University Life

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s recent foray into the realm of college admissions, highly selective schools around the country are grappling with the challenge of how to maintain or increase the diversity of their student bodies without explicitly favoring applicants of a certain race (see The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 1st online).

The early results indicate that elite institutions are getting creative.  Here’s a sample of application-essay prompts that schools are now using:

Brown University:  “A lot of people are talking about something called ‘race’ these days.  Our school has a name that evokes images of color, and our mascot is Bruno, a brown bear.  How does that make you feel?  If you were a student at Brown, what brave actions would you take to overcome those feelings if you felt those feelings needed be overcome?  In your answer you can refer to other animals that are noted for their courage if you wish.”   

University of Florida:  “Let’s say that you’re a slave.  Discuss some of the skills you’d hope to develop in that role, and how they might help you succeed in a work-study job at the University of Florida.” 

Bowdoin College:  “Imagine that you are a girl or boy of a non-whitish color who’s being bullied on the playground by a group of other children, some of whom may (or may not) be whitish.  How could you handle this situation in a way that would not be related to, or have implications for, your status as a non-whitish person?  Feel free to use drawings as well as words.”

Stanford University:  “Josh Gibson was a legendary Black baseball player who, due to segregation, never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues. Explain how your reaction to this fact would make a distinctive contribution to the Stanford community, especially its athletic teams.”

Duke University:  “Assume you’re a professor giving a lecture in your Organic Chemistry course when you glance out the window and notice that the student KKK chapter is setting fire to the main library and chanting, ‘D.E.I. deserves to die!’  Would you stop lecturing and attempt to transform this incident into a ‘Teachable Moment’ if it was the last class before the midterm exam?  Why or why not?”

University of Chicago:  “Beyoncé or Taylor Swift: Choose one.  That’s all.  Just choose one.”

Those softly spoken words you hear are the prayers of admissions officers throughout the nation.  

 

True Fact:  A recent study of Ivy-Plus colleges (the Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago) found that legacy applicants to those institutions were five times more likely to be admitted than non-legacy applicants with similar qualifications (Chronicle of Higher Education, July 24th online).  

Around the country, academics were stunned. 

“I’m shocked to my very core!”, remarked a long-time Harvard faculty member upon hearing the news.  “Who knew that the six generations of Pewter-Mastersons that attended our school were related?”

“Gadzooks!”, exclaimed Dartmouth President Sian Beilock.  “I had been wondering why our student body was so wealthy and white.  I just assumed that low-income minority high schoolers were put off by the frigid winters up here in New Hampshire.  Of course, our traditional recruitment pitch — ‘Dartmouth: We’ll Freeze Your Ass Off’ — probably doesn’t help.”

At Princeton, Professor Emeritus Noreen Fenderdent recalled that for decades she had been puzzled by the number of male students in her classes who wore bow ties, salmon-colored khakis, and Bass Weejuns with no socks.  “Could they have been legacies?”, she asks.  “These young men tended to be whitish.  Or at least I thought they were.  During my career I tried to make it a practice of not seeing color when I looked at people.  Okay, maybe sometimes I did.”

If elite schools are forced to curtail legacy admissions, alumni/ae donations could plummet.  Indeed, Yale President Peter Salovey warns that such an outcome would lead to reduced funding for student activities at his school:  “We’d probably have to eliminate our junior varsity Cribbage team, or at least replace the diamond-encrusted cribbage-board pegs we currently use with cheap plastic ones.  And the annual spring trip of the Antique Fountain Pen Club to the Vienna Montblanc Exhibition would, in all likelihood, become an every-other-year event.  I won’t lie to you; things could get tough around here.”

Yes, they could.

A decade from now, as Yale-educated hedge-fund managers tuck their children into bed at night, they might find themselves whispering to their little ones, “I may not be able to guarantee you an elite college degree, but I promise: you will have many, many ponies.”

 

As Jennifer Furlong and Stacy Hartman point out in the July 21st issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, writing the cover letter for your first faculty job application can be a challenge.  Furlong and Hartman offer excellent advice for tackling this task, but they do omit a number of tips widely recommended by experts in the field.  Here are 7 of them:

Downplay geographical preferences.  Don’t say that you want to teach at Duke because your aging parents live in nearby Chapel Hill and your mother has a serious drinking problem that you need to keep tabs on.  And under no circumstances should you send the Search Committee a photo of your mom.  

Promise that you won’t be a complainer.  State categorically that you will never grouse about the shortage of faculty parking, the 15-credit-hour-per-semeser teaching load, or the mango/yak incense stick that the secretary burns each day in the department office.  Include a short video that shows you crossing your heart as you make these promises. 

Avoid controversial topics.  Even if you feel strongly about the matter, resist the temptation to indicate in your letter that you think it would have been better if Bruce Jenner had never made the decision to transition to Caitlyn Jenner.  

