I’m pretty sure the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn’t want college athletes — or the athletics programs supporting them — to cheat their way through college. However, this article at Inside Higher Ed raises the question of whether some kind of cheating isn’t the best strategy to give the NCAA what it’s asking for.
From the article:
Category Archives: Academia
Memo to the FSU Athletics Department: ‘learning’ and ‘cheating’ are not synonyms.
Somehow, the Florida State University Office of Athletic Academic Support Services had in its employ a “Learning Specialist” who seemed to think it was part of his or her job to help a bunch of student athletes cheat.
As reported by the Orlando Sentinel:
Do you self-report lab mishaps?
This is a question that occurred to me earlier this month when I had occasion to observe an undergraduate laboratory course: If something goes wrong in the lab, do you tell the lab instructor? The “something wrong” could range from breaking a piece of glassware, to getting a stick with a syringe (of non-biohazardous material), to getting a stick with a syringe (of biohazardous or radioactive material), to spilling a nasty reagent. Of course, it could include other mishaps not enumerated here.
I’m not as interested in hearing when students should tell the lab instructor about a mishap, but rather in the conditions in which you would bring the lab instructor into the information loop.
Does specifying one’s guilty pleasures require an analysis of ‘guilt’ and ‘pleasure’?
Sean, Chad, and Steinn ponder the lameness of academics in self-reporting their “guilty pleasures”.
Quoth Sean:
I immediately felt bad that I couldn’t come up with a more salacious, or at least quirky and eccentric, guilty pleasure. I chose going to Vegas, a very unique and daring pastime that is shared by millions of people every week. I was sure that, once the roundup appeared in print, I would be shown up as the milquetoast I truly am, my pretensions to edgy hipness once again roundly flogged for the enjoyment of others.
But no. As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures: Sudoku. Riding a bike. And then, without hint of sarcasm: Landscape restoration. Gee, I hope your Mom never finds out about that.
Chad kind of blames technology:
Actually, it’s a little tough to come up with anything that really works, in this age of blogging. After all, a guilty pleasure is something you don’t want other people to know that you enjoy, and a lot of the really good candidates in my life are here for the whole world to see.
Steinn rejects the original question:
I’m not into guilt, and there are real academic pleasures; emotional states that come with the job.
We should revel in them.
As someone with a professional interest in ethics, and — perhaps more importantly — raised by two parochial school graduates, I know a little something about guilt. Let’s see if I can make Sean feel a little less like Caligula.
A postcard from academe: my tenure dossier.
You may have noticed a lull in my postings here. I’ve been laboring to put the finishing touches on my dossier for my sixth year review. This dossier is the document on which a succession of committees will be basing their decisions as to whether San José State University will be tenuring me and promoting me to associate professor, or whether they will be thanking me for my service and sending me on my way.
It’s an awful lot of responsibility to put in the clutches of a three-ring binder, don’t you think?
Freedom in the classroom.
Perhaps you’ve already seen the new(ish) AAUP report Freedom in the Classroom, or Michael Bérubé’s commentary on it at Inside Higher Ed yesterday. The report is such a clear statement of what a professor’s freedom in the classroom amounts to and, more importantly, why that freedom is essential if we are to accomplish the task of educating college students, that everyone who cares at all about higher education ought to read it.
Some of the highlights, with my commentary:
Question of the day: Is extra credit fair?
We’re going to discuss this at a Socrates Café gathering next week, but I suspect there are current and former students and educators reading who have a view, so I’m opening it up:
Is extra credit fair?
I probably should have paid more attention to non-standard logics.
The good news: My department chair really likes the project I’ve proposed for my sabbatical leave.
The bad news: The smart money says that my leave won’t be approved unless I cut down the amount I say I’ll accomplish during the year off.
That’s right. If you have a lot you want to get accomplished, you can’t have time off to accomplish it, whereas if you have only a wee bit to do, you are most welcome to a leave.
Cue the dinosaur with the voice of Rob Knop to remind me to stop expecting things in academia to make sense. Meanwhile, I have some cuts to make.
Memo to whom it may concern.
The bullets are addressed to different people and organizations, and I doubt very much that some of them would recognize these were addressed to them even if they received an actual memo. (It’s been that kind of week.)
Be it known that:
C&E News on writing journal articles.
Since scientist-on-scientist communication is a longstanding topic of interest in these parts, I wanted to point out a recent (August 13, 2007) article in Chemical & Engineering News (behind a paywall, but definitely worth locating a library with a subscription) that offers tips for writing journal articles. It’s quite a substantial article, drawing on advice from “dozens of scientists and engineers around the world in academia, industry, and government” — which is to say, the people who read and write journal articles as part of their jobs.
It goes without saying that this crowd has some strong views.