The Agony

Published by

Clarissa

March 11, 2015

We are cutting 100 courses across our College of Arts and Sciences, increasing the enrollment in language sections from 25 to 35, getting rid of part-timers, and increasing the teaching load of faculty members to 4:4. And this is just the beginning.

This was a good university with a great future but now it’s being dismantled because Mr. Rauner needs bigger handouts for a bigger bunch of “talented” bureaucrats. And no “I’m against the Big Government” warrior has dared as much as to offer a squeak against it.

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22 responses to “The Agony”

Evelina Anville

March 11, 2015

Are all faculty loads increasing? Just like that? Starting next year? This is horrible!

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Evelina Anville

March 11, 2015

And 35 in a language section is ridiculous!

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 11, 2015
  
  Absolutely ridiculous. But I have a colleague in Ontario who is teaching language sections with 80+ students. The usefulness of such courses is dubious at best but nobody seems to mind.
  
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  1. Evelina Anville
    
    March 11, 2015
    
    I can’t believe how many terrible changes have occurred in higher ed in less than 10 years. It’s terrifying. I keep thinking the pendulum is going to swing back and things just get worse.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      March 11, 2015
      
      People go to the polls and vote for Rauner, Walker, and the rest of these clowns. Or they stay home and support them with this passivity. What can anyone do if that’s what people like?
      
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  2. Shakti
    
    March 11, 2015
    
    They deliberately degrade the quality of regular courses so they can shove people into online courses. Never mind that it’s not easier to teach 80 people languages online. And of course, huge sections practically demand that some of the students be completely passive and quiet.
    Gah.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      March 11, 2015
      
      “And of course, huge sections practically demand that some of the students be completely passive and quiet.”
      
      Which is the best possible way NOT to learn a foreign language. But here is the question: do students protest against this obvious scam? No, not at all.
      
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      1. Shakti
        
        March 11, 2015
        
        I don’t know why. Passivity? They see it as a box checking requirement? Lack of knowledge of what good teaching looks like? Agita over the very idea anyone speaks anything other than English?
        
        There are many things which are more apparent and easier for me to protest or at least articulate with age.
        
        I don’t forgive my parents and high school for saying that I was making a mountain out of molehill over a math teacher repeatedly confusing me with another student in another class who had nothing in common with me except ethnicity and gender in her “small class.” I tuned out of that class and protested by refusing to answer any of her questions in class, which made me a “bad student” who didn’t put in enough “effort”. It’s not like I could attend another school, or drop out of the class or switch classes without cooperation from my parents/school. As an older person it’s even more wrong to me now than it was when I was a teen. If you had asked me as a teen, I would have just talked about being insulted and my feelings.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 11, 2015
        
        “I don’t forgive my parents and high school for saying that I was making a mountain out of molehill over a math teacher repeatedly confusing me with another student in another class who had nothing in common with me except ethnicity and gender in her “small class.” I tuned out of that class and protested by refusing to answer any of her questions in class”
        
        GOOD for you. I applaud you for this.
        
        The funny thing is that students were always and everywhere the most engaged social class. When I tell my students about the student movements of the 1960s-1970s, they just look at me confused because today’s students are the least politically engaged class. When I try to talk about politics with students, I either see averted eyes and bored faces or hear an aggressive “I’m not interested in politics.”
        
        Exceptions are so few that I can count them on the fingers of a single hand in all of my years of college teaching.
        
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m

March 11, 2015

How is it even legal for them to change your teaching loads like that? Surely it’s a change to the terms and conditions of your contract of service. And increasing class sizes like that in language courses is just bonkers!

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 11, 2015
  “How is it even legal for them to change your teaching loads like that? Surely it’s a change to the terms and conditions of your contract of service.”
  
  I’m not seeing any interest in protesting against this. This is being positioned as a temporary change “just to get us over the hump”, but that’s just a face-saving lie. These are emergency measures only in name. One has to be extremely oblivious to believe that next year we won’t have even more dramatic budget cuts, and the year after that some more, and so on.
  
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  1. Evelina Anville
    
    March 11, 2015
    
    To expand on what Clarissa says, until administrators start taking voluntary salary cuts (most upper administrators make well over 100k a year. Most are in the 200-300k range), then I don’t believe that there is any true financial emergency that necessitates cuts to the humanities, increasing courses minimums, or increasing instructor load. It’s all so disgusting.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      March 11, 2015
      
      We don’t really have any high-earning administrators at our university. Today, a very good Associate Dean left his position to save money. This will save the university about $20,000 (he is a tenured faculty member and will, of course, retain his faculty salary). This guy was doing really good useful work and now it won’t be done in order to “save” this really teensy amount.
      
