Author: Michael Morris

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.  

From the September 14th New York Times:  The University of Alabama “is rewarding students who attend [home football] games — and stay until the fourth quarter” with priority access to tickets for the post-season.  Wait, there’s more.  “Alabama is…using location-tracking technology from students’ phones to see who skips out and who stays.”

On September 21st, this new policy almost resulted in a world-class disaster at Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium, where the Crimson Tide was playing the University of Southern Mississippi.  Here’s what happened, according to University of Alabama Police Chief John Hooks:

“We had a full house at Saturday’s game: 101,821 to be exact.  The students in attendance were afraid that if they left their seats to go to the bathroom, the tracking system would report that they had exited the stadium.  So, virtually every student wore a ‘stadium buddy’ that day, a device that enables you to urinate while staying in your seat.

“Over the course of the game, the stadium buddies of tens of thousands of students were filling up.  Did you know that urine is really high in nitrogen?  I didn’t.  Well, by the time the fourth quarter rolled around, Bryant-Denny Stadium was basically Ground Zero, a massive reservoir of volatile nitrogen just waiting to be ignited.  All it would have taken was a tiny leak from one of the containers, trickling a line of pee that encountered a bit of salt from a discarded box of popcorn or random potato chip.  The resulting chemical reaction would have been BLAMMO!!!

“I checked with one of our Physics professors, and she said that the explosion would have been visible from Minneapolis, and that the force of the blast would have made the Hiroshima cataclysm look like a butterfly sneeze. 

“We dodged a bullet last Saturday,” says Hooks.  “Actually, we dodged a lot more than a bullet.  It would have been the worst catastrophe in Alabama football since we lost to Notre Dame 37-6 in 1987.  We’ve got to change this attendance policy!”

Crimson Tide students appeared to take the near-calamity in stride.  When Dwayne “Turnstyle” Willis, a sophomore, heard the news while skateboarding across campus wearing his 24/7 stadium buddy, he simply flashed a big grin and exclaimed, “AWESOME!”

 

Uh-oh.  According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “faculty members at Miami University [in Ohio] are protesting a proposed policy that would require employees to report their own criminal activity or that of their colleagues to the university’s lawyers…..failure to do so could mean disciplinary action, up to dismissal.”

If this weren’t bad enough, the Miami administration plans to extend the policy in 2020 to a variety of non-criminal faculty offenses, including the following:

—  leaving pee dribbles on toilet seats in campus bathrooms

—  putting too much text into PowerPoint lecture slides

—  failing to clap when the applause sign is lit during Presidential addresses to the faculty

—  encouraging adjunct faculty to seek higher pay and better working conditions

—  pouring an excessive amount of Thousand Island dressing on your salad during lunch in the faculty dining room; taking a pat of butter but not using it

—  nodding off at department meetings in the midst of discussions of course re-numbering

—  delivering course lectures in bathrobe and slippers 

—  using the same multiple-choice questions on exams for three consecutive semesters

—  being “generally annoying” or “weird”

—  mouthing the words to the Star-Spangled Banner, rather than actually singing them, prior to campus sporting events

—  promising to bring cocktail shrimp, hot wings, and recreational marijuana to the department Christmas party, but not following through

—  putting chewing gum and French fries in the paper-only recycling bin outside of your office

—  frowning or scowling at colleagues who greet you as you walk across campus

—  not erasing the white board at the end of class

—  erasing the white board with your tongue at the end of class

—  stating or implying that Michel Foucault has had a positive influence on academic discourse

—  telling students that the “real Miami University” is in Florida, and that they’d be better off attending school there

—  taking the floor at a General Faculty Meeting under the pretense of asking a question, and then proceeding to give a speech about an administrative decision 15 years ago that you’re still angry about

According to Miami U. Police Chief Garrett “Buzz” Saffron, the list of non-criminal offenses will be updated every six months starting in June 2020.  As he put it, “people shouldn’t think of this as some ‘Big Brother’ type of policy.  What we’re aiming for here is a ‘We Are Family’ vibe — loving but watchful.”

