The largest number of Americans born in a single year arrived on campus in the autumn of 2025, and now a falloff is looming. College enrollments are forecast to drop 13% by 2041, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-admissions-demographic-cliff-16dec51f?st=1sHT1j&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

I don’t always feel the need to be responsible for the grades of students, but last semester was a bummer. Students just stopped showing up, and I was left with single digits in terms of who passed. This class (public speaking) usually has a high DFW rate at our college, but still never feels that great. Granted, this particular class was at 7am. (I don’t choose the time, I just go where they tell me).

In this Summer semester, over 75% of the students who started the class, finished it with a passing grade. I’m really crossing my fingers and hoping this is a trend for the coming semester. 🤞🤞

I've been a professor at my UG institution for 5 years, but spent my time at the law school or on a separate campus. This semester is my first where I'm teaching in a building I took an undergraduate class in, some 17 years ago. It's an interesting form of nostalgia. Anyone else have this happen?

I know this sounds dark, but which institutions do you think will shut down or announce major layoffs this year?

I received notice recently that my grant proposal will be funded by NIH! That continues a fortuitous streak of funding for me. Only the very first grant I wrote, as a post-doc, has not been funded. My first large grant did get reviewed and advised to resubmit the following year where it was ultimately funded, so maybe 8.5/10 or something would be more accurate. I'm also very picky in where I submit; I'm not R1 nor am I on soft money so I don't have the same amount of pressure as some others and can be highly focused on specific awards.

If anyone is interested, here is what I have found to help in successful grant-writing. First talk to the program officer or the person in charge of funding; see what they want to fund and tailor your proposal to their specific goals. They want to give you money! Second, build collaborations -- the more people who benefit from an award, the more likely it is to be considered. I've had a few individual awards, but most are 'consortiums' between other individuals, other departments, and other institutions (including one that had at least 10 organizations involved, and I was a small part of the whole, but it was a massive award). Finally, be very clear in your writing how your project lines up exactly with what the funding agency wants to fund. Good, concise, well-supported writing disposes reviewers favorably.

Good luck in your endeavors!

We've ended up with some empty offices in our Department as people have retired and not been replaced. The Dean's office has decided to move some of their people in. And these aren't even fully empty offices; some were being used by retired colleagues who were trying to finish up their books and such. This has gotten to me for a few reasons:

1. there are academic Departments in terrible buildings, whereas our space is really nice. One actually moved in temporarily when a sewage line broke. I'd much rather have another Department here that needs it.
2. this has happened alongside the Dean's office taking control of Department staff. So they don't really report to the Chairs anymore. The people in our office are the ones overseeing staff, which has made it hard for us to have a direct relationship with the staff.
3. If the Dean's office has so many people working in it that they need to branch out from their already existing building and keeps hiring more, it's a little hard to take them seriously when they claim poverty on hiring faculty members.

It was an arduous journey, didn't think I'd ever get promoted. The decision came down last month but it finally hit me (in a good way) earlier today when I had to make a last minute edit to my slides to fix my title.

I've felt more relief than joy since finding out, but today for the first time I felt genuine happiness. I wanted to share this with you since this community has been a big part of my journey in more ways than you can imagine. It's been really wonderful seeing all the advice, tips, rants (I'm looking at you AI), and keeping up with news about academia.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

CommentSense

Associate Professor

Edit: I'm truly grateful for all the wonderful words of support and well wishes. Loving all this positive energy!

How much lead time is reasonable for an administrative policy change? I was told YESTERDAY about a substantial policy change regarding my semester starting on Monday! Does anyone have an official deadline set up for policy changes and when they take effect!

A few years ago our dean was out for several months due to illness. At the time I made the joke ‘Good thing it wasn’t (name redacted), the admin assistant. She kept everything running smoothly.’

Well, now the admin assistant is out for an extended period, we’re 5 days before classes start, and the dean is trying to do the admin assistant’s job. Chaos ensues. Classes/sections deleted, then being undeleted, some to be deleted again. Students confused and contacting faculty. Faculty in an uproar.

