Category Archives: Academics

“Dear Student…” (solid advice every grade-hungry student should read)

Posted on January 17, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Via the Facebooks comes “Dear Student:  I don’t Lie Awake At Night Thinking of Ways to Ruin Your Life,” a piece published on Forbes.com.  It’s thoughtful and even-keeled advice for students who think that grades are something more than they are, an evaluation of how well someone does (or doesn’t) do in a class.  For example, there’s this:

I’m here to be a mentor and instructor. This means that our relationship differs from the relationships that you have with your friends and family. Please don’t infer from this that I don’t care about you, because I do. A lot. I want to see you make good choices. I want to see you understand basic economics because I hope it will rock your world as it continues to rock mine and because the human consequences of lousy economic policy are enormous. That said, you should never take grades personally. I don’t think you’re stupid because you tank an exam, an assignment, or even an entire course.Economics is hard. A D or an F on an economics exam does not diminish your value in God’s eyes (or in mine) or indicate that economics just isn’t for you. It probably means you need to work smarter, and I’m here to help you with that.

 

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Posted in Academics, Faculty Life, In the media..., Student Life

“Romney Offers Praise for a Donor’s Business”

Posted on January 16, 2012 by | 1 Comment

An alert EMUTalk.org reader sent me a link to this Sunday New York Times story, “Romney Offers Praise for a Donor’s Business.”  I had seen the same piece and just kind of shook my head.  Let me quote at length the opening paragraphs:

At a town-hall-style meeting in New Hampshire last month, listeners pressed Mitt Romney on the soaring cost of higher education. His solution: students should consider for-profit colleges like the little-known Full Sail Universityin Florida.

A week later in Iowa, Mr. Romney offered another unsolicited endorsement for “a place in Florida called Full Sail University.” By increasing competition, for-profit institutions like Full Sail, which focuses on the entertainment field, “hold down the cost of education” and help students get jobs without saddling them with excessive debt, he said.

Mr. Romney did not mention the cost of tuition at Full Sail, which runs more than $80,000, for example, for a 21-month program in “video game art.”

Nor did he mention its spotty graduation rate. Or, for that matter, that its chief executive, Bill Heavener, is a major campaign donor and a co-chairman of his state fund-raising team in Florida.

You know, I wouldn’t have voted for Romney under any circumstances anyway.  But this is the sort of attitude/sliminess that worries me a lot about a President Mitt.

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Posted in Academics, In the media...

“Michigan Democrats developing college grant plan”

Posted on January 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

In “I’ll believe it when I see it” news, I heard on Michigan Radio this morning this story, “Michigan Democrats developing college grant plan.”  In the nutshell, the proposal would pay for college tuition at a public Michigan university for students who completed their K-12 schooling in Michigan, presumably at public schools.  I think this is obviously a great idea that will never happen.

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Posted in Academics, In the media..., State Government, Student Life

“‘College Tax’ Burdens Students, State”

Posted on January 11, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I actually saw this on Facebook via Geoffrey “Geoff” Larcom but certainly thought it worth a read here:  “‘College Tax’ Burdens Students, State,” via Bridge.  The “college tax” is a little confusing to me.  If I am understanding it correctly, it is the amount more students pay in Michigan to comparable instituions.  I suspect there are a lot of problems with those calculations, but what it boils down to is that the steady decrease in state funding means that Michiganders spend a lot more money on college which amounts to an extra tax, one that is paid by students.

According to the article, “Michigan has slashed about 20 percent of the dollars (adjusted for inflation) for four-year colleges between 2005 and 2010; only Rhode Island and New Mexico cut more.”  With the Snyder administration’s cuts, Michigan is now  in the bottom 10 states for per-capita student funding.  And to simply get “the middle of the pack in per-capita spending on universities, Michigan would need to increase higher education funding by 56 percent.”  But at least the football teams have done better.

