What I gleaned from the start of the semester faculty meetings.

Note that “gleaned” might suggest more in the way justified true belief than I actually acquired; at least some of these bullet points have all the tannins you’d expect from tea leaves. Also, there’s maybe a little sarcasm, but I’m trying to get most of it out of my system before my first class meeting tomorrow. You have been warned.

Anyway, in no particular order:

• Our university president and the governor of our state are super-excited about MOOCs. They’re the wave of the higher ed future, y’all! And that excitement extends to entering a partnership wherein faculty at our university will develop MOOCs and the university will pocket a whopping 51% of the proceeds! The other 49% of the proceeds will go to a private company that will do … something to add value to what our faculty build. No reason at all for California taxpayers to worry that this amounts to converting public funds to private profits!
• Also, no need to worry that the University of California’s bold initiatives MOOCward in UC Online have been much less successful than hoped. Because the California State University system will be able to figure it out!
• Some faculty with an awareness of history pointed noted that, in the 1950s, precisely the same bold future of revolutionizing college education and broadening access to it was predicted, only with television as the delivery method. Remember how classroom instruction at colleges and universities had totally disappeared by the end of that decade? And this is why history departments must be phased out immediately!
• So, our campus is phasing in its fourth “Learning Management System” (with which we develop and deliver content and interaction with students online) in 10 years. Faculty are scrambling to work out kludges to get the functionality with the new system that they had (but will be losing) with the old system. It combines all the hassle of a new prep with none of the intellectual thrill of a new prep. Bonus: Owing to the partnership with Udacity to develop and deliver MOOCs, there is absolutely no guarantee that the campus won’t end up ditching this new LMS in favor of a (proprietary) LMS that Udacity prefers (and could yank out from under us in the event that the partnership founders). This is awesome incentive for those who have never used online tools in their pedagogy to start!
• Faculty can reach a stage where they are so battered by directives from administrative levels beyond their department that they will hear their chair’s proclamation “We will be doing [X] over my dead body” and ask “When must we implement [X]?” (I assure you, these are faculty who sincerely desire their chair’s continued health and well-being.)
• Administrators who think that they can appease disgruntled factions of the administrative units they oversee by making sure those factions are heavily represented on key committees and then listening to their concerns sometimes discover that listening to those concerns is not sufficient to appease the disgruntled factions.
• Indeed, sometimes the disgruntled factions will make and distribute hundreds of fliers trying to rally the support of the less-disgruntled factions of their administrative units, including agitating for what could maybe shape up to be a coup against the administrators who listened to grievances but did not acquiesce to demands.
• Such attempts to rally support from colleagues might be more successful if they showed awareness of the real challenges those less-disgruntled factions of the administrative units face, and especially of ways giving the disgruntled faction everything it wants might impact the resources and effective functioning of the less-disgruntled factions.
• I have what feels like a memory that at least one of the first few start-of-semester faculty meetings early in my career here saw faculty generally gruntled. It’s possible that this is baseless nostalgia, though.
• You know what we hear that area employers are looking for in recent graduates? Good critical thinking skills. You know what core component of our General Education package the powers that be are seriously considering eliminating? Critical thinking! Of course, the proposal on the table is to fold the existing critical thinking requirement into another required course (the second semester freshman composition class), but some of us are fairly certain that student papers with solid mechanics but lacking critical thinking are going to end up being a horror show to grade.

I hope the rest of you in academia are experiencing a smooth start (or continuation, as the cas may be) to your term.