Tag: Job

  • Try Reading Job Descriptions With a Growth Mindset (Opinion)

    Try Reading Job Descriptions With a Growth Mindset (Opinion)

    In a résumé workshop with a group of Ph.D. students, I shared a job description for a position for which they were qualified. The students had participated in an advanced pedagogy program at my university’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and the position was an instructional technologist at a small liberal arts college. Immediately, the students searched the job description for qualities and experiences they lacked and reasons why they were unqualified. Many were so turned off by the job title that they likely would not have continued reading had they come across this position on their own.

    Then I encouraged the students to approach the position description with a bias toward “I’m qualified.” In other words, instead of starting with the assumption that they were not qualified for the role, do the opposite. Once they changed their mindset and believed that they were qualified, they were able to see many connections between their skills and experiences and what they read in the job description.

    In my work as a graduate student career adviser, I have found that this tendency for Ph.D. students to approach descriptions for jobs outside their academic field from a deficit perspective is quite common. Graduate students who have trained for years with an eye toward an academic position in their field often see themselves as utterly unqualified when they begin to search for jobs in other sectors. This can even be the case for those who have spent considerable amounts of time on career exploration and self-reflection and feel committed to a career in a field other than academia. Once they get to the job search process, they get hung up on the job descriptions themselves.

    When I told another career adviser about my “bias toward ‘I’m qualified’” approach, she said that this reminded her of the growth mindset concept. Psychologist Carol Dweck came up with the concept of the growth mindset nearly 20 years ago, and it has since been applied to everything from business to professional sports to early childhood education. In short, a growth mindset is, to cite Dweck’s definition, “based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.” In other words, you can change and improve many aspects of yourself through hard work and help from others. This is in contrast to a fixed mindset, which is the belief that your qualities are “carved in stone” and cannot be changed.

    This concept has many applications in work and life, and when we are stressed about a job search it is easy to let a fixed mindset take over. However, adopting a growth mindset in just one context—reading job descriptions—can help you be more positive and open-minded in your job search. Of course, not everyone can do every job, but a growth mindset will help you see and articulate both your qualifications and your potential in a new career field.

    Consider the following ways in which reading job descriptions with a growth mindset can create more opportunities in your career exploration and job search.

    • See and articulate your transferable skills and experiences.

    Talk to a career adviser for five minutes, and they are likely to discuss the importance of transferable skills. Yet it can be tough to conceive of your skills, know which skills are most important, see how they might come in handy in other contexts and then articulate those skills in a way that is appealing to other audiences. Here is an example from my own career about how reading a job description with a growth mindset helped me identify and articulate a skill set I didn’t know I had.

    Shortly after finishing my Ph.D., I came across a job posting for a school relations manager at a nonprofit organization, liaising between high school teachers and the organization. The job fit my interests, but at first glance it didn’t seem to match my skill set. In particular, the job description asked for relationship-building skills, which I had never thought about as a skill set, let alone one that I possessed. As I reflected on my experience throughout my time in graduate school, I thought about a short-term, part-time position I had meeting once a month with high school history teachers to help them design lesson plans. I enjoyed this work and was good at it and, though I had never thought about it before, realized that I could frame this experience as relationship building. In my application materials and job interviews, I emphasized this skill set and expressed confidence in continuing to grow in this area, and I got the job.

    • Open up new career fields.

    Several years ago, I worked with a Ph.D. student in art history who was interested in a career in user experience research. Although she was still two years away from graduation, she started looking at job descriptions to get a better sense of the responsibilities and qualifications for the kinds of roles she desired. In her research, she noticed that many positions asked for evidence of user experience projects, and some even asked for a portfolio. While some students would have seen this as an insurmountable barrier (a fixed mindset), she instead let her growth mindset kick in and got to work building her portfolio through project-based online courses, independent projects and on-campus jobs, and continued to network with practitioners in the field. Her hard work and help from others paid off, and she was able to move into the field after she graduated.

    • Compete for jobs for which you may be somewhat underqualified.

    Students often let the perception of being underqualified for a job prevent them from applying. This is a well-documented tendency among women and underrepresented groups, and, for graduate students, the impostor phenomenon often contributes to reduced confidence in relation to career possibilities. Most graduate students know about this tendency and the advice to apply if you meet 60 to 75 percent of the qualifications, Yet, many still have difficulty getting over the hump to apply when they don’t meet 100 percent of the qualifications in the job description. Or, if they do apply, they undersell their qualifications in their application materials.

    When you approach a position description for a job that interests you but feels like a reach, start with the job responsibilities and imagine yourself performing the tasks listed. If there are things on the list you haven’t done before, imagine how you could build on the skills and capacities you have in a new setting and then improve over time. Next, go through each qualification and look for some connection, however tenuous, to something you have done before and write it down. If you have trouble doing this on your own, work with a career adviser who can help. Usually this process helps you see capacities and qualifications you didn’t know you had and will give you confidence that you can grow into a role that feels like a stretch.

    • Apply for jobs for which you may feel overqualified.

