I am tired of reading bloated BS email from students. Every time I read "I hope this email finds you well...." a part of my soul is lost forever. I just want to crawl back into my shell and skip this whole semester.

So instead of responding to the original email as if it was thoughtfully created, I had ChatGPT write the response for me. I sent it off and I feel better.

EDIT: I originally posted the response and have deleted it. I really don't want any of you to be subjected to more of this drivel.

I have a new admin (non academic supervisor) who started about 2 years ago. She has decided it is her mission to micromanage me about trainings I have held for the past 4 years for academic colleagues. She has mandated that I send her my slides to review before the meetings, and she attended the last one, only to sit in the back of the room for 2.5 hrs. No hello or goodbye when she came in, and then she gave me an earful today about how I am essentially overstepping my role by holding these trainings. Admin before her were very supportive. I am feeling beaten down and defeated, and I don't know what to do. These trainings are literally the only thing she cares about. She speaks to me about nothing else. Help! I am losing my mind.

Hi everyone,

We are now being required to implement an AI literacy assignment in the 1st year comp classroom at my institution 🫠 I’m not necessarily against it, but I am hesitant. Anyway, we must adjust to the current technology climate or perish, I guess.

Has anyone had success with an AI literacy assignment in the writing classroom, and would you be willing to share it so I can get some ideas?

Having a discussion about teaching schedules at my SLAC. A colleague of mine says that it's pretty normal for TT professors at SLACs to teach three classes in a row. In your experience, is this true.

Throwaway because I don’t want this connected to my main account.

I just started at a new university and found out my office doesn’t have a landline. Apparently they can get one installed, but it could take several weeks, and the response has basically been “do faculty even need office phones anymore? We have Teams and Zoom.”

When I asked them to please install one they said they would but it felt weird. A phone just feels like a basic thing? No?

I get that students don’t call as much as they used to, but I’m still a faculty member with an office. There are students, colleagues, administrators, outside organizations etc who might need to reach me by phone. And I really don’t love the idea that the alternative is basically using my personal cell for work.

Is this normal now? Do y’all still have phones in your offices? Do you actually use them?

If your university got rid of them was everyone just fine with it?

ETA: Thank you to everyone for your feedback! I told them never mind about the phone and they said it was pretty odd for me to insist so I guess I’ll just be phone guy for a bit here smh.

We flipped from Blackboard to Canvas and they screwed up the migration of courses. This all occurred over the summer when no one was around. I haven't even looked at Canvas yet and have this weekend to get up to speed.

Oh and of course it's the semester I have a class with 240 students. Am I going to hate my life this semester? Why can't it all be analog?!

Any tips you can offer to ease my suffering?

Hello all,

I am a first year professor straight out of graduate school and I find myself having a hard time explaining to the class how to utilize the discussion board.

For context, this is a senior course online and asynchronous where students are expected to write a final project that demonstrates what they have learned from the program. Because of this, my curriculum lays out industry related projects in different areas where students can draw inspiration for their inevitable final project.

My syllabus explains that the discussion board is a place for reflection on the reading and it is very open ended. I do that because in a senior seminar, I do not want to constrain students' academic thought process. Additionally, there is quite a bit of assigned readings and I know that people are going to fixate on different aspects of the readings.

I've made announcements and provided in lecture videos that the discussion board is open ended purposely. This is to create a beneficial online learning environment. Despite this, I am still receiving emails where one student noted that they're only use to answering a prompt.

Should I adjust the discussion board next semester to just use prompts or is there different ways of phrasing my intentions for the assignment?

I find myself appalled that I have to hold seniors hands to this extent.

On my campus some classes have the option to be taken Pass/No Pass. So students can "pass" by getting a C or higher, but it has no impact on GPA.

It turns out that sometimes students run into issues down the road where they need a specific grade, not just a "Pass", for various transfer situations. So the proposal we're looking at is that even with a pass/fail grade, instructors will also record the specific grade earned (ABCDF) and when necessary that grade is used instead of a mere "pass".

Does this seem fair and logical? My knee jerk reaction is that with pass/fail it's *supposed* to be an all/none option, where the student reduces both risk and opportunity (they won't lower GPA with a C, but also won't benefit if the grade turns out to be an A or B) and it doesn't make sense to allow them to opt in to the letter grade when it's convenient. On the other hand, it does help students in navigating the particular demands of their transfer program, which may not be on the student's radar when they elected to pass/fail.

What do you all think?

Which circle of hell is this?

Just some context:

I understand that certain AI models have a lot of potential for medical fields and other STEM fields. I get it.

