Search results for tag #highered
Belhaven University hit by cyber incident in Mississippi #BelhavenUniversity #CyberIncident #HigherEd #Mississippi #IncidentResponse #cybersecurity https://dysruptionhub.com/belhaven-cyber-incident-mississippi/
#HigherEd #Indigenous #Maine #artifacts #reparations
'The University of Maine has identified the remains of at least 26 Indigenous people and 532 burial objects held in its collection that are now slated to be returned to the Wabanaki Nations.'
Decades after patients first warned Columbia University that one of its doctors sexually abused them, the school is acknowledging a culture of silence that allowed the abuse to continue and some school administrators are finally facing consequences.
#News #Columbia #University #Doctors #Health #Women #Medicine #SexualAbuse #Education #HigherEd
Columbia's report was prompted by a 2023 ProPublica investigation that revealed how the university protected a predator who abused more than 1,000 patients during his nearly 25-year career.
#Columbia #University #Doctor #Health #Medicine #Women #SexualAbuse #Education #HigherEd
ICE is showing up on college campuses. You don't need to be a student to fight back. Join Indivisible's organizing call Wednesday Mar 11 at 4:30 PM and learn what you can do. #ICEOffCampus #HigherEd
Audian Paxon from Ironscales asking thoughtful #HigherEd #cybersecurity questions, like, "What would change if your email security actually understood #education?" in his piece, "The Emails Hitting K-12 Right Now." https://cybersec.ironscales.com/s/the-emails-hitting-k-12-right-now-25663
Alt...
When attackers hit schools: a calendar of threats.
Community College of Beaver County locks down systems after cyberattack in Pennsylvania #CryptoLocker #CyberAttack #Pennsylvania #CommunityCollegeOfBeaverCounty #HigherEd #Ransomware https://dysruptionhub.com/ccbc-cyberattack-it-lockdown-pa/
"A recent WalletHub study ranked all 50 states across 18 metrics to determine where Americans are most and least educated based on two key dimensions: educational attainment and quality of education...We've listed the 15 most educated states, as determined by the WalletHub study, followed by the 15 least educated states. See if your state makes the list."
Not many surprises here.
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-and-least-educated-states-us-2026
#PublicHealth #education #schools #universities #colleges #HigherEd
Researchers, educators, students, staff—if open scholarship has ever crossed your mind, this one is for you. 🌱
The Open Science Community Victoria (a Kula seed-funded initiative) is hosting an inter-siciplinary panel on integrating open research practices into teaching:
- Tuesday, March 10 | 3:00–4:30 PM
- UVic McPherson Library (DSC) + online
- Featuring speakers Michael Paskevicius (UVic EdTech), Steve Lindsay (UVic Psychology), and Michelle Harrison (Instructional Designer, Thompson Rivers University).
Register here: 👇
https://libcal.uvic.ca/calendar/dsc/oscv_integrateos
This event offers a welcoming, inclusive space to connect, share, and learn. Everyone is welcome.
Refreshments included!
#OpenScience #OpenScholarship #AcademicMastodon #UVic #TRU #Kula #CdnLib #HigherEd #GLAM #yyj
“Cognitive psychology has shown that students grow intellectually through doing the work of drafting, revising, failing, trying again, grappling with confusion and revising weak arguments. This is the work of learning how to learn.”
#AI #HigherEd #Learning #Education
1/2
https://theconversation.com/the-greatest-risk-of-ai-in-higher-education-isnt-cheating-its-the-erosion-of-learning-itself-270243
Here's my list of established para-academic educational & research organizations:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q8HP1tMe1L42nZq-v_iB0dCIrGPYNe_sGeimtWep5x4/edit?tab=t.0
Related post: https://elftheory.substack.com/p/para-academia-is-the-future
I only add to the list when I stumble across things or when people make suggestions. I haven’t done any intentional research; I don’t even know what search terms I’d use, since “para-academic” hasn’t been enshrined & “alt-academic” has multiple conflicting meanings. Feel free to share & make suggestions, thanks!
yet another case of "don't comply in advance, assholes"--turns out it was both illegal and unnecessary (as well as shortsighted and immoral) to comply with EO's scrubbing DEI in higher ed. who knew!
https://apnews.com/article/dei-education-department-lawsuit-appeal-ad150d5ab7747b9c782bc381890e5c8f
RE: https://berlin.social/@kingconsult/115938115327131064
Very insightful, this #Fediverse #worldmap by @ricci
https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/map/?source=fedi
I'd love to see more #HigherEducation Institutions #HEI providing their staff (researchers and teachers) as well as their students the option to use free and open social media platforms. There is no #ads, no #tracking. #Mastodon isn't the only choice; there are many other federated services!
"Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication.
That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia.
Harvard recently dropped to No. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that emphasize the volume and quality of research they produce.
(...)
Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.
Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.
Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.
Harvard produces significantly more research now than it did two decades ago, but it has nonetheless fallen to third. And it is the only American university still near the top of the list. Harvard is still first in the Leiden rankings for highly-cited scientific publications.
The issue at top American universities is not falling production.
Six prominent American schools that would have been in the top 10 in the first decade of the 2000s — the University of Michigan, the University of California, Los Angeles, Johns Hopkins, the University of Washington-Seattle, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University — are producing more research than they did two decades ago, according to the Leiden tallies.
But production by the Chinese schools has risen far more."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/us/harvard-global-ranking-chinese-universities-trump-cuts.html
The most sophisticated cyber attacks often rely on the simplest human behaviors. 👀 The FBI’s latest flash warning regarding North Korean state-sponsored actors (Kimsuky) using malicious QR codes is a fascinating case study in behavioral engineering. A QR code is essentially a digital question mark in the physical world. It begs to be resolved. We have spent the last few years training ourselves to scan them automatically; for menus, for parking, for connectivity. Attackers are weaponizing this muscle memory. They aren't just exploiting code; they are exploiting our inherent need to know what is on the other side of that scan. In high-stakes environments like academia and think tanks, unchecked curiosity is now a critical vulnerability.
TL;DR
🧠 FBI Alert: North Korean group Kimsuky (APT43) is active.
🎯 Targets: NGOs, academia, and foreign policy experts.
⚡ Vector: Malicious QR codes bridging physical and digital gaps.
🛡️ Defense: Treat an unknown QR code like a discarded USB drive. Do not scan.
#CyberSecurity #HumanFactor #Infosec #HigherEd #security #privacy #cloud
Get ready to have to change your own bedpans if you're hospitalized. The attack on Americans health is a high priority on this administration's checklist.
"These new regulations will cause the shortage of practicing nurses to intensify – in turn, worsening the quality of care patients receive."
NEW BLOG POST: "The cowardice of the powerful: educational leadership in DEI"
https://jamesendreshowell.com/2026-01-03-educational-leadership-in-dei.html
This post might seem like it's about #brightspace (the #lms the #suny system is forcing us all to use), but it's actually about having bosses who hold you in such contempt that they can't even be bothered to explain why they paid millions of dollars for a product that doesn't work while telling you to use it or else.
Today's Brightspace issue: hundreds of questions with images (trapped within BS's little walled garden of impenetrable database locations) that appear only as placeholders, but might or might not render when placed into a student quiz. The odds seem so far to be about 50/50.
There is no way to know which items are affected *even when I edit each of the hundreds of items by hand*, because I see this placeholder for MOST of the questions but then the students sometimes see the image. Sometimes not.
It's silent failure. No flags, no checks, no indications of what's wrong. No way to know if any changes will fix things.
Other silent failures: BS will cheerfully tell you it has imported your 5,000 or so items (painstakingly created over the past decade) from your previous LMS--which was also mandated--and then just *won't tell you* that hundreds or thousands of them did not import because BS simply choked and pooped or because BS doesn't even have the functionality to use those question types.
I fucking hate this LMS, but I really hate the fact that the people in charge think so little of me and 30,000 of my colleagues that they shove shit like this at us and tell us to pretend it works.
#professor #rant #highered #broken #shittydesign #baddesign #badsoftware #capturedmarket
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Screenshot of an item creation page in BrightspaceD2L showing a question title, a prompt ("given what you know about graphs, what is the measurement scale of the variable being graphed here?") and a blank placeholder where a graph image should be.
Long: Gory details of the bullshit that is gen ed assessment in the US [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
It's late and I'm tired but unsleepable, and I spent the last 2 hours doing something I hate, so I will tell you about #assessment in #highered (in the USA). I'm extrapolating from personal knowledge of 2 universities' practices and hearsay about a few other places.
It's bullshit. Much of it, anyway. This is not an exaggeration.
