Tag: academentia (page 1 of 2)

Last night one of my students sent me this screenshot with the message “You were right, Dr. Jacobs!” 

I’ve never used Canvas, because I despise it even when it’s working as designed. Some of my students tell me that I’m the only professor they have ever had who does not use it, which makes me sad: the ed-tech value-extraction machine deserves and should receive more hostility. But universities that deploy these big platforms should realize that our data — that of professors and students — as only as safe as the companies’ security practices are sound. And companies like Instructure are so deeply embedded in American university life now that they think they can’t be rejected — no matter how gross their failure to maintain security. An exploit like this is therefore easily predictable. 

Every university function that is on the internet is a security vulnerability. (Just look at how many online systems we have!) But every university function outsourced to a giant company whose tools are used by many universities is a far greater vulnerability, because there is so much money to be made from exploiting all that data. Locally owned and managed data is a smaller and less appealing target for hackers.   

Also predictable, however, is the refusal of universities to reconsider their dependence on these “services.” We use one such ed-tech tool — Lord knows how much Baylor paid for it — to record our activities for our annual reports to department chairs and deans. We once did this by writing up the reports in Microsoft Word, but somebody in authority at Baylor thought that was Stone Age behavior, so we got a new giant web app. Entering the data into it is difficult and slow, and then what is the app supposed to do? Spit everything out … as a Word document. But the formatting is always so terrible that we — you guessed it — we have to open it up in Word and fix the formatting. So couldn’t we then just go back to writing the reports in Word right from the start, to save time, energy, and frustration? Of course not. Baylor paid for the tool so we must use it. The sunk-cost fallacy has never been better illustrated. 

I don’t know whether Baylor will ever learn from these situations — my experience on the university-wide Technology and Learning Committee suggests that no one even thinks of saying No to the ed-tech snake-oil salesmen, because our aspirant peer institutions have already bought the snake oil. But even if we could work up the resourcefulness to ditch the completely superfluous crapware, I don’t see how we could get rid of Canvas. 

Because the primary function of Canvas is to make it possible to manage, without administrative assistance, classes with fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred students. Whatever Canvas costs, it doesn’t cost as much as several additional faculty and/or administrative employees would cost. This kind of ransomware attack could happen every moth, and every Baylor student’s personal data could be bought and sold on the dark-web marketplace, and I don’t believe even that would cause the university to sack Instructure. We’ll cut faculty, cut assistance for faculty, cut anything any everything except Canvas. Well … we’ll still hire more deans.

Eventually there will be no faculty at all in American universities, just deans, IT guys, and AI instruction in Canvas. This is called The Pursuit of Excellence. 

Dear Colleague, 

I understand that you wish me to participate in your protests against the Trump administration’s proposed “compact” with American universities. I will do so on one condition: that you openly acknowledge (a) that you were completely comfortable with the Obama and Biden administrations’ use of “Dear Colleague” letters — e.g. — to strongarm universities into supporting their and your preferred political outcomes, and (b) that a chief purpose of your current protests is to ensure that people with my social, religious, and aesthetic views remain unemployable in your universities. 

Sincerely, 

Your Colleague 

I’ve gotten some grumpy emails about this admittedly grumpy post, so perhaps I should explain myself further. 

During the Obama years, and continuing with somewhat less fervor during the Biden administration, the Department of Education wrote a series of “Dear Colleague” letters that demanded first administrative and then academically substantive obedience to a series of progressive positions on a wide range of issues. The trend began in 2011 with a letter ordering universities to create systems to prevent and punish sexual violence — but the specific mandates of that system, as Jill Lepore has noted, forbade anything like due process for the accused in any such cases. (You can see how this system worked, and in some cases still works, here and in later reports from FIRE.) When Harvard Law School protested the mandates and sought a more fair-minded approach to assessing accusations of sexual violence, the DoE went after the school and enforced compliance. Despite the complexity and variability of the circumstances in which accusations of sexual violence occur, no alternative model for dealing with such cases was permitted. 

