In the past couple years, we have made progress in dropping the GRE, and now the pandemic has come through with a huge assist. Maybe that’s the final blow for the GRE, as programs are now dropping it permanently. Which means that people who cared about the GRE are now placing higher importance on other pieces of applications, including recommendation letters.

Which leads me to ask: Are recommendation letters a good thing or a bad thing? Of course, I don’t think this is a binary matter and there’s a lot of nuance involved here.

I have heard a variety of concerns about recommendation letters in the graduate admissions process, and I think it would be foolhardy for us to think that we’ve made a big amount of progress by getting rid of the GRE. The problem with the GRE is that it doesn’t reflect ability, research potential, or value to the academic community, as it’s more tied to wealth, access to resources, and the accumulation of cultural and social capital. You could say the same thing about recommendation letters, too.

Let me illustrate the problem with recommendation letters with a little, and wholly true, story.

The new solicitation for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program arrived last night with NSF’s daily digest bulletin. There were eight items they brought to our attention as changes from last year, but when I was going through it late this morning, the soundtrack screeched to a halt:

4. Although NSF will continue to fund outstanding Graduate Research Fellowships in all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF, in FY2021, GRFP will emphasize three high priority research areas in alignment with NSF goals. These areas are Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Information Science, and Computationally Intensive Research. Applications are encouraged in all disciplines supported by NSF that incorporate these high priority research areas.

https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2020/nsf20587/nsf20587.htm

Ummm, what?

I am simply asking, what the heck is going on? I’ve got a lot of questions.

For a lot of us, this Fall will be our first experience teaching fully online. This shouldn’t be like emergency teaching in the Spring. We can be ready.

I think it’s unfair to students if, yet again, we bumble through online teaching. What can do we do to make sure that our courses are designed to engage students and support their learning?

What works in a classroom often doesn’t work online, and what works online often doesn’t work well in a classroom. A lot of us will be stretching our skill set as instructors. At the very least, we can learn what is supposed to work online as we design our classes.

It must be so difficult to be in charge of a university right now. This is a critical moment for the future of every institution, and every college and university is facing their own unique uncertainties.

In the previous post, I was saying how it is known and obvious that in-person teaching in the Fall is a very bad idea. Considering how many people are actually planning to teach in the Fall, I imagine they perceive this assertion as myopic or simplistic. Because there’s more to be dealt with than the virus.

Taking steps to keep the campus community safe can be expensive. Some approaches are better and more feasible than others, though you can only really know in hindsight. Whenever we resolve this epidemic in the US, the surviving institutions will be in recovery mode, and everybody in charge all want to be positioned well. This kind of forward thinking is necessary for the folks in charge.

In my privilege as a tenured professor in a (California) state university backed by a strong union, I have the luxury of knowing that my own livelihood is relatively well protected. But this isn’t true for everybody I work with, and our students are at very high exposure and face extreme challenges because of this epidemic. Nonetheless, I have some level of dispassionate distance on this issue. Nobody is going to blame me personally if my university bungles the response to the pandemic in the Fall. (And, anyhow, it looks like they’re doing a great job, by the way.)

The people who are making the decisions have some major responsibilities, including:

• education of the student body
• fiscal health of the institution
• institutional reputation and prestige
• risk management (safety and health of the community)

In our particular moment, who the heck can attend to all of these responsibilities simultaneously and do a good job for all of them?

The pandemic is, quite sensibly, consuming a lot of our energy and most of us are stretched quite thin. I thought it would be nice to bring up something of a distraction, but also relevant to our lives right now. What music are you working to? (When you are able to work, that is.)

Thank goodness, nobody I am working with has asked or expected me to maintain my productivity at the level it was before All Of This started. Though from what I’m hearing from others, there’s some folks expressing that this social distancing is a great moment to write a crap ton of papers and grants. Yeah no, it’s not working out like that. For those who are positioned to do so, I wish you well.

Yesterday, I was reading how some K-12 districts were switching to a pass/fail model for this semester. Two beats later, I thought — hey — this is something that looks important to college students too.

This morning, I saw that higher ed twitter has been talking about it, and many universities have already taken action. And it’s part of the discussion in the slack channel for my department (which after some years, is no longer moribund). So, this is a thing (and it’s not my idea), and if your institution isn’t on it, perhaps this would be a moment for some leadership and bring it up with the policy makers?

Did you hear about the recent-ish story about the white professor who called the cops into his classroom to exert power over a black student in his class? By all reports, midway through a lecture, the professor commanded his student to move to a seat at the front of the class. And when the student explained that he was well situated in his seat and was sitting near a plug so he could charge his laptop, the professor decided that his request was an ultimatum, and he unwisely escalated the situation.

How can an incident like this happen? Of course, let’s be clear, it’s racism. The actions of this professor are symptomatic of deep problems in higher education and our country.

From a pedagogical perspective, how is it that a highly experienced professor could make such a poor decision?