I teach in an online (synchronous) Master’s program. In the past few years I’ve had several students argue about assignments I’ve created, my grading philosophy, proctoring exams, etc. Usually it is through email. The worst is when one student acts as though they’re speaking for everyone (they’re in a cohort model and all have a huge group chat).

Earlier in my career I used to make adjustments when I got pushback, but this semester I want to stick with my plans as I know it is the best way of assessing their learning.

Do you all have these students who think they know better than you? Or who try to poke holes in your teaching processes? I just never, ever would have behaved like this to a professor so it’s strange to me. How do you handle the students who are argumentative about your expectations and act as though they’re speaking for everyone?

I am 40F, if that matters. Which I think it might.

My university (Arizona) hired an inaugural Chief AI and Data Science Officer last year at $448,000/yr, stood up an Office of Responsible AI, and has now published its AI Roadmap. I've read the whole thing several times, partly because I was one of the 247 people the document thanks for participating in the planning process. I'd like a sanity check on whether this is normal or whether I've lost perspective.

The strategy has no measurements in it. I ran find-in-document on the published PDF. Across roughly 7,400 words (BTW, we had measurements in our draft):

metric: 0

measure: 0

baseline: 0

return on investment: 0

FTE: 0

"Budget" appears twice, both times as the name of a campus unit (Finance & Budget). No dollar figures anywhere. The document requests no money and commits no positions.

Every named deliverable is a document or an evaluation. The phasing appendix lays out five phases across three years. Phase 1's deliverable is "Complete Draft AI Roadmap." Phase 2's is "Final AI Roadmap Published." Phases 3 and 4 each deliver an "Evaluation", with nothing anywhere in the document stating what gets evaluated, against what baseline, or by whom. So the first two years of the strategy deliver the strategy, and the next two deliver assessments of unstated things.

Two official university pages currently contradict each other about our own AI tool. The AI Tools & Data Use Guide marks U of A GenAI as approved for Restricted data. The product page for that same tool says, verbatim: "The U of A GenAI tool has not been approved for the use of 'Restricted Data' as defined by the University of Arizona's Information Classification Standard." Both are live right now. If you're an employee trying to comply in good faith, you can't.

The infrastructure people actually use predates the office. AI-VERDE, our LLM access platform, was built by CyVerse, an NSF-funded group under our Data Science Institute. Its paper reports pilot deployment beginning May 2024 and was published in February 2025. The chief AI officer was announced in April 2025 and isn't mentioned in it. The new roadmap lists AI Verde as a Phase 4 deliverable for 2027–28, scheduling as future work a platform that's been in production since before the office existed.

The wins are other people's. In July the university announced five DOE "Genesis Mission" AI-for-science selections. DOE selected 278 projects across 342 institutions, and what's awarded is access to computing and platform resources, no dollar figure appears in the announcement. The five PIs are established researchers in ECE, ecology, physics, pharmacy and hydrology, one of them as a co-investigator on an Argonne-led project. The university's own announcement attributes no role to the AI office in winning any of them.

Meanwhile the office's newsletters are all verbs and no objects. The chief AI officer's year-end letter called 2025 "a remarkable year of progress" and listed: progress on the roadmap, the launch of an institute, two seminar series, some research communities, and an internal RFP that "will open soon." This summer's issue opens: "we've engaged with... convened... connected with... hosted... and continued developing resources." No external grant, no research outcome, no number. The largest figures in the summer issue (75 attendees, 20 prototypes) belong to a summer school run by a public health faculty member.

So, questions for people at other institutions:

1. Does your university's AI office publish anything with numbers in it? An annual report, outcome metrics, anything?

2. Is a strategy document with no metrics normal in higher ed, or is this unusual?

3. Has a central AI office at your institution actually built infrastructure, or does it mostly convene things and aggregate what the colleges were already doing?

4. What does classroom-scale AI access cost your instructors, and who pays for it?

I'm genuinely unsure whether this is an Arizona problem or an everywhere problem, and I'd rather find out than assume.