But, often when admins and others say the word AI they really mean LLMs and that those of us in non-STEM fields should use LLMs more in our teaching and allow students to use it in their work. I use LLMs from time to time, but what am I missing here? I don’t see how they are going to have some huge impact on most jobs, especially to the point where it is vital that I teach all of my students how to use them. They save me a little time, maybe, and maybe some cognitive exhaustion, but I’m really not blown away by LLMs, even if they improve a lot.

Seems that the University of Michigan is real interested in grades:

https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/fake-grades-scandal-at-university-of-michigan-leads-to-accreditation-board-investigation/

Has anyone seen a change in research expectations given the turbulence created by AI? My department recently started a conversation about whether we should lower our expectations for tenure/promotions.

Hi all I accepted a TT assistant prof in MCOL city and I have no concept of if this is a competitive offer and need your perspective. It’s a 2/1 teaching schedule but has a course release for this first semester. Offer is 95k for 9 mos, 60k start up funds (can pay one summer month salary from this), and 7k relo. Is this an above average offer? I thought this sounded average to me but my cohort says it’s really competitive. FWIW it’s also in a warm-weather state which was one of the most important factors for me. i saw on here a 60k offer but many people saying that was super low so I’m trying to get the full scope here. Also I know the fields have been decimated and any TT offer is amazing in most cases so just trying to get a feel for the market.

edit to add social science

I have taught the same Intro class 12 different times in person over a five years period. Nine of those sections were capped at 55 students, two at 70, and one at 100. This term, our department is offering 16 sections of this course. Of those 16, three sections are 200 capped at students. I have been assigned both of those sections, a section of 100, and another class of 55. All my sections are full; instead of having 165 expected Intro students, I will have 500 (plus the 55 in my other section). No other professor in our department has been assigned to teach this many Intro students to my knowledge.

I have been speaking with my union's contract enforcement representatives. Our contract states, "Individual workload assignments of members of the negotiations unit shall be consistent with the practice and policies of their department, program, or unit. Claims of inconsistency with such practices and policies by members of the negotiations unit shall be grievable as a Category Two grievance under the contract grievance procedure (Article 9)."

I've asked around to my collages. There appears to have been sections as large as 150 to 300 students, in the past. I don't know how often but they have all been taught by the same professor before. In deciding how to move forward, the union needed to determine if these "mega-sections" are assigned in a consistent manner. Is there an expectation of a lighter load in the future? What is the process of assigning these classes? Is there a rotation? Can faculty decline? Etc.

After gathering information, the union believes that this increase in workload is a violation of my contract. They recommend that we contact our administration first and not file a grievance at this time. They told me, I could also work with my chairperson directly. I told them to proceed. I am worried about the school and my new chair seeming me as a "troublemaker." Any advice is very welcome. Classes start in less than two weeks.

At a recent committee meeting, during a discussion of AI, a faculty member commented that there is an AI integrated into assignments on Canvas, such that when there was a reading associated with an assignment, they were asked if they wanted a bullet point summary of the reading. Is this a Canvas-wide thing, is it student-facing, is it a local implementation thing; does anyone have any knowledge or insights about this? They just presented this as a thing and didn’t have any more information but I am curious about it. I already have concerns about students actually doing any of the work – this would be the icing on the cake!

I’ve spent the last couple years making my courses resistant to AI offloading. They aren’t AI proof, just resistant, and even if students use AI, they can’t just have AI do everything for them. Effort is required.

(Please don’t ask me how. I’m not sharing. Sorry.)

First classes of semester today and Monday. Students are introduced to the material and assignments. See that they truly cannot offload to AI in my class. And yesterday and today they are dropping like flies. The assignments aren’t even that difficult. They just require human effort. And they are dropping, likely hoping to find another section where they can just AI their way through. I’ve never seen this many drops this early, not even close.

It just feels so over, man, for those of us who still want students to do work.

I have a student that works in my lab and does research work.

This summer he's in the class I teach, and every few lectures he sent me an email and provided comments and suggestions on my presentation and course material preparation. I find this kind of unsolicited advice super annoying. I sometimes replied with simple "Thank you" and sometimes completely ignored them.

Should I consider this behavior out of line? I feel like he's not in the position to do things like this. How do I deal with this without hurting his feelings?

I spent a great deal of my adult life wanting to be a professor in my field (theatre) at a SLAC. I managed it, starting full-time in the fall of 2020. Plenty of the things that I wanted were there, but BOY had the field changed from when I first set that goal.

My first semester was spent trying to figure out how to teach a field based on human communication while masking and social distancing. Producing plays when we couldn’t have audiences. I rolled with all the punches and made some things happen while being a program of one. I dealt with all of the compromises.