    This next piece of advice addresses the other end of the spectrum—jobs for which you feel overqualified. Ph.D. students who are entering a field other than academia are making a career transition, which often requires spending some time in a role that might feel beneath your qualifications. This is especially true in certain industries like publishing, journalism, marketing and communications, and others. It can feel demoralizing for doctoral students to apply for jobs that only require a bachelor’s degree.

    In this case, use a growth mindset to imagine how you could advance within the organization or how this first position could be a stepping-stone to another opportunity in a couple of years. Keep in mind that people with advanced degrees tend to get promoted to a higher level and more quickly than those with just a bachelor’s. You won’t be stuck in this first role forever, and it will give you a chance to demonstrate your skills in your new field.

    Underlying these tips is a nudge to get online and read some job descriptions, even if you aren’t yet ready to apply. Just make sure that when you do, you suit up with your growth mindset first.

    Rachel Bernard is the GSAS Compass Consultant at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she focuses on career development for master’s and doctoral students. She is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing a national voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.

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  • Community colleges are providing new opportunities for learning on the job in logging and oystering

    Community colleges are providing new opportunities for learning on the job in logging and oystering

    SHINGLETOWN, Calif. — On a cold morning in October, the sun shone weakly through tall sugar pines and cedars in Shingletown, a small Northern California outpost whose name is a reminder of its history as a logging camp in the 1800s. Up a gravel road banked with iron-rich red soil, Dylan Knight took a break from stacking logs.

    Knight is one of 10 student loggers at Shasta College training to operate the heavy equipment required for modern-day logging: processors to remove limbs from logs that have just been cut, skidders to pull logs out of the cutting site, loaders to stack and sort the logs by species and masticators to mulch up debris.

    For centuries, logging was a seasonal, learn-on-the-job trade passed down from father to son. But as climate change and innovations in the industry have changed logging into a year-round business, there aren’t always enough workers to fill jobs.

    “Our workforce was dying,” said Delbert Gannon, owner of Creekside Logging. “You couldn’t even pick from the bottom of the barrel. It was affecting our production and our ability to haul logs. We felt we had to do something.”

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    Around the country, community colleges are stepping in to run apprenticeship programs for heritage industries, such as logging and aquaculture, which are too small to run. These partnerships help colleges expand the workforce development programs central to their mission. The partnerships also help keep small businesses in small industries alive by managing state and federal grants and providing the equipment, courses and staff to train workers.

    As industries go, logging is small, and it’s struggling. In 2023 there were only about 50,000 logging jobs in the U.S., but the number of logging companies has been on the decline for several years. Most loggers are over 50, according to industry data, and older generations are retiring, contributing to more than 6,000 vacant positions every year on average. The median annual salary for loggers is about $50,000.

    Student logger Bryce Shannon operates a wood chipper at a logging site as part of his instruction at Shasta College in Redding, Calif. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

    Retirements have hit Creekside Logging hard. In 2018 Gannon’s company had jobs to do, and the machines to do them, but nobody to do the work. He reached out to Shasta College, which offers certificates and degrees in forestry and heavy equipment operation, to see if there might be a student who could help.

    That conversation led to a formal partnership between the college and 19 timber companies to create a pre-apprenticeship course in Heavy Equipment Logging Operations. Soon after, they formed the California Registered Apprenticeship Forest Training program. Shasta College used $3.5 million in grant funds to buy the equipment pre-apprentices use.

    Related: Apprenticeships are a trending alternative to college but there’s a hitch

    Logging instruction takes place on land owned by Sierra Pacific Industries lumber company — which does not employ its own loggers and so relies on companies like Creekside Lumber to fell and transport logs to mills.

    Each semester, 10 student loggers like Knight take the pre-apprenticeship course at Shasta College. Nearly all are hired upon completion. Once employed, they continue their work as apprentices in the forest training program, which Shasta College runs in partnership with employers like Gannon. State apprenticeship funds help employers offset the cost of training new workers, as well as the lost productivity of on-the-job mentors.

    For Creekside Logging — a 22-person company — working with Shasta College makes participation in the apprenticeship program possible.Gannon’s company often trained new loggers, only to have them back out of the job months later. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to train a new worker, and Creekside couldn’t afford to keep taking the financial risk. Now Gannon has a steady flow of committed employees, trained at the college rather than on his payroll. Workers who complete the pre-apprenticeship know what they’re getting into — working outdoors in the cold all day, driving big machines and cutting down trees.

    Workers who complete the apprenticeship, Gannon said, are generally looking for a career and not just a seasonal job.

    Talon Gramps-Green, a student logger at Shasta College in Redding, Calif., shows off stickers on his safety helmet. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

    “You get folks that are going to show up every day,” Gannon said. “They got to test drive the career and know they like heavy equipment. They want to work in the woods. The college has solved that for us.”

    Apprentices benefit too. Workers who didn’t grow up around a trade can try it out, which for some means tracking down an elusive pathway into the work. Kyra Lierly grew up in Redding, about 30 miles west of Shingletown, and previously worked for the California Department of Forestry as a firefighter. She’s used to hard work, but when she looked into getting a job as a logger she couldn’t find a way in. Some companies had no office phone or website, she says. Jobs were given out casually, by word of mouth.

