Many colleges and universities want to attract a more diverse work force and foster greater inclusivity in their faculty and administrative ranks, but don't know how. The Chronicle wants to help, so we've recast the weekly On Hiring newsletter and we're sharing stories, news, and data from around the web aimed at helping hiring managers and recruiters make better, more informed decisions about diversity hiring at their institutions and across higher education generally. Here are some highlights from the weekly newsletter. If you'd like to receive the new and improved On Hiring and Diversity newsletter, sign up here.
Punctuation is really an elementary and intuitive idea. Sentences are written down as a linear sequence of characters that (mostly) represent speech sounds. Punctuation marks are inserted in the sequence to signal certain aspects of the structure of their covert grammatical structure; they do what those little musical interludes do in NPR’s Morning Edition program.
This report explores undergraduate students’ involvement at The Ohio State University’s Columbus campus based on Student Life Survey data collected during Spring Semester 2016. The report focuses on differences between domestic and international students’ levels of engagement and belonging on campus. Specifically, this report examines students’ overall involvement in a range of co-curricular activities, their reasons for getting involved, their participation in different types of student organizations, their participation as student leaders and students’ sense of belonging at The Ohio State University.
Study finds gender of instructors influences evaluations they receive, even if they have fooled students (in an online course) about whether they are men or women.
I have a question about cover letters. In your blog posts and book, you stress the importance of putting research first in a cover letter for positions at research-oriented institutions, and teaching first for openings at teaching-oriented colleges. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell which camp an institution falls under. Any advice?
Indeed, in presenting yourself as a desirable job candidate for a particular institution, it is imperative that your application materials align you with the main focus — the main mission, if you will — of the place to which you are applying. The cover letter is the first indicator that you understand what will make you both effective and tenurable at a given institution, and search committees looking to fill a tenure-track position want to be sure they "spend" that tenure line on someone who will be successful.
I arrived at my Monday-evening seminar 10 minutes early to set up, get my bearings, and chat a little with the students before class started. While I was fiddling around on my laptop, a student spoke up from the middle of the room: "Professor Lang, I couldn’t see the feedback you gave us on our last papers."
Two years ago, I began grading papers via my college’s learning-management system (LMS, for short). I had evaluated the first round of papers in my senior seminar the previous week. Yet according to this student, while she could see her grade, she couldn’t read either my comments on the paper or my end note, in which I give instructions on how students might improve their next papers.
The history of rankings stretches back to the late 19th century, but it is the intensification of globalisation that has been the most powerful force and explanation for their emergence and success since the turn of the millennium.
Today, as the distribution of economic activity and scientific collaboration has become increasingly international, higher education has been transformed from a local institution into a global actor. It sits at the fulcrum of the geopolitical struggle for a greater share of the global market and the new world-order, facilitating increasing concentrations of wealth and resources and greater hierarchical differentiation and social stratification
Many people decide to get a Ph.D. because they feel a strong personal connection to the subject matter. Thinking, writing and talking with people who appreciate a subject or field of study as much as you feels validating. For some, the discovery of that subject may have clarified a sense of educational purpose. Perhaps it even illuminated a sense of individual purpose or a frame through which the world makes more sense.
Of course, not everyone feels that way about the material they research and teach during graduate school. But for those who do, it can be easy to tie one’s sense of identity to the academic enterprise. “I am a scholar of 19th-century German painting.” “I am an ecologist.” Rather than “I am currently teaching a course on the figure of the child in British poetry.” Or “Right now I am working on understanding the how the charter school movement impacts social mobility for low-income children.”
A Q&A with Peter Cornish of Memorial University on the Stepped Care model, which he hopes will get everyone on campus to be part of the support system for those dealing with mental health issues.
In 2014, Peter Cornish helped the Student Wellness and Counselling Centre at Memorial University launch the Stepped
Care program. With this model, the level of intensity of care is matched to the complexity of the condition. When someone
says they are stressed, or they are not feeling happy, then society tends to say, “Okay, go see a psychologist,” said Dr.
Cornish, who is director of the counselling centre. However, not everyone needs to see a therapist all of the time. The Stepped
Care model brings in many other “low intensity” options for the patient that are readily available in the community, but which
we’re often not making use of. University Affairs sat down with Dr. Cornish to find out more about the Stepped Care model and
why universities should consider it.
A few weeks ago, I had a good experience using a new educational-technology tool. I also had a bad experience using a new educational-technology tool. Actually, they were the same experience and the same tool.
Anybody who has spent any time experimenting with educational-technology knows exactly why that is not a
contradiction in terms.
The tool in question was the online annotating program Hypothes.is. Most historians I’ve heard talk about Hypothes.is seem to use it only as a way for students to annotate primary sources, but I had my students use it as a means to critique each other’s papers. First I asked students to post their research paper prospectus on a blog or on Scalar (another really interesting educational technology that I’ve been using). I set up a common Scalar page to serve as the class syllabus, and put links on it to all the students’ papers. They each had five prospectuses to read and comment on over the course of a single class period.
