The Income Gap Is Becoming a Physical-Activity Divide

Naomi Peralta, at left, prepares for a practice run at Highland High School in Albuquerque, N.M., in February.

The Income Gap Is Becoming a Physical-Activity Divide

House Republicans Prepare to Slash Spending in Budget Showdown

Warwick student with cancer wins payout after university denied extension request

University accepts it did not make adjustments for her illness as a form of disability

Warwick University has agreed to pay a student who is seriously ill with cancer £12,000 in damages for the “distress and inconvenience” caused by not allowing her to extend her course as a result of her health condition.

Riham Sheble, an international postgraduate film and television studies student at Warwick was diagnosed with uterine sarcoma – a rare and aggressive form of cancer – in February 2021.

History Repeats Itself: A Guest Post About The Crisis in Florida

The writer has asked to remain anonymous.

History repeats itself with the governor’s attack on Florida’s higher ed

In 1956 a Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, known as the John’s Committee, was created as a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education and modeled on the efforts of Joseph McCarthy to root out Communists. The John’s Committee looked for evidence to connect civil rights groups, like the NAACP, to communism. When these efforts failed, the committee shifted their focus to target and remove homosexuals and the “extent of [their] infiltration into agencies supported by state funds.” Suspected homosexuals, both faculty and students, were interrogated, outed, and fired at a time when sodomy was illegal in the state. The campaign ruined the careers and destroyed the lives of many ensnared in it, both falsely accused straight and homosexual. The John’s committee also attacked academic freedom by singling out faculty for such “offenses” as the perceived discrimination against male students, teaching evolution, and assigning books they deemed “obscene.” If you’ve been following along with what Governor Ron DeSantis and the Republican legislature are doing in Florida, this should all sound eerily familiar.

It is no secret that Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on education in Florida through authoritarian tactics targeting curriculum from pre-K to higher education. From book bans to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, he has k-12 teachers removing and covering up books to avoid felony charges and hiding pictures of their spouses to avoid termination. He forced university instructors to return to the classroom during the Delta variant surge, and students were asked to report non-compliance (virtual teaching) through a “course concern” button added to a phone app that was designed to report tips to the police, make emergency calls, and other functions that “improve their personal safety and security.” The Stop W.O.K.E. Act prohibits teaching any topic that might make students feel guilty based on race, color, national origin, or sex.  He has declared war on Critical Race Theory (a concept he cannot even define) and asked over 2 million state college/university faculty, staff, and students to complete a survey that all experts agree would not clear the Institution Review Board’s process that ensures the protection of participants in a research study, to suss out our political leanings. There are many more truly fascist overreaches and mandates coming out of Tallahassee, too many to list. I invite you to listen to the Banished podcast “The Sunshine State Descends into Darkness (Again)” which covers Florida’s all-out assault on academia.

I am a queer contingent faculty member, and the chair of my department’s DEI committee at a very large public university in the state of Florida. I’ve watched as my personal liberties and those of my colleagues have been whittled away. The latest involves reporting of spending and resources used for campus activities that relate to diversity, equity, and inclusion and critical race theory initiatives, and collecting information about the faculty, staff, and students serving on DEI committees. In a separate action, DeSantis has requested information on individuals who have or are receiving gender-affirming treatment at Florida universities. These moves come on the heels of legislation passed to remove our promotion and tenure process from the departments and peer evaluation committees, and allow the university president or board chairman to fire individuals, without due process, clearing the way to fire anyone whose gender, orientation, or political views offend the political party in power.

Great. So now we are putting people on lists, and history has not been kind to people put on lists by authoritarian leaders.

We knew it was coming, but this week department chairs received the request to provide the names, email addresses, and “notes” on all members of departmental diversity and inclusion committees. This opens up the possibility of names (and notes) being submitted without our knowledge. Most of the people who serve on these committees are marginalized in some way and don’t have the protections tenure provides; committee service is always disproportionately assigned to junior faculty, and diversity work is nearly always assigned to the “diversity” members of the unit. We are afraid. What if that guidance on how to draft job announcements to broaden our search pools, or that statement my department chair asked me to write acknowledging the murder of George Floyd, offends the wrong person? Will I lose my job, or something more sinister? What is DeSantis going to do with this information? We do not trust him.

So, what can we do about it? Several groups of faculty are taking action by providing guidance in how to respond to surveys and other data gathering activities by the state, organizing responses to public comment periods, and building an understanding of academic freedom issues and how they impact ALL departments and programs. But these efforts won’t stop the governor and legislature from demanding lists and firings, nor the university administrators from complying. For those outside Florida’s education system who are concerned, please consider donating to Equality Florida or the Florida ACLU. Please also consider joining the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and please VOTE (and get all of your friends to vote).

DeSantis’s actions and this thinking are a disease, and it is spreading. Other states are watching what is happening and emulating Florida’s efforts to crack down on open discourse and inclusivity in universities. Education in the US is already faltering in international rankings. We need to figure out how to protect our faculty and students, and our academic institutions, before it’s too late.

The post History Repeats Itself: A Guest Post About The Crisis in Florida appeared first on The Professor Is In.

What We’ve Learned From Presidential Physicals of Biden, Trump and Obama

It Takes Money to be Moral: Thoughts on Academic Ghosting

This week the Chronicle published a fascinating essay about academic ghosting. I am quoted in it. The author and I spoke at great length and had a great conversation.