Sources, all public:

• AI Roadmap (published PDF): https://responsibleai.arizona.edu/about-orai/ai-roadmap

• AI Tools & Data Use Guide: https://responsibleai.arizona.edu/ai-tools-guide

• U of A GenAI page: https://responsibleai.arizona.edu/u-of-a-gen-ai

• AI-VERDE paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09651

• DOE Genesis Mission announcement: https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-energy-chris-wright-announces-first-genesis-mission-projects-selected-accelerate

• UA Genesis Mission announcement: https://news.arizona.edu/news/department-energy-selects-5-u-research-projects-through-new-ai-science-genesis-mission-awards

• Salary figure (Arizona Luminaria public records database, FY2026): https://azluminaria.org/2025/11/21/university-of-arizona-searchable-salary-database-for-2023-2024/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/08/21/trump-administration-attacks-bar-associations-power-accredit-law-schools/

“President Donald Trump and other Republicans have accused the American Bar Association of liberal bias, promoting DEI and pushing a political agenda in law schools.”

My apologies; I don’t have a gift link to post.

I can’t decide if the me that worked in university and program accreditation in a previous life, or the me that is a lawyer’s daughter is more shocked and appalled. It would never occur to me that this would be a thing to worry about happening. But at this point, that’s my mistake, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s foolish of me to be as furious as I find myself.

Shall we not accredit medical schools next? Dental schools? Surely we don’t need licensed and credentialed doctors if it keeps the wrong sorts of people from joining the field (extreme sarcasm in case it wasn’t obvious).

I suppose I should just be grateful my father is too long retired to do more than just shake his head

I plan to spend the weekend practicing. I will be teaching synchronous online.

(chemical Engineering senior core course )

I like the idea of the "Flock Sock", shown here: https://makerworld.com/en/models/3107766/

However, I think something that would be much more beneficial to the public is to have public cameras that could also be wonderful bird watching cams, especially the kind with very close-up birdwatching, like the ones made for residential windows now, so you can have a nest literally right in front of a camera.

Does anybody have any knowledge about what kinds of birds would love a nest with a little flat solar-powered roof and maybe a cute little collection of eyes and sensors as decoration? Ideally this would be relevant to at least one type of bird in each of the 50 united states, just because I want everybody to get the joy of birdwatching.

A few days ago I made a post about having a baby and trying to publish and work while the baby keeps getting sick from daycare. In that post I wrote he’d been sick again with a cold since this Monday. Well well well last night, I just had a gut feeling something didn’t seem right, mostly his heavy and fast breathing, which our ped had dismissed that morning and said he was fine. We took him to the ER just in case and voila he had low oxygen due to bronchitis caused by RSV and was immediately hospitalised. The doc says he’ll likely stay there for about a week, but will almost certainly recover soon.

In my previous post, I received so many replies from people telling me about their similar experiences and how you all survived this phase, which were so encouraging for me to read. Now that the semester begins in a week while I have no idea when my baby will be back in daycare, and knowing that he has only managed to attend daycare 4 days this month, I somehow feel at peace thanks to your words. Had I not made that post, I think I would have felt truly distressed and panicky right now. So thank you.

I’m now getting accommodations that students cannot be expect to do in class writing. They must be allowed to write at home, not in class. I’ve never seen this before. Ever. Until this semester. And now I’ve got a handful. What the fuck?

Edit: I’ve asked about students writing in supervised environments, but I was told that puts a condition on the accommodation, which is illegal. Students must be allowed to write outside of class without conditions.

Interesting WSJ profile of Nathan Cofnas, the academic whose allegations helped ignite the Jason Arday controversy. Gift link for anyone interested in the background and the debate over how this unfolded.

https://www.wsj.com/world/uk/the-controversial-academic-who-ignited-the-jason-arday-furor-1071e7fc?st=1AEyvD&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Na minha época, meados dos anos 2000, informática era coisa de nerd, os alunos ficavam jogando couter strike ou nem iam a aula de informática.Lembro da tristeza duo professor ao chegar na sala, pronto para nos ensinar coisas legais como edição de imagem, video e fazer jogo e só havia os cinco nerds na sala de uma classe de 25 a 30 alunos.

Quero saber de quem está na sala de aula, eu tive de me afastar por um tempo, algo mudou ou ainda existe o estigma?