I write this from my office in a department of philosophy somewhere in the northern hemisphere. Beside my computer, the unshorn mug of Harvey Weinstein stares out from the cover of the 23 October edition of Time magazine. Beside his unpleasant mien are three words: Producer, Predator, Pariah.
Academia is no Hollywood, but it is also infected by a hidden epidemic of sexual misconduct. There is at least one sexual predator in every department I’ve studied in, or taught in, over 30 years. This is increasingly being acknowledged, but responses typically focus on teaching students about consent. This is hopelessly naive and dangerous.
Colleges and universities generally try to make information about mental health services accessible to students. But at Northwestern University, students may start seeing such information in a surprising place: syllabi.
Wanting the campus to be “accessible and welcoming to all students,” Northwestern’s Faculty Senate last week passed a resolution encouraging “all faculty to include language in their syllabi similar to the following: ‘If you find yourself struggling with your mental or physical health this quarter, please feel free to approach me. I try to be flexible and accommodating.’” The statement ends with phone numbers for health and student services.
Harvard, MIT and Stanford are key players in a global rush to facilitate the education of millions through distance education. The goal is noble, particularly when courses are free. Anyone with a computer will welcome lectures from professors who are gifted speakers as well as experts in their field.
Students may access electronic textbooks and even have opportunities for classroom discussion — although one wonders how lively the discussion was when MIT’s first online course had more students than all of its living graduates combined.
Faculty at colleges and universities across Ontario today are busy. They spend their days juggling lectures, student and faculty meetings,grading, and research in an attempt to provide students with the most broad and up-to-date education possible while at the same time furthering the research in their chosen field.
Will it always be this way?
What will a professor at a college or university be doing in 2020 and how might we understand the changed nature of their work as an opportunity?
I have been teaching for 20 years, and after a range of adjunct and visiting gigs and two tenure-track jobs (one of which ended because the institution was on the verge of financially collapsing after the economic crash in 2008), I am up for tenure and promotion this year. As virtually every tenure-track professor experiences, I, too, have had to make choices about when, where, how and why to speak out and about what, and have had to weigh issues of silence and voice against the hope and need for job security, health insurance, retirement benefits and the like.
I have had to decide what is worth it and what is not when I have been on the brink of making my viewpoints clear to the campus community and the larger community.
Being untenured is the ultimate manifestation of “You just have to know how and when to pick your battles.” If President Trump could have been an adjunct or tenure-track professor first, perhaps he would be less impulsive and reactive, thinking before tweeting, speaking, banning and dictating.
Having coached academic writers for more than a decade, I've noticed a pattern that tends to stall the development
and publication of their research.
I’ve work with a diverse group of humanists, social scientists, and STEM researchers, but they all hear the same drumbeat: "Get it out there!" The tremendous pressure to complete quality research and then send manuscripts out quickly can warp the writing process. In such a frantic atmosphere, even rigorously trained academics who care deeply about their topics can find themselves working from the outside in, rather than the reverse.
How do you teach the same concepts and skills to students with diverse abilities and interests? Different learning profiles? And how do you do that in real classrooms, with limited time to plan?
Instruction of team skills is quickly emerging as an important and missing dimension of engineering education. This project evaluated a new framework for guiding students in providing self- and peer assessments of their effectiveness in teamwork. This framework is the foundation for a new web-based tool that offers students structured feedback from teammates, along with personalized exercises and actionable strategies that guide targeted learning in the areas thereby identified. Specifically, the study documented in this report investigated whether the feedback framework, when used for intra-team self and peer feedback, increased students’ abilities to learn about and improve their team-effectiveness in executing design projects.
Nine months ago I was annoyingly posting weekly countdowns on Facebook because I was so excited at the
prospect of taking my first sabbatical. Now that it’s (sadly) nearing its end, I’m feeling good about what I’ve
accomplished but there are a few things I wish I’d known that would’ve helped me better plan my “early sabbatical.”
Before I share my lessons learned, I want to define and describe “early sabbatical” — sometimes called a “pretenure
leave” or “pretenure sabbatical.” It’s a semester-long leave granted to assistant professors after a successful thirdyear
review. Not all institutions offer pretenure sabbaticals so if yours does, be thankful. Early sabbaticals have
multiple goals. Most notably, they are an opportunity to ensure you are on track to submit a successful tenure file in
two to three years. To do so, an early sabbatical should meet the following four goals.
Using the chronicles of three friends, this chapter presents a counterstory that sets the stage for the examination of racism in teacher education, within the United States of America, using critical race theory (CRT) as an analytical tool. The setting of these chronicles is during a time when postracial rhetoric in the United States was at its highest—just after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. The three friends take the readers on a journey through their graduate experience in teacher education and into their first faculty position in teacher education. Their experiences, as students and junior faculty, are akin to what many faculty and students of color and their White allies experience daily in teacher education programs across the United States. The analysis of their chronicle, using CRT, reveals that postracial discourse has disguised racism and racial microaggression in teacher education. Racial microaggression is as pernicious as other forms of racism and, through its passiveaggressive orientation, validates institutional and individual lack of attention to issues of race.