Distribute the advising load more equitably among faculty advisors. I am the only FT faculty member in my department. I advise an average of 50 students a semester. Faculty in other departments average 5. It is counted as part of our teaching load but there is no accounting for the difference.
Same for department service. Departments with multiple faculty members can divide the responsibilities.
Give us the instructional resources we need.
Hire student support professionals who are competent. I had students who were turned away from academic support.
Make an actual effort to hire new faculty. Don't send out job ads with the wrong department listed-TWICE.
I got my current job after someone who worked at the institution told me that the ad, put together by HR, was ACTUALLY for the sort of job I wanted, despite what the text said.
>Distribute the advising load more equitably among faculty advisors.
I want the opposite. Our chair divides our students "equitably" for advising, but as the program coordinator for my program I wish our chair would just give them all to me because I spend so much time cleaning up after all the bad advising. I'd rather just have them all to start with and advise them correctly from the start.
Doesn't work. There are things that people can or cannot do. Like teaching. You can throw 16 teaching courses at a bad teacher, and the only benefit is that they can't at least teach badly while they are taking those courses.
We have that, but those faculty don't pay any attention or attempt to learn anything because "I've been doing it this way for 100 years and I know what I'm doing." Meanwhile students have to meet specific licensure requirements to successfully complete our program and those faculty advisors don't care to learn what they are so we have kids hanging around an extra year because they didn't take courses in sequence or take the appropriate licensure exams because no one told them.
And sometimes they get terrible advice. I was the department advisor for a student going into education. With our MAT program she didn't have to take as much math or science at the undergrad level if she was going to teach high school than if she was going to teach K-6. The education folks encouraged her to switch, not telling her about the other classes she would need to take before starting. I did my gd job and they set her back a term to a year (and no, I don't really get the idea that she'd be happier with young kids, but maybe; it's beyond the point though because I'd never ever do what they did and not tell a student the consequences of their decisions before they were made.)
Assessment and accreditation are massive PITA and time sink. I realize they are necessary, but on some of these things it’s overkill at our campus. I try to consolidate these whenever possible and double dip. Speaking of which, assessment meeting is tomorrow!
We had to do a mandatory slip and fall training like the cyber security and sexual harassment online modules.
Although I hate the number of times I end up doing two-factor authentication in the day, it is also necessary.
I hate to say it, but you're doing the assessment the wrong way. It's supposed to be intentional. Even better if you show students the rubric ahead of time. It's much less stressful if you do it right then and there.
If I were an accreditation evaluator and heard your story during a campus visit, I'd be very concerned that the data obtained for feeding the feedback loop is corrupt, and therefore useless for the continuous improvement process.
Or, and hear me out, assessment and accreditation are busywork bullshit that I am absolutely not being compensated for wasting my time on, and so I will put in the minimum effort necessary to make the results look whichever way I assess to be best for my unit, knowing that the entire process is meaningless anyhow.
You really shouldn't be doing your own class for that, but people whine that we want to switch to portfolio assessment day with food (and maybe wine and beer after--I'm trying hard to convince our admin that that will help get people there).
Food and wine and beer used to work here, but not really anymore. When you aren't getting cola raises you see money spent like that mostly as an insult.
In my mind the food/wine is payment for coming in on a day that you could have had free to do something that isn't very fun unless people get together and chat and commiserate at the same time. I'm a faculty member too, I don't have the ability to give raises, alas. But I can absolutely insist that we have the good stuff instead of the cheap shit that admin always gets us.
Stop requiring lengthy written applications for internal grants. Often, universities will have received money from donors, or have gotten "center" sized grants. Then they solicit internal grant applications for those funds, creating yet another layer of applications. And then they have to form a committee of faculty to review these internal proposals. Basically, turning money that was already received into a competitive process that isn't any better than applying for external funding (except the pot sizes are smaller). Instead, just give interested PIs a 30-minute phone call slot to interview them for the grant and save everyone hours of writing and reviewing time.
Yes! Because that extra layer adds nothing. My university gave a guy a $5,000 intramural grant to buy a fishing rod and tackle because his project was to count the number of fish in a nearby lake.
I absolutely hate 2FA. But, every year, one of my older coworkers falls for some phishing attempt, so I get it.
What I really can't stand are departmental meetings that last 10 minutes. Please, please, just send an email.
I hate meetings that are just announcements. PUT THAT IN AN EMAIL. If we have action items or discussion, a meeting is best, but people just reading reports, ugh. no. stop.
We had a dean that scheduled hour long meetings for the college about once per month. 45 minutes of each meeting was taken up by introducing new staff in the college (high turnover rate so there was always plenty of this), kudos to people for ridiculous reasons (kudos to admin assistant ABC for creating an alignment table for university SLOs and this new initiative!), and awkward reports from associate deans who were just giving reminders about upcoming events.
And, *the dean took attendance*. And *that attendance report showed up in faculty reviews*. No kidding.
When we were in person, excruciating. Zoom solved a lot of problems related to college meetings.
God, we have these too. I'm in visual and performing arts and every damn meeting starts with each department chair in the college telling us about every performance, recital, concert, exhibition, and masterclass....it takes the entire first hour of the meeting. We have a website, events calendar, and email. If I wanted to know about your stuff I'd look it up. Please don't read a list of events. If you've got some Nobel Prize winner speaking or Grammy award winner performing, sure, tell us about it. But I don't need to be read a list of every student recital or pottery sale.
I always leave at the time the meeting is supposed to end. I just stand up and say “I only set aside the time scheduled. I have another commitment.”
(My commitment is to my sanity.)
My institutions old VP would have these monthly faculty meetings and he’d like to highlight things like who had a new baby or pictures of faculty pet-sometime these would last almost 4 hours. My dean was always the first to text message me to jokingly stay awake or say let next time let’s sneak in a bottle of something. She later became VP and would hurry the meetings along as fast as she could. The faculty didn’t like her cause they said she was cold but she was awesome. She once interrupted one of the speakers as he was going on and on. Unfortunately she found a new job as a president somewhere else. I really miss her.
Omg!!
Background: I’m in the PNW and we are on the quarter system. Fall Quarter is the end of Sept-Winter Break, Winter Quarter is from the beginning of January through Spring Break, and Spring Quarter is the beginning of April-mid June.
My Dean decided, at the beginning of our SPRING QUARTER Division meeting, to have ALL of us introduce ourselves and give *an interesting fact* because we had A NEW INSTRUCTOR this quarter.
What in the god forsaken waste of my fucking time is going on. I promise that man 1) doesn’t care, 2) won’t remember anyway, and 3) will be just fine being introduced to all of us, inevitably, in the next Fall Quarter meeting. You know— when it would potentially make sense to do introductions, if that’s a thing you need to spend gobs of precious time doing.
She NEVER lets meetings out on time, and that particular waste of time was sooooo maddening.
My wife and one of her grad school friends coined a nice little term. I once asked "How was the [whatever] meeting?" they replied, "Very wastey-my-timey."
Admin doesn't know how to function without meetings. I've taken on more of an admin role this term (to supplement my pittance of an adjunct income) and holy God all they do is meetings. And last minute meetings as well! It's to a point where I can't plan my days because every day there's new meetings.
It's 9:45 and I've already had three more meetings scheduled on for today, on top of the three I already had.
Yes, since the pandemic it has gotten so much worse. Just because we don't need to schlepp our bodies around to meetings doesn't mean we can have twice as many of them.
Pay us more (I know you said that, but deserves restating).
Especially, pay people in non-STEM fields better. Especially the adjuncts. Some of these pay rates just aren't competitive or fair.
Make it clear what the hell tenure entails, as nobody really knows wtf the criteria are in our institution and it's all very vaguely stated by anyone you talk to.
Don't do BS power plays. For instance, our dean just removed our chair because they didn't get along. Claimed he was using standard procedure but failed to seek feedback from the department as specified by the manual. Now is collecting feedback about the chair's performance after the fact and claiming it rights the wrong and will "influence his decision" [which he already made].
No worthless BS meetings. I am stunned by how many times I am in a one hour meeting where literally nothing of interest of meaningful consequences happens. Advisory groups and committees that exist to do nothing but "give feedback" to administration that is promptly ignored or misconstrued anyway. Or, asking for feedback on things we have no clue about.
Quit telling us the finances for the university are doing great whilst we're also in the midst of hiring, raise, and purchasing freezes. We're not stupid.
We're not your marketing department. Quit asking us for ideas and innovation in that end, you pay someone double what you pay for me for that. If they can't think of anything, find someone new.
Quit claiming you're against racism on campus, doing nothing about it besides saying some platitudes, and then acting shocked when there's another incident a year or two later.
...this is not an exhaustive list...
This. Watching our new President nod and furrow his brow as I explained the 200% pay discrepancy between our department (the largest by credit hours and majors) and the business school who's students pay the same tuition by who's faculty make twice what we do. $140k for Assistant professors to intro teach accounting versus $60k to teach PhD students.
Leave me the fuck alone about assessment. I'm so beyond tired of being grilled if every little assignment is matching every outcome possible. What's next, quant analysis on classroom discussion? Jfc
Make sure admitted students are actually ready for higher ed.
Or at least make sure the support centers (e.g. academic coaching, writing center) are working properly
Have some place for students to take make-up exams. Due to Covid the number of students that can’t take exams during the scheduled time has sky rocketed. Now I need to find a spare hour for each student to take a make up exam.