Accrediting agencies, university systems, and other bodies want to see assessments. Administrators (presidents, provosts, deans, and the increasing cloud of quasis around them) want to see assessments, too. The big problems I see (caveat: I'm wrong sometimes) are embedded in the fact that (contrary to popular belief) almost all American public colleges and universities are not controlled by professors; they are authoritarian institutions controlled by suit-wearing, corporate-cosplaying middle-managers. This leads (because reasons) to a management-vs-labor dynamic.
For administrators, assessment is not about understanding processes or outcomes; it is about control of the university (especially the faculty, who tend to get uppity and think that they should have a say in things just because they know stuff about stuff) and career management. The last point is not remotely independent from the first, BTW; higher ed admins' careers options are impacted heavily by how hard they knock faculty heads.
Result: assessment is not about assessment at all, but anyone who says this out loud runs headfirst into authoritarian power games. Institution-level assessment is about power.
One big area of assessment is the ubiquitous General Education program (i.e., the "liberal arts" curriculum in which engineers have to take a philosophy class and aspiring writers have to take a math class). The schools of which I have knowledge all do the following:
- Revamp their gen ed program every 7 years or so
- Assess the new gen ed program to see if it's better than the old one
- Conclude that it is (100% of the time)
General education programs theoretically serve university "mission statements" etc., which have become so vague and stuffed with business-speak in recent years that they are nearly meaningless. However, they still tend to have some language about "success" or "skills" or "critical thinking" or similar. These things can be assessed. Perhaps a good way to demonstrate how assessment works is to show how I tried to influence assessment of these things at one institution.
I'm an Assessment Person. I'm not the most skilled and knowledgeable psychometrician in the world, but I am a psychometrician. I have a PhD that says "Psychology and also statistics with a focus on stuff like psychometrics or whatever." This, I have found, makes me more qualified to do all things educational-assessment-related than 99% of other employees at the average American college. Of course, my big head as I figured this out and my stats-specific imposter syndrome faded led me to bonk directly into an unspoken but firm rule of administrators at universities: Never let a faculty member contribute to anything of operational importance.
After a year or two at a particular school I volunteered to be on the Gen Ed Assessment Committee for our brand new gen ed program, which was hammered out by dozens of faculty over three years or so, with administrators over their shoulders and fingers on the scales at every turn. Well, I know some things about how to assess stuff when human behavior is involved, so it was a cool gig.
What followed was a year of meetings with three other faculty and one vice-provost. The VP was the chair of the committee and the rest were appointed, not elected. I spent many hours parsing our committee's charge, the university's mission and values statements, and the voluminous literature about educational assessment. I prepared briefs, made suggestions, etc.
You see, it's pretty goddamn simple (not the same as easy, but not that hard): If your gen ed program's mission statement says it will increase critical thinking in students, you get a fucking critical thinking assessment (there are a few pretty decent ones) and you fucking give it to the fucking students. You can do a longitudinal study, assessing students at various points in their college experience. You can do a cross-sectional thing where you assess a bunch of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year students all at once. You can get fancy and do a cross-lagged design. You can get picky and weird with the methdology, but it's not that fucking hard.
I didn't understand the problems with this approach. They included (but probably were not limited to) the following. This kind of assessment...
- Fails to occupy hundreds of faculty members for dozens of hours each, every semester
- Doesn't provide buzzword-intensive "initiatives" to go on the VP's resume
- Allows a few faculty members to gain social status by demonstrating their expertise
- Allows faculty members to have a meaningful say in university bidness
- ** Might show that the new gen ed program is not better than the previous one
So I spent a year working my ass off, not quite understanding (but beginning to suspect) why all my suggestions (e.g., "We want to know about skills. What if we measure skills?") were ignored or sometimes pointedly shot down. After a year, the committee was disbanded with no final report and no meeting minutes (another suggestion that got me some surprisingly hostile responses). There is no record, as far as I know, of anything we did. A year or two later, that same administrator announced the "faculty-led" assessment system we have now, which bears no resemblance to anything we discussed in that committee, let alone my suggestions.
The system we have now is this:
Every instructor of a gen ed course comes up with their own assessment of 3 to 6 learning outcomes. The learning outcomes were developed by a bunch of faculty committees, sort of. They're high-level and don't have a single obvious assessment process (e.g., "student utilizes relevant knowledge sources to evaluate claims in discipline", etc.). They are all basically OK, but literally every faculty member makes up their own assessment. It could be a test question, a class project, a student interview, a portfolio, whatever.