      The real problem is that our state appropriations have dropped from 70% to 20% and keep dropping. It is obvious to me that the state won’t be happy until it reduces the percentage to 0%. On the other hand, when we do get to 0%, then the state might leave us alone. Or we might be expected to start feeding the state, which is also possible. 🙂
      
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  2. m
    
    March 11, 2015
    
    This is completely crazy to me. How are people not outraged? This is a major change which fundamentally alters your working conditions and should not be met with passivity. I’m American (by birth and upbringing) and I find this attitude totally bizarre. I cannot fathom the notion that any intelligent adult could be so naive as to actually believe that something like this could be short term. Once changes like this are brought in, it becomes the new status quo.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      March 11, 2015
      
      Thank you for saying this, thank you! I’ve started to feel like I’m the only weirdo on the planet who disbelieves the idea that this is a short-term thing.
      
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Pen

March 11, 2015

That’s absolutely disgusting. Why aren’t people protesting?

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 11, 2015
  
  There is probably some sort of a cultural issue that is preventing me from finding an answer to this. This Governor was elected by a majority. It was a slim majority, but still. I saw students celebrate his election. Probably they see some good that he will bring to them although, hard as I may try, I am not seeing what it might be. I tried talking to students about these budget cuts and encountered glassy-eyed indifference from everybody but a student who is a citizen of another country. It was exactly the same with colleagues.
  
  There is something that is preventing Americans from caring, but I don’t know what it is.
  
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Fie Upon This Quiet Life

March 11, 2015

I hope you’re on the job market. I know it’s not easy to move once you’re so well established, but I don’t know how things are possibly going to get better there. I’d think you’d be in a good position in the fall to go on the market since your book just came out.

All that said, I sincerely hope that someone will stand up to this BS and that the faculty will somehow figure out a way to make this contractually indefensible in the future. Are you all unionized? I know that doesn’t always help. Perhaps bringing in someone from AAUP could help? I don’t know, but ugh, this is devastating news! Hugs!

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 11, 2015
  
  I want two books for the job market. 🙂 If I am to go, it doesn’t make sense to go to another place that is about to drown.
  
  Thank you for the support!
  
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NG

March 12, 2015

This anti-intellectualism seems to be a general phenomenon affecting everyone.

“Some of these politicians make a big deal out of the fact that they don’t believe in evolution or the effect that human activity can have on climate. I am assuming that some are lying to get elected. But I’m hearing from former investigators that they have stopped doing research on dementia because only traumatic brain injury was being funded. Department of Defense grants seem to be in somewhat better supply than other fields of study.

Anyway, just read it. It’s just one more straw breaking the camel’s back. Between the constant layoffs, restructuring, relocations, impoverished startups, vulture capitalists, stingy academic salaries and hard to get grants, more Congressional oversight from a bunch of anti-science wing nuts, investigators can’t catch a break. We’re on our last nerve.

We’re exhausted in every sense of the word.”

The negative effects of GOP malice and MBA stupidity on Research shows no sign of slowing down

I wonder if Rauner is planning to turn Illinois universities into some of his much touted “enterprise zones” with right-to-work laws and minimum regulations.

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NG

March 13, 2015

Update:

Remember a couple of years ago when we were discussing the Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District of Pima county in Arizona where they cancelled it because it was “unAmerican” and banned 80 books including Shakespeare’s Tempest?

A study was done in 2012:

“At the request of the Special Master, Dr. Willis D. Hawley, these analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between participating in the Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican American Studies (MAS) program and student achievement (positively, negatively, or no relationship). While the MAS program has been known by other names (e.g., Raza Studies), for the sake of continuity, the program will be referred to as MAS throughout the duration of this report. There are two central questions guiding these analyses: • What are the relationships between taking MAS courses and educational performance? • Are these relationships consistent for different cohorts of students over the years?”

Click to access MAS_report_2012_0.pdf

The conclusion was that participation in MAS by low income Hispanic students had a positive correlation with graduation and going to local community colleges.

So what is the state of Arizona doing this year? It’s taking away all funding for the Pima Community College district. Arizona state funding for Pima Community College :

2011 $16 million state funding for Pima

2015 $6.5 million state funding for Pima

2016 $0 million state funding for Pima

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/12/arizona-unprecedented-defunding-community-colleges

The solution? Privatization.

“We will have to be successful being aggressive to expand public-private partnerships in order for us to replace a permanent revenue loss of $68 million from over the last 7 years,” Glasper said. “It will need to be a larger volume of corporate members and sustaining members to have predictable revenue.”

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 13, 2015
  
  Stupid fucks. What else can anyone really say?
  
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