    “A lot of logging outfits are sketchy, and I wanted to work somewhere safe,” said Lierly, 25. She worked as an apprentice with Creekside Lumber but is taking a break while she completes an internship at Sierra Pacific Industries, a lumber producer, and gets a certificate in natural resources at Shasta College.

    “The apprenticeship made forestry less intimidating because the college isn’t going to partner with any company that isn’t reputable,” Lierly said.

    Related: In spite of a growing shortage in male-dominated vocations, women still aren’t showing up

    Apprenticeships, with their combination of hands-on and classroom learning, are found in many union halls but, until now, was not known to be common practice in the forested sites of logging crews.

    State and federally registered apprenticeships have gained popularity in recent years as training tools in health care, cybersecurity and telecommunications.

    Federal funding grew steadily from $145 million in 2018 to more than $244 million  during the last years of the Biden administration. That money was used to support apprenticeships in traditional building trades as well as industries that don’t traditionally offer registered apprenticeships, including teaching and nursing.

    The investment aims to address the shortage of skilled workers. The number of working adults in the U.S. doesn’t align with the number of skilled jobs, a disparity that is only slowly recovering after the pandemic.

    Labor shortages hit especially hard in rural areas, where trades like logging have an outsized impact on their local economies. For regional heritage trades like logging, just a few apprentices can make the difference between staying in business and shutting down.

    Lucas Licea, a student logger at Shasta College in Redding, Calif., operates a loader. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

    “There’s a common misconception of registered apprentices that they’re only in the building trades when most are in a variety of sectors,” said Manny Lamarre, who served as deputy assistant secretary for employment and training with the Labor Department during the Biden administration. More than 5,000 new occupations have registered with the department to offer apprenticeships since 2021, he said. “We can specifically support unique small occupations in rural communities where a lot of people are retiring.”

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who was confirmed earlier this month, said in her confirmation hearing that she supports apprenticeships. But ongoing cuts make it unclear what the new federal role will be in supporting such programs.

    However, “sharing the capacity has been an important way to get apprenticeships into rural and small employers,” said Vanessa Bennett, director at the Center for Apprenticeship and Work-Based Learning at the nonprofit Jobs for the Future. It’s helpful when employers partner with a nonprofit or community college that can sponsor an apprenticeship program, as Shasta College does, Bennett said. 

    Once Knight, the student logger, completes the heavy equipment pre-apprenticeship, he plans to return to his hometown of Oroville, about 100 miles south of Shingletown. His tribe — the Berry Creek Rancheria of Tyme Maidu Indians — is starting its own logging crew, and Knight will be one of only two members trained to use some of the most challenging pieces of logging equipment.

    “This program is awesome,” said Knight, 24. “It’s really hands-on. You learn as you go and it helps to have a great instructor.”

    Student logger Dylan Knight drives a masticator, which grinds wood into chips, as Shasta College instructor Chris Hockenberry looks on. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

    Across the country in Maine, a community college is helping to train apprentices for jobs at heritage oyster, mussel and kelp farms that have struggled to find enough workers to meet the growing demand for shellfish. Often classified as seasonal work, aquaculture jobs can become year-round careers for workers trained in both harvesting shellfish and planning for future seasons.

    “I love the farm work and I feel confident that I will be able to make a full-length career out of this,” said Gabe Chlebowski, who completed a year-long apprenticeship with Muscongus Bay Aquaculture, which harvests in Damariscotta, Maine. A farm boy from rural Pennsylvania, Chlebowski worked in construction and stone masonry after high school. When his parents moved to Maine, he realized that he wanted a job on the water. With no prior experience, he applied for an oyster farming apprenticeship and was accepted.

    “I was the youngest by five years and the only person who’d never worked on water,” said Chlebowski, 22. “I grew up in a landlocked state surrounded by corn fields. I had the work ethic and no idea what I was doing in boats.”

    Related: Modern apprenticeships offer path to career — and college

    The apprenticeship program was launched in 2023 by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which joined with the Maine Aquaculture Association and Educate Maine to create a yearlong apprenticeship with Southern Maine Community College. Apprentices take classes in shellfish biology, water safety, skiff driving and basic boat maintenance. Grants helped pay for the boots, jackets and fishing bibs apprentices needed.

    “The workforce here was a bottleneck,” said Carissa Maurin, aquaculture program manager for GMRI. New workers with degrees in marine biology were changing their minds after starting training at aquaculture farms. “Farms were wasting time and money on employees that didn’t want to be there.”

    Chlebowski completed the apprenticeship at Muscongus Bay in September. He learned how to repair a Yamaha outdoor motor, how to grade oysters and how to work on a 24-foot, flat-bottom skiff. He stayed on as an employee, working at the farm on the Damariscotta River — the oyster capital of New England. The company is known for two varieties of oysters: Dodge Cove Pemaquid and Wawenauk.

    Oyster farming generates local pride, Chlebowski said. The Shuck Station in downtown Damariscotta gives oyster farmers a free drink when they come in and there’s an annual summer shucking festival. But the company is trying to provide careers, Chlebowski said, not just high-season jobs.

