Hey all, I thought this column would not write itself, but academia is on the edge of major collapse. I’m basically Hard Copy for academia now.
The Great Grift
Karen Kelskey, otherwise known by her company consulting business, The Professor Is In, committed a mortal sin this week. She rudely demanded payment for her labor and services! I’m not even sure what the big brou haha is or how it started, but someone (a male) academic accused her of being a grifter, because she takes the stance that adjuncts are being exploited and suggests they use their skills to look for other jobs, because they should at some point leave a position that actively exploits academic hopefuls. Current tenured faculty didn’t like this, because they are under some illusion that leaving the academic realm is a horrible thing and ruins things for them (how?).
I think the heart of the matter is that this (male) academic did not like that Kelskey called him on his shit and screenshotted his remarks to put on her blog. Something that he publicly said. There was a bit of a pile-on, claiming that a career coaching service for academics was a grift, and accusing Kelskey of….get this…offering career advice for academic jobs AND for people who want to leave academia. The nerve!
She is pretty bold, putting a gun to someone’s head to use her services…oh waut, she’s not. She’s offering a service that people can pay for, but she smartly builds up her brand by offering lots of free content. Her book is incredibly useful as well and costs….$12.00.
Duquesne University rules for teaching:
Show up on time
Use accessible technology
Don’t use the N-word
Who really can reach these sky-high expectations? Apparently not Gary Shank:
a professor told students they have permission to use the N-word in his class because they are using it "in a pedagogical sense" and that is "not using it in any way other than to demonstrate a point."
Is there….no other way to demonstrate a point?
How dare students ask questions
This was circulating on Twitter: I can imagine that the TA, stressed about all the questions, went to their faculty supervisor and then the faculty suggested it.
I can’t understand being this cruel. If it was already covered in a module, then just link them back to the module.
I’m no master pedologist, but my thought is that if a lot of your students are not doing well or asking too many questions…the problem is you.
If you don’t have a Medium account, take to Google Docs!
On having no good options: Why I removed my name from a paper
Just some classic steamrolling of an early career researcher.
Soon after submission, Will wrote that the manuscript had been rejected and that he was planning to submit to a different journal. This was the last he contacted me about the paper (until I reached out a few weeks ago, as described below). I received an automated email from a journal stating that it had been submitted about two hours later. I received several more automated notifications of the paper being submitted to other journals over the next few months. If changes were made to the manuscript between these submissions, I was not informed of them.
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