Somewhere, Sister Sledge is smiling.

 

Yes, it’s true: For over a decade the University of Maryland at College Park has sent incoming freshmen a welcome box that includes a container of Old Bay seasoning and a crab mallet.

Overall, the program has been a success, but occasionally there have been missteps, according to Dining Services spokesperson Bart Hipple: “In 2016 we thought it would be a nice touch to put a steamed hard shell crab in the box.  Unfortunately, the boxes were assembled three weeks before they were mailed, so the students received crabs that were not, to put it mildly, ‘digestion friendly’.  The aroma the students encountered when they opened the box should have tipped them off, but not all of them were aware that a cooked hard shell crab shouldn’t smell like a pit latrine in Calcutta during cholera season.  We documented about 400 cases of food poisoning around the country that could be traced to the welcome boxes.  Trust me, it wasn’t a fun summer for Dining Services. 

“The following year, 2017, we tried to regroup by placing a sedated live crab in the box, along with instructions on how to steam it.  The problem was that we didn’t realize Maryland blue crabs become REALLY agitated when they’re confined in a small space for an extended period, regardless of how much you’ve drugged them.  When the boxes were opened, these feisty little crustaceans came out fighting!  Most of the injuries to students were minor — scratches and small puncture wounds — but at least five students lost one or more fingers to a particularly strong set of pincers. 

“Well, that ended the crab-inclusion experiment.  We’ve returned to just giving students the Old Bay and the mallet.  Of course, a few of the more adventurous kids can always be counted on to use their bong to smoke the seasoning after lacing it with oregano and powdered kale, but I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t produce much of a high, and it leaves your throat incredibly raw.  Now we include a sticker on the Old Bay container warning folks not to do this.”

Note to Mom and Dad: It’s probably a good idea to be in the room when your offspring open their welcome box from the University of Maryland.  It might be your last opportunity to offer parental guidance before your child heads to college.  

As the noted humorist Robert Benchley (1889 – 1945) once observed, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who get really upset when a colleague hits Reply All in response to a message from a university administrator to the faculty as a whole, and those who take the colleague’s mistake in stride. 

Okay, maybe it wasn’t Robert Benchley who observed this.  But you get the point. 

In any event, a typical episode of RRA (Reckless Reply All) goes something like this:

——————————————————————————————————

September 3, 2019, 8:45 am

FROM:  Fleming Helken, Dean of Arts & Sciences

TO:  Arts & Sciences Faculty

SUBJECT:  Dry-Erase Markers

Just a reminder that the deadline for submitting purchase orders for dry-erase markers for the Spring 2020 semester is today, September 3rd.  Please send your request electronically using Form DEM217.  You must submit a separate request for each color you would like to receive.  In addition to sending your request to the Purchasing Office, please copy the Provost and Campus Police in your email.  Thank you, and don’t forget that National Don’t-Sniff-Your-Marker Day is September 25th.  A rally will be held on the campus quadrangle at 11:00 am featuring a performance by TCU’s own Clear Nostril Jug Band.

Have a nice day, and best wishes for a productive Fall semester. 

——————————————————————————————————–

September 3, 9:02 am

FROM: Randall Yenz-Thompson, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages

TO:  Fleming Helken; Arts & Sciences Faculty

SUBJECT:  Re: Dry-Erase Markers

Is there any chance you could extend the marker deadline?  Last night our Bichon Frise, Stefan, developed a nasty abscess on his left hip.  It’s inflamed and quite painful, which you quickly discover if you press on it with your thumb.  I’m with him now at the animal hospital, and will probably be here until late in the evening.  The veterinarian says that she will need to lance the abscess to get all the pus out, and I want to stay by Stefan’s side until he wakes up in the recovery room.  As you can imagine, I’m in no shape, psychologically, to submit a dry-erase-marker purchase order today.  I promise to do it the first thing tomorrow morning.  Thanks so much, and please pray for Stefan.  

