Only as good as your grades – why 'toxic achievement culture' can crush kids [ All in the Mind ]

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/toxic-achievement-culture-students-grades/102961278

Harvard, MIT, UPenn presidents testify before Congress about antisemitism on campuses | full video [ CBS News ]

Exclusive: Felicity Huffman speaks for 1st time about college-admissions scandal [ ABC7 ]

‘Class’ author Stephanie Land on the realities of college when living in poverty [ PBS NewsHour ]

Snowplow Parents Are Ruining Online Grading [ NYTimes ]

The flava:

During the 2011-12 school year, Roxanne Greitz Miller was a professor-in-residence at a California middle school that had just started using an online grade book app that allowed parents and students to see students’ grades as soon as they were posted. I recently spoke to Miller, who is now the dean of the College of Educational Studies at Chapman University, and she said it was clear to her almost immediately that this technology was “game changing” for parents, teachers and students — and not in a good way.

“I’ll never forget the example where there was a student in an English classroom in eighth grade and the teacher said to the student, ‘You need to put your phone away.’ And the student said, ‘I can’t. It’s my mom. You still haven’t posted my makeup work that you graded, and if it’s not posted by this weekend, I’m going to be grounded,’” she told me, highlighting how stress provoking and disruptive to learning the technology could be.

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.

Article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/opinion/grades-parents-students-teachers.html

Incarcerated students graduate from top ten university for first time in US history [ ABC News ]

The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts. [ The Guardian ]

The flava:

The US library system, once the model for the world, is under assault from politicians, rightwing activists and corporate publishers. Book bans are at record levels, and libraries across the country are facing catastrophic budget cuts, a fate only narrowly avoided by New York City’s public libraries this summer. In
a separate line of attack, library collections are being squeezed by draconian licensing deals, and even sued to stop lending digitized books.

This war on libraries – and on the traditional values of equal opportunity, universal education and cultural preservation they represent – directly contravenes the will of the majority in the United States. Polls reveal that public support for libraries is as strong as ever. But the profession of librarianship has become a hazardous one, because of the actions of a hostile minority. It’s time to reverse course.

The article:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/09/us-library-system-attack-digital-licensing

Bard's response to the following prompt: "Write a creative blog post about the most important higher education issues of 2023."

Imagine a world where higher education is accessible and affordable for everyone, regardless of their background or socioeconomic status. A world where students are empowered to pursue their passions and make a difference in the world. A world where universities are at the forefront of innovation and discovery.

This is the future of higher education that I envision. But to get there, we need to address some of the most important issues facing higher education today.

Affordability

The cost of higher education has been rising for decades, making it increasingly difficult for students to afford to go to college. This is especially true for students from low-income families and students of color.

We need to find ways to make higher education more affordable for everyone. This could include increasing government funding for higher education, making college more affordable for students from low-income families, and reducing the amount of student loan debt.

Accessibility

Higher education should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or circumstances. But this is not the case today. Many students, especially students from low-income families and students of color, face barriers to accessing higher education.

We need to remove these barriers and make higher education more accessible to everyone. This could include expanding early college programs, providing more support for first-generation college students, and making college credit more affordable.

Equity

Higher education should be a place where all students can thrive, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any other factor. But this is not the case today. Many students, especially students from marginalized groups, face discrimination and inequities in higher education.

We need to create a more equitable higher education system. This could include implementing anti-racist and inclusive policies and practices, providing more support for students from marginalized groups, and addressing the root causes of inequity in higher education.

Innovation

The world is changing rapidly, and higher education needs to adapt to keep up. We need to innovate and develop new ways to teach and learn.

This could include using new technologies, developing more flexible and affordable educational programs, and focusing on teaching students the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century workforce.

Discovery

Higher education institutions are at the forefront of innovation and discovery. They play a vital role in advancing knowledge and solving the world's most pressing problems.

We need to continue to invest in higher education so that universities can continue to conduct cutting-edge research and develop new solutions to the world's challenges.

Conclusion

The future of higher education is bright, but we need to address the most important issues facing higher education today. By making higher education more affordable, accessible, equitable, innovative, and discovery-driven, we can create a better future for everyone.

