The semester is in full swing, and oh boy, is it ever swinging!
- We’re interviewing six million candidates for two million searches. Where the $%^@#%$ we are supposed to put all these new faculty, their labs, and their students is anyone’s guess. We’re already filled to capacity, especially regarding student office space. I am not the only one who has to curb student recruitment because I literally have no place to put them. FFS
- The proliferation of nonsense activities that supposedly enhance the student experience and waste everyone’s time has reached stratospheric levels. At the same time, the pleas by the likes of me to offer more sections of large courses—so we’d have smaller student-to-faculty ratios and students would actually have a chance to interact with faculty, which is actually rather than supposedly critical for the student experience—fall on deaf ears.
- I rode on the elevator with a colleague the other day. I don’t interact with this colleague very often and the ride took all of 20 seconds, yet he managed to share his frustration with the ever-increasing demands by admins that we faculty waste time on these student-experience events. While it’s true that there is a while stratum of people whose job is the student experience, that is not the faculty job at an R1. We don’t have the time to hunt for money, crank out papers, advise students, teach students, serve professional societies and universities, and also somehow make it to 1263572 additional events whose purpose is…something.
- My job is great mostly because I get to hang out with smart young people and help launch them into their careers with hopefully more understanding of and passion for the topics I teach than they would have otherwise.
- There is so, so much effort invested on reviewing everyone all the time. What the hell happened with letting people be to do their work?
What have you been up to, blogosphere?
Here’s also some Twitter levity, with a few bummers interspersed for good measure.
xykademiqz 