    “It can be hard to make a career out of farming, but it’s like any trade,” he said, adding that there is work to do year-round. “Welding and HVAC have trade schools and apprenticeships. Why shouldn’t aquaculture?”

    Chlebowski’s apprenticeship turned into a career. Back in Shingletown, students in the logging program hope for the same result when they finish. 

    Until then, they spend Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the woods learning how to operate and maintain equipment. Tuesdays and Thursdays are spent on Shasta College’s Redding campus, where the apprentices take three classes: construction equipment operation, introduction to forestry and wood products and milling.

    At the end of the semester, students demonstrate their skills at a showcase in the Shingletown woods. Logging company representatives will attend and scout for workers. Students typically get offers at the showcase. So far, 50 students have completed the pre-apprenticeship program and most transitioned into full apprenticeships. Fifteen people have completed the full apprenticeship program and now earn from $40,000 to $90,000 a year as loggers.

    Related: Some people going into the trades wonder why their classmates stick with college

    Mentorship is at the heart of apprenticeships. On the job, new workers are paired with more experienced loggers who pass on knowledge and supervise the rookies as they complete tasks. Pre-apprentices at Shasta College learn from Jonas Lindblom, the program’s heavy equipment and logging operations instructor.

    At the logging site, Lindblom watches as a tall sugar pine slowly falls and thuds to the ground. Lindblom’s father, grandfathers and great-grandfather all drove trucks for logging companies in Northern California.

    An axe sticks out of a freshly cut tree at a logging site used to train student loggers enrolled at Shasta College in Redding, Calif. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

    This is a good area for apprentices to “just be able to learn at their pace,” he said. “They’re not pushed and they can get comfortable in the machines without developing bad habits along the way.” 

    Lindblom, who studied agriculture education at Chico State University, spent all his breaks during college working as a logger. He works closely with the logging companies that partner with the program to make sure he’s teaching up-to-date practices. It’s better for new loggers to learn in this outdoor classroom, he said, than on the job.

    “The majority of these students did not grow up in logging families,” he said. “This is a great opportunity to pass on this knowledge and share where the industry is going.”

    Contact editor Christina A. Samuels at 212-678-3635 or [email protected].

    This story about learning on the job was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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  • What Job Design Can Teach Us About Course Design – Faculty Focus

    What Job Design Can Teach Us About Course Design – Faculty Focus

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  • To make profit, AI companies will have to take your job

    To make profit, AI companies will have to take your job

    Lately, I have been experiencing anger, occasionally edging toward rage (depending on my mood) when I open a new document in MSWord and I see the ghostly prompt urging me to use its Copilot generative AI tool.

    I do not want to use this tool. I especially do not want to use this tool to start a draft of a document, because writing the first draft under the power of my own thoughts is the key to ultimately producing something someone else might want to read, and outcome on which my living depends, but it’s also, the point of all writing ever, in any context, as far as I’m concerned.

    I am persuaded by Marc Watkins’s framing of “AI is unavoidable, not inevitable” for no other reason than the tech companies will not allow us to avoid their generative AI offerings. We can’t get away from this stuff if we want to, and boy, do I really want to.

    But just because it is unavoidable and must be acknowledged and, in its way, dealt with, does not mean we are required to use or experiment with it. Over the period of writing More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, and now spending a month or so promoting and talking about the book in various venues, I grow more and more convinced that if this technology is to have utility in helping students learn—and I mean learn, not merely do school—this utility is likely to be specialized and narrow and the product of deep thought and careful exploration and step-by-step iteration.

    Instead, we’re on the receiving end of a fire hose spraying, This is the future!

    Is it, really?

    One of the reasons we’re being told it’s the future is because at this time, generative AI has no strong business rationale. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who admitted in a podcast interview that generative AI applications have had no meaningful effect on GDP, suggesting they are not amazing engines of increased productivity.

    Tech watcher Ed Zitron has been saying for months that there is no “AI revolution” and that we’re heading toward the bursting of a bubble that will at least rival the 2008 downturn caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.

    So, while there is reason to believe that we are experiencing a bubble that is inevitably going to burst, as we imagine what our institutional and individual relationships should be with this technology, I think it’s useful to see what the people who are—literally—invested in AI envision for our futures. If they are right, and AI is inevitable, what awaits us?

    Let’s check in with the people directly funding and developing AI technology what they foresee for the educators of the United States.

    @elonmusk/X

    That is the man who is apparently running—and running roughshod over—the United States government suggesting that AI-assisted education is superior to what teachers deliver. Now, we know this is not true. We know it will never be true—that is, unless what counts as outcomes is defined down to what AI-assisted education can deliver.