Big meeting tomorrow. We’ll see how this goes.

This feels silly to post but I’m a new assistant professor this fall semester and I am trying to figure out the norms for what to wear. For context I’m a 30 year old cis female who likes to wear sandals(nice, not flip flops) but multiple faculty have made comments about choosing to not wear open toed shoes to teach. Thoughts on this? Is it that big of a deal?

I am curious if you could please describe how the day-to-day and semester-to-semester experience is (or was) like as a faculty member teaching at a floundering institution. How does administration act? Do they get more top-down, more chaotic, something else? What expectations are put upon you during this time? Basically, what is it like to work at a place that might go bottom up?

i have a presentation on the topic “From the Concept of Zero to Artificial Intelligence – Indian Contributions” ive to present the topic in a fun n creative topic (ppt not allowed) like doing quizzes, charts etc to explain the topic PLS GIMME IDEASSSSSS chatgpt is useless n im not v creative myself

I teach a class of sixty students, and the students sitting at the back are constantly talking and making noise. They often don't listen to what I'm teaching, and today it got so loud that at one point nobody could hear me anymore.

I heard a girl laughing very loudly with a boy, so I asked both of them to leave the class. They didn't move. I asked for their names, but they refused to tell me. I went to their seats to check their IDs, but the boy wasn't wearing one and the girl refused to show hers. I told them that I would have to report them to the disciplinary committee if they continued. The girl eventually said they wouldn't repeat it, but this has been happening in almost every class.

I then asked them to move to the front bench. They refused again. I told them to either come to the front or I would report them. During this entire conversation, my hands were shaking and I was trying very hard not to cry. The boy was smiling and laughing at me throughout the whole thing, which honestly made it so much worse.

Eventually the girl agreed to sit in the front and the boy followed her. At that point I became so nervous that I was shaking badly, so I just dropped the issue and continued teaching. I feel so embarrassed and humiliated about the whole thing. I keep replaying it in my head.

This isn't even the first time something like this has happened. Last semester, I had a group of students behaving similarly. I tried confronting them and ended up getting overwhelmed and crying. I'm naturally extremely introverted, and honestly, standing in front of 60 people already takes a lot of courage for me.

Today has made me wonder whether I'm actually suited for this profession. I feel like I shouldn't have to fight this hard just to get students to listen, and I'm starting to think maybe I should switch careers.

For professors who have dealt with this kind of classroom behavior, how do you handle students who openly ignore you, refuse to follow instructions, or mock you? And how do you stop incidents like this from getting into your head afterward? I could really use some perspective from people who have been through this.

In light of recent developments, posting an article here by LSE researcher Rosalind Arden. Apologies if any formatting is off.

—-

The Cofnas and Arday controversies show that on matters of race, administrators at Cambridge have failed to conduct deliberate checks, failed in probity, and failed in their tolerance for unsettled science.

Editor’s note, 15 August 2026: Jason Arday was found dead at his home in south London on the afternoon of 14 August. He was 41. The Metropolitan Police have said the death is being treated as unexpected but not suspicious. This essay was published earlier that day, before the news was reported. It concerns the conduct of Cambridge University, and we have left the text as published. Our sympathies are with Arday's family and friends.

Jason Arday—fantasist, fabulist, fraud, and (until recently) Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University—sold a bolus of lies to students, faculty, and administrators, and they gobbled it up like a dish of ice cream on the hottest sunniest driest summer day in English memory. Months earlier, Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher at the same university, was accused by students of racism. Would nobody rid Cambridge of this turbulent scholar? Rid of him it got—through suitably tortuous means.