If you describe your flaws, be honest.  For the love of God, don’t bullshit readers with self-praise disguised as critique (e.g., “I admit it, I’m a perfectionist.”).  Far better to be unflinchingly candid (“I should shower more often.”  “I fabricated a bit of the data in my doctoral dissertation.”  “I once purchased a voodoo doll to put a curse on a grad school classmate I envied.  The next day she was hit by a truck.”).

Don’t make threats.  This should be a no-brainer.  It’s never a good idea to intimate that “something bad” might happen to one or more members of the Search Committee if you’re not offered a job.  

Be linguistically flexible.  Inform the Search Committee that you’re comfortable using the phrase “lived experience” in everyday conversation on campus if that’s consistent with the culture of the university, but that you’re also okay with employing the less redundant term, “experience,” if that’s the norm.  

Display sensitivity to local/regional context.  For example, if you’re applying for a faculty job in Texas, be sure to mention that you look forward to packing a firearm in class, and that some of your fondest memories are of Grandma Tess taking you hunting at the neighborhood dog park when you were a kid.  

There’s a terrific position out there in academia waiting for you.  Start writing that cover letter.

Money Magazine recently announced that it is replacing its rankings of colleges and universities with ratings that will range from 2.5 stars to 5 stars (Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22nd online).  

So, here’s a question:  Why start the ratings with 2.5 stars rather than with zero stars? 

Investigative reporters from University Life have discovered that the magazine does assign ratings lower than 2.5, but it chooses not to publish them in order to avoid stigmatizing the institutions involved.  As a service to our readers, we are sharing the criteria upon which these lower ratings are based. 

2 Stars — Schools that offer Introduction to Snake-Handling as part of the core curriculum (“Fairly common in Pentecostal bible colleges in the deep South,” says a confidential source at Money.)

1.5 Stars — Colleges where more than 40% of all undergraduates major in Beer Pong or Esports 

1 Star — Universities where at least one-third of all 1st-floor residence-hall rooms are available to the public for hourly rentals (“Housekeeping staff at these schools display very low morale.”)

0.5 Stars — Institutions that do not participate in federal student-loan programs, opting instead to use DraftKings and/or FanDuel as a means of helping students finance their education (“These kids graduate with astonishingly high levels of debt.  It’s criminal.”)

Zero Stars — Schools whose alumni/ae have a greater than 30% chance of being arrested between 2 am and 4 am for speeding while driving in the wrong direction on an interstate highway (“This is what happens when you major in Beer Pong.”)  

The Bottom Line:  If a college your kid is interested in is not rated by Money, there’s probably a damn good reason. 

 

A recent letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Daily Briefing” complains that the term soft skills “sounds sexist and devalues the humanities” (May 30th online).  

Fear not.  Help has arrived.

Here are three phrases that are replacing “soft skills” at colleges and universities around the country.

Cashmere Competence — This graceful wording has officially unseated “soft skills” in the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.  According to Wharton’s Dean, Erika James, “cashmere conveys a sense of softness without any connotations of weakness.  It’s sleek.  It’s luxurious.  It rocks.  And you can never go wrong with competence.  In the business world, it’s what we call a ‘sturdy word’.”

“How You Doin’?” Proficiency — Widely used at New York University in honor of iconic “Friends” character Joey Tribbiani.  As NYU President Andrew D. Hamilton observes, “there were few women who could resist the smooth, silken appeal of Mr. Tribbiani’s greeting.  We want our graduates to be just as interpersonally successful in THEIR careers.  Every conversation in the workplace should begin with How You Doin’?

Non-Anal Attitude — Let’s be honest.  The bulk of one’s interactional prowess is simply the result of not acting like an a**hole.  Florida State University is attempting to explicitly focus students on this reality.  “We’re tired of graduating sphincter after sphincter,” says FSU President Richard McCullough.  “If this shift in language can help us achieve that, I’m all for it.”

“Soft skills,” your days are numbered.  

If you’re an assistant professor with young children, few periods in your life will be more stress-filled than the summer before you apply for tenure.  How can you take a family vacation when you must devote virtually every waking hour to preparing for your T & P application in the fall?

Sending the kids to a three-month sleepaway-survivalist camp in Newfoundland is likely to be prohibitively expensive.  And if yours is a typical family, all four grandparents have serious drinking problems, which means that having your offspring stay with them for the summer is not a realistic option.  

What is needed here is a little creativity.  It is in this spirit that University Life presents five expert-endorsed vacation recommendations for tenure-track faculty members facing severe time constraints.  