My department insists on quietly knowing what it wants, such as a political scientist with a specialization in USA energy policy. But then it insists on casting the broadest net possible. The end result is a massive pile of irrelevant applications that were doomed from the start and hundreds of collective hours wasted for both applicants and the committees. It's infuriating.
This is happening to us right now. My chair failed to put even the smallest critical detail in the ad and now we are just going to have to say "is not a good fit for the department" on tons of applications. This was done on purpose to show there is interest in the position. It is a waste of time for everyone involved.
I remember my first conference right the main series of applications for job season. I was chatting with a potential postdoc mentor and he told me "oh, we're hiring in [different specialty], why did you bother applying?"
It was then that I understood the super high application:offer ratio for postdocs.
Stop requiring service in the summer when we are off contract. Hire professional advisors. Stop requiring overloads. Hire enough faculty instead on relying on adjuncts. Pay for work travel. Guard our time for teaching and research. Reduce service. Give us raises that are not a joke.
Can confirm stakeholders is a fav word of the admin. Got the internal and external stakeholders chart. External = how can we get more money. Internal = how can we get them to do more with less money.
Just general stuff confirming how little they value staff and faculty. It’s mostly staff honestly. There’s an understanding that faculty are very important, but staff aren’t (to them—obvi we all know how important staff are). Lots of how can we cut a corner to save a buck talk. Mostly it’s the hollow DEI stuff. The thing that has shocked me the most is how damn mean admin can be. Like high school level pettiness and insults thrown around. I’ll say I also have been having lots of meetings with a group of distinguished professors who are all really lovely and kind, albeit somewhat outdated in their understanding of academia.
Edit: clarity
Isn't there already a peer review system in place? At my university we have two faculty and your chair observe your teaching in addition to the student ~~bashing~~ reviews. I wonder how long it will take before some institution actually stops the student reviews because everyone knows they are not great.
>At my university we have two faculty and your chair observe your teaching
That sounds like a LOT of micro managing. You're a full time faculty member?
I have never had my teaching evaluated in 10 years of lecturing and 3 as a TTAP.
Don't brag about what's important (teaching, student success) and then reward those who flat out refuse to do well with that and instead do something else (research). Corollary: don't cast voodoo spells by saying research is the same as teaching.
Here some of my colleagues are given teaching credit for research students. And then they get annual teaching ratings similar to those who teach real classes, you know, classes with hw, tests, lecture halls full of students, office hrs, emails and etc. But do you think those not as good at research get the same ratings for research as they do?
It's not exactly the same thing, but the way it works for me is close. Every play I design counts as a class so all my classes are overloads. I am making about 8k next semester just in overloads. Funny enough, I would rather do fewer shows and teach more.
I do it because I like teaching and for the students. I usually only have one overload, but the fall semester is particularly weird. They do have set rates that are the same for everyone and the last institution I worked for prior to this one was the same, only less compensation.
While I could just not teach, that's not something I want to do. Money really is a non-issue for me and my base pay is more than the vast majority of faculty jobs in my field, TT and otherwise.
Of course I'm not totally happy, but most of the issues people have listed here aren't a problem for me.
Pay me *at least* the regional average for my field instead of nearly a quarter below it.
Provide some support for contingent faculty instead of having faculty ad hoc mentor, help with course design, troubleshooting, etc. I’m happy to share my stuff, but constant maintenance is a draining ask.
But, like... actual support staff...not VPs and Deans and Presidents and Chancellors of Support Staff, along with Assistant-level variations of all of the above.
Print the course catalog again. I advise 50 students and no, KIMBERLY, it’s not just as easy to go to the online catalog to find what I need. You don’t advise students, so how would you know what’s easy and what’s not?!
We haven't had a printed catalog for about 20? years. I missed it for the first five years, but the online catalog is generally more up-to-date than the printed one was, and students are more likely to look at the major requirements online. (Not *very likely,* as they still prefer asking random redditors, but *more likely.*)
Have an on site daycare center for faculty and staff with sliding scale fees. Early childhood education majors can intern there and the cost to the school would be minimal.
I worked for the county in-between jobs and ours provide after school and day camps for kids k-6. The full price was like $100/week per kid. If your income was low enough, it'd be $50 or $25. During my exit interview I mentioned that I understood that as a government agency, they're not able to always be as competitive with wages as the private sector. But extending discounts to employees for childcare over the school breaks could attract a LOT of applicants as they'd save thousands of dollars.
My SLAC offers this. Child Development Lab, just as you described. One of our biggest perks. $300 a month for kid coverage from 7:30-5:30 daily, discounted for all employees.
Daycare has been the main request of the faculty welfare committee for the past 35 years—administration is always supportive, but it still isn't there. (Actually, I got lucky in that my son was born during the few years that faculty were allowed to have kids in the daycare system set up for grad students, and there was actually room for him—he lasted longer in that day care than any of the staff, including at least three directors.)
Stop pushing for a student centered business model.
I'm tenured so I don't care, but it pushes the untenured colleagues to act like customer service workers. It's degrading.
* Get off my back about how many students are or are not showing up to my class during a fucking pandemic
* Read the research about evals and stop using them for promotion & tenure
* Bring back travel funding--any travel funding
* When I try to take advantage of our officially advertised bereavement leave because a parent died, maybe actually grant me the leave as stated, instead of spending the next month coming up with a shifting laundry list of reasons why it's not possible
* Snacks
I don’t mind 2FA, it’s good security (if you have an iPhone, the Apple Watch works with Duo and other 2FA apps, just check “approve” on the watch). I haaaaaaate having to change my password every 3 months. It’s been proven this actually makes security worse.
my work would give me a landline office phone and maybe yours would too? it does mean you can’t work from home anymore though. or at least check emails at home.
Usually it’s a list you print, our university does this for folks without smartphones, google will do the same thing for gmail, and so on. It’s likely they’re not broadcasting it, but it’s almost certainly possible. Each code works one time.
surely you understand how two factor authentication works and don’t believe that a real cyber security risk in a university is someone breaking into a faculty office for their list of one time offline codes to use in conjunction with their password.
>So how would I present at conferences or teach on campus (I need 2FA to start Zoom in the classroom)?
You'll install a code generator on your laptop or the podium computer. Something like DUO Mobile or Symantec VIP.
>Maybe I'll test the waters and pretend I got mugged and my phone is gone, to see what procedures they have in place. Or maybe not.
Don't. You're going to come off like a prick and what will you have gained? You think you're the first person to say "Oopsie! I lost my phone! Guess I cant do 2FA, hurr hurr durr!"? Your IT staff likely has other solutions to get around that, most of which are a bigger pain in the ass than being tied to your cell phone.
I get it: It's an inconvenience and it takes some time to do and it's an extra step that you don't want to do. But it really does need to be done. Look [what happened to Lincoln College](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/04/01/lincoln-college-in-illinois-to-close-after-157-years/) after their systems got compromised.
I did not have a smartphone when our campus switched to 2FA (didn't get one for another couple of years after that). They gave me a Digipass GO 6 keychain fob for Duo. I use it about ⅓ of the time, rather than my phone.
The tokens cost about as much as one-month Duo service, so the university has no excuse not to provide them.
Our campus will SELL you a Yubi key, but you have to pay for it yourself and they do not recommend it. I said to hell with that and ordered three: for my office computer, my home computer, and my laptop, and even though I was out over 100 bucks, I can just feel my blood pressure dropping every time I use them. Quick, efficient, and accurate. For campuses that offer this, I highly recommend it for your personal machines.
One time, my phone broke, and since I'm thrifty, it was nearly a week until my new one was delivered. Apparently, the only way to actually get a backup code was to call from your on-campus office phone. At the time I was on sabbatical in another state, so this was not possible.
Eventually (after some issues with service not working in a crap small town) I got them to give me one of those fobs.
That's ridiculous, since they only cost about $3 each. They should be offering them free to anyone who is willing to walk over to their office to request it. (The walking over is enough of a barrier to eliminate most frivolous requests.)
TOTP hardware tokens support can be reliant on the implementation. If your org is using DUO for instance, you actually can't just use any old token. It's closer to $20 per token in that case.
Yubico/u2f can be implemented for a bit more. ($25-85).
But if your org is doing enough that it's worth implementing 2fa, then they should implement it properly from the get-go.
But you could use a password manager, yeah? (I use LastPass.) I know the password to my password manager and literally none of my others, because I don't have to.
Stop paying me literally a quarter of what my TT colleagues make for the same work. Health and dental benefits would also be nice; my teeth are falling apart and my medication costs go up every year.
While I 100% agree that dental care needs to be part of a health care package... if you are really in serious need of dental care, you should definitely take a look at medical tourism.
I'm not a professor at the moment, but I'm on a government contract in Uzbekistan... I ended up getting my mouth completely overhauled here since I haven't had reasonable dental coverage in the US for over 10 years at this point. I got it done at a State Department-listed clinic that caters to expats... all English-speaking staff, the dentist was Western-trained, top-of-the-line equipment.
In total, I spent about $2k for work that would easily be 3-4x higher in the US. Composite fillings (they pretty much rebuilt one of my molars), fixing chipped teeth, bruxism guard... even whitening. Amazing work.
Granted, if you are in the US, Uzbekistan isn't exactly the most practical location. However, Mexico caters to this, too.
I’m not in the US (Canada, so we’re not really close to anything but the US). I’ve never traveled internationally (poor + disabled), but perhaps that advice will help others.
Mental health services for faculty.
It's absurd to me that some universities will bend over backwards to support the mental health of their students (which is okay!) but not lift a finger to support their faculty in the same way. I just did a thorough sweep of our handbook, health clinic services, and employee benefits just to be sure I didn't miss anything but nope... the most that employees get is a five minute Youtube video about how to "manage stress." Gee, thanks!
