleagues!”  Reality:  Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?  They’re doing you a favor. 

“A Campus Police officer ‘keyed’ the side of my car with a corkscrew from his Swiss Army knife!”  Reality:  No, that would be your graduate assistant again. 

“The IT Department doesn’t like me.  It takes them a month to respond to my urgent Help Desk requests!”  Reality:  It takes them a month to respond to every Help Desk request.  They’re not singling you out. 

“The University’s Core Curriculum Committee is prejudiced against me!”  Reality:  Their rejection of your Special Topics course proposal — Blackface on Stage, Screen, and Fraternity Row: A Sentimental Journey — was mandated by the section of the school’s anti-racism policy that governs role-playing by faculty and students in class.  It had nothing to do with you personally. 

“At the All-Faculty Assembly last week, my colleagues appeared uninterested — or even worse, annoyed — when I attempted to discuss the unwarranted parking tickets I’ve been receiving on campus.  Dammit, no one EVER uses that part of the quadrangle lawn next to the Chemistry building!”  Reality:  This perception could be true.  University Life recommends that you pay the tickets. 

Have a healthy cognitive day. 

 

In ancient times, having a professor/mentor write a recommendation letter on your behalf was a pretty straightforward deal: you asked, and the professor said either yes or no (usually the former).  However, a step was added to the process a number of years ago.  In this incarnation, the professor responds to your request by asking you to prepare what is essentially a draft of the recommendation, which the professor will then review and presumably revise before sending it to a graduate school or potential employer.

The public rationale for this practice emphasizes the ability of a self-generated draft to produce a more fine-grained account of the applicant’s experiences, strengths, and characteristics than would otherwise be the case.  Of course, one can convincingly argue that such a detailed description is what personal statements are for.  But let’s not quibble over technicalities.  The real reason for self-generated drafts is that it reduces the professor’s workload.  We shouldn’t embarrass ourselves by pretending that this ship doesn’t sail in ethically compromised waters. 

Against this background, University Life is pleased to offer draft-writers five suggestions to help make the final versions of the recommendations produced by their references credible and compelling on an individual level, and not so similar to one another on a collective level that they generate undue suspicion among readers.  To put it in psychometric terms, one wants the inter-rater reliability of these communications to be high, but not too high.

Suggestion 1:  Identify related but distinct minor flaws about yourself that underscore your humanness and can be distributed among multiple drafts.  The key here is to make sure the flaws are consistent with one another.  “Todd is prone to fits of screaming when frustrated” in Draft for Mentor A  doesn’t fit well with “Todd remains disturbingly passive in circumstances that would provoke righteous anger in others” in Draft for Professor B.  A better pairing with Draft A would be, “When Todd is in the room, the level of ambient tension increases markedly.”

Suggestion 2:  Emphasize aspects of your research or scholarship that are likely to be associated with a variety of opinions.  “Not surprisingly, Daphne’s dissertation research on cloning of human infants has been shrouded in secrecy, but I have high hopes for its eventual impact.”  This meshes nicely with “Personally, I have ethical reservations concerning Daphne’s proposal to clone upper-class children in the Hamptons, but there is no arguing with the brilliance of her Bouillon Model for Centrifuge-Based Replication.” 

Suggestion 3:  Speaking of ethics, don’t be shy about pushing the envelope.  Keep in mind that the very act of writing these drafts makes you complicit in an unsavory activity.  “Some might call Gavin unethical, but I prefer to see him as transcending conventional discourses of morality in pursuit of transformational knowledge.”  This could be a winning match with, “Is Gavin a bit of an a**hole?  Absolutely, but so were Steve Jobs and General George S. Patton.  Case closed.  You’d be lucky to hire any one of them.”

Suggestion 4:  Classroom teaching.  Anything goes here, so don’t worry about it.  “Harriet consistently receives abysmal student evaluations, but keep in mind that she does not pander to students by providing them with crutches such as syllabi, course objectives, or punctuality in showing up for class.  She understands that, ultimately, education is a journey you must take on your own.”  In another draft you can say, “To be sure, all the available evidence indicates that Harriet is a disaster in the classroom.  Not a problem.  She will be coming to you with enough long-term grant support to buy out her salary until global warming turns your campus into a bubbling Petri dish of throbbing organic matter.”