    At her “Second Breakfast” newsletter, Audrey Watters puts it plainly, and we should be prepared to accept these truths:

    “But to be clear, the ‘better outcomes’ that Silicon Valley shit-posters Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk fantasize about in the image above do not involve the quality of education—of learning or teaching or schooling. (You’re not fooled that they do, right?) They aren’t talking about improved test scores or stronger college admissions or nicer job prospects for graduates or well-compensated teachers or happier, healthier kids or any such metric. Rather, this is a call for AI to facilitate the destruction of the teaching profession, one that is, at the K-12 level comprised predominantly of women (and, in the U.S., is the largest union) and at the university level—in their imaginations, at least—is comprised predominantly of ‘woke.’”

    It is hard to know what to do about a technology that some intend to leverage to destroy your profession and harm the constituents your profession is meant to serve. More Than Words is not a book that argues we must resist this technology at all costs, but again, these people want to destroy me, you, us.

    ChatGPT and its ilk haven’t even been around for all that long, and we already see the consequences of voluntary deskilling. Futurism reports, “Young coders are using AI for everything, giving ‘blank stares’ when asked how programs actually work.”

    Namanyay Goel, a veteran coder who has been observing the AI-wielding coders who can’t actually code, says, “The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just … missing.” This is output divorced from process, a pattern that is already endemic to our transactional model of schooling, but which AI now supercharges.

    There is no role for educational institutions in the world where we allow this sort of thing to substitute for knowledge and learning. That may be the least of our problems should the full deskilling result. (See the film Idiocracy for that particular flavor of dystopia.)

    When Microsoft shoves its AI tools in the face of a student with less time, less freedom, less confidence and more incentive to use it, what are we giving them to make them want to resist, to commit to their learning, to become something other than a meat puppet plugging syntax into a machine with the machine spewing more syntax out?

    At this point, where is the evidence the companies do not wish us harm?

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  • Gov. Hochul orders CUNY to remove Palestine scholar job post

    Gov. Hochul orders CUNY to remove Palestine scholar job post

    New York governor Kathy Hochul took an unusual interest in the hiring practices of the City University of New York on Tuesday when she ordered the public system to take down a job posting for a professorship in Palestinian studies at Hunter College.

    CUNY quickly complied, and faculty at Hunter are up in arms over what they call a brazen intrusion into academic affairs from a powerful state lawmaker.

    The job posting was for “a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.”

    “We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches,” the posting continued.

    In a statement Tuesday night, Hochul said the posting’s use of the words “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid” amounted to antisemitic attacks and ordered CUNY to “immediately remove” the posting.

    A few hours later, CUNY complied, and system chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez echoed Hochul’s criticisms of the posting.

    “We find this language divisive, polarizing and inappropriate and strongly agree with Governor Hochul’s direction to remove this posting, which we have ensured Hunter College has since done,” he wrote in a statement.

    Hochul also directed the university system to launch an investigation at Hunter “to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom.” Matos Rodríguez appeared to imply the system would follow that order as well, saying, “CUNY will continue working with the Governor and other stakeholders to tackle antisemitism on our campuses.”

    A CUNY spokesperson declined to say whether the system would launch a probe into the posting at Hunter but wrote in an email that “each college is responsible for its own faculty job posting.”

    Hochul’s order came after pro-Israel activists, including a former CUNY trustee and current professor, publicly voiced concerns about the posting.

    “To make a Palestinian Studies course completely about alleged Jewish crimes is akin to courses offered in the Nazi era which ascribed all the world’s crimes to the Jews,” Jeffrey Weisenfeld, who served as a CUNY trustee for 15 years, told The New York Post.

    Faculty at Hunter are livid about the decision, according to multiple professors who spoke with Inside Higher Ed both on the record and on background. They say it’s a concerning capitulation to political pressure from an institution they long believed to be staunchly independent.

    One longtime Hunter and CUNY Graduate Center professor, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their job, said faculty across the system were “outraged at this craven act by our governor and our chancellor.”

    “It shows that [Matos Rodríguez] has no commitment to academic freedom or moral compass that would allow him to stand up at this moment of political repression,” they said.

    CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, the union representing more than 30,000 faculty and staff members across the system’s 25 campuses, wrote a letter to Matos Rodriguez on Wednesday evening condemning the posting removal and calling on leadership to reverse their decision.

    “An elected official dictating what topics may be taught at a public college is a line that should not be crossed,” the letter reads. “The ‘divisive concepts’ standard for universities is something devised in Florida that shouldn’t be exported to New York. What’s needed are inclusive ways of teaching, not canceling concepts and areas of study.”

    It was unclear Wednesday whether the job posting would be edited and reposted or if the opening would be eliminated. A CUNY spokesperson declined to respond to questions about the job’s future, but the anonymous faculty member said they believed Hunter officials were revising the post, intending to relist it.

    The anonymous professor said they were worried that Hunter president Nancy Cantor, who took on the role last August after leading Rutgers University–Newark for a decade, could face severe scrutiny after the posting.

    “We fully support this initiative by our president to make this Palestinian studies cluster hire,” the anonymous professor said. “I’m very worried about Nancy Cantor’s tenure at Hunter. I think this is part of a campaign by the far right to get rid of Félix [Matos Rodríguez], and it would not surprise me in the least if he threw Nancy Cantor under the bus to save his own skin.”