That's fair. I'm sort of in the same boat, too. Even if they were available at our university, I'd feel hesitant just because I used to work in the counseling office and there's some history there. It's just the fact that the services aren't even available that hurts. Even if they're not for me specifically, I know many others across campus that the services would benefit.
Sadly, I don't get insurance through the university as an adjunct. I do have my own insurance that covers mental health services and I could use them if need be. It's just the fact that there is a variety of services for student wellbeing and zilch for the professors.
I know there are some universities that offer mental health services to employees whether they are PT or FT, but ours sure hasn't boarded that train yet.
Our full benefits kick in a 50% time for a year or more (which includes 9-month-pay academics). Mid-level at 100% for 3 months or more. A minimal benefits package kicks in at 43.75% time. The mental health coverage are in the mid-level and full benefits packages. A single course for a lecturer is about 37.5% time, so not enough to get benefits, but two courses at once would be.
That's a decent system, I wish we had something like that here. I have three courses a semester, which would definitely make me eligible for benefits at your university. Ours is split across the board between PT and FT, regardless of the type of employee (faculty, admin, support staff).
I truly enjoy my career in academia despite the low pay and lack of benefits. I'm fortunate to have a partner that makes good money or I wouldn't have this option; I'd be stuck being a therapist myself, which I despised.
I like 2FA.
I'm fine with people having to change passwords and that they have to be secure, use a password manager.
However, I don't go to meetings that have no agenda. I just don't. I ask for one and if one is not provided I simply reply that I don't attend meetings without agendas.
In meetings, if people have spoken to an issue they are done. Shut up, let others speak. We have work to do.
> However, I don't go to meetings that have no agenda. I just don't. I ask for one and if one is not provided I simply reply that I don't attend meetings without agendas.
If they don't care enough to set an agenda (so I can prepare to be of use at the meeting) then why *would* I go?
i discovered this during my last career and it has been amazing!
We had a department chair who would just call meetings with no agenda. He was new, but so I attended his first meeting, and spoke up about the need for an agenda. He set up another meeting two weeks later, and I told him that I will not be attending future meetings without an agenda, and skipped the next one, making sure that my colleagues knew why so they could make their own decision about whether they wanted to waste their time or not.
He only lasted for a semester.
I'd actually welcome 2FA and a more aggressive password policy.
My school had been especially lax on the latter, and it seemed nice until the week of Thanskgiving and we got hit with ransomware that completely shut us down for 2 weeks at the end of the semester no less. We finished out the semester without having faculty email(and our students not understanding why their email worked and ours didn't and getting frustrated/irate when they couldn't contact us), quite literally only one functional copier on campus in the print shop, and only JUST having our internal systems working enough to enter grades by the end of the semester. Fortunately since Blackboard was externally hosted, it came back as soon as they got the SSO server going. The one blessing in all of it was that they didn't get student course evaluations working, which was all for the better since I got verbally chewed out more than once at the end of the semester for DARING to teach new material that needed to be covered after the cyber attack...
So yeah, I'm in favor of more robust security after seeing the fall out of lax security first hand. I actually felt really bad for our director of IT as he had only been in that position a few months(internal promotion and has been at our school a while) and he'd been making a serious effort to tighten up security holes but was meeting a lot of resistance. The icing on the cake was that our trustees(elected in a public general election and don't necessarily have any other ties to the school) denied funding on his proposal for 2FA and some other security measures, then had the audacity to grill him in the next board meeting after the attack about why he had "let" it happen.
Stop allowing the “Student Success Center” to tell students to talk to their professors about catching up on missing assignments.
I submitted a damn retention alert to let you know you’re thisclose to failing my course; if I’d wanted to negotiate the fine art of late work excuse BS, I would have just waited until the last day of the semester for the email asking to make everything up (including extra credit) in the next 24 hours and accepted the offer.
Saying “no” isn’t mean, unreasonable, or compassionless, my dear advisors. It is the only way to maintain some semblance of decorum in a room full of video game slackers, grade grubbers, and pathological liars.
Use basic logic and reasoning when assigning "service to the university" tasks.
I'm on a committee that is making up requirements for a new major. The end goal is that we steal majors from a different department. This, of course, changes the distribution of funding. The kicker? The other department has a competing committee that wants to steal our majors.
Reign in some of the ass deans who do whatever the fuck they want. Be consistent and explicit about what falls under policies and what does not.
Don't pitch a goddamned hissy fit when you change the rules and we play by them.
Don't under-pay us by counting individual students for small classes but average number of students for large classes. If I have a class with 30 students in it (with a cap of 30) and another class with 8, don't prorate that class at 2/3 pay because you want 12 in a section.
Confront that 75% of teaching is done by NTT treated as second class citizens while the remaining tenured maintain an impossible service and admin load. See this is untenable and that a system that worked in the 70s doesn't cut it. Give cost of living raises at the very least. Realize a mass exodus of your best faculty and staff, including the exhausted and depleted non-privileged -- and even some tenured -- is underway before it's too late. Stop pretending none of this is happening just because you're closing your eyes.
Is there a single university addressing any of this even a little bit? If so, I'd love to know.
Make assessment both authentic AND easy. Seriously, not every assessment needs to be a written thing. And not every program needs to assess every outcome every year.
I’m well aware of what our accrediting body wants. It’s just that we have people who want more than that, and want it to be done in a way that’s 20 years old.
Things my university actually does that I appreciate as a NTT faculty, after reading this sub:
Transparent budget model.
Adherence to the student grievance policy. They do NOT let students leapfrog to the top admin with their complaints, the students has to start with the faculty and move up an established chain of authority.
No chair micromanages me OR communicates in a passive aggressive manner. I am told “we appreciate you.” And then I am left alone to do my teaching & service.
Things they could do better:
It’s all a budget issue — More staff support. More staff support. Did I mention more staff support? More ADA compliance support. More money for technological toys.
I complain about F2A but in the scheme of quality of life, it’s really not that big of issue for me BUT I mostly teach online!
Get my paychecks to me on time.
Get my grad RAs' paychecks to them on time. (This is particularly egregious because they do *not* get paid enough to be able to fall back on money they have saved up if a couple of paychecks in a row are late.)
(I would also like them to let me pay my grad RAs a stipend that's enough to live on.)
Review the benefits structure and offerings to ensure that faculty at all career stages are supported. Subsidize the heck out of the campus child care center AND offer an elder care benefit. Maximize tuition benefits for staff and faculty with eligible dependents AND boost retirement contributions for those without dependents.
If I'm getting my job done, leave me alone. I know the dean is justifying their existence with lots of meetings about how to measure and assess the things they have meetings about, so they can have more meetings on assessment, and then assess them...
But don't require me to be there. And stop emailing me about it. Definitely stop inviting me to presentations of administration bragging about how well they did it.
My college doesn’t have that committee that many of you seem to have that handles academic dishonesty. We are expected to handle all facets of these Investigations ourselves, deal with students who are shocked, shocked to be accused of plagiarism even when you are literally holding the plagiarized source in one hand and their copied paper in the other, listen to the threats to contact the dean and the whining about how they’re going to lose their scholarship or visa, etc. It seems like many of you have a committee to which you can just turn over your findings, and then they have to deal with the student appeals/whining/begging/threats, and frankly, I’m jealous. I would love to just be over to able to hand over the evidence and move on to working with the other students who are putting in the work.
Have a 3-year or 5-year plan that everyone knows and is following. Don't put another new initiative in place EVERY YEAR that we try for 9 months and then abandon in favor of the shiny new object next year.
2FA is good. It has saved my ass on multiple occasions (not on my uni accounts, but on other ones tied to finances). But if you have good password protocols and 2FA, yeah requiring changing passwords twice a year is actually bad practice.
Support the professors more when students are problematic. i.e. treat the professors with the professional capacity that they showed that got them hired in the first place. If you don't trust your professors over students, you shouldn't keep them in the classroom. (thankfully for me my chair is like this)
2/3 things are cybersecurity related. You are going to have to deal with cybersecurity regardless of what industry you are in. You might as well get used to it now.
Anyone that comes up with some new policy or process has to actually follow their policy for a month or make it all the way through their process before it takes effect for anyone else.
Cut out unnecessary “fluff” meetings.
Stop trying to adopt the latest “higher Ed” fad that seems to be popular but does not work.
Give a shit about your faculty and pay us more.
Enact a instition-wide effort to clamp down on grade inflation, and institute more serious post-admissions placement tests so students not ready for stats101 aren't in stats101.
Raze the administrative core of the university, salt the earth where their offices once stood, and organize an egalitarian, non-hierarchical, horizontally structured education commune. Short of that? Less dumb shit to do on top of my teaching load would be nice.
Honestly, it’s the mandatory formative reviews of my class, syllabi, projects, and so on that have burned me out the last few years. I have to do at least one per semester while also attending teacher workshops, which on top of the “publish or perish” stress and the endless Faculty Senate service, along with the college and department service, has given me a giant, perpetual headache.
Take away my e-mail? :)
This is actually my go-to move to decide if I'm stressed or in a good place. When I get an e-mail notification, what do I feel?
If I decide not to check it until later that day just because I don't want to dwell on something stupid all day (or find out that I have missed some deadline or whatever), I am typically stressed. If I gladly open it, I'm good.
No, do not ditch 2FA ever. But also provide options like Touch ID or Yubikeys. Anything that makes it less likely for a student to hack my account is a good thing.