1 — If you live near the Northeast Corridor, you can make the round trip from Boston to Washington, DC and back in a single day on Amtrak’s Acela Express (less than seven hours each way).  What kid doesn’t love a train ride?  There’s so much to see, even if much of it will be blurry because the train is going really fast.  When you arrive at DC’s Union Station, treat the family to a food-court meal at Chick fil-A or Shake Shack and then hop on the next Acela for the return trip.  If you sit on the same side of the aisle heading north as you did traveling south, your kids will experience new scenery.  Voila!  Vacation accomplished in less than 24 hours!

2 — Have your children watch the Live Cam of a bald eagle’s nest in Big Bear Valley, California.  The Live Cam operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Need we say more?  Just plunk the kids down in front of a PC with a 14-day supply of Cheetos and Mountain Dew, and then head to your home office to tackle that “Revise and Resubmit” manuscript on the Taylor Swift/Jonathan Swift connection that’s been bedeviling you.  You’ll get crucial work done while your offspring learn how our national bird feeds its young.  

3 — If you reside in a state that has legalized recreational marijuana, your vacation problems are so over.  Simply set up the kids in the den with a month’s worth of THC gummies and a couple of spinning multi-color pinwheels, and they will be mesmerized for days on end while you review page proofs for your forthcoming book on the history of Amish full-body tattoos.

4 — Is there anything more thrilling for youngsters than spending a week in the New York Public Library while you pore over the collected papers of Joan Didion?  Hell no.  Attach ankle monitors to your kids and then set them loose in this majestic building every morning.  Challenge them to find ways of gaining access to the restricted rare-book archives and removing items.  They’ll love you for sending them on this high adventure with nothing more than a penknife and a compass. 

5 — What’s more fun than popping bubble wrap?  Not a damn thing.  Buy a dozen giant rolls of industrial bubble wrap and toss them into the basement with your offspring.  The kids will have a month of nonstop excitement while you figure out how to put a positive spin on the less-than-stellar student evaluations your teaching has received over the past five years.  (Bubble-wrap vacations work best with children who are not academically gifted.) 

With these suggestions in mind, there’s no need to sacrifice your kids’ summer happiness in order for you to achieve promotion and tenure.  Good luck. 

 

The emergence of ChatGPT, the Artificial Intelligence text-generation technology, has professors all over the country soiling themselves as they anticipate being consumed by a tsunami of student plagiarism (e.g., see “The Review Forum” in the June 9th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education). 

Men, women, and non-binaries of the academy…..please relax.  As it always does, higher education will adapt and survive. 

Here are a couple of institutions that are leading the way.

Beginning in 2024, Princeton University will no longer award the bachelor’s degree.  Instead, graduating students will be given a Certificate of Attendance.  No written assignments of any kind will be required in undergraduate courses at the New Jersey school.

As Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber recently noted, “at an elite institution like ours, it doesn’t really matter if students learn any content or have an eye-popping GPA.  What matters are the highly resourced people you meet and the social networks you establish as you cultivate a lifestyle that will provide the level of success, wealth, and leisure you are entitled to.  That’s why a Certificate of Attendance from Princeton is much, MUCH more important than a degree.  You can’t network if you don’t show up.

“The elimination of all writing assignments in undergraduate courses will render ChatGPT irrelevant.  Hell, we lost the battle against plagiarism decades ago.  Students have always been one step ahead of us.  Let’s just acknowledge that fact and move on.  Getting rid of these assignments will provide our students with more opportunities for networking and our faculty with more time for submitting op-eds to The New York Times.  It’s a win/win.”

The University of California system has chosen a different path.  Starting next year, the only undergraduate degrees it will offer are a Bachelor of Arts in ChatGPT Management (BACM) and a Bachelor of Science in ChatGPT Management (BSCM).  

According to Chancellor Michael Drake, “the most crucial skill a 21st-century college student needs to learn is pretty straightforward: how do I use ChatGPT to produce excellent written work?  Colleges should be embracing this tool, not running away from it.  Of course, we understand that most faculty have little interest in reading ChatGPT-generated essays and papers, so our colleagues at UC-Berkeley have developed a ChatGPT text reviewer that professors can use to grade these assignments.  We’re calling the whole operation ‘Chat-to-Chat’.

“Voila!  We have replaced the outdated and inefficient internal-combustion engine of evaluation in higher education with an auto-drive system that Tesla would be proud of.”

Open your eyes.  It’s a ChatGPT world.  We just live in it.  

 

In case you needed further evidence that higher education is facing challenging times, just take a look at the sessions being offered on the first day of the 2023 Summer Institute sponsored by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at the University of Vermont in July. 

Wow.

THURSDAY, JULY 6th

9:00 am — Teaching in Texas: How to Modify Your Bandolier to Accommodate Dry-Erase Markers and Laser Pointers

10:00 am — Jokes You Can Safely Tell in Class: “A dean, a provost, and a department chair walk into a bar.  No one cares.”

