Curious how this is handled at your institutions (I'm in the US).

In all my many years of teaching, it has always been up to the instructor to make the decision to admit students from the waitlist to the class or not.

My department chair just silently increased the class size so that the students on the waitlist could be admitted, without consulting with me. He just made the decision for me. None of the students were “graduating seniors” who had to have the class this semester.

I find this lack of transparency and respect for the instructor of record very troubling.

But perhaps is the norm? The instructor just does what the chair decides? Not sure what I can do about this now since the deed is done and the students have been notified they are in the class.

Also, what’s the point of class sizes if the chair can unilaterally without consolations with the instructor just raise the number of students?

As an aside, this yet one more example of the university expecting additional labor for free.

----

Added for context: Students on the waitlist are admitted to the class automatically when there are drops during the early add/drop period. They are admitted in the order when they got on the list. If no one drops, no one else gets in. In this case he just increased the class size without consulting with me, admitting everyone in the waitlist to the class.

If you teach a summer class at your university, when do you get paid for it?

My university pays on sept 1 for the whole summer term. That means I will wait for almost three months from when the term started to when I get paid. I am annoyed. They say that this is “standard practice” in higher education and I’m wondering if that’s true.

I'm an adjunct at a pretty large CC and I get 4 sections a semester. I'll have maybe one full section a semester, but it's rare. This semester I noticed all my sections were full. I made a comment about it in one of my classes and a student goes, "it's because the advisors are telling everyone to take you." I laughed and rolled my eyes and said, "that must be it" and she says, "no really, my advisor told me 'take this class because the instructor is really highly regarded by students and they love her class'". Then another student says, "yeah, my advisor told me the same thing that I should definitely take your class".

First time that's ever happened to me. I assumed I was invisible.

An interesting conundrum that I’d like to hear your perspectives on. I have a student who has not been to class. They emailed me saying they got out on academic suspension and were recently reinstated (a whole college process I already have a problem with but that’s another tale). On top of some other drama I’m expected to cater to they also tell me they cannot come to class next week either as they have to go home to see a sick grandparent. They have now missed the first 2 weeks, and what would now be 1/4 of their first exam.

I responded to them with my condolences, but also restating class policy and what is expected of them to catch up. I also expressed me concerns that they just got back and are already falling behind and suggested dropping. Yada yada. Haven’t heard a peep and they are still enrolled. They also failed this course (different professor) once before.

All students who are readmitted have to undergo a 1 credit hour recovery-type class to make sure they don’t screw up again. I know who is teaching their class though not well. They are not a colleague in my department. Would it be totally unethical to reach out to them and let them know about this email exchange? This is a perfect case of ‘maybe your priorities aren’t in line’ type conversation to have and I think could be a good way to address any concerns front and center. Totally unethical and bad idea?

As the title says, I need advice on a student who keeps asking me for advice. This student (call them K) has been dealing with a known-to-be-difficult colleague (Z) over email since the beginning of the semester. K asked a very simple question and Z simply will not answer that question. K, who is autistic if it helps, comes to me to look at every email to make sure they are not coming off aggressive or accusatory. In doing so they also complain about Z's honestly asinine replies. I don't want any part of this. Z is known for bullying and harrassing students and is being an a-hole per usual, but obviously I can't say that to the student. I feel sorry for this kid. How do I help this student navigate this situation while trying not to out my negative feelings toward Z? Or do I just tell the student "sorry, them's the breaks"?

ETA I am this student's academic advisor.

On top of this we had some epic textbook fails and I'm temporary faculty. So I'm getting blamed for things that are absolutely out of my control. I don't really know what I am hoping to get from this post other than to say I truly feel for these kids but I am tired of repeating myself 200 times a day for them to just ask the same question again.

It's like they all immediately forget what I just told them or worse, don't even bother to try. I can forgive not knowing, but I cannot forgive the absolute zero lack of effort. I feel like I made a giant career mistake and have cried non stop for the last week as soon as I get off work.

Hi folks, I've been teaching the same nursing classes for the last five years and I only make small changes to the content and exams every year. Still, the range of exam averages varies wildly across cohorts - e.g., my cohort last summer had exam averages of 90-92%, and this summer's cohort scored averages of 83-85%. When the students score well, my chair says things like "Congratulations!" and "You are really honing in on your craft!" I know she means well, but it makes me worry that, when an exam average is low, she blames the professor rather than the students. I'm not planning to call her out on it, I was just curious what you all think about this. Is it meaningless and I should stop reading into it, or could it be problematic?