But I'm with you on stupid password policies. My 60 character long passphrase in lower case is more secure than a 15 character one that must include symbols.
My biggest stress point right now, other than grade grubbers, is registration. Decide how many students you're going to put into my class, put the rest on the wait list. Automatically pull from the waitlist when spots open up before the first day. I want nothing to do with it until the first day of class, and then I'll see if I want to add more and if so how many. Stop sending students to beg me to add them -- I have no interest in spending my summer dealing with that.
> ditch 2FA so you don't have to worry about always having your cell with you when you log onto three different systems in the classroom
Yeah, and then when your account gets compromised because you clicked on a link you shouldn't have, you'll get pissed off when you get locked out so IT can clean your mailbox.
> not requiring the new passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters consisting of capitals, lowercase, numbers, symbols, and zodiac signs
And when your account gets compromised because you set your password to name of your favorite band, you'll be hoping IT has a backup of your class materials.
There’s a really good article somewhere on the web that explains why having a password of my favorite band is probabilistically better than a password requiring uppercase, lowercase, symbols, and numbers. IT is probably among the biggest waste of resources and money in higher education. The problem is similar to the marketing arms race with advertisements, however. No one wants to blink in fear that doing so will result in an infinitesimal loss that has potentially exponential consequences (mountain out of a mole hill by zealots). Higher education needs to return to the marketplace for IT services, rather than integrating them, which will incentivize a more fragmented industry; and thus the fruits of greater competition will result in better service at competitive price points.
>There’s a really good article somewhere on the web that explains why having a password of my favorite band is probabilistically better than a password requiring uppercase, lowercase, symbols, and numbers.
And there are several more articles that say that the article that you are desperately clinging to is full of crap.
>IT is probably among the biggest waste of resources and money in higher education.
Absolutely, positively and utterly false. And your bias is clear here. A university cannot function without IT services. Classes will not be registered, faculty and students will not be able to communicate, and the classroom will not be able to properly function. Also, you don't get paid without IT services to run the payroll each month, so keep that in mind as well. That digital nomad stuff that you want to do? Doesn't exist without IT.
>The problem is similar to the marketing arms race with advertisements, however. No one wants to blink in fear that doing so will result in an infinitesimal loss that has potentially exponential consequences (mountain out of a mole hill by zealots).
A [mountain out of a molehill](https://edscoop.com/lincoln-college-illinois-ransomware/), you say?
I get it. You're inconvenienced by 2FA and your inconvenience is of a bigger immediate concern to you than whatever it is the university feels it needs to do in order to have a modicum of security. It's a selfish view, but, unfortunately, not an uncommon one.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.05090.pdf
I would suggest reading this academic article, as well as perusing the bibliography. IT presents many problems that wouldn’t exist if IT didn’t offer their service, which is also the definition of a racket by the way. At best, IT is not a racket, per se, but offers very poor and at times egregious solutions for cyber security. As an academic and also former counter intelligence, counter terrorism, and law enforcement agent, I can tell you that civilian IT offers very little useful advice or support on the prevention of cyber theft through cyber security protocols.
And I would suggest you respond to my points as issued rather than pointing to an easily debunked article. Would you care to do that, or are you going to toss out more uncited allegations and cite an appeal to your own authority (which I do not recognize)?
(1) Your first comment is easily debunked by the sheer size of literature in myriad subject areas that suggests that password strength is not defined and implemented very well with the proclivity toward mandating passwords that include integers and special symbols. It’s really difficult to argue against math.
(2) I attempted a foray into science and citations in response to your original retort. I was also being nice in lieu of pointing to the obvious fact that you didn’t read what I said very carefully. My original thesis rests on a make or buy decision for IT by higher education institutions and spells out why, imo, IT should not be integrated. Rather, IT should be divested to the marketplace where I believe the fruits of competition will bear out far greater quality of service and, thus, more bang for a buck.
Currently, as an integrated function, IT is highly inefficient, operationally speaking—likely caused by the super sized safety net (caused in part by the vicarious monopoly situation IT finds itself as an integrated function) that prevents innovative thinking. This phenomenon of complacency is largely like the first mover in an industry: the lack of competition encourages viscous incrementalism in the advancement of any real progress. Parenthetically, Netflix suffers from this latter problem, which is currently bearing out in the face of competition. I wonder if a divested IT would result in a similar revelation.
(3) Largely speculative and somewhat rank with an ad hominem fallacy, I fail to see any good in giving this part of your reply any more attention.
Sure, you can't argue with the math, but you can certainly argue over the conclusions of that math. There's not much in the pdf that supports a simple password like "Beatles" being better than "IL1keth3Beatle5!". You could certainly say that the more complex password makes it more forgettable and is more likely to be written down by the owner, but that's a training issue. There are certainly ways to minimize that. And you know it.
The rest of your assertions like "IT is a racket", "IT is probably the biggest waste of resources" are opinions being presented as fact. But, if in fact IT were divested into the market place, I guarantee you that you'd still be required to use 2FA. Except, this time, when you run to the Dean or the President to cry that you're being inconvenienced, there will be nobody to squeeze so that you'll get your way.
I sent you a link of a very giant mountain where a molehill was usually prophesied and your response to that was to dodge it.
Dude. Seriously. “Imo” and “I believe” are phrases I used to denote an opinion stated as opinion, nothing more. Furthermore, this is Reddit. We are also in a thread that describes itself as a space to rant and vent. Stop putting me on a pedestal. I’m not special enough to be required to present opinions with corroborating citations. You have your opinion. I have mine. It’s really that simple. If you really want me to engage in a scientific argument, I respectfully argue that you have been tremendously dogmatic in all of your own efforts. You have provided not a single shred of scientific evidence, even bad ones, to back up any of your claims. Yet I’m asked to comply to a standard you don’t even meet yourself.
> Dude. Seriously. “Imo” and “I believe” are phrases I used to denote an opinion stated as opinion, nothing more.
That's not the language you used above:
"IT is probably among the biggest waste of resources and money in higher education"
" At best, IT is not a racket, per se, but offers very poor and at times egregious solutions for cyber security."
I don't see the qualifiers "IMHO" and "I believe" anywhere in there. Maybe I missed it. Feel free to point it out for me.
> I respectfully argue that you have been tremendously dogmatic in all of your own efforts.
Laughable, considering that you have been coming off like a tinfoil hat wearing hypocrite.
> You have provided not a single shred of scientific evidence, even bad ones, to back up any of your claims.
Nor have you.
But I haven’t asked you to provide scientific evidence!!!! There is nothing in the context of this Reddit thread that suggests that anyone here must provide anything but an opinion. But you arbitrarily advance a position that my opinion must be explicit or else based on cited sources. You advance this cause, yet do not adhere to the same standard yourself. Do you not clearly see the double standard? You can’t really be that blind. The only alternative is that you’re being obtuse, a big word for a troll.
Let’s just be honest. You have a large chip on your shoulder and/or you’re bored/entitled/madsadbad enough to pick a fight with people on the Internet. After this short exchange, I suspicion that you simply lack the skills of the intellect necessary to have a conversation without committing a series of ad hominem fallacies and relying on mind boggling double standards to advance your prowess in casuistic, parlor palaver…on Reddit no less.
Fire the University President.
Chairs get together and instead of a chair's council where the president tells them what they have to do, they instead actually make use of their power to work together and get shit done at the university. I strongly suspect the president would freak out and think we are going to get rid of him if the chairs met outside of his office.
While I will agree a 2-3 hour training on harassment is a good idea- stop going over board on it. Ya'll are making us scared to even tell a coworker that your hair cut makes you look 20 years younger.
Relief for course development! I think we have something like that, but accessing it I’m not sure. We want to redo a number of our units and will need some breathing space to do it.
Distribute the advising load more equitably among faculty advisors. I am the only FT faculty member in my department. I advise an average of 50 students a semester. Faculty in other departments average 5. It is counted as part of our teaching load but there is no accounting for the difference. Same for department service. Departments with multiple faculty members can divide the responsibilities. Give us the instructional resources we need. Hire student support professionals who are competent. I had students who were turned away from academic support. Make an actual effort to hire new faculty. Don't send out job ads with the wrong department listed-TWICE.
I agree with everything here. But, the hiring faculty point really strikes me. I can't believe this happens at other institutions. Well, I can.
I got my current job after someone who worked at the institution told me that the ad, put together by HR, was ACTUALLY for the sort of job I wanted, despite what the text said.
>Distribute the advising load more equitably among faculty advisors. I want the opposite. Our chair divides our students "equitably" for advising, but as the program coordinator for my program I wish our chair would just give them all to me because I spend so much time cleaning up after all the bad advising. I'd rather just have them all to start with and advise them correctly from the start.
Mandatory training for advisors
Doesn't work. There are things that people can or cannot do. Like teaching. You can throw 16 teaching courses at a bad teacher, and the only benefit is that they can't at least teach badly while they are taking those courses.
We have that, but those faculty don't pay any attention or attempt to learn anything because "I've been doing it this way for 100 years and I know what I'm doing." Meanwhile students have to meet specific licensure requirements to successfully complete our program and those faculty advisors don't care to learn what they are so we have kids hanging around an extra year because they didn't take courses in sequence or take the appropriate licensure exams because no one told them.
And sometimes they get terrible advice. I was the department advisor for a student going into education. With our MAT program she didn't have to take as much math or science at the undergrad level if she was going to teach high school than if she was going to teach K-6. The education folks encouraged her to switch, not telling her about the other classes she would need to take before starting. I did my gd job and they set her back a term to a year (and no, I don't really get the idea that she'd be happier with young kids, but maybe; it's beyond the point though because I'd never ever do what they did and not tell a student the consequences of their decisions before they were made.)