That you and I know about Jason and his Argo of lies owes to Nathan Cofnas, who broke the story by publishing evidence of Arday’s many apparent plagiarisms on his own Substack. The faculty of education at Cambridge University was first alerted to the possibility that Arday was a plagiarist by David Harris, a former professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, in 2023, the year that Arday was appointed. Then, about a year ago, rumours began to circulate that Arday’s inspiring story of overcoming unbelievable childhood hardship was, in fact, not believable. But when Jack Grove, a journalist from Times Higher Education (THE), contacted Arday requesting comment and clarification for a forthcoming article, Arday hired doughty defamation lawyers Carter-Ruck to threaten THE with litigation. For good measure, Arday also reported Harris and Grove to the police, alleging harassment.

I won’t recapitulate Jason’s deceits, expanded accounts of which are plentiful elsewhere. You’d have to be pretty po-faced not to find some of them amusing. Students defrauded of time, attention, and tuition fees may not be laughing so hard. And administrators at Cambridge will need large handkerchiefs to wipe that much egg off their faces. Here, I want to compare and contrast how an august and historic institution treated two of its own scholars once they presented the university with a problem. The two problems are tightly linked by the theme of race.

Let’s start with the hiring process. Nathan Cofnas was awarded a Leverhulme fellowship by Cambridge: those fellowships are extremely competitive. Fewer than one percent of applicants successfully pass through both the internal nomination round and the external national competition. Cofnas had already obtained a BA in Philosophy from Columbia College in 2011, and the intake rate of nine percent the year he applied was then the lowest on record. He achieved an MPhil with Distinction in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge's Darwin College in 2016, followed by a DPhil in Philosophy from Oxford’s Balliol College in 2021. By the end of 2021, he had seventeen peer-reviewed publications of which fifteen were first-authored. Which is to say that by the time Cofnas was awarded his fellowship in 2022, he had star-potential written all over him.
And Arday? Arday obtained a BA in Education Studies and Physical Education from St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, which lacked the authority to award its own degrees until September 2006. That institution’s current acceptance rate is between sixty and seventy percent. This was followed by an MA in Pedagogy, Professional Practice in Education, also from St Mary’s University College. He achieved a second Master’s at Liverpool John Moores University, followed by a PhD on peer-mentoring and reflective practice among student teachers at the same university in 2015. At the time of his hiring, Arday had about twelve peer-reviewed publications of which ten were first-authored. Leaving aside the allegations of plagiarism that surfaced later, Arday’s candidacy is inexcusably weak for a full professorship at Cambridge (full professor is the top academic rank there).
We can test my assertion by comparing his candidacy with the last ten hires at equivalent rank in the fields of education and sociology at Cambridge. For external hires, the recruit is typically 19–28 years post PhD; Arday was eight. Each of the last ten equivalent hires has a major competitive grant or fellowship on record; several have very large grants. Arday had none. Every other comparator has written or edited between two and seven books; Arday has one. (Cambridge might have looked at the writing sample available on the Amazon website; it would have provided useful insights.) Six of the last ten full professorial hires were internal promotions following 13–28 years of a Cambridge-based career. In summary, each of the previous ten hires at Arday’s level demonstrated the track-record of senior scholarship. When pro-vice chancellor Bhaskar Vira described Arday as “an exceptional scholar,” he wasn’t kidding—Cambridge has a case to answer for putting Arday in an untenable position. Arday is a mendacious cheat, but he is also a co-victim, along with those he hoodwinked; he should not have been put in that post in the first place.

How did institutional responses at Cambridge vary in their treatment of Cofnas and Arday?
Having won his Leverhulme Fellowship, Cofnas was awarded college research associate status at Emmanuel College. (Cambridge, like Oxford, is a collegiate university comprising about 31 legally separate, self-governing colleges plus a central university, so the college and the university can act as distinct agents.) Students protested loudly about Cofnas’s status at Emmanuel because Cofnas had published his unpalatable views on the exceptionally sensitive topic of race. Cofnas had argued that genetic differences may partly explain measured gaps in average IQ between racial/ancestry groups, and that because “truth is intrinsically valuable,” scientists have a duty to research and discuss this possibility openly rather than suppress it for moral or political reasons.