Incidentally, the “college tax” at EMU is $9,220 over four years of school.  That means when compared to universities in its peer group (and no, I don’t have any idea how that’s figured out), students at EMU paid just over nine grand more over four years of school compared to other institutions.

 

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Posted in Academics, Budgets, In the media..., Student Life

See you next year, folks

Posted on December 20, 2011 by | Leave a comment

The university closes for the holiday at the end of the day Thursday, but I’m going to (more or less) close up EMUTalk a few days earlier.  I’ll be spending the Festivus season at an undisclosed and in-law related locale with family and sketchy internet access, so don’t expect much to be happening here for a while.

In the meantime, I thought I’d point you to a blog post on stevendkrause.com,”Bloom, Iowa, and academic locales: a few thoughts.” I was going to write this here, but it seemed a little too Iowa-centric for EMU, though it does also bend back to the academic life and the common phenomenon of faculty never really identifying with the community where they teach.  Give it a read if you’re interested.

And merry/happy whatever!

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Posted in Academics, Blogosphere, EMUtalk.org News, Faculty Life

Two bits of extra credit reading

Posted on December 16, 2011 by | 1 Comment

I’m not procrastinating from finishing up my fall term– honestly, I’m not!  Well, maybe a little.  In any event, I thought I’d pass along two links to things that I thought would be of interest here.

First, there’s  ”Bowling for Chumps,” by Pete Kotz in The Village Voice.  Alert EMUTalk reader Dick Schwarze posted this in the comments and I thought it deserved a promotion to the main part of the site.  Kind of a long piece, but an extremely detailed account of the highly dubious world of college bowl games.  Makes me glad that the Emus didn’t quite get there this year.

Second, there’s “What is College For?” a column in the “opinionator” part of the New York Times by Gary Gutting.  It simply puts out there an answer to the question at hand that is a useful reminder that college is about more than job training and that both faculty and students have an obligation to remember that.  I found it an inspiring way to get to that pile of grading.

Speaking of which….

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Posted in Academics, Blogosphere, Faculty Life, In the media..., Sports, Student Life

“How Not to Measure Faculty Productivity”

Posted on December 8, 2011 by | Leave a comment

It’s that crazy “grade grade grade” time of year right now, so perhaps the last thing most teaching-types want to hear is criticism about faculty not being “productive” enough.  So maybe that’s why I want to recommend Gary Olson’s very reasonable “How Not to Measure Faculty Productivity” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (and not behind a firewall).

For the most part, it’s a response to Mark Bauerlein’s critiques of the cost of literary research– Bauerlein has a column about that here.  Olson’s focus is on the way things work in English departments, and what he says rings true from my experience, and I suspect it’s similar in other departments, especially in the humanities.  Here’s one paragraph I like a lot:

The bottom line is that an efficient department is able to manage its curricular obligations while providing sufficient time for scholars to conduct their research and creative activities. Now Bauerlein might reply, “Yes, but if faculty were only teaching, then you could manage the entire enterprise for less money; you would no longer need to employ the lecturers and instructors.” True. However, the assumption underlying that response and several of the recent discussions of faculty productivity is that the job of university professor is equivalent to the job of teacher, but that is simply not the case at a university.

Exactly.  Even at a place like EMU– we’re not a “research 1″ institution and we put a lot of emphasis on teaching– there’s still an assumption that faculty do research.  And besides that, it seems to me that there is not a firm line between “research” and “teaching” anyway.

By the way, a fun fact:  I was on a panel with Olson several years ago at MLA, though I doubt he actually remembers me.  Small world, academia.

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Posted in Academics, Faculty Life, In the media...

“Hrabowski: An educator focused on math and science”

Posted on November 18, 2011 by | Leave a comment

To take folks into the weekend, I thought I’d share this video from a story about Freeman Hrabowski that was on 60 Minutes last weekend.  Here’s a link to it if the embedded video doesn’t work.