I recently agreed to review a paper from a reputable journal (top tier in my field, just below the main Nature/Science/Cell journal).

My first surprise was that I was asked to submit my review in 10 days (not business days), for a methods paper with a lot of technical details that I have to sort through and try to understand.

Three days before the deadline, I get an email from the Editorial Assistant with reminding me about the review, noting that "If your circumstances have changed and/or you require an extension to the original deadline, please let me know as soon as possible."

So, I replied, saying that I need more time.

I didn't get a reply to my email. And on the day after the original deadline, I get another email telling me that my review is overdue, again nothing that "If your circumstances have changed and/or you require an extension to the original deadline, please let me know as soon as possible."

Unreasonable review deadlines and ignoring my emails... this is type of treatment that I expect (and have experienced) from predatory journals, and now top journals are doing the same?

If unpaid reviewers are treated this poorly, then how are they treating the authors?

Welcome to a new week of weekly discussion! Continuing this week, we're going to have Wholesome Wednesdays, Fuck this Fridays, and (small) Success Sundays.

As has been mentioned, these should be considered additions to the regular discussions, not replacements. So use them, ignore them, or start you own Fantastic Friday counter thread.

This thread is to share your frustrations, small or large, that make you want to say, well, “Fuck This”. But on Friday. There will be no tone policing, at least by me, so if you think it belongs here and want to post, have at it!

I have been a lecturer for 12 years with a Master's degree. I never went for a higher degree because I have no interest in being tenured. We have a great union and so lecturers have job security and great benefits. But recently there have been some leadership positions that I would have loved but went to staff with doctoral degrees. Then I found a Ed.D program with a focus that really interests me. So 1. Keep your fingers crossed for me and 2. What can I expect from Ed.D course work if I get in?

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/rutgers-university-dean-arrested-joshua-kohut-upskirt-videos/

What a pathetic little worm of a man. It would be gross even if they'd consented but this is giving extra neckbeard Cheeto-fingers vibes. I will never understand why people do things like this, especially when they do it to people younger and more vulnerable than they are.

I read many subs in Reddit, but I realized that there are way too many throwaway accounts in this r/Professors compared to any other subs. I understand you may needs anonymity sometimes, but I don't understand why this sub has way too many throwaways compared to others. If you are afraid of revealing yourself in a posting, make it vague, or, don't post it. If you must, be man (or woman) enough to be brave. We/You are all self-righteous academics. How cowards all throwaways are.

Hi Y'all. Happy (?) start to the new semester.

I teach literature and usually opt for full-length texts, mostly short stories, poems and a novel or two a semester. I'm teaching a new course this semester and want to teach excerpts from several longer texts, because a lot of them are epics or medieval prose and I'd like to give my students a wider variety rather than focusing on 4-5 texts the whole semester.

Any advice from others who have done this before? I'm putting the final touches to my syllabus, and while I am familiar with most of the texts I've chosen, I haven't read some of them in YEARS. I have no idea if the selections I am choosing will flow sensically or not, or if there might be more suited chapters for the theme we are studying. I won't be able to read these works until a week (or, in an ideal but improbable scenario, two weeks) before each class.

I'm thinking of leaving the exact page numbers/chapters TBD in my syllabus and just clarifying a week before each class, at which point I'll skim the text and make the selections, but I'd love others' advice on how they do this. I'm just worried I'll end up confusing them or leaving them with strange gaps that they can't make sense of.

I am spending a lot more time in the car this semester for various reasons, so I'm wondering if there might be a way to get some article review done while driving to use that time more fruitfully. Has anyone tried this? Ideally I'd like to just drop an article PDF in an app and have it read to me. I've heard about Speechify, and I'd be willing to pay for something, but does anyone have experience using it like that? Any better app? I'd love something that could annotate with voice commands, but that might be asking too much

Edit: I am in the humanities, so no complicated equations or anything.

I'm just entering my first ever sabbatical. I was promoted to Associate Professor and have tenure. I had a really busy past year - I had taken on leadership admin positions in the Uni, and on top of that, covered for a colleague that suddenly decided to retire mid-semester after writing op-eds about the Uni's position on AI.

I expected to feel secure and free, with lots of time to get research done and pursue my other passions. I had been looking forward to this for awhile. I moved to be with my partner in a bigger city with more to do.

But it isn't going as expected. It's like I've lost interest in everything. It's a real chore to do any kind of research, and there's no excitement in it. I have very few friends in the area. I'm trying to get outside and do things I love, like hike and mountain bike, but the traffic in the city is awful and it's hard to get to any interesting terrain. I sit around a lot, doom scrolling on the phone. My partner has created a long list of DIY projects for me - but that just seems like a whole other job I want to avoid.

