Tag: Faculty

  • The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

    The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

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  • The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

    The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

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  • Right-Leaning Faculty Likelier to Be “Hostile” to Jews

    Right-Leaning Faculty Likelier to Be “Hostile” to Jews

    A new report from Brandeis University researchers concluded that 7 percent of non-Jewish faculty polled during the spring semester at “very high research activity” universities showed “a pattern of explicitly hostile views toward Jews as a people.”

    The “Ideology in the Classroom” report, released last week, says an additional 3 percent of non-Jewish faculty “had a pattern of views about Israel that are generally described as antisemitic” by Jewish organizations and Jewish students. And while 11 percent of non-Jewish faculty who self-identified as extremely liberal were “hostile to Israel”—a view “virtually non-existent among all other political identities, including other liberals”—the faculty “with more conservative political views, including those who were the most critical of DEI, were the most likely to be hostile to Jews.”

    Over all, though, the report says 90 percent of non-Jewish faculty were hostile to neither Jews nor Israel.

    “The results confirm our earlier research findings that Jewish students are more likely to experience hostility from their peers than from faculty,” the authors wrote. They added that “government efforts to punish universities as a whole for their lack of viewpoint diversity and failure to address antisemitism are not well targeted to address these challenges. For example, STEM faculty, who are less likely to teach about contentious political issues, are the most likely to be profoundly harmed by the government’s cancellation of federal research grants.”

    Leonard Saxe, one of the authors and the Klutznick Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Social Policy at Brandeis, told Inside Higher Ed that faculty “don’t appear to express any interest in imposing their own political or ideological views on students.” Saxe said, “Faculty need to be seen as allies” in resolving the problems underlying the conflict between the government and universities regarding antisemitism and diversity more broadly.

    “They want the same thing,” Saxe said. “They want to teach students how to understand diverse perspectives, multiple perspectives. They don’t want to make every single issue political.”

    Graham Wright, another author and an associate research scientist at Brandeis’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, said that to the extent antisemitism is an issue on some campuses, it’s “not necessarily due to the actions of large numbers of faculty, but a smaller group.”

    The report found that almost half of Jewish faculty were somewhat or very much concerned about antisemitism on their campuses, and they were “more concerned about antisemitism emanating from the political right than the political left.” This “can be attributed in part to the political makeup of Jewish faculty,” the authors wrote, noting that more than 80 percent of Jewish faculty identified as liberal and about a quarter as extremely liberal.

    Using a statistical model, the researchers also sought to predict hostility from non-Jewish faculty based on their holding certain beliefs. They concluded that “faculty who more strongly agreed that Israel was an apartheid state” were likelier to be hostile to both Israel and Jews. And they found no statistically significant difference between academic areas in levels of faculty hostility after controlling for other factors.

    The study grouped faculty into these categories of “hostile to Jews,” “hostile to Israel” or hostile to neither based on their pattern of agreeing or disagreeing with seven statements.

    The statements were:

    • “Jews in America have too much power,”
    • “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind,”
    • “Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda,”
    • “Jews should be held accountable for Israel’s actions,”
    • “Israel does not have the right to exist,”
    • “I wouldn’t want to collaborate with a scholar who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state,” and
    • “All Israeli civilians should be considered legitimate targets for Hamas.”

    The report says “virtually no non-Jewish faculty expressed agreement” with that last claim.

    The researchers also wrote that “more than three-quarters of the faculty in our sample reported that, over the past academic year, the Israel-Palestine conflict never came up in class discussions, and less than 10 percent reported actively teaching about it.” Saxe said there’s not much evidence that a faculty member’s negative attitudes toward a group “seep into” their classroom.

    The researchers surveyed 2,335 faculty across 146 R-1 Carnegie classification universities from Feb. 3 to May 5. About 11 percent of the sample was Jewish. The online survey also polled faculty on other current political issues, such as immigration.

    “More than two-thirds of faculty identified as liberal, while one-third identified as moderate or conservative,” the report says, but “there was overwhelming agreement among faculty that climate change is a crisis requiring immediate action and that President Trump is a threat to democracy.”

    The report also says that “half of liberal faculty members and 70 percent of extremely liberal faculty members expressed serious concerns about being targeted by the federal government for their political views.”

    But Saxe said that “as a faculty member on campuses most of my life, I believe we’re not going to address the current issues unless faculty themselves get more engaged—and that it’s recognized by policymakers that we need faculty if we’re going to solve these issues.”

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  • Reaching (Not Just Teaching) Today’s Students: A Communication Cheatsheet – Faculty Focus

    Reaching (Not Just Teaching) Today’s Students: A Communication Cheatsheet – Faculty Focus

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  • DOJ Investigating George Mason Faculty Senate

    DOJ Investigating George Mason Faculty Senate

    Gregory Washington became George Mason University’s eighth president in 2020.

    Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    The Justice Department is now investigating the Faculty Senate at George Mason University after the panel backed the university president and affirmed that “diversity is our strength,” The New York Times reported.

    DOJ officials requested drafts of a faculty resolution passed in support of the president, Gregory Washington, who is facing multiple investigations from various federal agencies related to the diversity, equity and inclusion practices at the university. The DOJ also wants communications among Faculty Senate members who drafted the document as well as communications among those faculty and the president’s office. 

    The George Mason board is set to review the president’s performance at a meeting Friday, and faculty are worried Washington could be pushed out. 

    Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the civil rights division at DOJ, wrote in a letter to GMU that the Senate’s resolution was concerning in that it praised Washington’s efforts to diversify faculty and staff to reflect the student population

    Dhillon wrote, according to the Times, that “it indicates the GMU Faculty Senate is praising President Washington for engaging in race- or sex-motivated hiring decisions to achieve specific demographic outcomes among faculty and staff.”

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  • Building a Thriving Classroom Community – “Bond & Beyond” – Faculty Focus

    Building a Thriving Classroom Community – “Bond & Beyond” – Faculty Focus

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  • Building a Thriving Classroom Community – “Bond & Beyond” – Faculty Focus

    Building a Thriving Classroom Community – “Bond & Beyond” – Faculty Focus

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  • Faculty better get active on AI and academic freedom.

    Faculty better get active on AI and academic freedom.

    Is AI an academic freedom issue?

    Of course.

    Education technology as a whole is an academic freedom issue, unfortunately, the encroachment of technological systems which shape (and in some cases even determine) pedagogy, research and governance have been left in the hands of others, with faculty required to capitulate to a system designed and controlled by others.

    AI is here, rather suddenly, pretty disruptively, and in a big way. Different institutions are adopting different stances and much of the adaptation is falling on faculty, in some cases with minimal guidance. While considering how these tools impact what’s happening at the level of course and pedagogy is a necessity, it also seems clear that faculty concerned about preserving their own rights should be considering some of the institutional/structural issues.

    Personally, I have more questions than answers at this time, but there’s a handful of recent readings that I want to recommend to others to help ground thinking that may lead to better questions and actionable answers.

    A report, Artificial Intelligence and the Academic Professions, just released by the AAUP, should be at the top of anyone’s list. Based on a national survey, the report examines a number of big-picture categories, all of which have a direct relationship to issues of academic freedom.

    1. Improving Professional Development Regarding AI and Technology Harms
    2. Implementing Shared Governance Policies and Professional Oversight
    3. Improving Working and Learning Conditions
    4. Demanding Transparency and the Ability to Opt Out
    5. Protecting Faculty Members and Other Academic Workers.

    The report both summarizes faculty concerns as expressed in the survey and offers recommendations for actions that will protect faculty rights and autonomy. Having read the report, in some cases the recommendations initially seem frustratingly vague but looked at in total, they are essentially a call for active faculty involvement in considering the implications of the intersection of this technology (and the companies developing it) with educational institutions. 

    In a way, the report highlights, in hindsight, how truly absent faculty have been as existing educational technology has been woven into the fabric of our institutions, and that it would be a disaster for that absence to be perpetuated when it comes to AI.

    After checking out the AAUP report, move on to Matt Seybold’s, How Venture Capitalists Built A For-Profit “Micro-University” Inside Our Public Flagships, published at his newsletter, The American Vandal. It’s a long and complicated story about the ways outside service providers conceived in venture capital/private equity have insinuated themselves into our universities in ways that undermine faculty roles and educational quality. 

    It would take a full column to do Seybold’s piece justice, but here are two quotes that I hope induce you to go consider his full argument.

    Here Seybold pulls the lid back on what it means for these third-party provider offerings to exist under a university brand “powered by” the third-party provider:

    The “powered by model” is a truly absurdist role reversal. A private, unaccredited company founded and run by sales and marketing professionals is responsible for the (pseudo)educational coursework, while the accredited university is employed only for its sales and marketing functions, getting paid by commission on the headcount of students who enroll from their branded portal. University partners are incentivized to flex their brand power and use their proprietary data, advertising budgets, and sales forces to maximize this commission, while Ziplines provides cookie-cutter landing pages and highly reproducible microdegrees, the content of which is largely created by gigworkers.

    And here, Seybold pinpoints the downstream effect of these kinds of “partnerships.”

    EdTech is not only always a Trojan horse for elite capture of public resources; it is also always a project in delegitimizing the project of public education itself.

    The applicability of Seybold’s analysis to the “AI partnerships” many institutions are busy signing should be clear.

    As another thought experiment exercise, I recommend making your way through a Hollis Robbins’s piece at her Anecdotal website, How to Deliver CSU’s Gen Ed with AI.

    Robbins, a former university dean, perhaps intends this more as a provocation than an actionable proposal but, as a proposal, it is a comprehensive vision for replacing human labor with AI instruction that relies on a series of interwoven tech applications where humans are “in the loop,” but which largely run autonomously.

    If realized, this sort of vision would obviate academic freedom on two fronts:

    1. The curriculum would be codified and assessed according to a rigid standard and then be delivered primarily through AI.
    2. Faculty would barely exist.

    I read it as a surveillance-driven dystopia from which I would either have to opt-out (if allowed), or more likely have to flee, but you can check the comments to the post itself and find some early enthusiasts. The complexity of the technological vision suggests that such a vision would be difficult to impossible to realize, but the underlying values of increased efficiency, decreased cost and increased standardization are consistent with the direction educational systems have been going for decades.

    Many of the factors that have eroded faculty rights and left institutions vulnerable to the attacks that have been coming were, indeed, foreseeable. Adjunctification is at the top of my list. 

    When it comes to technology and the university, we’ve seen this play before. If faculty aren’t prepared to assert their rights and exercise their power, you won’t see me writing the kinds of lamentations I’ve offered about tenure over the years because there won’t be enough faculty left to worry about such things.

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  • Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus

    Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus

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  • Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus

    Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus

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