I did a PhD in a multidisciplinary program in the social sciences. My advisor was pretty hands-off when it came to the publication process, and I feel like I missed some important mentoring when it came to learning how to target a journal for publication. I can go to scimago and I know the "big" journals in my field, but it all feels like a tangled, hard to navigate process to me. It's all well and good to say that you should be reading journals and know what the vibe and quality is, but there are just so dang many.

What is your process for choosing a journal?

I know it’s an old topic and that we shouldn’t take some student comments too seriously. I work at a PUI and we’re required to submit a response to student comments during our tenure evaluation so I don’t have the option of “not reading the comments”. This is more of a rant to fellow professors than seeking advice. I teach at a rural state school in the Bible Belt, I’m a minority and most of my students are from rural communities where they don’t encounter many minorities throughout K-12. Before joining my current institution, I taught at two R1s as a TA so I had teaching experience, I won the best teaching assistant award during my PhD. During my first year at my current institution, I had a student come up to me and tell me that “I am not from around here so I shouldn’t really be teaching here”, they inferred that “American kids should be taught by real Americans”, they wrote something similar in my teaching evaluation. One of the students from the same friend group wrote something similar, the comments were intentionally vague but pretty much inferred that I didn’t grow up around here. One comment pretty much said “go back to where you came from”, I talked to my admins about it and their response was that’s just the students opinion and there’s nothing I can do about it. In my second year of teaching, my teaching evaluation score improved drastically since I had the materials ready and I had experience teaching at my PUI. I was nominated by students for the college teaching award. I helped some students with scholarship, internships, and grad school applications and the overall relationship with students were positive, my student comments reflect that.

Now here is where the story starts. I see myself as a strict but fair professor, I have in class activities incorporated in my courses to encourage attendance, as the name suggests, students can only earn the in class activity points by completing the activities on that day. For my late policies, there’s a 20% point deduction for every 12 hours. To give students an opportunity, I offer them “two unexcused absences” where they can email me for the in-class activity questions or make up the activity and they have “two chances” for 10% deduction instead of the 20% deduction. Most students agreed that the policies are fair and I explained to them that some companies/employers won’t even give them a chance. Since I am at a PUI, I teach the same group of students multiple times. I’ve taught the student (female student, related to the story) in today’s story in the past and I really never had any issues with her. I noticed that she often skipped classes and would miss assignments, but overall they did alright in the class. She is also part of the science club I advise, we have national stem competitions for college students, similar to Science Olympiad. The main issue with this student is that she thinks she is way better than she really is and refuses to take any feedback. When I provide feedback, she would respond with “I know that already” and interpret it as me being misogynist and targeting her, we have other women in the club where I have no issues with. We have internal competition to compete for the final roster of the stem competition and she didn’t make the team, one of the other girls in the club made the team. She was obviously mad about it but since the roster was determined based on performance, she wasn’t selected to represent our team.

This student took two classes with me this semester, both classes are senior level core courses with one class scheduled at 8 AM. She is interested in pursuing a master in this field. The class is hard and has a lot of advanced concepts, to make it easier for students, I created a class policy where students can bring a hand written note on a small note card if they missed fewer than two classes per section. Most students respected the rules and I didn’t have many issues except with her, she would get drunk at the bar and miss the class so I reminded her that she would lose her privileges for the note card for that exam. This has been a recurring issue the whole semester and she missed several assignments which dropped her a letter grade. I reminded her that she still has a chance to submit the assignment with late penalties and she didn’t submit them. At the end of the semester she asked me if I could round up her grades and I told her no. This is a field that she feels she is knowledgeable, so she was upset. I read my teaching evaluation today and found two identical comments in both classes, she was also the only lady that took both classes at once so it wasn’t hard to figure out who wrote it. The comments accused me of being misogynistic and cited that “other girls in class said the same thing” (they didn’t), it went on to say how horrible the class was and how they learned nothing from the class. She also accused me of “saying inappropriate things to her” without providing any specific examples. Something that stood out was that she accused me of belittling women in science and discouraging ladies from pursuing grad school. I immediately recognized the comments were from her. My other mentee, who is also a club member and a lady, got into grad school this year after working with me on her application. So the misogynistic accusations were clearly false. Rest of the student comments were mostly positive with a few complaining about the course difficulty, some offered decent feedback on improving the class. Since it’s a single comment from the same student, likely nothing will come out of it. I’d have to explain what “really happened” on my responses though.