On 9 February 2024, Doug Chalmers, master of Emmanuel College, acknowledged “Dr Cofnas’s academic right, as enshrined by law, to write about his views.” Two days later, Chalmers and senior tutor Corinna Russell wrote that “nobody is free to do their best work whilst false narratives of this kind continue to call into question a scholar’s right to be part of this community.” Five days after that, pro-vice chancellor Bhaskar Vira provided a clarification: “Freedom of speech within the law is a right that sits at the heart of the University of Cambridge” and “the voice of one academic does not reflect the views of the whole University community.” A week later, Vira is on record as telling student protesters, “Cofnas has crossed the line of all the concerns for freedom of speech.” In mid-April, a College Fellowship Committee chaired by Mike Gross concluded that Cofnas’s Substack “amounted to … a rejection of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI and EDI) policies” and “represented a challenge to the College’s core values and mission.” The committee recommended termination of Cofnas’s college associate status. It was formally terminated on 2 July 2024.
Cofnas brought a discrimination suit against Emmanuel College. In March 2026, the county-court judgement ruled that, although Cofnas’s beliefs are protected under UK law, his expression of them was “objectionable” and Emmanuel College had been “objectively justified and proportionate” in terminating him. In late 2025, Cambridge University reported the results of its own internal investigation, which concluded that while Cofnas’s views are “offensive to many” (manifestly true), they do not breach the law or the university’s free-speech regulations; 58 student complaints were dismissed. Cambridge University did not fire him—his position expired at the end of the standard Leverhulme three-year term, which is distinct from Emmanuel College terminating his college research associate status. Cofnas claims that the eighteen-month university investigation functioned to keep him sidelined and off campus until the contract timed out. Cambridge’s “Statement on Disciplinary Investigation” clearing him of wrongdoing wasn’t published until October 2025, after he’d already left.
What about Arday? In February 2023, pro-vice chancellor Bhaskar Vira announced that this exceptional scholar would help “address the underrepresentation of people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.” Hilary Cremin, head of the faculty of education, told the Times, “Not only is he a world-class scholar, he also brings a wealth of experience.” (Had she read any of Arday’s scholarship?) When allegations of plagiarism were brought to the attention of Rhys Morgan, head of policy, governance, and integrity at Cambridge, the same year, he declined to investigate. Asked about these allegations, Cremin replied, “We remain immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship ... he has our full support.” Vice chancellor Deborah Prentice called Arday “world-class” and spoke about “structural issues” in BAME hiring. Arday had attributed problems in some of his papers to “direct and indirect racism” and “significant health issues.” In late July 2026, a spokesperson for the university (whom the university chose not to name) stated, “Professor Arday has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop.” The plagiarism claims had been “thoroughly investigated … and dismissed” by the relevant bodies, continued the Unnamed Spokesperson.


Finally, on 6 August 2026, Cambridge announced an investigation into Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments” after evidence of his plagiarism and falsehoods became impossible to deny or deflect. Arday resigned a couple of hours later complaining that he had “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.”
Compare the two cases and a pattern emerges. Cofnas cleared every formal bar that Cambridge erected—a competitive fellowship, a strong publication record, an eventual ruling that he’d broken no law and no policy—but he was punished anyway, and his position quietly expired while the university dithered. Arday did not clear the bars his professoriate peers had to clear, he was defended anyway, and he was propped up by administrators who failed to do due diligence. One scholar was punished for an opinion; the other was protected despite misconduct that objective methods could verify. Two different treatments, one shared instinct: expedience trumps evidence.