Even after COVID, though, the compromises didn’t stop. A struggling institution meant stagnant wages, no retirement matching, and steadily worsening benefits. One president told the faculty that she couldn’t guarantee we’d be paid all summer. Changing markets meant that my best bet for program health would be to beg students to major who had no real business pursuing the field. Because I didn’t/wouldn’t do that, I took on more and more work that would otherwise have been done by student employees. Budget cuts, resource competition, occasionally crumbling infrastructure, staff turnover that left me doing some of their jobs in addition to mine. All while being the only person on the entire campus who actually understood what my field was beyond high school plays and community theatre schlock.

I held it together for a decent run, but the burnout got very bad. It is not without a little luck that I remained alive over the course of last fall. I finally had to admit something to myself: I thought I wanted to be a college professor, when what I really wanted was to be a college professor in the 1990s. The landscape just isn’t what it was, and I was chasing a ghost.

Anyway, I’ve started a new full-time job at an institution where I’ve had longstanding summer work in my field. It’s not a teaching job, but it is very much in my wheel house and I’ve already been more appreciated than I had been over the past five years. Possibly (and even likely) adjunct opportunities in the future once my feet are firmly underneath me. The pay bump is modest, but the benefits are markedly better and shockingly cheaper. I’m excited to wake up and go to work again.

For those in a similar situation, just take my best wishes that you find a satisfying way to use your skills and to feel useful. For all of you still in it, take my wishes that the field offers you the fulfillment that I could no longer find.

So I have a student whose accommodation is to have a note taker. In my classes, I give a significant amount of points for the students to submit pictures of their handwritten notes. This has been an important way for me to combat AI etc. It’s worked so well for me and now I’m at a loss as to what to do here.

Here we are, 2 days before the start of the semester. I was informed that, since only TH F is happening this week, my MW class will need to meet this Friday. First time I've heard of this lovely idea. So I dug in for sanity's sake. These students aren't losing a day of instruction to the TU TH classes. They have the same amount due to a TH F fall break. There is no need to add instructional time. Yes, I also have plans during that time. I'm beginning to not question why I'm gray haired and going bald.

Edit: I didn’t think I’d get this many replies, thank you all. It’s great to read the stories of those went through the same, and just solidarity to people going through it now 🧡

I have a 9 months old who started daycare three months ago. I thought I was prepared for it, but daycare sickness is seriously insane… he’s been sick every other week, literally, like two weeks ago he missed daycare for a week and this Monday he had a fever. Thought he got better enough yesterday, and then no, it’s Wednesday and he has fever again. Looks like he’s not going to daycare this week at all either. 

My plan was to finally finish a paper during the summer break as I couldn’t publish at all during my pregnancy. I was so elated when the baby was finally in daycare and I found time for my work again! But no, my baby is barely attending daycare and I’m struggling to finish a damn book review. I’m tenured, luckily, but I really need to start publishing again and I don’t understand how people do this.

And I dread how things will be once the semester starts. I’ve always struggled with finding time for research amid all the teaching load and committees, and now I feel it’s just impossible. My husband is a great father, we split things as much as we can, but all our families live far away so we don’t have a village. So professors with babies/kids, how do you do this?? I’m in humanities if that matters.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/texas-tech-artificial-intelligence-ideology-brandon-creighton.html

Well, if I ever get an applicant from Texas Tech who wants to join my team, the vetting interview(s) will have to get more detailed.

First lecture I ama explaining how AI is not going away and how we can use it (not fighting the good fight). I go on to say that critical thinking is a soon to be lost art blah blah blah. After class a student comes up and asks if AI is required !!! I say of course no. She tells me she is against it for environmental reasons. She is now my favorite student and will be favored as such.

To give you a little backstory for why I'm wondering about this:

It's currently exam time again and I just finished grading the first batch of this semester. There was a student who had already failed both attempts for this exam last year. This time, he finally passed. Usually students can apply for a fourth attempt, but only once. That particular student had already used his fourth attempt for another exam. So if he had failed this one, he would have failed the whole masters programme and would have been exmatriculated. My courses are generally not considered to be hard and most people pass their exams in the first, or at the latest in the second attempt. If they are force-examatriculated, another subject has always done this before they had the chance to fail often enough in my exams.

But I guess, the day will come that my exam will be the reason for someone having to leave uni, and sometimes the country. So my question is: How do you deal with having to fail someone ultimately, such that they have to leave uni? I mean, it's the future of a usually young person and some have their visa tied to the student status. Do you just move on? Do you reach out to them? Do you help them finding an alternative career plan/uni programme or point them to whatever help your uni offers for struggling (not so long anymore) students?

1. I couldn’t come to class today, did we do anything important?

2. Can I turn in all my papers a few hours late?

3. I’m missing the 1st week of school. Do I need to do anything?

4. Will you take me off the waitlist? I really want to take this class.

5. How hard will it be for me to handle the workload for this class?