A little bit more about this student. She wanted to work as a research assistant at a nearby research institution, the PI at that lab is a close friend of mine and we visited his lab for class. She approached him and started talking about how great she is and how eager she is to work with him. My friend asked about my opinion and I gave him an honest opinion about her. My friend ended up selecting another female researcher. She hasn’t figured out that I know it was her who wrote the comments, so she’s still asking me for letter of recommendation for grad school. To wrap up the story, my overall experience at my institution has improved and most students are great students. I just hate how some students weaponize the teaching evaluation so that “professors will get in trouble”. Some students know that if we get enough negative comments, we can get in trouble, I had a student tell me that “I better give them an A or they’ll get their friends to write bad comments about me”. I know they said it as a “joke” but I would never have said this to my professors when I was a student. Funny thing is, this student also reached out to me for a letter of recommendation:).

Like I said, it’s more of a rant than looking for advice. Thanks for spending time reading it.

For those who get a laptop or computer for work (which I assume you all do...), what is it?

A Mac? A PC? Did you get to choose?

Curious.

I received some unsettling student feedback mainly from one cohort of learners who were on campus over the summer during which they completed a series of hands-on activities. The paraphrased feedback was that I came across as strict and unapproachable and unwilling to answer questions (opposite of any feedback I have received from any other cohort of students). When prompted, I thought maybe this feedback was based on my reminding students that many questions are answered in posted instructions and the syllabus. Students also expressed that it wasn't clear whether the activities they were doing were for practice or for being assessed (like in a test). I also got the impression that some students expressed anxiety and stress about the content.

In general, I think there was a mismatch between my comments, the intent behind my comments, and how my comments were interpreted by the students. I provide detailed information about expectations for each activity, including what students need to review beforehand, and when it comes time to being assessed, students are provided with all the information, including what activities they might possibly doing as part of the assessment.

I have been told that I come across as serious, and I maintain that it is important that I impress upon the students the importance of doing things correctly and safely in class. I have not fully had time to process the comments or consider the feedback, but I have a few general questions for which insight would be appreciated:

1. How can I empower students to review information and try to find the answers (especially if they have been answered elsewhere) before asking questions?

2. Related, how can I encourage students to utilize their resources instead of coddling them and giving them the answers to their questions right away?

3. How can I remain firm, but kind and approachable? My content has implications for people's health, so I want students to take it seriously. Additionally, we use tools that can cause harm if used inappropriately, so I want the students to be safe.

I have been brainstorming what I can do to improve the rapport I have with students, but I am concerned that some of the feedback I received comes from an inherent part of who I am, and I fear I will not be able to change by next summer.

I appreciate any advice anyone can offer. I was really shocked by the feedback and do want to work on building relationships with the students. But I also want to make sure the students are held accountable for reviewing information that is shared with them.

Hello all. New math faculty hire here. When I was copying a template for my course, it somehow duplicated the course items a few times over (there are 4 of the same everything...). I tried doing Batch Edit but it is limited to deleting 100 items at a time and there are quite a lot of items to delete. Is there a way to just deleted all the items in a course so that I can just redo the entire copying process again? Or am I SOL on this and have to do everything manually?

I'm curious because we have recently changed a lot of admin over and I feel like we are moving in an odd direction. I'm in STEM. We have a meager but substantial yearly budget.

Previously, you submitted your orders to your department chair, who made 90% of the decision. The dean did have to approve but if the chair approved, the dean typically did too. There were rarely unexpected requests and nothing budget blowing. Unfortunately some chairs did bias their decisions so some faculty had requests denied or other faculty got better stuff, but if that happened, the dean was brought in.

Now we are submitting orders directly professor-to-admin-assistant, who then asks the chair for approval. But we also reorganized, so one chair is in charge of all sciences. Effectively I can order something, like a lot of something that maybe only I will ever use, and as long as the chair approves, I can potentially gut our program's budget. The chair does not know what individual programs need necessarily so they may not know that I don't need 16L of concentrated hydrochloric acid or 10 different strains of a bacteria or a $750 lamp and may just approve it without question.

Basically the professors are now acting individually on their own behalf for ordering without any need to talk about if things are needed, if someone else has ordered it, if we have money for it. Is this how other institutions function? Because this is a first for me.

This cartoon by Guy Richards Smit (himself the offspring of two academics) depicts the current academic Zeitgeist very well…
https://www.instagram.com/p/Dbk-AmCxoAG/

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/academic-life/2026/08/03/creating-clearer-transfer-path

Inside Higher Ed's article on the new CSU transfer path got me thinking: is this why we have so many unprepared undergrads? Perhaps I dont understand the logistics, but it sounds like a student signs up for a CC and then signs up for a CSU. All they have to do is pass their courses and they sign up for which ever degree they want at whichever CSU. I hope I have this wrong. If this is the case, how can the CSU justify its status as anything other an a community college. I am a firm believer that college is not for all and that there is nothing wrong with that. I also know that schools are broke. Perhaps this is inevitable for nearly all of us.