——————————————————————————————————–

In recognition of how annoying incidents like this can be, Texas Christian University has become the first school in the country to establish a “Progessive Discipline System” for RRA offenders. 

Here’s how it works:

1st offense:  A note is added to the faculty member’s annual performance review by the chair. 

2nd offense:  The Human Resources Department is notified and the offender is required to participate in a Saturday morning training session on Email Etiquette offered by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. 

3rd offense:  The faculty member must attend a Scared Straight session sponsored by Campus Police.  In the session, a rehabilitated RRA offender engages in some “attitude adjustment” with the professor in question: “You think this is a joke, punk?  Don’t look away from me!  What makes you think that anybody at this school gives a good goddamn about your lame-ass bee-shawn free-zay oozing pus from a bump on his butt?  Is that thing even a real dog, or just a big ol’ puff ball of cotton you use to shine your sports car? I told you, ‘DON’T LOOK AWAY FROM ME!’  And stop crying, or I’ll smack you upside your head like Aaron Judge hitting a fastball with a two-by-four!”

4th offense:  The faculty member will not be considered for a merit raise or cost-of-living salary increase for the coming academic year.

5th offense:  The offender’s email privileges at TCU will be suspended for 3 months. 

6th offense:  Public shaming on the TCU campus quad.  The faculty member is branded with a scarlet RRA on his or her forehead. 

7th offense:  Revocation of tenure and banishment to a local for-profit college specializing in cosmetology and long-distance trucking. 

Although these measures may seem harsh to some, a TCU spokesperson indicates that there is broad support for them among the faculty.  Indeed, the spokesperson asserts that “one professor even told me, ‘I can forgive a sexual innuendo or two directed at a good-looking undergraduate a lot more readily than I can condone the lack of attention to detail that leads to clicking on Reply All when you shouldn’t’.”

Will other schools follow TCU’s approach?  University Life will keep you posted.  

 

On August 8th, Ohio State University submitted an application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to trademark the word “The,”  as in “The Ohio State University.”  No joke.  According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, OSU “wants the exclusive right to sell T-shirts, baseball caps, hats, and more emblazoned with ‘THE’.”  Samantha Quimby, an attorney with the firm Frost Brown Todd, filed the application on behalf of Ohio State.  

When Ms. Quimby was asked by reporters at a press conference if her work on this request embodied the dreams, aspirations, and ideals that motivated her to pursue a career in the law, she responded, “Absolutely!  Words matter.  Even little words.  We all know that when language is employed recklessly, people can be hurt and lives tragically scarred.  What we’re trying to do here is……..”

Ms. Quimby hesitated, smiled slightly, and suppressed a soft chuckle.  Regaining her composure, she said, “What we’re trying to do here is…….”

She began to chuckle again, and then slapped herself hard in the face with her right hand while muttering, “Goddammit, woman, get a grip!”

It all quickly went downhill from there.  Ms. Quimby tried once more to explain the rationale behind OSU’s application, but dissolved into giggles that became increasingly hysterical.  Anxious reporters exchanged nervous glances. 

Suddenly, Ms. Quimby’s visage became haunted, and her eyes darted around the room.  She started yelling: “ARE YOU F**KING KIDDING ME?  WE’RE ACTUALLY GOING TO TRADEMARK THE WORD ‘THE’?  THIS IS TOTAL BULLSHIT!  WHAT HAVE I DONE?  OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?”

She stared down at her hands and began violently massaging her fingers, repeatedly asking in a maniacal fashion, “Will these hands ne’er be clean?”

Security guards escorted Ms. Quimby from the building.  She is currently an inpatient, resting comfortably, at THE Ohio Hospital for Psychiatry in Columbus.