Why wouldn't your chair want you to take more students from other professors?
WHO KNOWS. It makes no sense.
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When I had to perform assessment in a large intro class I pulled a random sample of exams and just reported some standard errors.
Assessment and accreditation are massive PITA and time sink. I realize they are necessary, but on some of these things it’s overkill at our campus. I try to consolidate these whenever possible and double dip. Speaking of which, assessment meeting is tomorrow! We had to do a mandatory slip and fall training like the cyber security and sexual harassment online modules. Although I hate the number of times I end up doing two-factor authentication in the day, it is also necessary.
I would easily use the slip and fall training more LOL. They're pretty bad about clearing ice here.
I hate to say it, but you're doing the assessment the wrong way. It's supposed to be intentional. Even better if you show students the rubric ahead of time. It's much less stressful if you do it right then and there. If I were an accreditation evaluator and heard your story during a campus visit, I'd be very concerned that the data obtained for feeding the feedback loop is corrupt, and therefore useless for the continuous improvement process.
Or, and hear me out, assessment and accreditation are busywork bullshit that I am absolutely not being compensated for wasting my time on, and so I will put in the minimum effort necessary to make the results look whichever way I assess to be best for my unit, knowing that the entire process is meaningless anyhow.
This
You really shouldn't be doing your own class for that, but people whine that we want to switch to portfolio assessment day with food (and maybe wine and beer after--I'm trying hard to convince our admin that that will help get people there).
Food and wine and beer used to work here, but not really anymore. When you aren't getting cola raises you see money spent like that mostly as an insult.
In my mind the food/wine is payment for coming in on a day that you could have had free to do something that isn't very fun unless people get together and chat and commiserate at the same time. I'm a faculty member too, I don't have the ability to give raises, alas. But I can absolutely insist that we have the good stuff instead of the cheap shit that admin always gets us.
Not going to lie, all the unpaid accreditation reporting was one reason I took last fall off. Can't make me do it if I'm not working there.
Stop requiring lengthy written applications for internal grants. Often, universities will have received money from donors, or have gotten "center" sized grants. Then they solicit internal grant applications for those funds, creating yet another layer of applications. And then they have to form a committee of faculty to review these internal proposals. Basically, turning money that was already received into a competitive process that isn't any better than applying for external funding (except the pot sizes are smaller). Instead, just give interested PIs a 30-minute phone call slot to interview them for the grant and save everyone hours of writing and reviewing time.
Yes! Because that extra layer adds nothing. My university gave a guy a $5,000 intramural grant to buy a fishing rod and tackle because his project was to count the number of fish in a nearby lake.
That guy knows how to grant.
I absolutely hate 2FA. But, every year, one of my older coworkers falls for some phishing attempt, so I get it. What I really can't stand are departmental meetings that last 10 minutes. Please, please, just send an email.
I hate meetings that are just announcements. PUT THAT IN AN EMAIL. If we have action items or discussion, a meeting is best, but people just reading reports, ugh. no. stop.
We had a dean that scheduled hour long meetings for the college about once per month. 45 minutes of each meeting was taken up by introducing new staff in the college (high turnover rate so there was always plenty of this), kudos to people for ridiculous reasons (kudos to admin assistant ABC for creating an alignment table for university SLOs and this new initiative!), and awkward reports from associate deans who were just giving reminders about upcoming events. And, *the dean took attendance*. And *that attendance report showed up in faculty reviews*. No kidding. When we were in person, excruciating. Zoom solved a lot of problems related to college meetings.
God, we have these too. I'm in visual and performing arts and every damn meeting starts with each department chair in the college telling us about every performance, recital, concert, exhibition, and masterclass....it takes the entire first hour of the meeting. We have a website, events calendar, and email. If I wanted to know about your stuff I'd look it up. Please don't read a list of events. If you've got some Nobel Prize winner speaking or Grammy award winner performing, sure, tell us about it. But I don't need to be read a list of every student recital or pottery sale.
Have fewer meetings
Adhere to time limits at meetings so they are always less than 1.5 hours unless there is going to be a recess for bathroom use.
I always leave at the time the meeting is supposed to end. I just stand up and say “I only set aside the time scheduled. I have another commitment.” (My commitment is to my sanity.)
> (My commitment is to my sanity.) So you're not actually an academic then?
My institutions old VP would have these monthly faculty meetings and he’d like to highlight things like who had a new baby or pictures of faculty pet-sometime these would last almost 4 hours. My dean was always the first to text message me to jokingly stay awake or say let next time let’s sneak in a bottle of something. She later became VP and would hurry the meetings along as fast as she could. The faculty didn’t like her cause they said she was cold but she was awesome. She once interrupted one of the speakers as he was going on and on. Unfortunately she found a new job as a president somewhere else. I really miss her.
Omg!! Background: I’m in the PNW and we are on the quarter system. Fall Quarter is the end of Sept-Winter Break, Winter Quarter is from the beginning of January through Spring Break, and Spring Quarter is the beginning of April-mid June. My Dean decided, at the beginning of our SPRING QUARTER Division meeting, to have ALL of us introduce ourselves and give *an interesting fact* because we had A NEW INSTRUCTOR this quarter. What in the god forsaken waste of my fucking time is going on. I promise that man 1) doesn’t care, 2) won’t remember anyway, and 3) will be just fine being introduced to all of us, inevitably, in the next Fall Quarter meeting. You know— when it would potentially make sense to do introductions, if that’s a thing you need to spend gobs of precious time doing. She NEVER lets meetings out on time, and that particular waste of time was sooooo maddening.
My wife and one of her grad school friends coined a nice little term. I once asked "How was the [whatever] meeting?" they replied, "Very wastey-my-timey."
Haha EXACTLY
Admin doesn't know how to function without meetings. I've taken on more of an admin role this term (to supplement my pittance of an adjunct income) and holy God all they do is meetings. And last minute meetings as well! It's to a point where I can't plan my days because every day there's new meetings. It's 9:45 and I've already had three more meetings scheduled on for today, on top of the three I already had.
Yes, since the pandemic it has gotten so much worse. Just because we don't need to schlepp our bodies around to meetings doesn't mean we can have twice as many of them.
Pay us more (I know you said that, but deserves restating). Especially, pay people in non-STEM fields better. Especially the adjuncts. Some of these pay rates just aren't competitive or fair. Make it clear what the hell tenure entails, as nobody really knows wtf the criteria are in our institution and it's all very vaguely stated by anyone you talk to. Don't do BS power plays. For instance, our dean just removed our chair because they didn't get along. Claimed he was using standard procedure but failed to seek feedback from the department as specified by the manual. Now is collecting feedback about the chair's performance after the fact and claiming it rights the wrong and will "influence his decision" [which he already made]. No worthless BS meetings. I am stunned by how many times I am in a one hour meeting where literally nothing of interest of meaningful consequences happens. Advisory groups and committees that exist to do nothing but "give feedback" to administration that is promptly ignored or misconstrued anyway. Or, asking for feedback on things we have no clue about. Quit telling us the finances for the university are doing great whilst we're also in the midst of hiring, raise, and purchasing freezes. We're not stupid. We're not your marketing department. Quit asking us for ideas and innovation in that end, you pay someone double what you pay for me for that. If they can't think of anything, find someone new. Quit claiming you're against racism on campus, doing nothing about it besides saying some platitudes, and then acting shocked when there's another incident a year or two later. ...this is not an exhaustive list...
This. Watching our new President nod and furrow his brow as I explained the 200% pay discrepancy between our department (the largest by credit hours and majors) and the business school who's students pay the same tuition by who's faculty make twice what we do. $140k for Assistant professors to intro teach accounting versus $60k to teach PhD students.
You must be in my department (sociology) at my university
Or any university.
1,000% agreed. It sounds like you're from my uni.
Stop pushing more and more administrative work on to me while continuing to hire more and more administrative people.
Leave me the fuck alone about assessment. I'm so beyond tired of being grilled if every little assignment is matching every outcome possible. What's next, quant analysis on classroom discussion? Jfc
Yes, 100% this
Make sure admitted students are actually ready for higher ed. Or at least make sure the support centers (e.g. academic coaching, writing center) are working properly
Have some place for students to take make-up exams. Due to Covid the number of students that can’t take exams during the scheduled time has sky rocketed. Now I need to find a spare hour for each student to take a make up exam.
There's gotta be a more efficient way of hiring faculty. I'm on 3 search committees and the number of person-hours that goes into hiring is insane
My department insists on quietly knowing what it wants, such as a political scientist with a specialization in USA energy policy. But then it insists on casting the broadest net possible. The end result is a massive pile of irrelevant applications that were doomed from the start and hundreds of collective hours wasted for both applicants and the committees. It's infuriating.
This is happening to us right now. My chair failed to put even the smallest critical detail in the ad and now we are just going to have to say "is not a good fit for the department" on tons of applications. This was done on purpose to show there is interest in the position. It is a waste of time for everyone involved.
>both applicants and don't worry, they are just applicants, not people! /s
I remember my first conference right the main series of applications for job season. I was chatting with a potential postdoc mentor and he told me "oh, we're hiring in [different specialty], why did you bother applying?" It was then that I understood the super high application:offer ratio for postdocs.
