I’m on the Faculty Senate, and we constantly work on approving a large number of small or smallish measures. If you only work with each individual little measure, you can easily miss the big picture. But if you see all of them at once, it becomes clear that they all aim to make the university less academic and give as much power over assigning college credit to people who are not professors but poorly educated and miserably paid staffers.
Yesterday, for example, we passed a measure that will give a random staffer the authority to assign college credit for “experiences.” Students will bring “portfolios” that explain the value of these “experiences” and will be assigned credit for them as if they actually took college courses. One person voted against, and of course that was me.
I asked the random staffer what will prevent anybody from getting AI to generate a completely fake “portfolio of experiences”. She got very upset and told me that she “took a training on evaluating portfolios.”
The staffer was very emotional, shaking, and acting extremely insulted. I wasn’t, and of course, everybody sided with the measure. We are rapidly moving towards a model in which professors are unnecessary. Staffers will assign credit and hand out diplomas in exchange for payment. Any argument against this is greeted with, “don’t you trust that I know how to do this?” and tearful declarations of emotional distress caused by my doubts. Then everybody feels bad for the wounded, crying individual, and the measure passes.
Clarissa's Blog 
I work in the Department of X. We had a search going on where my colleagues have identified someone who has training from the Department of Y and would be a good fit for a position in the Department of Y. There was another excellent candidate who was clearly trained in X. Despite a few lonely voices, we are proceeding with hiring the candidate who would fit into Y, because “something something interdisciplinary”. I predict that in a not too distant future, the administration will merge the departments of X and Y since they will not be able to tell the difference between us anyway. We all know what happens with tenure when departments are eliminated. One would think that people who are trained to collect and evaluate data would see this coming. No one cares.
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That’s EXACTLY the kind of thing I’m talking about. People seem completely oblivious. I’m so tired of being the party pooper for these gatherings. Everybody hates me at this point for always raising objections. I see people rolling their eyes and hear them sighing audibly. Nobody wants to sit next to me even when the room is full.
We had a whole previous generation of professors retire in the past 5 years. They were all hired around the same time and all reached retirement age at once. My department is halved by retirements. These people were fighters. They wouldn’t have let any of these measures go through. I feel their absence almost like an amputation.
But now there’s nobody. It’s always just me. I don’t mind in the least being a pariah. But the university is getting dismantled.
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Unfortunately, this appears to be a general problem not unique to our institutions. I am not sure if anything can be done at this point. I will keep doing what is right, but it is somewhat of a lost fight. I think that the top institutions are not feeling it as acutely since their enrollments are not declining thanks to their reputation, so what they do does not have dire consequences.
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