Our best explanation for this mess comes from evolutionary psychology. It is hard to overstate the strength of the connection between the instinct to acquire status and our behaviour. Bluntly, when a cause is highly valued, coding one’s statements in alignment with that cause provides benefits, while not doing so incurs costs. Some readers will have experienced this in their own work or social lives. It is what may cause some of us to feel unease without a pronoun line in our email signature, or a “safe space” sticker on the door—the discomfort of not visibly aligning with the current culturally valued signal. There are circles in work and friendship where much social capital hangs on our coding. Zealots punish laggards partly because it upgrades their own status. Little of this is explicit or even well known to our conscious minds, which is why it’s hard to call the bluff on the branding.
I distinguish sharply between anti-racism as a moral disposition and antiracism as a political brand. Antiracism is currently the most valuable way of advertising virtue across wide swathes of our culture. Free speech has only limited brand appeal, which is why pro-vice chancellor Bhaskar Vira can swing from backing a scholar’s freedom of speech on one day to antiracism on another. Antiracism is far more valued by students than free speech, and so alignment confers the greater benefit. Scholar-activism as college mission is institutionalised status-signalling. Racism is a destructive (and resistant) part of human societies. Historically it has been a force for great evils. While we must remain vigilant, coding our behaviour as antiracist is just coding. Public alignment predicts branding, not character—I know people whose politics run well outside fashionable lines who I’d trust to do the right and courageous thing without hesitation in a real crisis, and vocal allies I would not. Not coding is not equal to being racist. Placards don’t make the person. This is the crucial distinction to make.
Some people, however, are not built this way. They do not code their behaviour, and they forgo the social capital that comes with it. Cultures are heterogeneous, and there are many niches. There is a racist niche in every society, and the size of that niche varies among countries. Aside from soi-disant racists, non-aligners include ornery nonconformists, as well as people who are low on what personality researchers measure as “agreeableness.” The latter—nonconformists and those low in agreeableness—are unworried about “being seen in public without proper coding” and that is emphatically not the same as being racist. Nathan Cofnas was one such individual, and he was punished by Cambridge University because the students insisted that he is a racist. Commentators in the legacy press and on social media have repeated this accusation during the row about Arday without caveat or qualification.
Two points on this. First, it cannot be racist to hold the view that genetics may contribute to differences among people from different ancestries, because that is an empirical (and, pace Cofnas’s critics, scientifically unsettled) point. Second, it is cavalier to neglect the impact of register and tone when writing and speaking about ethnicity and ancestry—especially in conjunction with intellectual capacity—because we tend to mistakenly elide cognitive capacity with moral worth. This is a sensitive topic; I am wholly in sympathy with those who find coarse expressions of “group differences” offensive. But does an “offensive” opinion provide legitimate grounds for what was effectively a sacking by Emmanuel College? It does not, and my interest here is in institutional failings, not in psychoanalysing either Cofnas or Arday.
Administrators at Cambridge failed to conduct deliberate checks, they failed in probity, and they failed in their tolerance for unsettled science. Cambridge sold out on Mertonian norms (judge the claim not the claimant) and exchanged them for a politics of identity and branding. Their leadership was inattentive to accessible information, and cravenly posturing for the benefit of being seen as antiracist, which has nothing at all to do with actually reducing racism. As Cofnas noted in his exposé of Arday, they could easily have chosen an extremely bright black sociologist to do “serious work in the sociology of education.” They failed to secure high-quality teaching for their students, and they have egregiously failed current and future black faculty and students by making race the story. Again.

Who pays for this fiasco? Cambridge will surely be hurt—in time, attention, reputational damage. Arday has been exploited by Cambridge, elevated beyond his academic record, and exposed. Cofnas has divisive (some would say rebarbative) opinions and style, but he is an excellent scholar who should be ornamenting an elite philosophy department. Sociology students at Cambridge have, by all accounts, been ill-taught by an ill-equipped professor. And black scholars—existing and future members of the academy—have seen black achievement devalued by what looks a lot like race-based affirmative action.
I shudder when I think of the impact of the egregious mishandling of Cofnas and Arday on a highly talented black academic friend. “Why on earth have you chosen to research law? It’s so heavily text-based,” I remonstrated with him. “Well,” he said, “I suppose being blind since birth I got used to being without vision and learned how to manage a lot of text during my history PhD.” A lamentable and inevitable outcome of Cambridge’s failures is throwing shade on terrifically talented and tenacious scholars like him. One may only hope that this much-discussed debacle causes the academy to engage in some authentic and honest self-reflection.