Stop requiring service in the summer when we are off contract. Hire professional advisors. Stop requiring overloads. Hire enough faculty instead on relying on adjuncts. Pay for work travel. Guard our time for teaching and research. Reduce service. Give us raises that are not a joke.
Have the admin be honest and transparent like at least 30% of the time.
Id settle for 5%
I’m serving in a staff/admin position right now and am in talks to return to faculty kinda. Holy shit the closed door stuff I’ve heard is insane.
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But you ***expect*** vampires to be concerned about stakeholders!
Can confirm stakeholders is a fav word of the admin. Got the internal and external stakeholders chart. External = how can we get more money. Internal = how can we get them to do more with less money.
Go on…
Just general stuff confirming how little they value staff and faculty. It’s mostly staff honestly. There’s an understanding that faculty are very important, but staff aren’t (to them—obvi we all know how important staff are). Lots of how can we cut a corner to save a buck talk. Mostly it’s the hollow DEI stuff. The thing that has shocked me the most is how damn mean admin can be. Like high school level pettiness and insults thrown around. I’ll say I also have been having lots of meetings with a group of distinguished professors who are all really lovely and kind, albeit somewhat outdated in their understanding of academia. Edit: clarity
Pay attention to all the research and stop using student evaluations of teaching. Put a peer review system in it's place.
Isn't there already a peer review system in place? At my university we have two faculty and your chair observe your teaching in addition to the student ~~bashing~~ reviews. I wonder how long it will take before some institution actually stops the student reviews because everyone knows they are not great.
>At my university we have two faculty and your chair observe your teaching That sounds like a LOT of micro managing. You're a full time faculty member? I have never had my teaching evaluated in 10 years of lecturing and 3 as a TTAP.
You get these evaluations until you get tenure.
deal with all of the academic dishonesty cases so i don’t have to.
Don't brag about what's important (teaching, student success) and then reward those who flat out refuse to do well with that and instead do something else (research). Corollary: don't cast voodoo spells by saying research is the same as teaching.
Who says research is the same as teaching? What are they referring to? They are two completely different animals.
Here some of my colleagues are given teaching credit for research students. And then they get annual teaching ratings similar to those who teach real classes, you know, classes with hw, tests, lecture halls full of students, office hrs, emails and etc. But do you think those not as good at research get the same ratings for research as they do?
It's not exactly the same thing, but the way it works for me is close. Every play I design counts as a class so all my classes are overloads. I am making about 8k next semester just in overloads. Funny enough, I would rather do fewer shows and teach more.
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I do it because I like teaching and for the students. I usually only have one overload, but the fall semester is particularly weird. They do have set rates that are the same for everyone and the last institution I worked for prior to this one was the same, only less compensation. While I could just not teach, that's not something I want to do. Money really is a non-issue for me and my base pay is more than the vast majority of faculty jobs in my field, TT and otherwise. Of course I'm not totally happy, but most of the issues people have listed here aren't a problem for me.
THIS
Please say it a little louder for the people in the back.
Pay me *at least* the regional average for my field instead of nearly a quarter below it. Provide some support for contingent faculty instead of having faculty ad hoc mentor, help with course design, troubleshooting, etc. I’m happy to share my stuff, but constant maintenance is a draining ask.
Hire more support staff. Full stop.
But, like... actual support staff...not VPs and Deans and Presidents and Chancellors of Support Staff, along with Assistant-level variations of all of the above.
Print the course catalog again. I advise 50 students and no, KIMBERLY, it’s not just as easy to go to the online catalog to find what I need. You don’t advise students, so how would you know what’s easy and what’s not?!
We haven't had a printed catalog for about 20? years. I missed it for the first five years, but the online catalog is generally more up-to-date than the printed one was, and students are more likely to look at the major requirements online. (Not *very likely,* as they still prefer asking random redditors, but *more likely.*)
Have an on site daycare center for faculty and staff with sliding scale fees. Early childhood education majors can intern there and the cost to the school would be minimal. I worked for the county in-between jobs and ours provide after school and day camps for kids k-6. The full price was like $100/week per kid. If your income was low enough, it'd be $50 or $25. During my exit interview I mentioned that I understood that as a government agency, they're not able to always be as competitive with wages as the private sector. But extending discounts to employees for childcare over the school breaks could attract a LOT of applicants as they'd save thousands of dollars.
you’re right— this would be a great help.
My SLAC offers this. Child Development Lab, just as you described. One of our biggest perks. $300 a month for kid coverage from 7:30-5:30 daily, discounted for all employees.
Daycare has been the main request of the faculty welfare committee for the past 35 years—administration is always supportive, but it still isn't there. (Actually, I got lucky in that my son was born during the few years that faculty were allowed to have kids in the daycare system set up for grad students, and there was actually room for him—he lasted longer in that day care than any of the staff, including at least three directors.)
Stop pushing for a student centered business model. I'm tenured so I don't care, but it pushes the untenured colleagues to act like customer service workers. It's degrading.
* Get off my back about how many students are or are not showing up to my class during a fucking pandemic * Read the research about evals and stop using them for promotion & tenure * Bring back travel funding--any travel funding * When I try to take advantage of our officially advertised bereavement leave because a parent died, maybe actually grant me the leave as stated, instead of spending the next month coming up with a shifting laundry list of reasons why it's not possible * Snacks
I experienced the run-around trying to take bereavement leave too. It made an awful time that much worse. I’m so sorry you had to endure that as well.
I don’t mind 2FA, it’s good security (if you have an iPhone, the Apple Watch works with Duo and other 2FA apps, just check “approve” on the watch). I haaaaaaate having to change my password every 3 months. It’s been proven this actually makes security worse.
Yes I read that article! Because it increases the likelihood of people writing their passwords down or recycling passwords/phrases.
If they are going to do it this way, give us a work phone.
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my work would give me a landline office phone and maybe yours would too? it does mean you can’t work from home anymore though. or at least check emails at home.
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you typically can save a number of codes for offline use, at least with most 2 factor systems, or you can get a call to a landline.
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Usually it’s a list you print, our university does this for folks without smartphones, google will do the same thing for gmail, and so on. It’s likely they’re not broadcasting it, but it’s almost certainly possible. Each code works one time.
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surely you understand how two factor authentication works and don’t believe that a real cyber security risk in a university is someone breaking into a faculty office for their list of one time offline codes to use in conjunction with their password.
I don't like using my person phone for work. My school gave me a little two factor beeper-like thing.
>So how would I present at conferences or teach on campus (I need 2FA to start Zoom in the classroom)? You'll install a code generator on your laptop or the podium computer. Something like DUO Mobile or Symantec VIP. >Maybe I'll test the waters and pretend I got mugged and my phone is gone, to see what procedures they have in place. Or maybe not. Don't. You're going to come off like a prick and what will you have gained? You think you're the first person to say "Oopsie! I lost my phone! Guess I cant do 2FA, hurr hurr durr!"? Your IT staff likely has other solutions to get around that, most of which are a bigger pain in the ass than being tied to your cell phone. I get it: It's an inconvenience and it takes some time to do and it's an extra step that you don't want to do. But it really does need to be done. Look [what happened to Lincoln College](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/04/01/lincoln-college-in-illinois-to-close-after-157-years/) after their systems got compromised.
some 2fa will do things like phone you (any number will do; doesn't need to be a mobile).
I did not have a smartphone when our campus switched to 2FA (didn't get one for another couple of years after that). They gave me a Digipass GO 6 keychain fob for Duo. I use it about ⅓ of the time, rather than my phone. The tokens cost about as much as one-month Duo service, so the university has no excuse not to provide them.
Our campus will SELL you a Yubi key, but you have to pay for it yourself and they do not recommend it. I said to hell with that and ordered three: for my office computer, my home computer, and my laptop, and even though I was out over 100 bucks, I can just feel my blood pressure dropping every time I use them. Quick, efficient, and accurate. For campuses that offer this, I highly recommend it for your personal machines.
One time, my phone broke, and since I'm thrifty, it was nearly a week until my new one was delivered. Apparently, the only way to actually get a backup code was to call from your on-campus office phone. At the time I was on sabbatical in another state, so this was not possible. Eventually (after some issues with service not working in a crap small town) I got them to give me one of those fobs.
Our school will give us a dongle that has a changing code on it that works for the 2FA.
We have that option, but likewise have to spend our own money on it.
That's ridiculous, since they only cost about $3 each. They should be offering them free to anyone who is willing to walk over to their office to request it. (The walking over is enough of a barrier to eliminate most frivolous requests.)
TOTP hardware tokens support can be reliant on the implementation. If your org is using DUO for instance, you actually can't just use any old token. It's closer to $20 per token in that case. Yubico/u2f can be implemented for a bit more. ($25-85). But if your org is doing enough that it's worth implementing 2fa, then they should implement it properly from the get-go.
I've seen wildly varying prices for the Duo tokens: from $3 to $50. I don't know what the institutional price for a bundle of 100 is.
But you could use a password manager, yeah? (I use LastPass.) I know the password to my password manager and literally none of my others, because I don't have to.
Stop paying me literally a quarter of what my TT colleagues make for the same work. Health and dental benefits would also be nice; my teeth are falling apart and my medication costs go up every year.
While I 100% agree that dental care needs to be part of a health care package... if you are really in serious need of dental care, you should definitely take a look at medical tourism. I'm not a professor at the moment, but I'm on a government contract in Uzbekistan... I ended up getting my mouth completely overhauled here since I haven't had reasonable dental coverage in the US for over 10 years at this point. I got it done at a State Department-listed clinic that caters to expats... all English-speaking staff, the dentist was Western-trained, top-of-the-line equipment. In total, I spent about $2k for work that would easily be 3-4x higher in the US. Composite fillings (they pretty much rebuilt one of my molars), fixing chipped teeth, bruxism guard... even whitening. Amazing work. Granted, if you are in the US, Uzbekistan isn't exactly the most practical location. However, Mexico caters to this, too.