Then every instructor must evaluate every student in every gen ed class (hence the many hours) on each of those learning outcomes, and score them on a rubric which was suggested by... someone, then voted into existence... or maybe just mandated. It is based on a well and truly debunked theory of learning, and it has 4 categories: did not meet outcome, approached outcome, achieved outcome, and exceeded outcome.
Side note: After this assessment process was dropped on us several years ago, there were a couple of months of intense discussion about how and who, etc. After the contention, the University Senate and administrators (who are goddamn members of our Senate for reasons that continue to elude me) agreed that no students would be identified in the assessment process, nor would any instructors or course sections. Everything would be reported in broad categories of courses, with all identifying information removed. This is because (see everything above) faculty who have been at a college/university more than a couple of years do not trust administrators. If you give them data, they will use it to fire, marginalize, or just be shitty to faculty they don't like, or in pursuit of whatever buzzword career booster is popular among provosts and deans that semester.
Great. It sucked but it was a compromise.
Then an admin announced that we had spent something like $50K/year on a "solution" to collect these data from faculty. Sadly, the "solution" required us to enter all student names attached to all scores, and our own names attached as well. When some of us mentioned the previous agreement we were told that we were harming the university by wanting to make this big (for us) financial investment worthless. When some other of us (OK, me) mentioned that every part of the assessment could be done with an Excel workbook or even pieces of paper slipped under the provost's door at the end of the semester and tallied up by a secretary, we were told that we clearly didn't understand assessment.
So now we have a tedious, laborious, overly complex, data-harvesting online platform to do the job of a single Excel workbook. It costs tens of thousands a year while we are told that we might go bankrupt at any minute and we can't have copier paper for exams. Our "assessment" involves a bunch of outcomes that were never evaluated for validity or effectiveness, assessed by hundreds of people who have (a) no expertise in creating valid assessments, (b) instructions that guarantee very low validity, and (c) fear-based motivation to inflate scores as much as possible. And we all spend a dozen or two hours a semester creating the assessments, scoring them, entering them in the cumbersome system, and dealing with dozens of emails about how to do it.
I hate some parts of my job, and this is one of the hateyest. I hate being forced (literally on threat of unemployment) to participate in this farce every semester. I hate being gaslit (gaslighted?) about the history, validity, and need for this process. I hate watching ritualized authoritarianism on display: Do this thing and prentend it makes sense and shut up about what's actually going on. I figure a junior faculty member who never took a psychometrics course and who didn't understand how universities work would feel OK about this; it has the appearance of assessment.
I just criticized fiction authors for not knowing how to end a story. I don't, either, I guess, because The End.
#highered #professor #assessment #psychometrics #bullshit #power #labor
Grading a great student project is easy. Grading a truly awful one is also easy. The problems come with the projects with a mix of good and terrible and maybe-terrible-or-maybe-typo that is hard to gauge. Is this mess over here because they didn't understand the concepts or because they just made a minor goof? I spent 10x longer on those than other projects.
I need a term. Maybe "shitshow-liminal" or something.
Trump regime goes after disabled people and academia.
The right wing rewards recent grads "eager to debate" with jobs after they graduate (if not sooner) and platforms to write apologia and "I'm just asking questions". One of them writes an opinion piece, and before you know it, other media accept their premise and parrot the same right-wing ableist talking points. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/12/16/colleges-dont-over-accommodate-disabilities-opinion
https://mas.to/@meganL/115662946627662982 #Disability #Ableism #USpol #HigherEd #AcademicChatter
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Screenshot of linked op-ed from Inside Higher Education. "In the current climate, one might question whether academic accommodations are the most urgent avenue for discourse. Yet a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces in spaces like The Atlantic (the newly published “Accommodation Nation”), The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?), The Wall Street Journal (“Colleges Bend the Rules for More Students, Give Them Extra Help”) and, indeed, Inside Higher Ed itself (“How Accommodating Can (Should) I Be?”) speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education.
As members of the executive board of the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) in Virginia—a professional organization for staff of disability service offices—It is our intention to define and defuse the recurring arguments of this specific “type” of opinion article, which for convenience we will call the “Do Colleges Over-Accommodate?” piece."
I made the last exam for my introductory #statistics course optional. How many of 25 students (current exam averages ranging from 20% to 95%) do you think opted to take the optional exam?