11:00 am — Riding the Coattails of Your School’s Star Point Guard: How the NCAA Transfer Portal Can Deliver You to a New Job

Noon — Lunch (Eagle Mountain Coyote Sliders served with Artisan Kettle Chips)

1:00 pm — Using Anagrams to Covertly Address the Topic of Race in History Courses at Florida’s Public Universities: The ACRE Project

2:00 pm — (Panel Session) Consensual Sex Between Undergraduates: Is It Really OK, Even if It’s Taking Place in the Classroom During Your Lecture?

3:00 pm — Should Profound Stupidity Be Criminalized?  Reflections of a Yale Law Professor Who Dated Marjorie Taylor Greene in High School

4:00 pm — (Panel Session) Supporting Non-Binary Students While Opposing Asymmetrical Purple/Green Haircuts: Can a Professor Do Both?

5:00 pm — (Plenary Address) Untangling the Differences Between DEI, DUI, and DWI: The Perspective of Campus Law Enforcement (Evan Treskle, Chief of Police, The Ohio State University)

6:00 pm to Midnight — Maple Syrup Sour Mash Reception on the Quadrangle (BYO Mason Jar and bail money)

The deadline for registration is Friday, June 23rd.  Don’t wait until the last minute.  This promises to be the most popular AAUP Summer Institute in a decade. 

 

 

 

The higher education chattering class was abuzz last week when it appeared that the University of Idaho was about to purchase online behemoth University of Phoenix for $550 million (Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19th online).  

But then…

…three days ago, Mexico’s infamous Sinaloa drug cartel offered $770 million for the Arizona school, and Idaho dropped out of the running faster than a Russet potato tumbling from a carton of spuds in Kroger’s produce section during an earthquake. 

The cartel intends to use the University of Phoenix for money-laundering purposes.  According to a confidential Sinaloa source, “the core values of the University of Phoenix have always been much more closely aligned with ours than with those of the University of Idaho.  It’s a natural partnership.  And the number of cartel employees who’d love to earn an online dual degree in Substance Abuse Counseling and Supply Chain Management is in the THOUSANDS!  Hell, this is the sweetest deal between Mexico and the U. S. since NAFTA!”

Sinaloa leaders promise that, once the purchase is finalized, every University of Phoenix student in good academic standing will be eligible to sponsor at least one kidnapping per academic year for a nominal fee.  As the source put it, “you want someone disappeared?  We can do that!”

 

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a piece entitled, “How Do You Get Professors to Respond in the Summer?” (May 10th online).  As helpful as this essay is, it omits the most potent strategy for producing an immediate faculty response:  using a panic-inducing falsehood to get the recipient’s attention.

Along these lines, here are five email messages that experienced department chairs swear by:

Accusation — “Dear Todd:  I was visited yesterday by a female student who was in your Romantic Poetry seminar this spring, and she had quite a story to tell.  It included photos.  Could you contact me when you get a chance?  I’d like the two of us to chat before I turn the matter over to Campus Police.  Thanks.”

Pay Cut — “Hey there, Millie:  The Business Office informs me that your salary is going to be reduced by 14% for the 2023-24 academic year because you missed the deadline for submitting your annual report to the Dean.  Were you aware of this?  We should probably talk.  Stop by my office the next time you’re on campus.”

Misrepresentation — “Dear Ajani:  I received an anonymous letter yesterday claiming that you are not Nigerian but Portuguese.  A 23andMe report with your name on it was attached, and it appears to support the claim.  Given that you head our Ph.D. Program in African Studies, we could have a problem here.  Please make an appointment to see me as soon as possible, and bring a Q tip with you so we can do a DNA swab.  Hope you’re having a good summer.”

Course Load — “Hello Tanya:  It looks like your senior seminar on Hemingway’s cats only has 3 students registered for the fall, so we’re going to have to cancel it.  In its place you’ll be teaching a Core Curriculum course on lust as a metaphor in the novels of Nora Roberts.  Its current enrollment is 175 and counting, so there’s no chance of this one tanking.  Let me know if you have any questions.  I’m working on getting you a teaching assistant, but no guarantees.”

Plagiarism — “Hi Glen:  Hope your first year as an Assistant Professor was a rewarding one!  Quick question:  I just got a note from Neil deGrasse Tyson saying that a chapter of your dissertation was copied, virtually word-for-word, from an article he published in 2015.  Your thoughts?  Let’s talk before he goes public.”

The Takeaway:  When you meet with them, your faculty will be so relieved to find out that you were simply engaging in harmless “fake news” that they will be more than happy to accommodate your actual summer request.  And they’ll appreciate your sense of humor. 

Okay, it’s time to go sit on your deck and have a tall glass of lemonade.  Don’t forget sunscreen.