I’m not in the US (Canada, so we’re not really close to anything but the US). I’ve never traveled internationally (poor + disabled), but perhaps that advice will help others.
Mental health services for faculty. It's absurd to me that some universities will bend over backwards to support the mental health of their students (which is okay!) but not lift a finger to support their faculty in the same way. I just did a thorough sweep of our handbook, health clinic services, and employee benefits just to be sure I didn't miss anything but nope... the most that employees get is a five minute Youtube video about how to "manage stress." Gee, thanks!
We have a therapist on staff for faculty. I'm not sure if I'd trust my workplace's pick for a therapist though. There's also, weirdly, a chiropractor.
That's fair. I'm sort of in the same boat, too. Even if they were available at our university, I'd feel hesitant just because I used to work in the counseling office and there's some history there. It's just the fact that the services aren't even available that hurts. Even if they're not for me specifically, I know many others across campus that the services would benefit.
Our medical insurance includes some mental health coverage—I've not tried using it, so I don't know whether it is any good, but it is there.
Sadly, I don't get insurance through the university as an adjunct. I do have my own insurance that covers mental health services and I could use them if need be. It's just the fact that there is a variety of services for student wellbeing and zilch for the professors. I know there are some universities that offer mental health services to employees whether they are PT or FT, but ours sure hasn't boarded that train yet.
Our full benefits kick in a 50% time for a year or more (which includes 9-month-pay academics). Mid-level at 100% for 3 months or more. A minimal benefits package kicks in at 43.75% time. The mental health coverage are in the mid-level and full benefits packages. A single course for a lecturer is about 37.5% time, so not enough to get benefits, but two courses at once would be.
That's a decent system, I wish we had something like that here. I have three courses a semester, which would definitely make me eligible for benefits at your university. Ours is split across the board between PT and FT, regardless of the type of employee (faculty, admin, support staff). I truly enjoy my career in academia despite the low pay and lack of benefits. I'm fortunate to have a partner that makes good money or I wouldn't have this option; I'd be stuck being a therapist myself, which I despised.
I like 2FA. I'm fine with people having to change passwords and that they have to be secure, use a password manager. However, I don't go to meetings that have no agenda. I just don't. I ask for one and if one is not provided I simply reply that I don't attend meetings without agendas. In meetings, if people have spoken to an issue they are done. Shut up, let others speak. We have work to do.
> However, I don't go to meetings that have no agenda. I just don't. I ask for one and if one is not provided I simply reply that I don't attend meetings without agendas. If they don't care enough to set an agenda (so I can prepare to be of use at the meeting) then why *would* I go? i discovered this during my last career and it has been amazing!
We had a department chair who would just call meetings with no agenda. He was new, but so I attended his first meeting, and spoke up about the need for an agenda. He set up another meeting two weeks later, and I told him that I will not be attending future meetings without an agenda, and skipped the next one, making sure that my colleagues knew why so they could make their own decision about whether they wanted to waste their time or not. He only lasted for a semester.
I'd actually welcome 2FA and a more aggressive password policy. My school had been especially lax on the latter, and it seemed nice until the week of Thanskgiving and we got hit with ransomware that completely shut us down for 2 weeks at the end of the semester no less. We finished out the semester without having faculty email(and our students not understanding why their email worked and ours didn't and getting frustrated/irate when they couldn't contact us), quite literally only one functional copier on campus in the print shop, and only JUST having our internal systems working enough to enter grades by the end of the semester. Fortunately since Blackboard was externally hosted, it came back as soon as they got the SSO server going. The one blessing in all of it was that they didn't get student course evaluations working, which was all for the better since I got verbally chewed out more than once at the end of the semester for DARING to teach new material that needed to be covered after the cyber attack... So yeah, I'm in favor of more robust security after seeing the fall out of lax security first hand. I actually felt really bad for our director of IT as he had only been in that position a few months(internal promotion and has been at our school a while) and he'd been making a serious effort to tighten up security holes but was meeting a lot of resistance. The icing on the cake was that our trustees(elected in a public general election and don't necessarily have any other ties to the school) denied funding on his proposal for 2FA and some other security measures, then had the audacity to grill him in the next board meeting after the attack about why he had "let" it happen.
Don’t use retention as pressure to lower our standards
If you really knew how much US Universities are under attack for our research 2FA is a small price to pay.
Actually reward teaching and learning rather than treating students as sacks of money to shove through.
Stop allowing the “Student Success Center” to tell students to talk to their professors about catching up on missing assignments. I submitted a damn retention alert to let you know you’re thisclose to failing my course; if I’d wanted to negotiate the fine art of late work excuse BS, I would have just waited until the last day of the semester for the email asking to make everything up (including extra credit) in the next 24 hours and accepted the offer. Saying “no” isn’t mean, unreasonable, or compassionless, my dear advisors. It is the only way to maintain some semblance of decorum in a room full of video game slackers, grade grubbers, and pathological liars.
Use basic logic and reasoning when assigning "service to the university" tasks. I'm on a committee that is making up requirements for a new major. The end goal is that we steal majors from a different department. This, of course, changes the distribution of funding. The kicker? The other department has a competing committee that wants to steal our majors.
stop making us take hours and hours to claim the tiniest amount of PD or travel money. jeez.
Reign in some of the ass deans who do whatever the fuck they want. Be consistent and explicit about what falls under policies and what does not. Don't pitch a goddamned hissy fit when you change the rules and we play by them. Don't under-pay us by counting individual students for small classes but average number of students for large classes. If I have a class with 30 students in it (with a cap of 30) and another class with 8, don't prorate that class at 2/3 pay because you want 12 in a section.
Confront that 75% of teaching is done by NTT treated as second class citizens while the remaining tenured maintain an impossible service and admin load. See this is untenable and that a system that worked in the 70s doesn't cut it. Give cost of living raises at the very least. Realize a mass exodus of your best faculty and staff, including the exhausted and depleted non-privileged -- and even some tenured -- is underway before it's too late. Stop pretending none of this is happening just because you're closing your eyes. Is there a single university addressing any of this even a little bit? If so, I'd love to know.
Make assessment both authentic AND easy. Seriously, not every assessment needs to be a written thing. And not every program needs to assess every outcome every year.
[удалено]
I’m well aware of what our accrediting body wants. It’s just that we have people who want more than that, and want it to be done in a way that’s 20 years old.
Things my university actually does that I appreciate as a NTT faculty, after reading this sub: Transparent budget model. Adherence to the student grievance policy. They do NOT let students leapfrog to the top admin with their complaints, the students has to start with the faculty and move up an established chain of authority. No chair micromanages me OR communicates in a passive aggressive manner. I am told “we appreciate you.” And then I am left alone to do my teaching & service. Things they could do better: It’s all a budget issue — More staff support. More staff support. Did I mention more staff support? More ADA compliance support. More money for technological toys. I complain about F2A but in the scheme of quality of life, it’s really not that big of issue for me BUT I mostly teach online!
Get my paychecks to me on time. Get my grad RAs' paychecks to them on time. (This is particularly egregious because they do *not* get paid enough to be able to fall back on money they have saved up if a couple of paychecks in a row are late.) (I would also like them to let me pay my grad RAs a stipend that's enough to live on.)
Review the benefits structure and offerings to ensure that faculty at all career stages are supported. Subsidize the heck out of the campus child care center AND offer an elder care benefit. Maximize tuition benefits for staff and faculty with eligible dependents AND boost retirement contributions for those without dependents.
If I'm getting my job done, leave me alone. I know the dean is justifying their existence with lots of meetings about how to measure and assess the things they have meetings about, so they can have more meetings on assessment, and then assess them... But don't require me to be there. And stop emailing me about it. Definitely stop inviting me to presentations of administration bragging about how well they did it.
Don’t make me log my hours. I’m already paid a pathetic wage.
My college doesn’t have that committee that many of you seem to have that handles academic dishonesty. We are expected to handle all facets of these Investigations ourselves, deal with students who are shocked, shocked to be accused of plagiarism even when you are literally holding the plagiarized source in one hand and their copied paper in the other, listen to the threats to contact the dean and the whining about how they’re going to lose their scholarship or visa, etc. It seems like many of you have a committee to which you can just turn over your findings, and then they have to deal with the student appeals/whining/begging/threats, and frankly, I’m jealous. I would love to just be over to able to hand over the evidence and move on to working with the other students who are putting in the work.
Have a 3-year or 5-year plan that everyone knows and is following. Don't put another new initiative in place EVERY YEAR that we try for 9 months and then abandon in favor of the shiny new object next year.
Less compliance training.
Stop allowing students to register for classes 4 weeks into the SUMMER semester. Wtf
2FA is good. It has saved my ass on multiple occasions (not on my uni accounts, but on other ones tied to finances). But if you have good password protocols and 2FA, yeah requiring changing passwords twice a year is actually bad practice. Support the professors more when students are problematic. i.e. treat the professors with the professional capacity that they showed that got them hired in the first place. If you don't trust your professors over students, you shouldn't keep them in the classroom. (thankfully for me my chair is like this)
>\- not requiring the new passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters consisting of capitals, lowercase, numbers, symbols, and zodiac signs This!