Creative addition

Imagine a world where students can learn at their own pace, in their own way. Where they can choose from a variety of educational programs that are tailored to their individual needs and interests. Where they can learn from experts from all over the world.

This is the future of higher education that I dream of. A future where learning is accessible, affordable, and empowering.

We are already starting to see glimpses of this future. There are now a growing number of online and hybrid educational programs that offer students more flexibility and affordability. There are also a growing number of innovative teaching and learning methods that are more engaging and effective than traditional methods.

I believe that the future of higher education is bright. By working together, we can create a higher education system that is accessible, affordable, equitable, innovative, and discovery-driven. 

--Bard

Death of the physical library [ Locklin on science ]

The flava:

One of the unsung disasters of contemporary academic life is the death of the physical library. There are so many disasters in current year academia, I doubt as anyone else grouses much about this, but as a great enthusiast for the KNN algorithm, I will complain about it. . . .  

The article:

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/07/28/death-of-the-physical-library/

Unpacking the “Black Box” of AI in Education [ jstor.org ]

Unpacking the “Black Box” of AI in Education

By Nabeel Gillani, Rebecca Eynon, Catherine Chiabaut, Kelsey Finkel

Educational Technology & Society, Vol. 26, No. 1 (January 2023), pp. 99-111 (13 pages)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/48707970

ABSTRACT:  Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have sparked renewed interest in its potential to improve education. However, AI is a loose umbrella term that refers to a collection of methods, capabilities, and limitations—many of which are often not explicitly articulated by researchers, education technology companies, or other AI developers. In this paper, we seek to clarify what “AI” is and the potential it holds to both advance and hamper educational opportunities that may improve the human condition. We offer a basic introduction to different methods and philosophies underpinning AI, discuss recent advances, explore applications to education, and highlight key limitations and risks. We conclude with a set of questions that educationalists may ask as they encounter AI in their research and practice. Our hope is to make often jargon-laden terms and concepts accessible, so that all are equipped to understand, interrogate, and ultimately shape the development of human-centered AI in education.

Groundbreaking educator recounts remarkable life in a new memoir [ PBS NewsHour ]

 

'University Endowments Are Increasingly Under Foreign Influence': Bob Good Sounds Alarm On Funding [ Forbes ]

The Fall of a Superstar Psychologist

Charlie Munger on teaching

Stanford freshman's determined reporting leads to investigation, president's resignation [ ABC7 News Bay Area ]

 

What was Minerva University REALLY like?

 

Minerva University

How to live a life you won’t regret [ Bryan Cranston ]

 

Dr. Jekyll & Prof. Hyde discuss pettiness in academia (as mentioned in the NYTimes)

<scene: Interior, faculty lounge at Utterson University>

Dr. Jekyll:  I say, Hyde, we are eating our own again.  Look at the third letter in this advice column.

Prof. Hyde:  Ha!  The sub-headline "Middle School Never Really Ends" sets the stage.

Dr. Jekyll:   And the statement "It is astonishing how many people deal with petty torments in the workplace. I shouldn’t be surprised given that I work in academia, a bastion of pettiness, but still …" offers a depressing tableau.  <sighs>

(Paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/02/business/roxane-gay-work-friend-advice.html

SCOTUS decision on affirmative action

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

 SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

_________________

Nos. 20–1199 and 21–707 _________________

STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC., PETITIONER

20–1199 v.

PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF

HARVARD COLLEGE

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIRST CIRCUIT

STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC., PETITIONER

21–707 v.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, ET AL.

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI BEFORE JUDGMENT TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

[June 29, 2023]

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court.

Dr. Jekyll and Prof. Hyde share an essay, concluding, "The job never ends until you end it."

It’s Not How You Play the Game

By Jonathan Malesic  

Published: Spring 2023

“We should play Dungeons & Dragons,” my friend Anne proposed one night more than a decade ago, apropos of nothing. She brought it up at a gathering of friends who either worked at the college where I taught or were married to someone who did. Anne had never played before, and her idea might have lasted only as long as the last drink of the night if I hadn’t volunteered to run the game as its dungeon master.

I needed a hobby, something to keep me from taking it personally when my students plagiarized or didn’t do the reading for the required and resented theology courses I taught. I had played D&D in middle school during the 1980s; it seemed appealingly absurd to dust off my trio of rulebooks — the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Monster Manual — and play again as a fully fledged adult and tenure-track professor. I hoped D&D could offset my frustrated fixation on the live-action role-playing game we call work. . . .