That letter involved administration and governance. Later letters, such as the one linked to above, effectively mandated the creation of DEI bureaucracies in every university that receives government funding and led to the farcical demands that every candidate for every faculty position show how their work in music theory or biochemistry promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion — and, if they were white or white-adjacent, confess their own complicity in racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. (As someone once said, in Stalin’s Soviet Union you only had to sign your confession of guilt; in American academia you have to write it too.) Prospective faculty members, and in many cases existing faculty members, were obliged to proclaim their practical, not just verbal, allegiance not just to DEI but to a very specific interpretation of what DEI means; and these obligations were an obvious assault on academic freedom. As FIRE — an organization recently doing yeoman work to protect universities from the new assaults on academic freedom from the Trump administration, about which more later — has concisely put it, “Vague or ideologically motivated DEI statement policies can too easily function as litmus tests for adherence to prevailing ideological views on DEI, penalize faculty for holding dissenting opinions on matters of public concern, and ‘cast a pall of orthodoxy’ over the campus.” 

And of course casting a pall of orthodoxy over campus is precisely what many academic progressives want. That’s why, as Lepore says in the interview cited above, when she decided some years after the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter to explain why she thought that Harvard Law was right and the DoE wrong, she significantly delayed its publication.  

I was pretty afraid, but I had written the piece to be published. Then a number of people informed me that it would destroy my life. I could have insisted. It’s hard to even recall the ferocity of that time. It probably would have destroyed my life in some significant ways. But looking back, it would have been the right thing to do. 

Indeed, she says, even after that particular controversy has been sorted out, the incessant ideological police-work of her fellow faculty members makes Harvard a “miserable” place to be even now. 

All that is the background to my chief point: A great many of the academics protesting most loudly against the Trump administration’s demands upon universities — its threats that noncompliance with its preferences will lead to a withholding of federal funding — either were silent when Democratic administrations made the same kinds of demands, accompanied by the same kinds of threats, or enthusiastically endorsed such action and condemned colleagues who didn’t share their enthusiasm. I know or have read the writings of a significant number of academics  who would think it their moral duty to “destroy the life” of anyone who dissented from their preferred practices.

Now, if professors and administrators have this highly particular vision of what the American University should be and pursue it with vigor, I understand. It is certainly not true that “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time,” as some staffer tweeted for Joe Biden a few years ago; but racism remains pervasive in American life, an open wound that in recent years seems to have grown worse, and efforts to combat it are commendable. But racism is not the only wound our body politic suffers, or the only culture-wide problem that needs to be addressed, and perfectly reasonable and compassionate people do not think it the greatest problem we face or the only one worthy of being acknowledged in our hiring practices and institutional structures. Nor are any of the pet progressive causes objectively more significant than those the academic left neglects. Still, I understand the urgency felt by the antiracists. 

However: many such people now present themselves as defenders of academic freedom and the sovereign right of universities to set their own course. They are nothing of the kind, and have proven themselves to be nothing of the kind. They want their version of progressivism to be hegemonic not only in their own universities but in all American universities, and are eager to pursue that hegemony by any means necessary. Ideological policing is the name of their game — which means both including whom they want to include and excluding those who refuse to conform — and academic freedom is not one of their core values, indeed is not something they even believe in. They just now want to be free from the kinds of governmental pressures that they have been glad to impose on others.

As Ross Douthat said in a recent column,

Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say.

To borrow a term from law, in light of this history the progressive ideological police have no standing to complain about governmental interference in academic life. 

So why, then, do I say that if they simply owned up to this obvious truth I would participate in their protests? Because, as Douthat wrote in the same column, “Progressivism has absolutely weaponized the law against its opponents, but it’s still more constitutionally destabilizing when the president himself is screaming on social media about the need to prosecute his enemies.” So I will indeed join in their protests against this presidential strong-arming — but not under the self-congratulatory covering fiction that any of these progressive protestors would ever stand up for my academic freedom, or that of anyone who dissents from their preferred policies. 