Hrabowski is the President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which is a university sorta/kinda like EMU in some ways– both are regional institutions with a history of working with “at risk” and otherwise non-traditional students, commuters, etc.  It’s an inspiring piece about the ways that he’s leading innovation there.  Anyway, one of the things he talks about in this interview (albeit briefly) is football.  From the transcript:

Hrabowski: We need hands on experiences. We need to be encouraging that curiosity. And people cannot– should not be allowed simply to sit back and be bored.

Students can also get jobs and internships at one of 76 companies located on campus. Most are technology startups. They get help growing their businesses and tax credits, along with access to students and faculty. One thing you won’t find at UMBC…

Pitts: You had a chance to get a football team at UMBC, right? And you said no?

Hrabowski: People talk about that. Right. I mean, well– well, first of all, it takes a lot of money for a football team to win.

Hrabowski prefers to win on different playing fields. Incoming freshman Francois Rice noticed right away.

Francois Rice: It seems like everything’s flipped. Where, you might go to another university and the football team might be top dog. Here, it’s the chess team that’s top dog. And it’s–

Pitts: The chess team?

Rice: Yeah, it’s cool to be smart.

Rice is part of the 23rd incoming class of Meyerhoff Scholars – a program that recruits high achievers in math, science and engineering who are aiming for graduate degrees and careers in research.

Oh, if we had only put our money into the chess team.  Or academics, or something.

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Posted in Academics, Budgets, EMU President, In the media..., Sports

“Researches Rate RateMyProfessors, and Find It Useful if Not Chili-Pepper Hot”

Posted on November 18, 2011 by | 3 Comments

This is behind the paypal at The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Researches Rate RateMyProfessors, and Find It Useful if Not Chili-Pepper Hot.” Basically, it is about a study which suggests that the ratings on RateMyProfessors for teachers that have at least 10 entries are just as accurate as other student evaluation measures.

Of course, that is part of the problem:  the evaluations that students fill out at the end of classes are only “kinda useful,” at least in my experience.  In my evaluations, I see a major correlation between the level of the class and the average grades students earn:  that is, my evaluations for freshmen-level classes where lots of students are getting Cs are worse than they are for senior-level classes where lots of students are getting Bs and As.

Plus RateMyProfessors has lots of “outliers” since relatively few students post there, and often enough, the comments that are posted are wildly inaccurate. Just yesterday, I was talking with a colleague of mine about RateMyProfessors and what to do about a comment that was posted about him that was demonstrably not accurate.  I told him I’ve complained before to RateMyProfessors about some of those kinds of comments and they’ve been removed, but really, there isn’t much you can do.

And yes, every faculty person I know looks at RateMyProfessors once in a while.

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Posted in Academics, Faculty Life, In the media..., Student Life

EMU makes “Military Friendly” Schools list

Posted on November 10, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Sure, this is a PR story that was sent to me by Geoff “Geoff” Larcom, but as Veteran’s day approaches, it seems a story worth sharing.  According to GI Jobs magazine EMU is ranked as a “military friendly” university.  Here’s a quote from the press release:

Eastern Michigan University has been named one of the country’s top “military friendly” schools by GI Jobs magazine for 2012. The magazine’s list recognizes the 15 percent of universities and colleges that best serve veterans nationwide. The full list is at http://www.militaryfriendlyschools.com/mfsList.aspx

“Our student veterans have earned our thanks and gratitude for serving our country,” said Bernice Lindke, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management at EMU.  ”I am glad that Eastern Michigan University is able to recognize their service by providing them with a welcoming and supportive environment.”

Criteria for making the list included efforts to recruit and retain military and veteran students, financial commitment to veterans and academic accreditation.

For what it’s worth, I have some colleagues in my field– both ex-military and both teaching at military academies now– who put together a special issue of a journal called Kairos about “Rhetoric, Technology, and the Military.”  Some folks here might be interested in checking that out.

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Posted in Academics, EMU Branding, Student Life