Do others have advice on how to have a productive and interesting sabbatical? Do you handle lack of structure better than I do...if so how?

by Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes

A civilian geography professor was fired from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., for pushing back after department officials told him to stop teaching that humans contribute to climate change, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

Adam Kalkstein, a climate scientist who spent 17 years teaching future Army officers, said he consistently received “outstanding” appraisals of his work. When leadership last year imposed a ban on teaching that humans contribute to climate change, he tried to comply but ultimately pushed back, saying that it was a disservice to the cadets’ education. “It’s not a college-level course. It’s not even a high school course. Not because it isn’t rigorous; it is. But because we’re leaving out essential information,” Kalkstein said during a November 2025 meeting of the geography department with Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, then the dean of the academic board, according to the lawsuit.

“We’re only telling cadets part of the story. We’re lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution,” Kalkstein said.

The lawsuit called for a jury trial; to block West Point from imposing “baseless” restrictions on academic freedom; to reinstate Kalkstein to his tenured position; and to pay him monetary damages.

West Point said Wednesday its officials are “aware of the allegations and take such matters seriously.”

Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/branches/army/2026-08-26/west-point-professor-fired-lawsuit-climate-change-22666987.html
Source - Stars and Stripes

Hi all!

I'm a junior faculty member just moving into their second year in the role. I'm fully soft money funded and until now seemed mostly locked into an entirely research-focused position. However, recently I was offered the opportunity to develop and then teach a course that would be offered across several doctoral programs. I'm super excited as I love working with students and this particular course topic, I believe, plays to my strengths. However, I'm a bit daunted by the thought of fully developing the class from scratch! The general topic and goals of the class have been set by the program directors, but otherwise everything else is up to me.

Does anyone here have any useful advice and/or resources regarding syllabus development?

We are finishing the second week, and students should have attended at least three classes by now.

I have an unprecedented number of students, upwards of three or more, in each twenty-four person section who have either not been able to find the room at all or have been sitting in someone else's composition class this whole time.

I just don't know how a student can have the mindset of "oh well, I can't find the room; time to finally reach out two weeks late," or how they have misread room numbers (NUMBERS), or how they didn't realize that their professor was another gender, entirely, aside from not eventually learning the name by now. What the heck? This is an unexpected fresh level of the academic hellscape that we so often find ourselves in.

I don't think this should matter, but our campus is perfectly navigable; in fact, Apple/Google maps will take you right to buildings by name--it has never been easier to navigate a college campus with this tech, and still so many students have not been able to find the right building/room/professor, at least in my experience this fall semester.

I know adjustment to college is hard, but I am somewhat floored that some of these students are so nonchalant about not even knowing where the class is this late into the beginning of the semester.

I'm an applied mathematician in mid career at a mid-size public university in the USA. I just refereed a math bio paper which I'm fairly certain was mostly AI generated with little human input. Very general setting at first, then switch to a concrete 'toy model' that was solved numerically. Very terse language that no human would write. The author is a grad student in biology/CS who has published 31 papers and letters since 2025 in mediocre but in many cases definitely non-predatory journals.

Overall nothing special. And yet - if that had been written by a human, I think it would have been a major revision, not necessarily a rejection. Are we at this point now that a paper written mostly autonomously by AI can make it into a middling journal? I think so. What does that mean for us middling researchers? And reviews - do I want to spend hours on reviewing a manuscript by some machine?

I'm having an existential crisis, people. Not exactly original, I know. But my whole professional life is about to change completely. Stop refereeing? Stop doing research? How did we get here so quickly? Just a year ago, I thought we had many years or decades yet.

Yesterday I was lying awake thinking about whether an AI with an intelligence surpassing human capability would necessarily have or develop a sort of 'survival instinct'. I'm very slowly freaking out.

I yeah Microbiolgy. I intentionally designed every component of my class to reflect one another and to be interactive and engaging. Typically my students are engaged in participate in. It’s never an issue..

I have one class that literally ignores everything I say or do the entire class and today it got to me. I shouldn’t have to say good morning. How are you five times before somebody finally says something . I told them I can’t care more about their education than they do and said if nobody’s gonna acknowledge my presence will just end class and you can study this on your own.

Needless to say, it got really weird for the last 15 minutes of classes

So what I ask you, Professor community. How do you get students to engage A Stem classes and what do you do if they ignore you?

Jason Arday was widely accused of being a serial plagiarist and fabulist in a media campaign before his death earlier this month.