#professor #teaching #HigherEd
| Zero: | 0 |
| 0 (note: this is a numeral not "zero" the word): | 0 |
| None: | 0 |
| Why did you even bother making this poll: | 0 |
"“Never before in my time across multiple presidential administrations did we send out press releases essentially saying workplaces or colleges were guilty of discrimination before finding out if they really were,” said one attorney"
archive link: https://archive.ph/NIjFG
“What’s sold as innovation is really surrender.”
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-destroying-the-university-and-learning-itself
The Customer-Service-Corporate-Middle-Management-ification of #higherEd makes me unhappy on a regular basis. The craven approval-seeking and weaponization of student sentiment by quasi-competent (or fully incompetent) "leaders" means my work, year by year, has been consumed more and more by dealing with mostly bullshit student complaints with heavy pressure and subtle job threats from my bosses.
But good things still happen. Two students were just in my office getting help on a #statistics project and they have done some great work. They are also genuinely interested in their results. An absolute superstar in my my statistics course is someone who, through past experiences, I misjudged early on: a women's basketball athlete. She works her ass off and it shows. She's doing extremely well, and she's the person whose assignments make me say, "Why can't the rest of the students be more like this?". I have students in Research Methods doing above-and-beyond stuff to not only check the boxes on their research projects but actually find interesting insights. In another class, a student took me up on a half-assed joke comment and is going to perform an interpretive dance version of two or three related psychological concepts.
Grading papers. Observations:
If your teacher writes "Yes! Yes!!!" next to a pretty normal question you got right, like a 35-year-old virgin discovering orgasms, you can bet 10 people missed it right before you and the teacher's desk has face-shaped dents in it.
Oh my god read the very, very basic directions. The super basic ones. The ones that say things like "here are ten questions. Please answer them."
If your paper has a grade crossed out and rewritten a few times, you know you managed to be just barely, ambiguously wrong in new and frustrating ways, and the teacher is cursing your name for making them spend ten minutes instead of thirty seconds on your grade.
This is the slippery slope we all warned about.
#DEI #Racism #Sexism #PublicEducation #HigherEd
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Headline: University of Alabama shuts down Black, female student magazines
“A long time ago” universities were running (and developing!) their own infrastructure before “corporatisation” made them clients of major corporations with complete loss of control (incl. their data!) and know-how. And all using mostly open standards for the benefit of all. These are finally small steps in the right direction. #highered #academia https://chaos.social/@melaniebartos/114020563986896577
In undergrad at Brigham Young University I told a friend I had declared #psychology as my major. The #LDS church's relationship to #socialScience has been similar to that of some other American Christian religions--i.e., lots of suspicion and dismissal, with occasional full condemnation. The friend misquoted a former president of the LDS church: "Spencer W. Kimball said a degree in the social sciences is nothing but a degree in the errors of man."
30+ years later I have to say that the "errors of man" has been a deeply satisfying, endlessly interesting domain of study.
#story #PersonalHistory #religion #science #byu #exmormon #highered
Lawyer says student was 'deported in shackles'
The attorney representing 19-year-old college student Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, who was removed to Honduras, despite a court order, while on her way home for Thanksgiving break, said his client was "deported in shackles like she's a murder suspect."
"They deported a child alone in shackles and handcuffs a few days before Thanksgiving," attorney Todd Pomerleau told ABC News.
Jacob Kennedy, a 28-year-old server and bartender living in Detroit, told NBC News that while he believes 'an educated populace is the most important thing for a country to have,' if people can’t use those degrees because of the debt they’re carrying, it undercuts the value.
#education #HigherEd #colleges #universities #StudentLoans #debt #careers #jobs #value #USpol
Request from academic psychology people & those adjacent: General principles for academic psychology?
I'm developing a list of "general principles" for my Intro Psych course. I'm thinking of giving the list of general principles to the students so they can select one and write an assignment with it.
These are intended to be statements that are generally true across multiple domains and describe patterns in what #cognitiveScience / #psychology has discovered over the past century and a half.
(Note: At this time I'm not looking for principles of counseling or therapy, though I'm definitely open to principles that apply across counseling/clinical and other domains, if they are research-based)
If you have #suggestions, please chime in! And if you have suggested tweaks or deletions from my current list, I hope you'll share (I mean, don't be personally insulting about it; otherwise, I welcome the feedback).