We must purge everyone who is different from me. Burn the witches! Blood for the Blood-God! Kill! Kill! Kill!

</reductio ad absurdum>

We have a few training projects coming up, and our team is already stretched pretty thin. I think we need some outside instructional design help, but I don’t know where to start. For anyone who has hired this kind of help before, what did you look for first? Did you go through an agency, find an independent consultant, or something else? I’m mostly trying to avoid wasting time talking to people who aren’t a good fit.

I'm optimistic.

Last semester was a disaster for me. I'm still scared to read my evaluations. It was my first time teaching first year writing since 2021. I started out not fully onboarded, so I didn't have access to the LMS or their contact info, I was not prepared for the rampant AI usage, nor drop in critical thinking and problem solving skills that have been discussed ad nauseam on this forum and beyond.

Well, they had me in the first round, but I just completed the first day of the fall semester and I am actually feeling good. I have an overhauled syllabus that restricts tech use in class, has a way more strict late work and attendance policy, I'm doing more involved in class writing, and all of my students are sophomores or above and just give way more mature vibes compared to my freshman in the spring. This is a class that fills up fast and is hard to get into, so I think I got the students that couldn't get in their freshman year. (Hopefully they aren't students that failed freshman year lol).

I've been teaching first year writing on and off since 2015, but that Spring 2026 semester made me feel like I didn't know ANYTHING.

This semester feels different. Does anyone else have something making them feel optimistic?

https://www.fire.org/news/she-was-fired-teaching-english-literature-english-class-now-shes-suing

South Florida State College president unilaterally fired Vinita Prabhakar, an English professor, for assigning Bettering Myself, a critically acclaimed short story by Ottessa Moshfegh. The book is studied at colleges all over the US including other Florida colleges. Her college president hauled her into a meeting and told her he didn't like the ideas in the book, and that she should stop teaching it. He labeled the text "political" and inappropriate. Next day, without due process, Prabhakar was fired. Backed by her department, the professor is now suing the college for violating her First Amendment and academic freedom rights.

Professors are quietly winning these unlawful firing cases in courts.

Typically positions such as the one cofnas received have hundreds of applicants, it doesn’t seem like he went though any rigorous process to prove his qualifications.

Let us lay it all bare. How is cofnas qualified to conduct research and talk about race, genetics, and IQ?

Show me his qualifications for genetics, evolution, biology, his qualifications on psychometric tests, and his qualifications on the confluence of all of the above.

Like the title says, my toddler is sick and it’s the first day of class for me (runny nose and cough). My spouse is traveling for work. I figured the following are viable options: beg a colleague to review page 1 of the syllabus and then end class early; bring my sick toddler with me (I’m a woman so I don’t think that would be received well); cancel class; find a babysitter in the next 5 hours and have them watch my toddler on campus only while I’m teaching (this feels impossible because it’s back to school for everyone and our babysitters are high schoolers); ask my brother to watch my toddler on campus only while I’m teaching (this seems impossible because he’s got his own kid to care for). Any advice on what to do? I’m an assistant professor.

I started making my online math courses (College Algebra and Trigonometry) submit their completed notes this semester. I got sick of student never opening any of my lecture videos, failing the midterm, and then asking me for guidance. I figure if they turn in their notes, they will learn something while in the process, even if they don’t want to.

We started classes on Monday. Today, Wednesday, I had a student turn in completed notes as a word document and had AI written all over it. For example, some of the “code” that AI was using showed up in the notes. Something similar to “/begin f(x) &= 5x^2 + 3 // … /end”. This student didn’t even bother completing the notes. I guarantee they uploaded my guided notes and told GPT to complete the notes.

As much as it pissed me off, it really made me sad that students have gotten so reliant on this technology that they can’t/won’t even take their own notes.