    Heba Gowayed, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter, said she was shocked that Hochul had made the job posting a priority, especially as threats to academic freedom and attacks on higher education from Republicans are intensifying.

    “This is an unprecedented overstep in authority, but instead of coming from Republicans, it’s coming from a Democrat in one of the bluest states in the country,” she said. “They’re the ones that are supposed to be fighting to protect academic freedom. This is a tremendous abdication of that responsibility.”

    ‘A Climate of Fear’

    The anonymous professor said their colleagues are grappling with contending emotions: rage and fear. There’s a great appetite to speak up, they said, but they also feel it’s more dangerous than ever, even for tenured faculty.

    “People are worried across the board,” they said. “That is the kind of climate of fear that this sort of action creates.”

    It’s not the first time CUNY has responded to pressure from pro-Israel activist groups in faculty workforce decisions. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, CUNY institutions have declined to renew contracts for two vocally pro-Palestinian professors: Danny Shaw at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who says he was the target of a pro-Israel pressure campaign to get him fired after 18 years of teaching, and lecturer Lisa Hofman-Kuroda at Hunter, who was reported for pro-Palestinian social media posts.

    Shaw, who is currently suing CUNY for breach of contract, told Inside Higher Ed that the decision to remove the job posting did not surprise him.

    “This is McCarthyism 2.0,” he said. “Administrators won’t protect us. It’s been made pretty clear that at the end of the day, it’s either their necks on the chopping block or ours.”

    Last spring, when the student-led pro-Palestinian encampment protests spread from Columbia University across town to the City College of New York, CUNY leadership drew criticism for calling the New York Police Department to disperse students. Gowayed said that decision shocked faculty across the system, who took pride in their institution’s progressive reputation and history of academic integrity.

    Even then, she said she was “disturbed that they have let it get to this higher level of censoring faculty for a completely legitimate job posting.”

    The Palestinian studies position was one of two Hunter planned to hire, and Gowayed said faculty and leadership at Hunter had been supportive of the plans to expand their research and teaching capacity in an area of growing interest.

    “Whatever your feelings on Palestine, this is a research area in a widely recognized field of scholarship on genocide and apartheid,” Gowayed said. “These are well-established fields, whether you’re studying the Belgian Congo or Rwanda or Palestine, and the posting wasn’t even saying what approach the faculty should take … The reaction to this posting is so discrepant from the actual academic integrity of the job search.”

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  • This LSU law professor’s job has become a legal drama

    This LSU law professor’s job has become a legal drama

    In a Jan. 14 lecture, Ken Levy, Holt B. Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at Louisiana State University, dropped f-bombs against then–president-elect Donald Trump and Louisiana governor Jeff Landry and told students who like Trump that they need his “political commentary.”

    Some students found the apparent attempt at political humor funny, according to an audio recording of the class obtained by Inside Higher Ed from a student who supports Levy.

    But at least one student in the administration of criminal justice class who subsequently complained, according to LSU, wasn’t amused—and neither were the university and the governor. An LSU spokesperson said the institution “took immediate action to remove Professor Levy from the classroom after complaints about the professor’s remarks.”

    Levy got a lawyer and took immediate action himself, pulling LSU into court instead of waiting for the university to take further steps internally regarding his job.

    In the month since that lecture, state district court judges have twice ruled that Levy should return to the classroom, only for a state appeals court to twice overrule that. The back-and-forth nature of the case has attracted attention in Louisiana and in law circles, including via headlines such as “The LSU Law School Professor Free Speech Hot Potato Saga Continues.”

    Landry also continues to discuss the case. A Republican governor who’s repeatedly inserted himself in LSU affairs, Landry used social media in the fall to call on the university to punish one of Levy’s law school colleagues for alleged in-class comments about Trump-supporting students. Landry has now repeatedly posted about Levy, recently saying an alleged exam he gave was incendiary and suggesting that “maybe it’s time to abolish tenure.”

    In and Out

    In the lecture in question, Levy referenced Landry’s previous criticism of his LSU colleague Nick Bryner, adding that he “would love to become a national celebrity [student laughter drowns out a moment of the recording] based on what I said in this class, like, ‘Fuck the governor!’”

    Levy also referenced Trump. “You probably heard I’m a big lefty, I’m a big Democrat, I was devastated by— I couldn’t believe that fucker won, and those of you who like him, I don’t give a shit, you’re already getting ready to say in your evaluations, ‘I don’t need his political commentary,’” Levy told students. “No, you need my political commentary, you above all others.”

    A few days after that lecture, LSU notified Levy he was suspended from teaching pending an investigation into student complaints, according to a letter from the university provided by Levy’s attorney, Jill Craft.

    On Jan. 28, Craft filed a request for a temporary restraining order against LSU to get Levy back in the classroom. The filing alleged that a student complained to the governor, not LSU, and calls were then made to LSU. A state district court judge granted the restraining order Jan. 30 without a hearing.

    In the first reversal, a panel of appellate judges wrote Feb. 4 that the lower court shouldn’t have approved the return-to-teaching part of the temporary restraining order without a full evidentiary hearing. But after the lower court held a two-day hearing last week, a different group of appellate judges overruled Levy’s return to teaching again—without explaining why.