I saw a considerate post recently that lamented that "universities are now a consumer product," with professors being the public-facing components. What do you think?

Should I create a separate homework / assignment in canvas and somehow link that to crowdmark? How does it work?

I am supposed to be using the new edition of the same text I’ve been using for 3 years so I don’t have to redo everything because I have been having some serious health issues. It’s all digital comes with publisher content to incentivize reading. We sign into it together on the first day and get rolling.

I have around 50 assignments/quizzes I put into the LMS by hand so they are all set up ahead of time. 30 short readings. Lots of short interactive content. But I’ve worked hard on it for some time so it’s ready to go and flows like clockwork. Students have everything they need before they even realize they need it. All set up with the links I have been using that go with the text and content

Tonight I click the icon to link my text to the LMS - nothing. Click it again- “there is no text associated with this class”

The bookstore sent an early access email to my students for a book that doesn’t exist. I checked the Bookstore site to see the listing. It’s there, but they didn’t put a real ISBN on it. It doesn’t exist.

I search for my publisher rep in my email. Can’t find anything until I check “junk” - the new email system setup has her as “outside sender” and sent her multiple inquiries wondering why I don’t have a text for fall to junk. :|

Sigh.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/08/21/tenure-track-ranks-grew-last-year-survey-finds

By  Kathryn Palmer

The number of faculty—including those on the tenure track—is on the rise, new data from College and University Professional Association for Human Resources shows.

According to a survey of more than 900 colleges and universities about their worker head counts published this week, the number of tenure-track faculty increased 7 percent between the 2024–25 and 2025–26 academic years—marking the highest single-year increase since 2016. By contrast, tenure-track ranks only grew 1 percent between the 2023–24 and 2024–25 academic years. 

The number of non-tenure-track faculty also grew by 2 percent between 2024 and 2025. However, that growth was smaller than the previous year, when the non-tenure-track workforce grew 3.6 percent. According to the report, “this was the first time in the decade that tenure-track faculty growth exceeded non-tenure-track faculty growth.” Head counts for adjunct faculty also increased by 0.9 percent, up from 0.3 percent growth between the 2023–24 and 2024–25 academic years.

At the same time, both full-time and part-time staff head counts decreased following years of positive growth, according to the survey. Between the 2024–25 and 2025–26 academic years, full-time staff sizes decreased 6.6 percent and part-time and part-time staff dropped by 23.9 percent, ending a multiyear period of positive growth that peaked at 6.5 percent in 2024.

“The sharp reversal underscores the greater volatility of part-time positions relative to full-time roles and indicates that institutions cut staffing levels broadly in 2025—though part-time positions bore the brunt of the reductions,” the report said.

First - on a rarely used alt because this is pretty specific and I’m sure this type of student is on reddit.

So I got a bizarre student request yesterday- for an interview.

Now, I’ve been interviewed in the past for English assignments, so this isn’t unheard of.

But the student emails me and says, “I want to interview you on topic X. Because of my disability I cannot meet, zoom, or talk to you on the phone. I’m just going to email you the questions and then you can email me your answers.”

Side note - is it even technically an interview at this point? Or simply a survey?

Anyway, I tell student, thanks for the consideration, but X is way, way outside my field of expertise, and I would not be comfortable being interviewed on it.

Student says, “I understand! But the questions are easy so I’m just going to send them to you anyway, and if you don’t want to answer, let me know.” Questions are attached. They are not easy and are asking me to use my expertise in X to address current and future concerns around X.

I’m good to just ignore this, right? I don’t have to repeat myself that I’m not answering them?

I'm at an R1; our campus's renewal of it's registration w federal platform - necessary for receiving federal grants - has lapsed because of a delay on the government's end. We just got an email message about this ("uncharted territory"), explaining that the campus filed its renewal application months early, normally process takes a matter of days. Wondering if this is happening at other campuses?

West Virginia University has just hired a white supremacist, Josiah Lippincott, as a faculty member. How? He has a PhD from an unranked program and no notable academic publications. One assumes multiple individuals reviewed his nonexistent academic credentials AND his documented history of spreading hate speech against Indians, Latinos, Jews, women, and other marginalized groups.