 

 

What I find interesting, however, is what she did NOT use from our long talk: all the things I said about the ECONOMICS of ghosting specifically in the context of academic hiring.

 

 

https://www.chronicle.com/…/the-sad-humiliations-of…

 

 

Ie, that catastrophic systemic defunding means we no longer have sufficient administrative staff to send the emails to candidates when they are no longer under consideration.

 

 

Because it was the administrative staff who sent them back in the day! And now those staff are gone, or overwhelmed with other work.

 

 

I said this over and over.

 

 

But she wanted the problem to be about morals. Which it absolutely is! Faculty should behave better and ghosting is outrageous and immoral. And it occurs all over the place, as she describes, not just in hiring. And it’s bad.

 

 

But. Morals are also a by-product of economics.

 

 

Because accountable hiring systems require money, money in the form of administrative staff, and reasonable work demands. IS IT A COINCIDENCE that the Academic Jobs Wiki started the same year as the Great Recession??

 

 

Late capitalism wants to pretend otherwise but the collapse of actual human accountability is rampant across all sectors of our economy now because of budget cut after budget cut. Cuts have consequences. Yes it hurts more in academia because of our peculiar structures of intimacy, but in the end, like everything else, it comes down to adequate or inadequate funding.

 

 

To say otherwise is to keep participating in academic exceptionalism, that academia owes “more” to the world because it “should be” finer or better. That academics are special people who operate outside the demands of capitalism. Which is the same logic that fuels adjunctification and the imperative to work for free or for peanuts in pursuit of some myth of “higher calling.”

 

She ends the essay with this:  “But some scholars, especially those who are early career, women, and people of color, are trying to deal with these conditions. We are desperately trying to renovate — to make the whole place safer, more welcoming. We are trying to add rooms, to guide guests through the various mazes, to build a more stable foundation. We take on this labor because renovating is the professional thing to do; building an academy where structures encourage us to be accountable to one another, to set and communicate boundaries, and to show up as best we can — that’s the work.

 

We owe each other more.”

And what is this, but yet another call for “special” academics — the young, women, and people of color — to work for free?  To sacrifice themselves, without compensation, in the service of some higher moral imperative of academia?  More exploitation in the service of the myth.

Will this never change?  Has this myth not done enough damage? Do people never learn?  Learn that academia will never love you back?  That individual effort CANNOT alter structural failure?

 

That rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is also its own form of unpaid labor, even as the ship sinks?

 

 So this essay as written is both brilliant and necessary, and completely wrong, at least about ghosting in hiring. It requires money to create and sustain the infrastructure for humane hiring practices. Let’s not gaslight about (the causes of) our gaslighting.

 

 

 

 

The post It Takes Money to be Moral: Thoughts on Academic Ghosting appeared first on The Professor Is In.

Who’s going to be triggered by Northanger Abbey? It’s hardly Game of Thrones | Catherine Bennett

Greenwich University is warning students to prepare themselves for the ‘toxic friendships’ Jane Austen satirises in her novel

Spoilers – but does it matter? Now Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is identified by a British university as a vehicle for potentially disturbing “gender stereotypes” and “toxic relationships and friendships”, perhaps the safest way to approach the satire is, if at all, second hand.

The University of Greenwich’s trigger warning (TW) is for undergraduates, but since the original intention of such alerts was to prepare readers for some possible reminder of upsetting experiences, it’s older ones who should be most grateful for this vigilance. Who, after all, is likely to have squeezed in more toxic relationships or suffered more acutely from gender stereotyping? Can such a novel be considered remotely safe for mature women, even those of us too young to have been jilted by an army captain in a Georgian pump room? Plainly, since Greenwich has stuck a warning on it, not.

Students Lost One-Third of a School Year to Pandemic, Study Finds

Elementary school students returning to in-person learning in a school in California in 2021. Education deficits were equivalent to about 35 percent of a school year and remained steady, according to a new study.

How Parenting Today Is Different, and Harder

Nearly half of U.S. parents surveyed by Pew Research Center said that they were raising their children differently from how they had been raised.

Attitudes to ADHD have come a long way – but we still have further to go | Letters

There is thankfully more understanding of the condition than when my daughter was first diagnosed over 30 years ago, writes Judy Evans, while Cal Walters-Davies calls for more support and more positive coverage

How refreshing to see so much positive coverage given to the condition ADHD, coverage which helps to widen the understanding of and facilitate support for a disorder that is both challenging and potentially life-changing (ADHD services ‘swamped’, say experts as more UK women seek diagnosis, 13 January).

I wish the media had always been so enlightened. Over 30 years ago, my then 10-year-old daughter was diagnosed with ADHD, after many years of struggling to get an understanding and acceptance of her particular difficulties. At around that time, the disorder was considered by many in the media and general public as an “American” disease, with a great deal of scepticism attached to its validity as an illness requiring support.

In his Guardian column, Francis Wheen poked fun at what he described as “illness as euphemistic excuse” and “convenient props for people who are suffering from nothing more serious than the human condition” (Wheen’s world, 14 September 1994). I objected to his cynicism and you published my riposte on the letters page a week later. I’d like to think he wouldn’t write in the same tenor today – and that you will publish this letter too.
Judy Evans
Brighton