Tenure, once earned, is hard to revoke. That’s the idea behind it. Most institutions nevertheless have processes for stripping a professor of tenure where there is demonstrated incompetence, neglect of duty, academic dishonesty or serious personal misconduct.
Fewer institutions have clearly outlined processes for denuding emeritus professors of that honorary status. The University Senate at San Diego State University this week considered a proposal on adopting one.
No one at San Diego State outwardly opposes the idea of taking back emeritus status when a professor is revealed to have, say, sexually harassed someone or committed some other serious crime. Instead, what rankled professors was proposed language on revoking emeritus status “when it is determined that an individual’s conduct, before or after emeritus status has been granted, causes harm to the university’s reputation.”
Herman, who does not know Hurlbert, also linked his case to the broader “cancel culture” decried by some academics, including the co-authors of a recent (and much criticized) open letter in Harper’s magazine.
“Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial,” that letter says. “Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”
the HyFlex model for the fall… reflects a rift between administrators and professors, who are raising alarms over the health risks of teaching in person, and about the logistical, technical, and pedagogical complications of the model itself. Search HyFlex on Facebook and Twitter and you’ll come across comments like this one: “Whoever the hell thought of this is a bean counter, not an educator, and an idiot.”
Teaching experts and others familiar with hybrid teaching say that HyFlex can work, but it requires effective technology, careful planning, instructional support, and creative course design.
“If HyFlex is part of the plan, it has to be done with will faculty participation,” says Brian Beatty, an associate professor of instructional technologies at San Francisco State, who created the model. “Otherwise, if it’s top down and the administration is saying, We’re doing this, then the faculty are saying, But why are we doing this?”
Much of what bothers professors about the push for HyFlex is that so many details about its mechanics remain ill defined. And assumptions about its value seem rooted in a particular idea of teaching, one where the professor stands at the front of a classroom and lectures.
“We are the ones holding the bag if this does not work, or if it’s chaos,” says Michelle Miller, a psychology professor at Northern Arizona University and author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively With Technology.
Miller is a fan of the original HyFlex model from San Francisco State, but says that colleges need to be mindful that the conditions under which it’s now being adapted — quickly, at scale, and without giving students much choice — will limit its effectiveness.
To work effectively, she says, hybrid teaching requires a lot of support, such as having teaching assistants help manage the complexities of working simultaneously with two different audiences. Otherwise it risks becoming a “lecture-centric, passive consumption view of learning.” That goes against years of hard work faculty members have been doing to make their classrooms more inclusive, active, and engaged.
To help think through pedagogical challenges, faculty groups are testing out teaching strategies, some departments meet weekly to discuss course design, and a student-leadership team is providing feedback and creating online tools to help their peers learn effectively online.Even so, the process has been challenging and frustrating at times for faculty members. Professors are both looking for templates and wanting to maintain control over their courses, which inevitably creates tension with the administration.
Working on a MAJOR article for @techlearning now examining many different models schools are proposing for the fall. Made this little graphic to accompany what is coming. pic.twitter.com/a5q2nStLSg
“Penn State University Libraries will need to reduce spending on library collections by about $2.2 million for the 2020-21 fiscal year”https://t.co/HOj7fJTUy5
Jack of all trades. LinkedIn had — and still has — multiple branded apps: Job Search, SlideShare, Learning, Recruiter, Sales Navigator and something call ‘Elevate”
Bad at integration and scaling. LinkedIn acquired many companies to introduce various services, but wasn’t so good at making them work.
Ads were expensive and user-unfriendly. Natalie Halimi, a marketer with 10 years of experience, wrote about LinkedIn ads back in July 2014. She used the headers “high CPC, poor dashboard, poor analysis” and concluded “ LinkedIn need to reassess their pricing strategy to provide better ROI for advertisers”.
Overvalued, full stop. Just before the plunge, LinkedIn shares were trading at 50x forward earnings. Twitter was at 30x, Facebook 34x and Google 21x. It was one of the most expensive stocks in tech.
When Microsoft introduced Office 365, it was to battle Google’s G Suite which appealed to smaller businesses with its cheaper pricing and cloud-based subscription model.
It is succeeding. According to a 2018 Bitglass survey, Office 365’s global market share has gone up to 56.3% from 7.7% in just four years. G Suite has stayed at about 25% since 2016.
LinkedIn’s employees were actually using G suite — the whole bag: Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Hangouts, Docs, Sheets… — before the Microsoft acquisition.
Unlike many other major tech platforms based in the U.S., Zoom, which is headquartered in California, has not been blocked by the Chinese government. Zoom said in a blog post that it is “developing technology over the next several days that will enable us to remove or block at the participant level based on geography” which will allow the company to “to comply with requests from local authorities when they determine activity on our platform is illegal within their borders; however, we will also be able to protect these conversations for participants outside of those borders where the activity is allowed.”
Zoom’s interference with the Tiananmen gatherings and its suspension of user accounts raised alarm among many in higher education, which increasingly depends on Zoom to operate courses remotely — including for students located within China’s borders.
Multiple scholars took to Twitter to express their worries
PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression, condemned Zoom for shuttering the activist’s account.
This is not the first time Zoom’s links to China have come under scrutiny. In April, the company admitted that some of its user data were “mistakenly” routed through China; in response, the company announced that users of paid Zoom accounts could opt out of having their data routed through data centers in China.
An April 3 report by scholars at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy said Zoom’s research and development operations in China could make the company susceptible “to pressure from Chinese authorities.”
Zoom, whose Chinese-born CEO is a U.S. citizen, said in its latest annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it had more than 700 employees at its research and development centers in China as of Jan. 31. The SEC filing notes that Zoom has a “high concentration of research and development personnel in China, which could expose us to market scrutiny regarding the integrity of our solution or data security features.”