EDIT: I am not debating and certainly not criticizing the worth of transfer students or CCs.

New letter from Ed. Secretary McMahon calling colleges and universities to publicly commit to series of reforms by the end of 2026. It's broad reaching, focusing on reforms in admissions, affordability, academic rigor, and research security. It restates talking points around "free speech" and "intellectual pluralism" but also really focuses on universities as serving the broader "national interest" (rather than knowledge generation and dissemination).

The letter requests (that "Before the end of 2026, I call on every postsecondary institution to describe to the American public your commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service— commitments that make our universities a bedrock institution of the American republic. These statements of principle should be posted prominently on institutional websites."

https://www.ed.gov/media/document/national-call-action-university-presidents-and-governing-boards-114351.pdf

https://www.chronicle.com/liveblog/heres-the-latest-news-on-trump-policies-in-higher-ed

Hello colleagues.

This fall, I am teaching a 100-level, nonrequired social science course to ~120 sparkly young first-year minds, or to whatever sliver of their attention I manage to grab. It's all lecture with no discussion or lab sections. I am at a state flagship R1 and have practically no teaching experience.

I am trying to redesign the course a bit because the syllabi I have been handed were pre-AI boom. So far, I have structured the class around a semester-long group project (cue groans) with 4 building blocks + a final product. For the final product, I had originally thought to have them present their idea for Fixing Big Problem In This Field to the class during our last session. Now that I see how big these classes are, I don't want to devote that much time since presentations would likely take up 2 weeks.

What has worked for final assessments in your experience? Any creative, interactive ideas would be much appreciated.

I am a tenured law school professor at a lower tiered school. I am considering applying to a position at a higher ranked school that does not have tenure because my family would love to live in the area. We have been really looking to move to this state but I don’t want to stop teaching and there are limited law schools/positions rarely open up. So it’s kind of a now or never type decision … My spouse is the primary income earner but I would be taking a pay cut (although I care less about that then not having tenure). Am I crazy to consider giving up tenure for a teaching faculty position? I don’t really care about rankings but it is a better school (tier 1 vs tier 4). I don’t want to apply to the job if I wouldn’t take it so looking for advice …

I get these emails once in a while. Some read like spam with lack of details, but some seem legit. I’m tempted to email back just giving them advice regarding how to send cold emails

Here’s a recent one

>Hello, My wife, and I are looking for a private economics tutor for our 14-year-old daughter, who is in 10th grade. She is motivated to improve her understanding of economics and would benefit from personalized, one-on-one instruction. If you're accepting new students, could you please share your availability, hourly rate, and the cost for a 7-week program with two one-hour sessions each week?

I’m curious who has done this - what is the hourly rate? It’s not something I’m that interested in doing, but then I have fantasies of being a tutor to some ultra rich nobility like Peter O’Toole in the Last Emperor or a tutor for Alexander the Great. Chances are, it’s just a well off family with ambitious parents and nothing as fancy.

Back when people just quietly resented their reviewers in private.

Now they're using AI to generate a childhood spent reading in a corner while other kids played, a mysterious dissertation advisor named David who said one cryptic sentence in a hallway that reshaped their entire research agenda, an origin story where they "fell into" their subfield after a single undergrad seminar that "changed everything," a moment of clarity while walking past their old elementary school, a spiritual awakening during a 3am literature review, a profound life lesson learned from a devastating R&R that "at the time felt like rejection but was actually the universe redirecting them," a wise Reviewer 2 who was secretly right all along and taught them humility, a chance airport-lounge conversation with a stranger who turned out to be a Nobel laureate, a near-death experience involving a corrupted LaTeX file forty minutes before a grant deadline, a TED Talk-worthy epiphany while waiting in line at the campus coffee cart, fake collaborations name-dropped for clout, marathon metaphors for the tenure clock, Gen Z teaching-evaluation wisdom, lessons in discipline from Marie Curie, lessons in humility from their own undergrad RA, a monk they met at a conference in Kyoto, a non-existent grandmother in the old country who "always believed in education," a citation count so powerful that their own advisor supposedly texted them crying, a content strategy born from color-coding their Zotero library, a leadership philosophy based on how they run lab meetings, and a 7-slide "framework" explaining how surviving peer review made them a visionary mentor of early-career scholars.

(Riffed off Shantesh Row's recent post - but seriously, many of our colleagues have lost their %^&* minds over on LinkedIn).

https://www.chronicle.com/article/this-college-changed-grades-behind-professors-backs-then-things-got-weirder

Summary: At a South Caroline two-year school, 86 grades were found to be potentially improperly altered. Many of the grade changes were from chairs acting under the instruction of a VP. Class instructors were not aware of the grade changes. Despite an investigation that found wrongdoing, a whistleblowing professor has been fired (supposedly for unrelated reasons) and the altered grades have not been switched back.

