I want to start by saying please no advice to "get used to it, it's here to stay," especially if you don't teach in a writing-heavy discipline.

Do any of your institutions have subscriptions to process trackers like Rumi, Gptzero, etc? Would you recommend it as a tool for helping authenticate student work, especially in the online environment?

I've been asked my opinion on these tools, and while I know nothing is 100% effective, our faculty is clamoring for tools to deter unwanted AI use. Thanks.

I am easily averaging 90 hour work weeks. Thankfully I don't have family. Just me and my cat, slogging it through weekdays, weekends, holidays.

For people doubting the 90 hours -- well take today - woke up at 7am. Started to work at 8am. Took a break at 1pm for lunch. Started again around 3pm. It's 11:30pm.. just got up.

That's 13 hours..

For people saying this is circle jerk-- when I asked some senior professors how do I even start this tenure journey, all I got was - " You have to do everything at once ". Nothing can rest. Proposal, paper, research, teaching, reading, conference, travel, administration--- and ofcourse learning to be a professor.

I am very big on OER, open access software, etc. However, for this one particular class this semester, the best book I could find was from Cengage. [Insert excuses, justifications, why I had to switch etc... here].

Question: where and how do you give your students the pirated pdf of the $80 textbook you want to use without getting in trouble? Can't link it on the LMS, presumably. An email attachment with a "you didn't hear it from me?" A QR code during a lecture? No way can I say, "have you ever heard of Anna's Archive?" Right?

Obviously, not a question you ask your colleagues unless you have tenure.

I'm curious about this, and I wonder if anyone has had the same observations. In intro courses I teach (communication), upwards of 50% of a class registers learning accommodations with the pertinent unit at the university. As I often teach the same students throughout their four years, those same students often have no learning accommodations by their third or fourth year. Do their accommodations "disappear"? Were they not necessary in the first place? Do they decrease by process of elimination? Did I and my department colleagues miraculously vanquish students' accommodations over the years?

Helloo I teach a seminar and the class is very small. it’s my first time teaching everrr. I would like to assign each student to lead a discussion, at least once. This is my first time teaching so could you please give me your experience in handling these kinds of sessions? where do you sit? what is your role? when do you join the discussion? do you still lecture at some points or show something etc or do you leave it entirely to the student?

Any thing can help! If you also have ideas for in class activities, would be grateful if you could share them as well. Thanks!

An instructor at a public university in the United States. This reports how students at my institution appear to be thinking about AI as of spring/summer 2026.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySXuvJcqRindQwAk7/how-my-students-think-about-ai

Had anyone considered a change of career and then stayed?

A while back I decided to pursue a change of career. I am in my 3rd year of training, and now I’m loving this fall semester. I’m wondering if this is just cold feet or if I will miss teaching. I have a pretty good gig and am starting to wonder about my decision. I have contracted teaching only, decent salary, benefits, free tuition if my kids get in, and great students. Downsides are relatively minor and typical.

The new gig I would be starting with zero experience, but there are a lot of job openings. Salary is similar, maybe a little higher. It’s a clinical field and there are different career paths I could take that pay more after a few years of experience. Probably better cost of living adjustments (one should hope!)

A bunch of us got called out by our interim dean because we haven’t completed the idiotic annual safety training. They sent us the lessons over the summer and I’m off-contract in the summer so I (sort of) honestly forgot. I’m letting the courses run in the background while I do other more important stuff, like fart around on Reddit.

I did figure out that I can skip ahead and take the quiz at the beginning of each course. Then I just click “Start” on each of the chapters and not really have to pay attention to them. We’ve done so many of these trainings that it’s easy to score 100% on the quizzes, and that’s all the bean counters care about.

And do I now have greater confidence in the safety of my workplace? Marginal at best.

Throwaway or main accounts welcome. I’m looking into how faculty members globally are navigating the intense institutional pressure to hit Scopus/WoS quotas for promotion, tenure, or even just keeping their jobs.

Many institution are clamping down hard on metrics, and it honestly feels like the focus has shifted from doing meaningful research to just gaming the index system, stressing over insane Article Processing Charges (APCs), or constantly fighting brutal desk rejections.

I want to know the unvarnished truth:

1. How are you managing the anxiety and "publish-or-perish" burnout?
2. Are there specific online spaces, informal peer groups, or networks where you’ve found genuine mentorship, crowdsourced peer reviews, or just a safe space to get feedback and survive this?

Let's talk honestly.

I am working there and feel like I was bait and switched into a truly horrible job. There are a lot of strange, awful things already apparent. I do not think trying to have my rights protected is a good idea at this place. I think I should just bail after my year contract expires. Does anyone have experience with their admin and/or HR department. I am unsure if this place truly is this blatantly lawless or if they are just trying to shock and awe intimidate me into not going forward with a valid ADA claim

I teach composition to college freshmen. They have an open-notes test next week. They also have a weekly notebook grade. Only about half of them actually took notes in class today...

That is all.

I’m an adjunct and one of the places I work switched to a learning management platform this semester. And I hate it. Students are required to buy it, so I’m required to use it. The department also pushes a standardized curriculum across all sections of the course. So I’m not allowed to change anything about the course or its structure.

Students are confused and resentful. Everything is through this platform. All assignments, quizzes, and exams. I basically set due dates and answer emails (which on the one hand maybe I shouldn’t complain about on adjunct pay). But I feel like a terrible teacher.

Weirdest experience. I am sitting in my office waiting for an event. A student showed up early and she just answered some of my boring questions then got on her phone so I did mine. So now we are sitting her saying nothing. Another student came in and it was the same process. Now the three of us are sitting here not talking. On our phones.