Read the rest:

https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/its-not-how-you-play-the-game/

Why More And More Colleges Are Closing Down Across America [ CNBC ]

 

Phi Beta Kappa Speaker Minsuh Choi ’23 | Commencement 2023 -- Wiliams College

 

2023 Class Day Keynote Address: Sanjay Gupta -- Harvard Medical School

 

Bertrand Russell - Message To Future Generations (1959)

 

Psychology at Austin College

 

A look at Yo-Yo Ma's newest musical project, where nature becomes the concert venue [ CBS ]

 

What Makes a "Good College" – and Why It Matters | Cecilia M. Orphan | TED

Tom Hanks delivers Harvard University 2023 commencement speech

 

The First Year of AI College Ends in Ruin [ The Atlantic ]

The flava:

There’s an arms race on campus, and professors are losing: “One-hundred percent AI. That’s what the software concluded about a student’s paper. One of the professors in the academic program I direct had come across this finding and asked me what to do with it. Then another one saw the same result—100 percent AI—for a different paper by that student, and also wondered: What does this mean? I did not know. I still don’t. The problem breaks down into more problems: whether it’s possible to know for certain that a student used AI, what it even means to “use” AI for writing papers, and when that use amounts to cheating. The software that had flagged our student’s papers was also multilayered: Canvas, our courseware system, was running Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service, which had recently installed a new AI-detection algorithm. The alleged evidence of cheating had emerged from a nesting doll of ed-tech black boxes. This is college life at the close of ChatGPT’s first academic year: a moil of incrimination and confusion. In the past few weeks, I’ve talked with dozens of educators and students who are now confronting, for the very first time, a spate of AI “cheating.” Their stories left me reeling. Reports from on campus hint that legitimate uses of AI in education may be indistinguishable from unscrupulous ones, and that identifying cheaters—let alone holding them to account—is more or less impossible…”

The article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/chatbot-cheating-college-campuses/674073

Prof. Pottah submits some info.

Hello,

Here’s a potential post for Zooze:

You’ve just been Reddited! Not by me, but by someone whose Reddit posts I follow. He sang the praises of “Rate Your Students” and its descendants, College Misery and Zooze the Horse. Whether the post gets any traction, we’ll see, but the writer seems to pine for the RMS family of websites.

And I do, too. I’ve posted on Zooze before, and a few of the comments I received have remained withme, much like how I kept a wonderful little note my from high school English teacher safely in my wallet until after I became a father. It finally disintegrated (believe it or not, I saw one of its electrons whiz past me the other day, and even that felt good), but I would dig through my wallet for that piece of paper (covered with transparent tape to persevere its life) in order to read it when I needed it most, when things were bleak, when I doubted my own agency. The Zooze comments worked—work—the same way for me.

OP says that the posts on the RYS Family were “despondent” but humorous. Yeah, there were some “despondent” posts, but most that dealt with students were despondently hilarious. I always felt that these sites were places professors could go to without worrying about being zapped for being “anti-student.” We could complain, we could exaggerate, we could kvetch. But underlying everything, we (usually) seemed to know that the posters were people who cared about their students. Some would disagree over political matters, but it never seemed personal. It never seemed to derail conversations. Or if it did, those differences didn’t prevent people from posting and reading.

But getting back to my other point, the posts (and comments) were funny. They were entertaining. And they usually provided more context, more voice, than you see on Reddit. Maybe it was the awesome graphics?  I don’t know, but these posts always seemed more human, funnier, more relatable—somehow more pleasant. It felt like I was listening to someone speak, not reading a post. The posts were more inviting. More supportive. Better.

I guess that was the old Internet. Reddit and Twitter “rolled” (as the Reddit OP says) over the RYS family like Walmart rolling over Ma and Pa Kettle's Bargain Food and Sundries. Something was lost. 