Faculty in my college today got an email announcing a new program “designed to encourage Baylor University faculty to reduce the educational costs for their students by using library content, open educational resources (OER), or other low- or zero-cost materials. In particular, it is intended to encourage instructor experimentation in high-quality low- and no-cost learning materials for their students, especially through the use of OER.” Admirable!

But in the same email we also learned that Baylor has bought a subscription to yet another AI product: “Scopus AI is an intuitive and intelligent search tool powered by generative AI (GenAI) that enhances your understanding and enriches your insights with unprecedented speed and clarity.” And who among us has not wanted their insights to be more clearly and speedily enriched?

But wait, there’s more! Baylor has also purchased a subscription to “Leganto, a resource management tool that enables instructors to add course materials in Canvas for students to access.” The advantage for instructors, we’re told, is that we can “track student engagement with course materials.”

Here’s a suggestion: Maybe if Baylor would choose not to invest in more ed-tech/AI snake oil, and decline to further a student-surveillance regime, we could include textbooks and other “learning materials” in the current tuition cost. My guess is that we could do so and have money left over.

I haven’t been writing here much lately. I’ve been busy with teaching, of course, but that I’m used to. No, I have been absent from the blog because of an avalanche of administrivia — forms to fill out, mandatory Zoom meetings, online “trainings.” 

• There are trainings about Title IX. 
• There are trainings about racism. 
• There are trainings about mental health and mental illness. 
• I have to read and sign forms relating to students who need “accommodation” for various struggles. (As I have previously noted, about these matters my own knowledge is neither solicited nor welcomed.) 
• I have to sit through a 90-minute Zoom meeting on how to book travel. 
• “The purpose of this short class is to help all Baylor’s faculty and staff understand their rights, responsibilities, and necessary actions with both the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA).” 
• “This is your second reminder that your OAI Disclosure Profile is awaiting an update. You are required to complete this update to confirm that you have disclosed a complete and accurate list of your outside activities and interests as dictated by institutional policy. Follow the link included in this email to log in and complete a Disclosure Profile update.” 
• “As part of the Business Transformation Initiative, Business Offices have been established within each division. To ensure continuous improvement in the services provided, feedback is needed from individuals who regularly interact with Financial Administrators and Financial Managers in their respective Business Offices.” 
• “The Committee on Committees has identified appointments for the 2024-2025 academic year, and your appointments are listed below. Thank you for your willingness to serve on University Committees.” 
• I must serve on a Working Group meant to articulate an approach to technology that’s consistent with Baylor’s new Strategic Plan. 

This is a partial list. Obligations of this kind increase every year, and the only general goal I can discern is the gradual transformation of an academic position into a bullshit job. But whatever the purpose, such tasks make writing in-term nearly impossible. 

Fraudulent academic papers are on the rise, and will continue to be on the rise as long as academics substitute counting for judgment. The fetish for sheer numbers of publications should have ended decades ago, but the professoriate can’t confront its addiction, or accept its responsibility for creating this vast system of perverse incentives. It’s always interesting to see what elements of their wobbly structures academics are simply unable to reconsider, no matter how dire the situation. In this case, I think people who have climbed the greasy pole to tenure can’t bear the thought that some younger people might be less miserable than they and their cohort were. 

UPDATE: Useful commentary on this subject by Victor Mair. 

Jessica Grose:

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks talking to teachers about their experiences with online grade books like Schoology and Infinite Campus, and many of their anecdotes were similar to what Miller shared: anxious kids checking their grades throughout the day, snowplow parents berating their children and questioning teachers about every grade they considered unacceptable, and harried middle and high school teachers, some of whom teach more than 100 kids on a given day, dealing with an untenable stream of additional communication.

Mitch Foss, who was a classroom teacher in Colorado for 19 years, told me that when he posted grades, he would hear from kids almost instantly via email or text. Sometimes they’d be waiting outside his classroom door to talk about their scores. “You might get emails from parents questioning the grade, wanting an explanation, and that’s for every single thing,” even assignments that had little bearing on students’ overall marks, “which can be overwhelming.” 