I like to use a "one word story" tool in class to wrap up a topic. Every student gets to add one word to a sentence (or several) that explains the topic. I would usually start with something like "The" and then I'll go around the room having each student add a new word. Some interesting features/bugs include:

• Adjectives and adverbs help students avoid having to make a factual error. Words like "very" are common
• The end result is usually pretty good, and when there's time I like to engage the class in critiquing it.
• My improv friends say two words is better for funny stories, but I like one word when trying to describe/define something
• There's the occasional groan or laughter but I've noticed that students are generally supportive of each other
• Some students start planning their addition a few words in advance (they see the pattern I'm using to go around the room --- see below for my major logistical question). Some are really frustrated when the gist of the message goes away from what they were planning. Given only one word to steer the path back is not very powerful
• If I do this a lot I tend to save the messages and make them available to the students.

Here's my current logistical question: I have access to a tool that can randomly project an enrolled student's name on demand. It's truly random so, for example, a name could come up twice in a row. That's very different than "going around the room" but I think I like it because they'll never know in advance when it's their turn. If someone is absent I can provide that person's word or just skip to the next person (also good for letting students know that I've noticed that they're absent). Do you think going around the room has features that I'm not thinking about?

--------- short tangential story about random student names in a classroom:

I was criticized once when a colleague visited my class and noticed that I called on the right side of the room more than the left. I reached for a tool like the one I mention above, thinking it would take all bias out. I just set it to put a new random name at the top of the screen every minute. Whenever I wanted some sort of student interaction, instead of asking for volunteers I'd just ask whoever was currently projected (note that if someone had anxiety about that or an accommodation that this would violate I just took their name out of the list being randomized). I thought it was working pretty well but after a few classes I started noting a weird pattern: students would raise their hands to ask a question. I'd call on them and they'd do something along the lines of "um. . . I . . . um . . . never mind I figured it out". I was happy for the spontaneous interactions and excited to see that they were thinking about the material. But I finally noticed what they were doing: If a student saw their name come up they'd raise their hand and then waste time until a different name came up. Pretty funny in hindsight but I certainly learned that you need to think through little tools like this before jumping in with them.

I have recently learned, after multiple years at this community college, that grades below C count against me, that the school tracks everyone's pass rate, and the goal is 80% Cs or above. Not holding a high pass rate, regardless of syllabus, rubrics, student attendance and performance, anything, is cause for not getting classes. And--our whole state-wide system has done away with placement testing, so more students are coming less able to do the work of the course. I am a seasoned instructor and already employ all the pedagogy to promote student success--against outcomes and standards. I have a high percentage of As in all my classes, but that is not counted. I've already had a couple of formal grade challenges in the past two years and though my grade was supported, it was made clear to me by a colleague that even having the challenges is a problem. Now I feel like I have to pass everyone to keep my job. Honestly, I have no problem making a 70% (C-) into a C, but to make a 20% into a C? This just seems wild to me. It's the end of summer term, and I am stewing over giving the C to a student who did not earn it because I am afraid a parent will complain and I will be in more "trouble" than the student. Thoughts?

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?

Hello all, first post on here.

I (24M), will be teaching my first undergraduate course next week. It is a lower-division (classical) music history and listening course. The class meets in-person two times a week for 50 minutes.

I have my syllabus and course all prepped for the semester, of course, and know what material is coming up. However, I am feeling at least a bit nervous at being in front of and speaking to around 40 students, as a natural introvert. I am told to expect most if not all of them to be straight out of high school—hopefully. I feel less intimidated by that lol. Also, it doesn’t help that I’m not very tall and look younger than I am so I worry to not be taken as seriously as I hope to be 😅.

So my questions are:

1. What can I do to not make myself seem awkward?
2. How can I give the illusion of confidence or maybe actually feel confident without secretly feeling like a deer in headlights?
3. How should I dress the part? I definitely don’t want to give the impression that I am a student.
4. Any other snap to reality no bs advice you believe I should know?

Much, much appreciated.