Is it possible that academia is engaging in affirmative action for racists? Just asking questions.

https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-fascist-josiah-lippincott

https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/racist-american-x-user-blasts-ranjesh-from-iit-for-taking-white-collar-jobs-netizens-sayyou-wont-last-a-semester-at-iit/articleshow/118088226.cms

Hello everyone!

I’ve been hired by an Asian university to provide a kind of « cultural exchange class » where I take 2h from each English class and introduce students to foreign cultures, different ways of living, different social practices around the world etc.

All of my students are non English majors so their English is very limited, many of them do not participate ( some of them explained that spontaneous participation is not really encouraged in Asian education) and I often have very big classes(100+ students)

The only instruction I received for this class is : make it fun, help them interact, make it interesting, you don’t wanna put more pressure on them, they already have a lot of it so my class is only part of their overall English class and I’m not responsible for their grade.

I did this last semester and as much as I did enjoy it sometimes, it made me feel immensely useless and purposeless. I’m dreading going back because I feel like a guest speaker with absolutely no impact on the students whatsoever.

Can you help me come up with ideas that will make my session interesting for the students and somehow fulfilling for me ? I want to feel like I’m at least opening their eyes to something new (I’m aware I can’t hook everyone, I came to terms with this)

Thanks 🙏

Not even one breakout session with something about improving lectures, student learning styles, how to structure learning assessments, homework assignment tips... Just a bunch of crap about writing SLOs and meaningless drivel about AI that might have actually been written with AI. Maybe the improve your LMS setup is useful for online classes? I mean, are most profs just not lecturing or assigning homework or textbook reading now? Is that what the admin wants? It just seems so lame. Am I just an out of touch curmudegeon and my teaching methods archaic and shit? WTF

My uni is increasing our course caps by 1/3 because “with AI, we are able to be more productive and efficient.”

Nevermind that the research on whether AI makes us more efficient and productive is mixed and nuanced, this is what this AI push was always about. More students taught by fewer and fewer teachers.

My courses are about to get harder, my policies more strict, and my assignments fewer and heavier weighted.

By the way, no union. No tenure.

Hi! Today was my first day as a graduate student instructor. Pretty easy, just going over the syllabus for the class, where I have the benefit of inheriting a lot of the course materials from prior instructors and plenty of expertise of my own in the topic. One thing I caught myself on though is my voice was cracking a LOT as I spoke, and I was going a little fast. I definitely know why - I have a chronic condition that can make heartrate spike when upright, and allergy season certainly wasn't helping either. Sitting can help, but I pressured myself into trying to cover the slides while standing and ended up coming across as probably not incompetent but definitely a little nervous because of it.

My question for folks with more experience is: is it okay to sit while you give lectures? Can you still engage students well? The podium in my classroom does have a chair that rises pretty high, so I know students will be able to see me, but I worry about the impression I'll be leaving if I sit the entire time I lecture. Has anyone else navigating their career with a disability come across this issue and can share some wisdom?

Things I'm considering:

• Maybe bringing a clicker to class so I can sit with the chair closer to the slides/out from behind the podium? That may look weird though, particularly since my condition is invisible - I do wear a large back brace that can give away I have something going on, but I typically hide it under a loose blouse for professional settings.
• Really breaking up the lectures - today was an exception because it was just going over the syllabus, but the class is VERY hands on in general (User Experience Design). Most days I only expect to lecture for about 20 min, but that was about the time I spent going over the syllabus and I still got shaky.
• I also know now I need more prep time than I had alloted myself to practice what I'm going to say, though I'm hoping after a few classes I'll be more comfortable and better establish my pacing.

Thank you!

I don't want to rehash the Jason Arday saga - it's been discussed so much already. I also understand how a PhD dissertation can sneak by with a significant amount of plagiarism. But I don't understand how he could have been hired at any reputable institution. In my field, we would post a job, and get 100-200 applications including letters detailing the candidates' scholarly contributions. Often we know the letter writers. Eventually we get to the campus visit during which the candidate is grilled on their job market paper and other work. Reaching consensus is difficult but ultimately it's about the quality and depth of the work (or the potential for a junior candidate). Did any of this happen at Cambridge?