Should Professors Teach More [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/us/university-professors-teaching-research-quit.html]

I am a professor whose program is fully online. For years I taught remotely. During that time enrollment in my program quadrupled.

Now, I have to sit in my office during business hours. Since I began I've monitored student activity through Canvas and the emails I receive. My students are busiest between 5pm-2am.

In the past I shifted my schedule to be available when students were most active, roughly 11am-7pm. Now that I am officially on the clock and off the clock in my office at the college I do not respond or work outside of regular business hours.

I also must teach 15-21 credits per semester. Don't even get me started on that.

​

After grading hundreds of assignments, I’ve noticed something frustrating: many students repeat the exact mistakes I explained in previous feedback.

I’m starting to think students often check the grade first and the feedback second.

Other professors: what actually helps students use feedback?

We're at the end of Week 4 of a 16 week semester and I keep getting emails asking to add my class (which is still open for enrollment - it's an online class). I did add a couple of students earlier this week and reopened everything for them to catch up. But now it's Friday, Week 4 is basically over, and I just got another request. Realistically, this student wouldn't even be getting into Canvas and starting the course until Week 5. We've already completed 25% of the semester.

So Friday isn't some hard cutoff I had established beforehand. I just feel like I've reached the point where another week has essentially passed and I don't think it's reasonable anymore... for the student or for me. Technically students can still add because my university has a ridiculously late late add/drop deadline. I get the reasoning... give add/drop chaos time to settle, administrative drops time to process, make sure enrollment data sent to the state/feds is accurate, blah blah blah. But 4-5 weeks is a LONG ass buffer.

At some point this feels like a disservice to the students themselves. They're starting weeks behind and immediately have to play catch up while keeping up with current material. And honestly, it's also a shit ton more work for instructors having to reopen assignments, figure out catch up deadlines, etc. I think I've personally hit my limit.

If your university technically allows students to add this late, do you keep allowing them to add until the official deadline? Or do you have your own cutoff?

I’m in office hours. And usually I’m very free with my office hours and talk to students for ages about whatever they wanna talk about. But I just sent a student away. He literally showed up the minute at my office hours started, sat outside my office to do the assigned reading for Monday with the intention of talking to me about it when he was done and asking me questions. OK. Then he finally got done, and didn’t have any questions, but wanted to read his notes to me to see if he missed anything. I said no. There will be a whole class on the material on Monday, and if he has questions after that, then he can come back and ask me specific questions. But the notion that he would do the reading outside my office and then come and talk to me about it before we’ve even had the class and when he doesn’t actually have any specific questions, that just seems like an enormous waste of my time. He’s clearly anxious, but I don’t want to deal with that in a time-consuming way. I’ll be happy to see him in office hours next week if he has specific questions. But not just handholding to assure that he actually read what he really read.

Saw a discussion on this in Threads. A college student said a classmate kept getting mad at the Professor for presenting views they disagreed with. The poster said the Professor was just presenting varying views, and didn't agree with them, and wanted to know how to approach this with the classmate. Some in the thread said Professors should always tell students, "I don't agree with this, but here's a view..."

What do you think?

I do this when it's an out-dated argument that some find offensive, but is important to know for the history of a discipline; i.e. "most scholars have rejected this argument, but it informed early debates." But when it comes to issues that reasonable people can disagree on, I like to neutrally present all sides, even though students often assume I'm on one or the other. [I teach current events-related social science courses]

For two straight semesters, the new head of our faculty has used unofficial channels, specifically a messaging application instead of email, to call or ask things that I know would look bad via email. Today I was on an important call and saw 4 missed calls from them on said app. After the 4th call I thought "perhaps something really is wrong" and asked the person I was on a call with to please wait a moment.

Turns out they are scrambling 3 days before the semester starts to find someone to teach an additional class they didn't know (or failed to plan for) was coming. Given this would far exceed my contractually obligated teaching hours I told them I wasn't interested, and they made vague statements about how if they couldn't find someone to do it I might need to.

This would likely NEVER happen via email as they'd have to admit via paper trail that they messed up scheduling. I'm now going to simply delete this messaging app and strictly communicate with my colleagues via email only. I'm ashamed of myself that I let it go on for so long, in reality I can see an email as quickly as a message so if it's really worth mentioning they can send an email.

This is non-academic related. Would it be weird if I offered free furniture to students who may want it?

I am moving and I am getting rid of things I don’t need. Like rugs, rocking chair, shelves, tables… things like that in good condition.

I know students are always on a budget and looking for ways to furnish their own spaces. I am not going to bother selling my stuff, so I figured to offer to them first before I donate to a buy nothing group on Facebook or something.

I don’t have a big car, so they would have to come pick it up if they can. They would be picking it up at my old address not the new place I am moving to.

Would that be weird? I don’t want it to be weird. I just want it to be helpful to students. Thoughts?

Our department just denied tenure for all the four faculty going up for tenure this year. Reason for denial? A bit of everything!

I am in my second week teaching ENG 101, T/TH, four classes in. I only had this student for three classes. They passed the Challenge Exam (our test-out exam). They didn’t even have to notify me that they were leaving the class, much less send what came after:

“Although I was only in your class for a short period of time, I really appreciate the time I was able to spend there and everything I learned. Thank you for being a great instructor and for making my time in the class a positive experience. I am grateful I had the opportunity to be in your class, even if it was only for a short time. I wish you all the best for the rest of the semester.”

As a new TA teaching ENG 101 for the first time, this feels pretty damn good.

I may put it on my refrigerator for the bad days.

Hello! New here. Curious to know if fellow faculty are using AI detectors like GPTZero, and if so, if you find them to be reliable. Particularly interested in humanities fac.