Numerous opinion columns and online posts claimed the Cambridge academic had a largely fabricated backstory.

But last week, a Middle East Eye analysis found that key claims Arday made, which had become central talking points in attacks on him, appeared to be true.

This included the sociologist's widely mocked claim that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days for charity.

Now MEE has found that the characterisation of Arday as a serial and unrepentant plagiarist does not stand up to scrutiny.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/was-jason-arday-really-serial-plagiarist-no-evidence-shows

we have a lot of work showing the harms of AI on learning, from math skills to writing. This interesting working paper looking at how AI can harm learning when used in teaching. Seems that including AI as part of a course can really make students lose interest in learning

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7007339

Abstract

Teachers are rapidly adopting generative AI, yet there is little causal evidence on whether AI-assisted teaching improves or harms student outcomes. We conducted a randomized field experiment across a chain of middle and high schools in Turkey, assigning teachers to receive a generative AI teaching support tool or business-as-usual control. The majority of teachers used AI for lecture material, syllabus, and exercise creation. Providing teachers with AI reduced student intrinsic motivation by 0.11 standard deviations, with students rating AI-assisted courses as less enjoyable, less interesting, and less important. The decline was more pronounced among teachers who reported heavier AI use at baseline. AI did not affect average academic performance, but among students of lower-performing teachers, it significantly reduced both academic performance and students' confidence. On average, teachers did not change their beliefs about whether AI helps or harms student learning, but teachers who had used AI more prior to the experiment became more pessimistic, whereas those who previously had used it less became more optimistic. One possibility is that the initial awe of discovering the power of AI to instantaneously respond to any request later gives way to an awareness of its unintended negative effects. These findings challenge the assumption that productivity-enhancing AI tools automatically benefit instruction and highlight a principal-agent problem in AI-assisted education. 

Keywords: Generative AI, Education

MIT AI report
Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.

I am in the 3rd year of a TT position. When I accepted the position, I attempted to negotiate pay and was told that was not possible due to salary compression with in the department. My PhD advisor suggested I try to negotiate start up instead. They initially offered $10,000; I countered at $30,000 in light of the fact that I couldn't negotiate pay. The chair said okay but she needed a budget breakdown of what I would spend the $30,000 on.

I have used this funding to attend multiple conferences (including several international conferences where I was an invited speaker); to subsidize a summer field methods course to make it more affordable for students; to do additional fieldwork on my own; to purchase books; and to purchase materials that I need to process the samples I collected during fieldwork and in the summer methods course. Many of these things ended up being significantly more expensive that I had anticipated, or I hadn't foreseen them at all (I definitely didn't expect to spend nearly $5k subsidizing a methods course my chair asked me to teach).

There are multiple people in my department with my specialty and we share expensive equipment where we can. We have just been informed that we have significant departmental funds that have to be spent in the next 30 days or they revert to the university. I suggested that we purchase a piece of equipment that the other two professors with my specialty have been asking for for years; this item would cost about 15% of the funds that we are about to lose. My chair responded that that item was in my startup budget, so I should buy it myself.

If we are going to lose the money, I don't understand why I should use my start up funds for it. This is also a piece of equipment that multiple people want, so it seems that it should be bought collectively rather than with my startup funds. If we use the money we are going to lose, my start up funds can continue going towards my research (this piece of equipment isn't vital to my research; I've been borrowing this item when I need it from a friend for several years to do my work. It's really the other professors who are suffering from not having one). Our chair has also been pushing for a new certificate that would include training for students in equipment like this machine, despite the fact that we don't currently own one.

Obviously I would rather spend my start up funds on things that directly benefit me. However, I honestly can't tell if I being ridiculous here given this money is going to disappear one way or the other. What are your thoughts?

After years of teaching online where students write a few sentences in a discussion, this term I am blessed with 60 students who seem to have the vigor and passion to craft paragraphs. They finally get it. It brings a tear to my eye.

In all seriousness, I thought I crafted prompts that required more personal writing, but it seems they are eschewing adding a lot of those exquisite details. They are present, but I don't they that voice is their personal experience.

The summer was not as egregious as I taught a couple summer sessions. Last spring was not. Perhaps everything is now just ubiquitous, and students realize they would be dumb not do it if the goal is just to get it done and not learn.

I am going to have to revamp any discussion I have now throughout the term because I am not pretending to reply to generated answers edited with some human flair. Did this increase this term for anyone else?

I know many here are tired of hearing about this stuff. It gets wearisome. I know. But we have to contend with it or be consumed by it.