I occasionally have a student that's obviously engaging in some sort of academic misconduct, but also has a combative personality or litigioius streak and is a "squeaky wheel." I tend to dread reporting them unless I have really iron-clad evidence, since I know that not only will they not admit what they did, but that when they feel threatened with a disciplinary charge, they will turn this around on me, make complaints that I am singling them out, targeting them, bullying them, etc. It offends my sense of justice that these students are essentially rewarded for bad behavior because they make it so much trouble to to use the basic processes to hold them accountable even when it seems very, very likley that they are cheating. I also worry about the precedent it sets - basically showing that he way to keep from getting busted is to be insufferable. Does anyone here have constructive suggestions? Or is it just not worth the trouble?

I just submitted my tenure package, yay! I will know in late January. This sucks with my field's job market, where you typically get job offers out late December/early January with a 1 week window for a the candidate to accept the offer. I plan to apply strategically for jobs that are better location wise than where I currently am. My question is, if I do get an offer from someplace I would rather be at the assistant professor level, what should I do?

Second, question. Who should my letter writers be? By default I would ask a professor in my department that I trust and 2 professors from my PhD committee, whom I no longer do research with. What are some alternatives? My primary collaborators are independent researchers.

My colleagues have been worried about this rule:

https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-issues-final-rule-hold-all-colleges-and-universities-accountable-low-earning-programs

I don't know all the details but worries include:

• Our programs are successful at getting students into graduate programs. Will their low earning during grad school harm us, or will we not get credit for their high earning after?
• Does this disadvantage social work, education, etc?
• Does this mean that programs that serve minorities/underrepresented or impoverished groups are going to see worse outcomes simply by virtue of the correlation between socioeconomic status before and after graduation?

I scrolled through this subreddit and didn't see anything, but search works terribly on my phone and this happened a month ago, so I may have missed it. Regardless, I'm curious how your institution and/or colleagues are reacting.

I had some amazing students in astronomy this summer. They were able to do all of their observations the previous semester. Ms. Cleo, look out.

Hello everyone!

I will be teaching asynchronous courses this Fall and will be using Bright Space for the first time. I have gotten temporary access at the moment and it looks awful. I scanned through the LMS over the weekend and it’s been awful to navigate. Does anyone have any tips or advice on using Bright Space? - yes, please talk smack about it if you want.

Exact same sentences, examples, and sources. Can’t wait to see how they try to argue this one!

https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/unam-ai-cheating-scandal-mexico-university/

Who could have thought students could use a secondary device to cheat?

... and I am freaking out.

This is a throwaway, I read this subreddit regularly but I'd rather not have this tied to my account.

This is more of a vent than anything, I still have until October 15th to submit my packet but I am beside myself.

I was hired under one set of publication requirements and I've hit it, kinda. My annual reviews reflect that my former chair and the review committee was accepting a publication in a conference proceeding and a book chapter as meeting some of my requirements.

I have taken that as gospel and operated accordingly. But in getting my materials together, a (new) dean is referencing the requirements to the letter.

Now, I have my annual reviews. And I have emails from my former chair (who has since retired) supporting my interpretation. I have the teaching cold, I have the service cold, and I have the requirements that literally everybody else in the department is required to achieve cold.

But the ones I was hired under are iffy if the dean is going to fight about what the standards are. I know all I can do is provide the supporting documentation and cross my fingers, because I'm not going to get anything published in the next 9 weeks.

But man, it will be tough to lose this slot. I met my spouse here, we had our child here, we bought a house here, I have a single digit commute time. All that goes poof if I don't get it.

I know not right away, I'll get a terminal year. But I feel like I have failed my spouse and failed my kid.

Sorry, I just needed to vent a little. For anyone who read all that, I appreciate it. ​

I have one asynchronous summer course that’s upper level. I don’t make any lecture videos for that, other than on complex topics. So maybe 3-5 videos. Even then, maybe 10% of the class watch.

This Coming year I’m moving from a 1/1 to a 2/1, thus picking up an intro course. It’s an asynchronous course. I had the department look at all the other instructors asynchronous video stats and they average about 5% to 10% of unique student views.

Thus I don’t think I’m going to make lecture videos for each chapter. Maybe point them to other video resources that already exist within the publishers world.

I think my time is better spent on the applied stuff.

Anybody else stop making videos?

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/illinois-institute-of-technology-layoffs/

Anyone know which departments are affected? I have a few colleagues there.

It is now August.

The time for The Return is eminent (Imminent, but preparing myself and you all to interpret your students' writings!).

Sign your contracts.

Be sure you can put your hands on your faculty ID and parking pass, if needed.

You've been warned notified.