    Local journalists who covered last week’s hearing reported that district court judge Tarvald Anthony Smith kicked an LSU deputy general counsel out of the courtroom because the lawyer told the law school dean, who was a scheduled and sequestered witness, about a student witness’s earlier testimony. The testimony was reportedly that the student had recorded a conversation with the dean.

    Smith ruled Feb. 11 that LSU policy required the university to keep Levy in class during the investigation of his comments, WBRZ reported. But a Feb. 4 statement from university spokesman Todd Woodward to Inside Higher Ed suggested the investigation was already over: “Our investigation found that Professor Levy created a classroom environment that was demeaning to students who do not hold his political view, threatening in terms of their grades and profane.” The university didn’t make anyone available for an interview about the case.

    Amid this legal back-and-forth, Landry continues to denounce Levy on social media. Last week, Landry posted on X an alleged exam from Levy that included potential sexual and other crimes committed by various fictitious individuals and asked students at the end to “discuss all potential crimes and defenses.” The narrative included a teen who put his penis into pumpkins on Halloween and was seen by trick-or-treating children, and a powerful Republican and suspected pedophile who invited the children inside to dance for him.

    “Disgusting and inexcusable behavior from Ken Levy,” Landry wrote on X regarding what he claimed was Levy’s test. “Deranged behavior like this has no place in our classrooms! If tenure protects a professor from this type of conduct, then maybe it’s time to abolish tenure.” Asked about this document, Craft said she believes the assignment was part of the sex crimes portion of Levy’s criminal law exam years ago, but she did not confirm it.

    After the latest appellate ruling in LSU’s favor, Landry wrote on X that “Levy should stay far, far away from any classroom in Louisiana!”

    Craft said Levy has received death threats on X due to Landry’s comments there. “This seems to be a situation entirely of the governor’s making,” she said. “He has been active on social media, trying to accuse my client of all kinds of bad things. He’s a lawyer himself. He attacked the courts and the judge.”

    Landry’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

    Craft also said Levy’s roughly 80 students remain with another 80 in another professor’s classroom.

    “I’m not sure how he can handle office hours for 160 law students,” Craft said of that second professor. The university says it’s doubled the number of student tutors for the course.

    No Longer the U.S.?

    Craft said Levy was set to return to the classroom Feb. 13, but Louisiana’s First Circuit Court of Appeal issued its two-sentence order around 9:30 a.m. that appeared to stay the part of the lower court’s order that returned Levy to teaching.

    LSU again kept Levy out of the classroom Tuesday, Craft said. But she said the rest of the lower court order remains in place, at least for now, and that prevents LSU from taking further employment action against Levy due to his expression.

    “This is a critical issue, and I feel like we have got to, as a nation, understand that there has to be academic freedom, there has to be free speech in this country, and there have to be protections against governmental intrusions without due process,” she said. “We take all that away and we are no longer the United States of America.”

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  • Job titles matter for inclusive and meaningful work

    Job titles matter for inclusive and meaningful work

    Job titles, and the names given to organisational roles, are important for the meaning that individuals derive from their work and their engagement with their work.

    Yet within many UK universities, and especially the post-92s, the trend is towards new job titles with potentially negative connotations for the job holders in terms of the meaning of their work and their commitment to it and to their institution.

    Such universities have been moving away from the conventional “lecturer” titles, adopting the US system of titles. US institutions typically designate their junior (un-tenured) academics as Assistant Professors, with an intermediate grade of Associate Professor and then a full Professor grade. Within the US system, most long serving and effective staff can expect to progress to full Professor by mid-career.

    Yet, in this new UK system, only around 15-20 per cent of academics are (and likely ever to be) full Professors and many academics will spend their entire careers as Assistant Professors or Associate Professors, retiring with one of these diminutive job titles.

    The previous, additive, job titles of Lecturer to Senior Lecturer and then to Principal Lecturer or Reader had meaning outside the university and, crucially, had meaning for the post-holders, giving a sense of achievement and pride as they progressed. Retiring as a Senior or Principal Lecturer was deemed more than acceptable.

    Status and self-esteem

    It is not hard to imagine the impact that the changes in job titles is having upon mid and late-career academics who may have little chance of gaining promotion to full professor, perhaps because quite simply they draw the line at working “just” 60 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. The impact on status and self-esteem is immense. Imagine explaining to your grandkids that you are, in essence, an assistant to a professor. As an Associate Professor, and particularly in a vocational discipline, one of the authors is often asked, “I can understand you wanting to work part-time for a university, but what’s your main job?” Associate, affiliate, adjunct – these names are pretty much the same thing to outsiders.

    Managerially, though, the change from designating academics as Senior Lecturer to Assistant Professors and from Principal Lecturers to Associate Professors is genius. These diminutive job titles confer inferiority – but with the promise that if you keep your nose to the grindstone and keep up the 60+ hour weeks, 50 weeks a year, you might be in with a chance of a decent job title, as a professor. What a fantastic, and completely friction-free, way of turning the performative screw.

