1a) We need to take our students in hand and teach them time management. You know, the way
cashiers do.
2) Some students report dropping out because of boredom or lack of motivation. Therefore it's our responsibility to be more "entertaining" and "inspirational." Other reasons students gave for dropping out included procrastination, poor sleeping habits, relationship issues, death in the family, addiction, and partying. These can all be fixed if we are "engaging" enough. We must not make lame excuses like "but I'm not a trained addiction counselor." Anything short of taking full responsibility for students' progress is tantamount to blaming the students, and we must never blame the students.3) Many students report dropping out due to financial issues. For some reason this point was passed over quickly and without discussion.
4) Millennials want meaning, not money or job security.
5) Some majors "need to go" because they don't lead to those high-paying and stable careers that millennials apparently don't care about. (Also, "everyone knows" which majors should be eliminated: The ones that sound old-fashioned and don't have "digital" in the name.)
6) Students need to find their passion. We don't have the right to discourage students from following their passion.
6b) But if they major in something impractical and end up broke and indebted that's our fault.
7) The presenter thinks we're idiots. "Look up your institution's graduation rate on College Navigator. Are you shocked your graduation rate is so low?" Um, no, folks like you have been beating us up about our (entirely predictable) graduation rate for years.
and mutterings of "we really need to get the faculty involved in this conversation." [1]
Unfortunately, it's too early to start drinking. So I'm going to go look at guinea pigs in costumes instead.
Frankie
[1] Of course there won't actually be a conversation. If there were, the faculty would trot out with the same old hidebound and unfashionable ideas we're always banging on about: offering the classes students need to graduate, reducing class size, hiring full-time faculty and paying them a living wage, and providing childcare. BO-ring!
In case you don't have access to the Financial Times article about job security (linked to above in #4), here is Google's cache.
ReplyDeleteLet me apologize, Frankie. We try to keep Batshit U's president on campus as much as we can, but it appears he got loose again.
ReplyDeleteIf total cognitive surrender and verschlimmbesserung had a child, he would be it.
I had to look up verschlimmbesserung -- what a tragically perfect word.
DeleteCuriously, my first thought is that it would make a great name for a boat.
DeleteA brilliant post--true and thus crushing.
ReplyDeleteThere was a recent series in reruns of "One Big happy" about a young woman just out of school with a head filled with unrealistic ideas about kids. The character reminded me of the people who peddle this junk. The series starts here and continues to the next week.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.gocomics.com/onebighappy/2017/06/10
Sorry, that was the link for the third comic. Here is where it starts. http://www.gocomics.com/onebighappy/2017/06/08
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty touchy-feely-new-agey, but I can't get past the first one. I don't go to a store and tell them what to sell.
ReplyDeleteDo you remember when Fab was sunny? No, me neither.
ReplyDelete@Frankie: What you need is one or more tenured and externally funded physics faculty to stand up and say, "What you have just said is LOGICALLY INCONSISTENT." That will strike terror into your administrators’ feeble little hearts, but don’t let them off light. CLOSE IN for THE KILL, by adding, "...and furthermore, it is CONTRARY to EXPERIENCE in the CLASSROOM!" It’s fun to be a silverback: you really can rip someone’s arm out of the socket and beat them to death with it, and people more-or-less expect you to.
ReplyDeleteOne has to do this calmly and bravely, much like how one wields a crucifix to keep a vampire at bay. I’ve been standing up to bullies on behalf of my fellow nerds in much this way ever since I was 6 years old. Very little has changed. What motivates the opposition more these days is less malice and more stupidity and laziness, not that those weren’t copious in the old days too. What stops them even quicker than it used to is humiliation. Remember, they’re academics: they like people to think that they’re smart. You don’t even need to point out they don’t know doodly-squat about physics, and never will: they already know it. A physics silverback can therefore vaporize one of these clods instantly (to mix a metaphor).
Thanks to the TV show “The Big Bang Theory,” physics people aren’t even expected to have social skills. I’m often astonished by what I can get away with. Of all the STEM disciplines, physics strikes TERROR into the hearts of EVERYONE, even engineers. Therefore, you want to cultivate friendships with physics people, even if after a marathon work session they sometimes don’t smell so good.
Something else to point out is how expensive the equipment for training STEM majors is. THAT will stop your fools DEAD in their tracks: for 2 ½ days, as always, until they come up with their next abomination.
P.S. There is a good English translation for “Verschlimmbesserung.” It’s: “being like a kid with bubble gum stuck to your fingers.”
Frod is right. The first step in turning the big dumb boat around is standing up and putting an oar in the water the other direction. It's been my experience that silverbacks (and I certainly qualify) sometimes steer away from the highly charged political mess once they are free and clear.
ReplyDeleteBut the dwindling number of full tenured proffies means there is less and less resistance to the idiocy described in Frankie's post.
I wish I'd done more when I could. And I'm going to set my teeth a bit to it when Fall comes around.
It's never too early to drink. What webinar is this, if you don't mind shsring?
ReplyDelete#3, #3, #3, #3.
ReplyDeleteBecause trying to earn enough money to pay for the education they don't actually have time to get because they're too busy earning money to pay for it (and the resulting sleep deprivation, stress, anxiety, etc.) is at the root of many of the other problems mentioned above, including difficulties with time management, lack of engagement, and possibly even the temptation to seek solace in (and then get hooked on) various substances.