Suggestion 5:  Figure out multiple ways to say you’re altruistic.  “Sheldon is a giver.  Whether it’s helping a colleague jump-start her car in the parking lot when it’s 5 below zero, bailing a drunken advisee out of jail on Homecoming Weekend, or bringing recreational marijuana to the department Christmas party, he’s there for you.  Of course, sometimes he can be too there for you, knocking on your bedroom window at 3:00 am, bearing donuts and ready to discuss the spreadsheet he’s developed for scheduling intro courses.  But that’s just Sheldon: he’s a giver.”  On the other hand, sometimes less can be more: “Sheldon Chicklett is the finest being, human or otherwise, I’ve ever met.”

Well, that should get you started.  Writing multiple drafts of recommendations for yourself isn’t easy, nor should it be.  But don’t forget: once you’re hired or accepted into a doctoral program, you can have your students write their recommendations.  Is that cool or what?  Ultimately, everything evens out.  Isn’t that what the classic song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” is all about?  Okay, perhaps not.

Uh-oh.  The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa has agreed to provide its former Dean of Students with a “neutral reference” for future employment after some of the Dean’s tweets, published by Breitbart News, contributed to his resignation.  

A “neutral reference”?  Really?  

Before you get all uppity and start sputtering that this insipid concept could only come from a state that claims the Alabama red-bellied cooter (a pond turtle) as its official reptile, it must be acknowledged that the legal profession is apparently the true culprit here. 

Essentially, a neutral reference is a mechanism for preventing lawsuits.  Roughly translated, the implicit message of a neutral reference is, “We think this guy is an a**hole and/or incompetent and/or unethical and/or God-knows-what-else, but we’re not going to write any of this down (wink, wink). But we will tell you that he worked here.”

[Please, take a few moments to mop up the hypocrisy-induced barf you just spewed onto your lap.]

On those unfortunate occasions when your institution’s legal counsel has instructed you to write a neutral reference, feel free to use the following sample, provided at no charge by University Life, as a template:

Dear Hiring Committee:

I am neither pleased nor displeased to offer this reference letter regarding Professor Harold Twembly.  On the highway of professional life at our university, Professor Twembly occupies the median strip, where he has parked his 1972 AMC Gremlin and watches the traffic.  His research and scholarship have not advanced the field but, on the other hand, they have not retarded it.  Put another way, he has left his discipline undisturbed; think of his work as ink that disappears as it dries.

Professor Twembly’s students, when they can recall him, describe him as neither a good professor nor a bad one; he’s just “a professor.”  As one senior who took three courses with Professor Twembly wrote on his course evaluation, “he was there.”  End-of-course assessments indicate that his students do not learn anything, but none of them have grown more stupid, except for Vince Yorpelson, a tight end on the school’s football team who experienced three concussions during the Fall semester.   

Outside of class, students report that during visits to Professor Twembly’s office he neither smiles nor frowns.  “Imagine a cantaloupe with a lobotomy,” wrote one junior.  “He never has much to say, which is OK with me.  Really, it’s fine.”  

As a colleague, Professor Twembly is neither helpful nor unhelpful to fellow faculty members.  He just “is.”  He has never encouraged me to do anything, nor has he discouraged me.  In department meetings he radiates a Zen-like presence that resembles a small, odor-free tureen of vegetable broth served at room temperature.

In sum, Professor Twembly can be described as a human organism that has taught at our university for the past seven years.  I hope you have found this reference letter to be neither useful nor counterproductive when making — or not making — a decision — or no decision — concerning Professor Twembly.

There you have it.  No need to thank us.  At University Life, we always have your back.  

 

 

 

Let’s be honest, you knew this was coming.  What we’re referring to here is a New York Times October 7th headline: “Do Works by Men Toppled by #MeToo Belong in the Classroom?” The Times wonders, “should they be canceled — banished from public engagement like some of their creators?” 