This sounds like the Hell that would be designed specifically for me. 

A while back I quoted Amna Khalid’s thoughtful response to the Hamline University kerfuffle; now we have a strong statement from the Muslim Public Affairs Council. It’s not often that you get a big public dispute in which every party on one side of the issue is thoughtful, measured, and well-informed, while every party on the other side gives every indication of being an ignoramus. But here we are. 

The Hamline administration has committed one of the classic blunders — right up there with getting involved in a land war in Asia and going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line — and the mistake is not deciding that certain groups on campus are to be protected from perceived insult while others are left to fend for themselves. No, that’s bad academic practice, but it’s not one of the classic blunders. The classic blunder here is assuming that the protected group is intellectually unanimous. The leaders of Hamline obviously believed that if one Muslim is offended by something then that thing is ipso facto “offensive to Muslims.” It’s the kind of error you make when you’re a well-meaning lefty who doesn’t know anyone who isn’t also a well-meaning lefty. 

Amna Khalid:

But most of all, I am offended as a Muslim. In choosing to label this image of Muhammad as Islamophobic, in endorsing the view that figurative representations of the Prophet are prohibited in Islam, Hamline has privileged a most extreme and conservative Muslim point of view. The administrators have flattened the rich history and diversity of Islamic thought. Their insistence that figurative representations of Muhammad are “forbidden for Muslims to look upon” runs counter to historical and contemporary evidence. As Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, reminds us, Muslim artists since the 14th century have depicted Muhammad visually — images that were painted “by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons in respect for, and in exaltation of, Muhammad and the Quran.” Such images were, “by definition, Islamophilic from their inception to their reception.” Far from being forbidden, many Muslims, even today, appreciate such figurative representations. While more common among Shia Muslims, even Sunnis are known to have made such images. (In fact, the painting the professor showed was commissioned by a Sunni king in the 14th century.)

“But one of our Muslim students claimed to feel marginalized and excluded! We had no choice!”

My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey and her co-author Jeffrey Polet have written an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Indoctrination Sessions Have No Place in the Academy.” The heart of the essay is, I think, these paragraphs: 

True, many people also understand the university as a place where social justice should be learned and practiced, assuming that we agree on what social justice is and what it requires. But a simple thought experiment highlights the problem with this view. Can we imagine other institutions whose intrinsic purposes are to promote social justice? Of course we can. Hundreds or even thousands of such institutions exist: think tanks, businesses, social clubs, Facebook groups, and nonprofits of all sorts.

Can we imagine, by contrast, other institutions where the free exchange of ideas is valued and promoted as an end in itself? Certainly many other institutions — journals, publishing houses, public-interest groups, advocacy groups, and foundations — engage in the “ideas business.” But these operate on the basis of largely predetermined agendas and shared values. They do not tend to be interested in freewheeling conversation or debate about first principles. A foundation that exists to promote religious liberty, for example, will likely not be enthusiastic about questioning the legitimacy or importance of religious liberty itself.

Only a university invites the contestation of ideas in a ceaseless effort to get at the truth. Free inquiry is, therefore, intrinsic to universities — extrinsic to other organizations. Social-justice efforts can and do take place at universities, of course, but universities could exist without them and still retain their fundamental character. Without the free contestation of ideas, universities would lose their central animating purpose, their raison d’être. 

I think this point — a very MacIntyrean point about the goods intrinsic to a given practice — is correct. “Trainings” or “training modules” that remove disagreement and even mere inquiry from the environment are intrinsically anti-intellectual and anti-academic. The pervasiveness of such “trainings” — I can’t use that silly word without scare-quotes — raises many potential questions, but the one I want to ask today is simply: Why do universities do this kind of thing? 

Here are my answers: 

First, academia is a world that is not just strongly left-leaning but also profoundly sensitive to media attention, and the media have agreed that One Must Do Something about social justice (vaguely but recognizably defined) — so a university can create these online click-through slide-shows and say See? That’s Something. 

