Kay Cunningham's List: Higher Education

• However, we were warned in two separate places that inappropriate humor violates university policy. I’d always thought inappropriateness was pretty much the definition of humor—I believe Freud would agree. Why all this delicacy? Students were being encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was likely to create lasting trauma.
• Consider some notable treatments of the student-professor hookup theme—J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace; Francine Prose’s Blue Angel; Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections—in which learning has an inverse relation to self-knowledge, professors are emblems of sexual stupidity, and such disasters ensue that it’s hard not to read them as cautionary tales about the disastrous effects of intellect on practical intelligence.
• In fact, it’s just as likely that a student can derail a professor’s career these days as the other way around, which is pretty much what happened in the case of the accused philosophy professor.
• Around the time the "survivor" email arrived, something happened that I’d never experienced in many decades of teaching, which was that two students—one male, one female—in two classes informed me, separately, that they were unable to watch assigned films because they "triggered" something for them. I was baffled by the congruence until the following week, when the Times ran a story titled "Trauma Warnings Move From the Internet to the Ivory Tower," and the word "trigger" was suddenly all over the news.
• But what do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life? What becomes of students so committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and protected from unequal power arrangements in romantic life? I can’t help asking, because there’s a distressing little fact about the discomfort of vulnerability, which is that it’s pretty much a daily experience in the world, and every sentient being has to learn how to somehow negotiate the consequences and fallout, or go through life flummoxed at every turn.
• Among the problems with treating students like children is that they become increasingly childlike in response. The New York Times Magazine recently reported on the tangled story of a 21-year-old former Stanford undergraduate suing a 29-year-old tech entrepreneur she’d dated for a year. He’d been a mentor in a business class she was enrolled in, though they’d met long before. They traveled together and spent time with each other’s families. Marriage was discussed. After they broke up, she charged that their consensual relationship had actually been psychological kidnapping, and that she’d been raped every time they’d had sex. She seems to regard herself as a helpless child in a woman’s body. She demanded that Stanford investigate and is bringing a civil suit against the guy—this despite the fact that her own mother had introduced the couple, approved the relationship every step of the way, and been in more or less constant contact with the suitor.

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• For her candor about the overreach of Title IX, Ms. Kipnis was hit with . . . a Title IX investigation. In an argument that would have made <!--  --> Joseph Stalin<!--  --> blush, two Northwestern students charged that Ms. Kipnis’s criticism of Title IX violated Title IX.
• The responsibility of the school wasn’t to provide equal opportunity to participate in sports—it was to educate women to be interested in sports. In effect the ruling said that Brown women didn’t know what they wanted. They only thought they were dancers or actors or musicians. They had to be taught that they were really athletes. They didn’t know what was good for them but the government did.
• It no longer mattered if schools offered equal or more-than-equal opportunities for women in athletics. If colleges couldn’t produce enough actual female bodies on the playing field, the schools were forced to cut male athletes until the participation rates of both sexes were the same.
• Suddenly, schools were responsible for harassment and assault that occur off campus. A lower standard of evidence was established to prove the guilt of the accused. Earlier protections for academic freedom and free expression were dropped.

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• According to the Project Information Literacy Research Report called “Learning the Ropes,” published in December 2013, student retention rates and student engagement with library resources go hand-in-hand. Thus, the more engaged a student is with library resources, the less likely the student is to drop out of college and the more likely they are to achieve academic success.

• Faculty members have long viewed the growth in the number and salaries of college and university administrators with a strong sense of suspicion. The AAUP devoted an entire issue of Academe to the topic of “Administrative Bloat” more than twenty years ago (November–December 1991).
• The three categories of contingent academic appointments in these data have also shown rapid growth over this period: the number of part-time faculty members grew by 286 percent, more than tripling, while full-time non-tenure-track faculty ranks swelled by 259 percent. The number of graduate student employees also more than doubled, increasing by 123 percent. The growth in full-time senior administrative positions (formally labeled “executive, administrative, and managerial” in the IPEDS survey) was less rapid than the growth in contingent faculty positions at 141 percent. But this rate represents more than a doubling in the number of people at the top of the organizational hierarchy.

• The AAUP study does not include part-time professors. As a result, while full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members are counted, the adjuncts who are not full-time -- many of whom face flat wages -- are not covered. So those faculty members who earn the least, and may have the least chances of earning a raise, aren't included.

• Students who need the most help and are the least likely to succeed in college in particular lack access to full-time professors. That’s because fully three-quarters of faculty members who teach remedial courses are employed part time.

• “College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience. But in the process, he turned what had been a small New England college with red-brick buildings and a quad into something barely recognizable.

• The research found that they almost always used e-book readers, mobile devices, and tablet computers for nonacademic reading but relied on paper printouts for academic reading.
• Several students in Ms. Foasberg’s study expressed a distaste for digital textbooks. Some who had used e-books said they would not use them again because they found the embedded links distracting and because they could not interact with the content as they could with print texts—highlighting or taking notes in the margins, for instance. And since the students found themselves printing out digital texts, whatever money they had saved by not buying printed copies was largely lost to printing costs.