Well, the fever is spreading, and the targets are no longer just males accused of sexual misbehavior.  In Topeka, Kansas, the city’s main public library has removed every Dr. Seuss book from its children’s collection.  According to Willard Dwenz, Chief Librarian, it has been recently documented “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that in 1978 Theodor Geisel punched a cat in the face in his home.  The feline, a Persian named Sprinkles, had scratched Geisel’s left arm, but only slightly.  Geisel proceeded to hit Sprinkles so hard with a right hook that he fractured her tiny nose.  Sprinkles never fully regained her sense of smell, and was on anti-depression medication for the rest of her life. 

Says Dwenz:  “After reviewing a videotape of the incident, there was no way we could justify keeping his books on our shelves.  This man, the author of “The Cat in the Hat,” was an abuser of kittens, for God’s sake!”

Or consider Rachel Carson, the acclaimed environmental activist who authored “Silent Spring” and “The Sea Around Us.”  Last month it was revealed that Ms. Carson did not separate paper from plastic when recycling, and thought nothing of tossing hamburger wrappers, half-filled soda cups, and mangled French fries out of her car window when traveling the pristine roads of coastal Maine. 

Responding to this discovery, Bates, Colby, and Bowdoin — all prestigious Maine colleges — announced that they will no longer allow professors to assign Carson’s books in their courses.  In a strongly worded joint statement released on October 10th, the Presidents of the three schools asserted, “it is clear that Rachel Carson was a trash whore whose reprehensible behavior betrayed the ideals she so eloquently wrote about.  She is dead to us as a legitimate commentator on the state of our planet.”

This just in:  The days of “Pride and Prejudice” and “Little Women” may be numbered.  You don’t want to know what University Life recently learned about Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott.  You’ve got to trust us on this one.  Imagine the worst possible scenario, and then quintuple its depravity.  That wouldn’t begin to describe what these women did…..and then bragged about.  

It is not for us to forgive them. 

 

True Fact: The undergraduate population of the University of Montana at Missoula has decreased by more than 40% over the past 8 years.  It is, by far, the biggest drop in undergraduate enrollment experienced by a public flagship institution in the United States.  Appropriately, on September 26th a Chronicle of Higher Education headline asked, “What’s Going On?” at Missoula.

University Life has spent the past two months investigating this question, and the answer is clear:

Bears. 

Montana is home to black bears and grizzlies, both of which inhabit the woods on the edge of the Missoula campus.  According to Campus Police Chief Seth “Deer Tick” Crick, “global warming is diminishing the availability of the bears’ traditional food supply, so they’ve started to replace that supply with our students.  Undergraduates who walk back alone to their dorms from the cafeteria right after dinner are particularly vulnerable, especially in the winter months when it gets dark early.  As the bears see it, these kids are just calorie-laden snacks.  And let’s face it, most college students these days are pretty self-absorbed.  By the time they look up from their smartphones to identify the source of the heavy breathing behind them, it’s too late.  Often, the only thing we find left on the sidewalk is a smartphone, and occasionally a stray sneaker.  It’s a damn shame, but there’s only so much we can do.  We encourage students to walk in groups at night, and never to wear honey-scented cologne, perfume, or body spray.”

It’s the rare Missoula student who hasn’t lost a friend or classmate to a bear.  Says sophomore Nate Cleghorn: “My roommate Skip was a terrific guy.  At home football games he would dress up as Monte, the grizzly mascot of our school.  It’s really ironic that he was carried off by an actual bear.  Or maybe it’s really ‘paradoxical’; I always get those two terms confused.  I have the same problem with ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.  Regardless, I miss Skip a lot.”

As an anonymous staff member in the University Admissions office put it, “it’s hard to recruit students when they know there’s a good chance they’ll be eaten before they graduate.”

Addendum:  This installment of University Life is dedicated to Tyler Krill, a beloved UL reporter who doggedly pursued this story.  Tyler was a relentless investigator, and the last entry in his notebook — found on a nature trail near the campus — was, “I think I’ll check out those rustling sounds coming from the bushes next to that cave opening.”

With Tyler, it was always about getting the story.