Here's my list so far, in no particular order, is in this document. If you have suggestions, make them here or there (it should be editable by anyone with the link)
https://drive.proton.me/urls/6ZH4XQ1ZQR#7LYw5M9ZRa1s
#highered #professor #psychology #socialscience #crowdsource #teaching
Bluesky thread on the (apparently) strongly increasing phenemenon of college students simply doing nothing and expecting grades for it.
https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvkojqk2l
There's an unrolled threat that is malfunctioning so I'll past the whole thing here.
An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do anything. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.
We're seeing possibly the worst attendance in history. Even in creative writing classes, where students generally want to participate and have their voice heard--they're not showing up, ignoring guidelines and feedback, and either describing expectations as "unclear" or simply refusing to comply.
We keep adjusting our goalposts, trying to meet students where they're at--but for some, that place is a kind of non-place, where they don't complete any work or engage with the class, but still receive a high grade. Emails are ignored. They can't meet a deadline or keep an appointment.
This is not a "students today" post--it's more "this is a new form of dysfunction" that doesn't look exactly like it's been in previous decades. It's more than just "first-year chaos." It's an across-the-board inability to process instructions, engage with longer texts, and connect with others.
I am forever explaining assignments which, to me, feel fairly basic. I do offer some creative options, which need a bit more context. But so many of my students seem unable to follow instructions, even when I return to them multiple times, write them down, or turn them into games or quizzes.
It's like they just keep...forgetting? Or they read the instructions and completely disregard them, even knowing that they can't pass the assignment without demonstrating really clear skills (citing material, writing on a course text, etc.). They just...don't do it. And don't seem to care.
I've never encountered more students who say they hate reading. Students who want to be teachers, writers, or both. I wonder if "hate" means "I have trouble reading," but I also talk with so many students who write in a genre but refuse to read in it. They can't see themselves in relation to others.
I don't know how to teach students who hate reading/writing, when reading/writing are the foundations of what I'm supposed to teach. Yes, I engage with audio technologies, digital narratives, cinema, material culture...but it's all forms of reading. I just don't know what they want out of this.
When I ask them: "What are you reading? What are you watching? What are you listening to?" Often, the answer is: nothing. Which has a direct effect on their over-use of prompts and AI, because they can't think of ideas, because they are literally not engaging with a single figurative thing.
And I swear, once again, this is not dunking on kids. We are seeing this at all levels--even grad students. AI + social media has had a profound impact on how we think and process our world, and we can't stop to reflect on it, because billionaires keep hurling addictive tech at us.
Universities are assembling larger and larger teams to deal with academic integrity issues--mostly focused on AI--while simultaneously holding AI "writing" contests, AI-themed events, "hey, come play with these fun tools!" The messages are so mixed, it's criminal. Because AI is bloated with money.
It's only a matter of time before humanities departments will be forced to accept AI-authored assignments, as part of revised university policy to cooperate with these billionaires. It's already happening, and our response needs to be decisive. Because our students' ability to think is at stake.
At this point, our intro comp/first-year English course has been so heavily revised, it no longer includes a novel, or "extended reading" of any kind, no "specialized" or "historical" reading, mostly in-class assignments, no research essay...and we are still seeing a 40-50% rate of AI misconduct.
Admin are continually pressuring us to make the course "more accessible," by which they mean "devastatingly easy to complete," but it's not about access. Many students refuse to read or write in any capacity that isn't tech-aided, no matter how simple the assignment, no matter how process-based.
And I don't know if the answer is: everyone is too traumatized to do work and we need to reinvent society. Or if it's more like: generations are losing their cognitive abilities and willpower due to destructive technologies. Or: we all have post-viral brain damage. Or: all of the above.
#highered #reading #teaching #professor #ai #llm #criticalthinking
Another Ivy League name, another data breach notice. Dartmouth is part of a broader campaign abusing Oracle EBS, with more than 35,000 people seeing their data walk out the door. It sits alongside incidents at Harvard, Columbia, Penn, and a growing list of household brands that all relied on the same software stack. The uncomfortable pattern is that institutions are excellent at collecting data on students, alumni, and donors, but much slower to question whether they can actually protect it. Security teams keep saying that third-party platforms are part of your attack surface; this is what that looks like in real life. If prestige, tradition, and big budgets cannot buy immunity, then the only defensible posture is humility, rapid patching, and ruthless minimization of what you store.