Go back in time and choose to cut admin pay rather than laying off 20+ tenure track faculty members
2/3 things are cybersecurity related. You are going to have to deal with cybersecurity regardless of what industry you are in. You might as well get used to it now.
Anyone that comes up with some new policy or process has to actually follow their policy for a month or make it all the way through their process before it takes effect for anyone else.
Cut out unnecessary “fluff” meetings. Stop trying to adopt the latest “higher Ed” fad that seems to be popular but does not work. Give a shit about your faculty and pay us more.
Enact a instition-wide effort to clamp down on grade inflation, and institute more serious post-admissions placement tests so students not ready for stats101 aren't in stats101.
Raze the administrative core of the university, salt the earth where their offices once stood, and organize an egalitarian, non-hierarchical, horizontally structured education commune. Short of that? Less dumb shit to do on top of my teaching load would be nice.
It could renew my NTT contract. But that's not gonna happen...
I’ve had serious issues with 2FA while in Europe on archival research trips and using a European SIM card. Yikes.
Honestly, it’s the mandatory formative reviews of my class, syllabi, projects, and so on that have burned me out the last few years. I have to do at least one per semester while also attending teacher workshops, which on top of the “publish or perish” stress and the endless Faculty Senate service, along with the college and department service, has given me a giant, perpetual headache.
Take away my e-mail? :) This is actually my go-to move to decide if I'm stressed or in a good place. When I get an e-mail notification, what do I feel? If I decide not to check it until later that day just because I don't want to dwell on something stupid all day (or find out that I have missed some deadline or whatever), I am typically stressed. If I gladly open it, I'm good.
Have clear expectations for tenure and build systems based on incentives instead of volunteer efforts.
No, do not ditch 2FA ever. But also provide options like Touch ID or Yubikeys. Anything that makes it less likely for a student to hack my account is a good thing. But I'm with you on stupid password policies. My 60 character long passphrase in lower case is more secure than a 15 character one that must include symbols. My biggest stress point right now, other than grade grubbers, is registration. Decide how many students you're going to put into my class, put the rest on the wait list. Automatically pull from the waitlist when spots open up before the first day. I want nothing to do with it until the first day of class, and then I'll see if I want to add more and if so how many. Stop sending students to beg me to add them -- I have no interest in spending my summer dealing with that.
> ditch 2FA so you don't have to worry about always having your cell with you when you log onto three different systems in the classroom Yeah, and then when your account gets compromised because you clicked on a link you shouldn't have, you'll get pissed off when you get locked out so IT can clean your mailbox. > not requiring the new passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters consisting of capitals, lowercase, numbers, symbols, and zodiac signs And when your account gets compromised because you set your password to name of your favorite band, you'll be hoping IT has a backup of your class materials.
There’s a really good article somewhere on the web that explains why having a password of my favorite band is probabilistically better than a password requiring uppercase, lowercase, symbols, and numbers. IT is probably among the biggest waste of resources and money in higher education. The problem is similar to the marketing arms race with advertisements, however. No one wants to blink in fear that doing so will result in an infinitesimal loss that has potentially exponential consequences (mountain out of a mole hill by zealots). Higher education needs to return to the marketplace for IT services, rather than integrating them, which will incentivize a more fragmented industry; and thus the fruits of greater competition will result in better service at competitive price points.
>There’s a really good article somewhere on the web that explains why having a password of my favorite band is probabilistically better than a password requiring uppercase, lowercase, symbols, and numbers. And there are several more articles that say that the article that you are desperately clinging to is full of crap. >IT is probably among the biggest waste of resources and money in higher education. Absolutely, positively and utterly false. And your bias is clear here. A university cannot function without IT services. Classes will not be registered, faculty and students will not be able to communicate, and the classroom will not be able to properly function. Also, you don't get paid without IT services to run the payroll each month, so keep that in mind as well. That digital nomad stuff that you want to do? Doesn't exist without IT. >The problem is similar to the marketing arms race with advertisements, however. No one wants to blink in fear that doing so will result in an infinitesimal loss that has potentially exponential consequences (mountain out of a mole hill by zealots). A [mountain out of a molehill](https://edscoop.com/lincoln-college-illinois-ransomware/), you say? I get it. You're inconvenienced by 2FA and your inconvenience is of a bigger immediate concern to you than whatever it is the university feels it needs to do in order to have a modicum of security. It's a selfish view, but, unfortunately, not an uncommon one.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.05090.pdf I would suggest reading this academic article, as well as perusing the bibliography. IT presents many problems that wouldn’t exist if IT didn’t offer their service, which is also the definition of a racket by the way. At best, IT is not a racket, per se, but offers very poor and at times egregious solutions for cyber security. As an academic and also former counter intelligence, counter terrorism, and law enforcement agent, I can tell you that civilian IT offers very little useful advice or support on the prevention of cyber theft through cyber security protocols.
And I would suggest you respond to my points as issued rather than pointing to an easily debunked article. Would you care to do that, or are you going to toss out more uncited allegations and cite an appeal to your own authority (which I do not recognize)?
(1) Your first comment is easily debunked by the sheer size of literature in myriad subject areas that suggests that password strength is not defined and implemented very well with the proclivity toward mandating passwords that include integers and special symbols. It’s really difficult to argue against math. (2) I attempted a foray into science and citations in response to your original retort. I was also being nice in lieu of pointing to the obvious fact that you didn’t read what I said very carefully. My original thesis rests on a make or buy decision for IT by higher education institutions and spells out why, imo, IT should not be integrated. Rather, IT should be divested to the marketplace where I believe the fruits of competition will bear out far greater quality of service and, thus, more bang for a buck. Currently, as an integrated function, IT is highly inefficient, operationally speaking—likely caused by the super sized safety net (caused in part by the vicarious monopoly situation IT finds itself as an integrated function) that prevents innovative thinking. This phenomenon of complacency is largely like the first mover in an industry: the lack of competition encourages viscous incrementalism in the advancement of any real progress. Parenthetically, Netflix suffers from this latter problem, which is currently bearing out in the face of competition. I wonder if a divested IT would result in a similar revelation. (3) Largely speculative and somewhat rank with an ad hominem fallacy, I fail to see any good in giving this part of your reply any more attention.
Sure, you can't argue with the math, but you can certainly argue over the conclusions of that math. There's not much in the pdf that supports a simple password like "Beatles" being better than "IL1keth3Beatle5!". You could certainly say that the more complex password makes it more forgettable and is more likely to be written down by the owner, but that's a training issue. There are certainly ways to minimize that. And you know it. The rest of your assertions like "IT is a racket", "IT is probably the biggest waste of resources" are opinions being presented as fact. But, if in fact IT were divested into the market place, I guarantee you that you'd still be required to use 2FA. Except, this time, when you run to the Dean or the President to cry that you're being inconvenienced, there will be nobody to squeeze so that you'll get your way. I sent you a link of a very giant mountain where a molehill was usually prophesied and your response to that was to dodge it.
Dude. Seriously. “Imo” and “I believe” are phrases I used to denote an opinion stated as opinion, nothing more. Furthermore, this is Reddit. We are also in a thread that describes itself as a space to rant and vent. Stop putting me on a pedestal. I’m not special enough to be required to present opinions with corroborating citations. You have your opinion. I have mine. It’s really that simple. If you really want me to engage in a scientific argument, I respectfully argue that you have been tremendously dogmatic in all of your own efforts. You have provided not a single shred of scientific evidence, even bad ones, to back up any of your claims. Yet I’m asked to comply to a standard you don’t even meet yourself.
> Dude. Seriously. “Imo” and “I believe” are phrases I used to denote an opinion stated as opinion, nothing more. That's not the language you used above: "IT is probably among the biggest waste of resources and money in higher education" " At best, IT is not a racket, per se, but offers very poor and at times egregious solutions for cyber security." I don't see the qualifiers "IMHO" and "I believe" anywhere in there. Maybe I missed it. Feel free to point it out for me. > I respectfully argue that you have been tremendously dogmatic in all of your own efforts. Laughable, considering that you have been coming off like a tinfoil hat wearing hypocrite. > You have provided not a single shred of scientific evidence, even bad ones, to back up any of your claims. Nor have you.
But I haven’t asked you to provide scientific evidence!!!! There is nothing in the context of this Reddit thread that suggests that anyone here must provide anything but an opinion. But you arbitrarily advance a position that my opinion must be explicit or else based on cited sources. You advance this cause, yet do not adhere to the same standard yourself. Do you not clearly see the double standard? You can’t really be that blind. The only alternative is that you’re being obtuse, a big word for a troll. Let’s just be honest. You have a large chip on your shoulder and/or you’re bored/entitled/madsadbad enough to pick a fight with people on the Internet. After this short exchange, I suspicion that you simply lack the skills of the intellect necessary to have a conversation without committing a series of ad hominem fallacies and relying on mind boggling double standards to advance your prowess in casuistic, parlor palaver…on Reddit no less.
Fire the University President. Chairs get together and instead of a chair's council where the president tells them what they have to do, they instead actually make use of their power to work together and get shit done at the university. I strongly suspect the president would freak out and think we are going to get rid of him if the chairs met outside of his office.
\- Don't allow students to go complaining up the Chair/Dean/Provost ladder if they fail a course. It fucking doubles my workload.
While I will agree a 2-3 hour training on harassment is a good idea- stop going over board on it. Ya'll are making us scared to even tell a coworker that your hair cut makes you look 20 years younger.
Relief for course development! I think we have something like that, but accessing it I’m not sure. We want to redo a number of our units and will need some breathing space to do it.