But why that particular Something? In the American university, the predecessor to these Diversity/Equity/Inclusion/Justice endeavors was the need to educate faculty and staff in the legal implications of Title IX. That was especially important at institutions (e.g. the one I work for) with ugly histories in these matters. So online click-through slide shows were made to train us — the word is quite appropriate in this context — in the nuances of Title IX law. And then when the next big problem rolled up … well, why not do the same kind of thing? 

And here comes what I believe to be a vital but neglected point: Universities don’t usually create their own training modules — they buy products from companies that specialize in that kind of thing. And those companies want to save money by reusing their old code. So they extract the content of their Title IX courses and simply stuff new content into the existing frameworks. Easy-peasy. And the upper-level administrators of the university, who don’t want to spend any more money on such projects than they have to, accept the Frankenstein’s jury-rigged monster they’ve been handed. 

But that creates a big problem: the kind of structure needed to communicate to people the contours of a law and the expectations generated by that law is not the kind of structure needed to explore the moral development of a community. It’s just not; it can’t be. As Corey and Polet write, “When the training involves ‘tests,’ the tests usually have only one right answer. The ‘correct’ button must be clicked before one can ‘successfully complete’ the training.” Inquiry and reflection are prohibited by the code. 

All of which leads me to one final point. The re-use of code designed to elucidate law in the very different context of communal values introduces ambiguities — ambiguities that actually might be useful to administrators of a certain cast of mind. 

Imagine that you’re working through a module on Title IX. You’re presented with a scenario in which you’re asked to choose among several possible actions. You click on one option and are told that that option could in fact land you (and by extension your university) in very hot water. You are told to go back and pick another one. The inflexibility of the code exhibits what we literary scholars like to call “imitative form”: it imitates the non-negotiability of the law. 

Now imagine that you’re working through a social-justice module. You’re presented with a scenario in which you are asked to respond to someone’s complaint they they are the victim of an injustice. You click on one option and are told that it’s wrong. But wait a minute, you say to yourself, I don’t think it’s wrong — I think the one you tell me is correct would not in fact contribute to a more just community. But there’s no way for you to say that. There’s nothing to do but choose the answer you’re told is correct. 

This is an experience that might lead you to certain questions about your responsibilities as an employee of your university. Do you have to do what the module tells you is correct? Would you be punished if you failed to — maybe even fired? What are the consequences of dissent? What might be the consequences even of asking questions? Nothing in the module itself, or in the university’s presentation of it, addresses these matters. You’re just told: Do as we say. 

But you keep thinking about it. One possibility is that the administration is just hoping that everyone will comply with the demand, because then they can say to the world, See? We’re doing Something. It might be that disciplining recalcitrant employees is more than they want to deal with, since any employee so disciplined could take legal action the outcome of which would be uncertain. But they don’t want to say that. They don’t want to admit that there will be no consequences for the disobedient, because that would reduce compliance. But, heck, maybe they don’t even care about compliance, they just want to be able to point to the creation and distribution of the “training” as evidence that they’re supportive of the current imperatives. 

Maybe. But, you reflect, the ambiguity is susceptible to a less consoling interpretation. It’s possible that the administration wants you to get this message: Nice tenured position you got there. Shame if something happened to it. 

Jeannie Suk Gersen:

If, in the face of scientific findings, one lets go of the view that trigger warnings foster mental health or facilitate learning, what reasons might remain for using them? It may well be that, at this point, trigger warnings have developed a spinoff cultural meaning that departs from the aim of providing psychological aid to those who suffer from trauma. A trigger warning might really function as a signal to the subset of students who are looking for it that the teacher is sensitive to their concerns — or at least compliant with their requests — regardless of psychological benefit or harm. The choice to send such a signal is of course part of a teacher’s academic freedom. But it is important to undertake it with the understanding that signalling compassion for students and trauma survivors in this particular way may be at cross purposes with helping them, whether psychologically or pedagogically. 

Yep.