TL;DR
🧠 Dartmouth breach tied to a broader Oracle EBS campaign
⚡ 35k+ people exposed to SSN and financial data risk
🎓 Reputation and rankings do not equal resilience
🔍 Treat third-party systems and alumni data as critical infrastructure, not back-office admin
https://therecord.media/dartmouth-data-breach-thousands
#cybersecurity #databreach #highered #infosec #security #privacy #cloud #infosec
https://www.brandeis.edu/online/academics/microcredentials/index.html
Note the two "credentials" are AI for STEM and prompt engineering.
Nobody has any business calling these things "credentials", or suggesting they are credentials by naming them "microcredentials". You can't go to your boss waving your prompt engineering microcredential and get a raise, or even a microraise for that matter. You can't access more competitive jobs after obtaining one of these microcredentials.
If they were serious about credentialing people, these would definitely not be the first two made available. They couldn't be more transparently venal. This isn't about credentialing, it's an attempt to profit from the AI bubble.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #HigherEd #academia #USUniversities #brandeis #BrandeisUniversity #microcredentials
They are offering you crumbs of an education, on which they hope to profit still, while hollowing out their own institutions.
Eating the seed corn.
A special kind of zero happens when a student turns in a reasonable paper for a completely different assignment.
Demonstrate three core psychological principles in everyday life by using news articles
"In this paper I will summarize three psychological principles"
:facepalm:
Then one of three things happens:
- Student learns something and changes their behavior (rare)
- Student complains to my chair about something unrelated (reasonably common)
- Student demands to know why they got a low grade when they worked really hard (also kind of common)
Dear US universities insisting that big college #sports are "revenue neutral" or "pay for themselves" on your campus: this is easy to prove. Kind of a no-brainer, actually: fully separate sports from academics, financially and legally.
Remove all possibility of hidden movement of funds, services, and goods between them. If the sports org needs money, it can ask and any funds transferred can be declared openly. Same if the uni wants money from the sports club. The club can pay rent for use of college facilities like tracks, stadiums, ice rinks, offices, locker rooms, and workout gyms, or they can build their own. They can hire their own staff, buy their own uniforms, lease their own buses, pay for athlete travel, and fund their athletes' scholarships, all of which they claim they are already doing.
If there is a budget surplus after all that, I'm sure the uni will be happy to accept donations to fund #academics, as #CollegeSports programs have been claiming they do for decades.
IIRC a few Universities have done this, enjoyed a sudden boost in the budget, and never looked back.
Separating academics from sports would have additional benefits like reducing pressure to give failing athletes a pass, disentangling student athlete career and class choices from paternalistic meddling by athletic staff, limiting the influence of sports on hiring choices for the school (especially of presidents etc ), and legally protecting the university (to some extent) from the fallout of NCAA recruiting violations, lawsuits from athlete assaults. It would essentially eliminate the university's legal exposure to allegations of collusion or conflict of interest with presidents and VPs.
Background: at least two big #economics studies have shown that very few or no college sports programs in the US pay for themselves. All or almost all take money from academics. These studies also reported that it is very difficult to track all the money that is shifted from academics to sports.
"Following direction from the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the Department of Education determined that nursing was among the programs that would now be excluded from the 'professional degree' list. This would affect how those seeking a nursing degree would be reimbursed for student loan payments."
#healthcare #education #HigherEd #StudentLoans #nurses #nursing #DOE #labor #hospitals #massachusetts #USpol
Dartmouth College has confirmed a data breach after Clop leaked files allegedly taken via an Oracle E-Business Suite zero-day. At least 1,494 individuals were affected, potentially more as notifications expand.
Part of a broader exploitation wave targeting EBS platforms across multiple organizations. Data included names, SSNs, and some financial details.
💬 Thoughts on how higher-ed can balance complex ERP ecosystems with modern security expectations?
Follow TechNadu for more non-sensational, technical insights.
#CyberSecurity #Clop #OracleEBS #ThreatIntel #DataBreach #HigherEd #InfoSec #DFIR
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Dartmouth College confirms data breach after Clop extortion attack
Outrage over Trump’s bill reclassifying #HigherEd courses in nursing, architects, accountants & other professions as not a ‘professional degree’ for college students, impacting the status of such programs for the purposes of federal #StudentLoans.
An update on the loss of my tenured faculty job at a public regional university. There is no much I regret already about writing this. So much I wish were different. https://robinderosa.net/higher-ed/insult-and-injury/
What, exactly, are universities like Columbia actually for in the US in 2024? They are making it very difficult to believe that they are for students. If not the students, who and what are they for, then?
#Columbia #US #Universities #HigherEd #FreeSpeech #FreeAssembly