    The UK university sector is not alone and other public sector organisations have similarly got into a meaning muddle from the naming of their jobs. For example, in the British civil service, a key middle management role is labelled “Grade B2+”, whereas a relatively junior operational role is designated a rather grand sounding “Executive Officer”. And just last autumn, the NHS acknowledged that names do matter, abandoning the designation of “junior” doctor which was used to encompass all medics that sit within the grades below what is known as “consultant”, and which their union described as “misleading and demeaning” – it’s been replaced with “resident” doctor.

    Meaningful work

    A name gives meaning to workers. It gives status, prestige, and identity. While those organisations such as universities who fail to realise the importance of job titles may be able to turn the screw in the short-term, extracting ever more work from their junior-sounding Assistant and Associate Professors, they will in the longer-term, for sure, have an ever more demoralised and demotivated workforce for whom the job has little meaning other than the pay.

    And, since pay for university academics in the UK has been so badly eroded in recent decades, job title conventions are a self-inflicted injury – one that risks academics’ engagement and wellbeing and, ultimately, their institutions’ performance.

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  • Americans Are GIVING UP On Working, And the Job Market Is Broken. (Large Man Abroad)

    Americans Are GIVING UP On Working, And the Job Market Is Broken. (Large Man Abroad)







    Higher Education Inquirer : Americans Are GIVING UP On Working, And the Job Market Is Broken. (Large Man Abroad)




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  • Higher Education Marketing Job Titles and Salaries

    Higher Education Marketing Job Titles and Salaries

    Elevate your marketing team with strategic expertise

    Does your higher education marketing team have what it takes to capture the attention of right-fit students in a competitive landscape? Marketing budgets can be tight, but without the right mix of talent, increasing your ability to reach and convert key audiences, clearly connect upstream efforts to enrollment outcomes, and producing actionable marketing intelligence will be a constant challenge.

    Dive into our latest infographic to uncover the key roles essential for enhancing the student journey and driving a robust return on investment.

    If you hired them all, you could spend $1M+ in annual salaries alone. But you don’t need all the roles all the time. Hire the ones you do and outsource the part-time or specialized roles where you can.

    Partner with Collegis to expand your marketing approach

    Ready to assemble a marketing super team that engages students with personalized, AI-driven experiences at scale? Join forces with Collegis Education to access tailored marketing services that maximize the data, tech, and talent you already have.

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  • JOB SATISFACTION QUESTIONNAIRE FOR MBA PROJECT

    JOB SATISFACTION QUESTIONNAIRE FOR MBA PROJECT

    Job Satisfaction Questionnaire for mba project

    Here is the Job Satisfaction Questionnaire for mba project  to give you an idea how to frame your project questionnaire for data analysis and help you to get top grade in your project. You must remember that the questions you are choosing should be unique and should fulfil the objective of the project. The goal should be to find the solution of the problem you are trying to solve.

    Questionnaire

    Please share the following details:

    NAME: ………………………………………….

    DESIGNATION: ……………………………….

    COMPANY: …………………………………….

    1. I am often stressed out at work.
    2. I you’ve been passed over for promotions multiple times in last two years.
    3. I spend parts of my daydreaming about a superior job.
    4. I find much of my job repetitive and boring.
    5. I am Mentally and emotionally exhausted  at the end of a day at work.
    6. I feel that my job has little impact on the achievement of the company.
    7. I have an increasingly awful attitude toward my job, supervisor, and managers .
    8. I am no longer given the working environments I need to successfully do my job.
    9. I am not being used to my full potential of my skills.
    10. I have received no better than unbiased evaluation and impartial evaluations recently.
    11. I feel as though my boss and colleagues have let me down at office time.
    12. I often feel sense of anxiety at workplace.
    13. I live for weekends away from the job.
    14. I find myself negatively comparing my situation to my peers.
    15. I feel my bad days at work outweigh the good ones.
    16. I often experience a sensation of time standing still when I am at work.
    17. I have been told that I am becoming a more cynical person.
    18. I feel as though my company have broken trust and commitment about my future with the workplace.
    19. I have lost my career goals.
    20. I no longer feel appreciated for my work.

    Tick the Answer

    • Strongly Agree
    • Agree
    • Neither Agree nor Disagree
    • Disagree
    • Strongly Disagree

    Conclusion

    Here in this content I have tried to solve all the Job Satisfaction Questionnaire For Mba Project related query which student need to prepare for mba project in hr. These are all close end questionnaire which you can prepare the data analysis using statistical tool and find the outcome of the report based on the report. If you need more in-depth Questionnaire feel free to get in touch with our academic writing team to help you prepare your Job Satisfaction Questionnaire as per university guidelines.



    Whatsapp

    Frequently asked questions

    Questionnaire to measure job pleasure,  work atmosphere, remuneration, and personal fulfillment.

    Respect , Job Security, Recognition, Engagement, Pay and benefits

    Today’s Genz looks for Respect, Job Security, Recognition, Engagement, Pay and benefits in companies

    It’s a  Smart Tool that finds employees opinions and experiences in workplace and happiness index.

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