I know this site will never get revved up again. But as I said, something was lost.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/13eqzdt/old_professor_websites/

—Prof. Pottah

Georgetown Professors Read Their Rate My Professor Reviews! (Spring 2023)

 

The fight over banning books [ CBS Sunday Morning ]

 

The AI revolution: Google's developers on the future of artificial intelligence [ 60 Minutes ]

 

Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence, by Paco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence

 

Planta Sapiens by Paco Calvo review 

Talk to your plants and you might just learn something.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/21/planta-sapiens-by-paco-calvo-review-talk-to-your-plants-and-you-might-just-learn-something

:-)

Hollywood Azusa Pomona Pasadena Yermo.  Berkeley Irvine Riverside Torrance Healdsburg Davis Anaheim Yountville.   Carlsbad Alameda Livermore.  

First Gen Latina navigating higher education & beating the odds [ Estrella Serrato, TEDxLakeBalboa ]

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell, by Vincent Lloyd

The flava:

On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application process—the acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percent—to spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid.

The group reminded me of the heroes of the Mysterious Benedict Society books I was reading to my daughter: Each teenager, brought together for a common project, had some extraordinary ability and some quirk. One girl from California spoke and thought at machine-gun speed and started collecting pet snails during the pandemic; now she had more than 100. A girl from a provincial school in China had never traveled to the United States but had mastered un-accented English and was in love with E.M. Forster. In addition to the seminar, the students practiced democratic self-governance: They lived together and set their own rules. Those first few days, the students were exactly what you would expect, at turns bubbly and reserved, all of them curious, playful, figuring out how to relate to each other and to the seminar texts.

Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. And I was next. . . .

The article:

https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell

The author:

https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/artsci/africana/facstaff/biodetail.html?mail=vincent.lloyd@villanova.edu&xsl=bio_long

How these HBCU presidents fixed their colleges’ financial futures [ CSMonitor.com ]

The flava:

Post-pandemic, colleges nationwide are facing an imperative: Change trajectory. Enrollment is down and falling, and Pew’s 2023 Parenting in America survey found that only 41% of parents say it’s important for their children to have a college degree – down from 94% in 2012. Even before COVID-19, smaller colleges from Green Mountain to Mount Ida already were closing or being bought out by larger institutions that wanted campus real estate but not their professors or students.

But for the 101 accredited Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States, this moment is particularly portentous. Undergrad enrollment is up 2.5%, compared with a decline of 4.2% for colleges overall – one of the only bright spots noted in the 2022 National Student Clearinghouse. While the pandemic dealt blows to some colleges that have never recovered, HBCUs say they were able to make use of the shared relief to do everything from covering lost wages to forgive their students’ debt. . . .

The article:

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2023/0222/How-these-HBCU-presidents-fixed-their-colleges-financial-futures

This professor asked his students to use ChatGPT. The results were surprising. [ zdnet.com ]

The flava:

One of people's biggest concerns about ChatGPT and AI chatbots is how they will affect the education system. Will the chatbots' technical proficiency make learning certain skills for humans obsolete? To mitigate this issue, some schools are blocking student and teacher access to ChatGPT on their networks entirely. One professor has taken an entirely different approach. 

Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has embraced ChatGPT and AI use in all of his classes. His policy sets an expectation that students must use AI for class -- and learn how to use it well. 

The article:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-professor-asked-his-students-to-use-chatgpt-the-results-were-surprising/

DeSantis’s Latest Target: A Small College of ‘Free Thinkers’ [ New York Times ]

The flava:

A plan by Gov. Ron DeSantis to transform New College, which is known as progressive and describes
itself as “a community of free thinkers,” into a beacon of conservatism has left students, parents and faculty members at the tight-knit school reeling over what they see as a political assault on their academic freedom. Mr. DeSantis’s education commissioner has expressed a desire to remake the school in the image of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in Michigan that has been active in conservative politics.

Over 25 tumultuous days last month, the Republican governor removed six of the college’s 13 trustees, replacing them with allies holding strongly conservative views. The new board then forced out the college’s president, a career educator, and named Mr. DeSantis’s former education commissioner, a career politician, as her replacement. On Monday, the board signed off on paying its pick a salary of $699,000 a year, more than double what his predecessor earned.

The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/us/ron-desantis-new-college-florida.html

To Sir, With Love

 

Campus Tour | University of Sheffield

 

Big Hungry 2023

 What's your chief concern about the state of higher education this year?  

Or about your role in it?