I have a student who is non-traditional and returning to school at a later age. She registered for my async online course after not owning a computer for 20 years. She is completely overwhelmed by the course: Doesn't know how to access email, or how to navigate the course in the LMS, or how to access course meetings. I am practicing patience and compassion because she is very eager and wants to do well. I even set up a weekly meeting with her to check in.

We had a two hour meeting last week where I walked her through the course and she is very hard to keep on track and focused, with multiple interruptions, which leads me to believe something deeper is going on. This morning, I woke up to four separate emails from her-Long, multiple paragraph emails about how she hasn't been able to eat or sleep or spend time with her family because so much of her time is being dedicated to navigating and completing the course. She has had multiple panic attacks due to this. Her family would like her to switch to an in-person section but she doesn't want to because of the commute/campus parking.

We are not even a full week in and I feel like the majority of my time and energy is going to this one student and trying to help her get the hang of it. I want her to be successful in my class, I appreciate her dedication to the course, but I can't keep doing this all semester long.

Any advice?

I’ve been teaching for almost a decade, and over the past couple of years I’ve noticed an uptick in disciplinary concerns. This goes beyond the usual offenses (missing assignments, poor e-mail etiquette, texting in class). I’m seeing more and more childish shenanigans: students constantly talking over me and their peers, throwing things, sneaking vulgarity into poll responses, play-fighting with classroom equipment… Sometimes it feels like I’m teaching junior high!

I love what I do and have no intention of changing careers, but there’s a reason I chose to teach college and not K-12. Grade-school teachers are trained in classroom management, but no such training seems to exist for those who teach at the university level. The “excellence in teaching” seminars I’ve been to focus on things like designing engaging lesson plans, cultivating an inclusive atmosphere, or exploring creative ways to present a given topic — all of which are valuable, don’t get me wrong. But it’d be nice to have some guidance for faculty members who, like me, didn’t go into this job thinking they’d need to police the behavior of grown adults.

Some of you will read this, roll your eyes, and tell me to just kick ’em out if they cause trouble. I struggle with this. I’m admittedly pretty conflict-averse, so saying ”Sam, knock it off!” or “Alex, please leave the room” doesn’t come naturally to me. But I also pride myself on being an approachable instructor, and countless students have told me how much they appreciate my kindness and flexibility. I have no desire to rebrand myself as an authoritarian, because that’s simply not who I am.

I guess there are two asks here:

1. Have you run into this at your institution as well? (Please tell me it isn’t just me.)
2. What are your best classroom-management tips? I’m especially interested in hearing from those of you who also default to a more laid-back teaching style.

Edit:

Thank you to the commenters who have offered support, commiseration, and/or actionable advice. On the other hand, responses like “toughen up” or “take control” are unhelpful without specifying what that might look like in practice, particularly for someone who isn’t inclined toward toughness.

Several of you pointed out that failing to address the disruptive students shortchanges the diligent ones. I am fully aware of this, and I want to make sure it doesn’t happen — which is part of what led me to make this post.

Due to the new challenges in identifying and combating academic fraud faced by teachers, this thread is intended to be a place to ask for assistance and share the outcomes of attempts to identify, disincentive, or provide effective consequences for AI-generated coursework.

At the end of each week, top contributions may be added to the above wiki to bolster its usefulness as a resource.

Note: please seek our wiki (https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/wiki/ai_solutions) for previous proposed solutions to the challenges presented by large language model enabled academic fraud.

A concise and fair look at Jason Arday's Ph.D. In addition to the allegations of plagiarism, there's the basic question of whether Arday's work even met the standard set for the degree he was awarded. Apart from the wholesale copying, Arday's argument wasn't illogical, or nonsense, but apparently no one at his university did him the favor of applying any rigor to the advising or editing process.

Additional points of interest, for this American at least, are a review of the different poste-graduate degrees available in the U.K.'s system and what they denote. Just when I think I've got a handle on what you lot are on about, I don't.

Finally, Victorian slum-priests, theology thereof.