this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Professors

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Attribution statement: I have stolen this text from the Professors subreddit with the hopes of providing an alternate community on Lemmy for us.

This community is BY professors FOR professors. Whether you are tenured, tenure-stream, a lecturer, adjunct faculty, or grad TA, if you are instructional faculty or work with college students in a similar capacity, this forum is for you to talk with colleagues. This community is not for students. While students may lurk and occasionally comment, they should identify themselves as students, and comments are subject to removal at mods’ discretion.

SYLLABUS

This community is a place for professors to BS with each other, share professional concerns, get advice and encouragement, vent (oh yes, especially that), and share memes. It has erstwhile been described as “kind of a 'teacher's lounge' for college professors.” This community is not for non-professors to ask questions of professors or about The Life™; it is for professors to ask each other questions.

As such, we ask all posters to abide by the following rules:

  1. No student posts/comments: This is a place for those teaching at the college level to discuss and share. While some student posts or comments may sneak by, and Mods may allow a richly upvoted post or comment that has spawned useful discussion to remain, that is the exception, NOT the rule.

  2. Don't Be Inappropriate: No weird sexual fantasy stuff, no confessions of crushes, no questions about dating or anything of that nature. Any posts of this type will most likely to be removed without question, explanation, or hesitation.

  3. No Incivility: No personal attacks, racism, or any other diatribes against students, or each other, that cross the line of civility. For that matter, attacks IN GENERAL are not tolerated. Disagree, challenge, vent, express frustration, but don’t cross that line. Attacks, hostility, or inappropriate conduct/content of any kind may result in a ban (temporary or permanent) at the Mods’ discretion.

  4. No "How do I become a professor?": Go to the website of the school you want to teach at. Look at the job listings. If the position you want is available, look at the qualifications. If you don't have those qualifications, get them. Apply for the job. That's it.

  5. No Spam/Surveys: No spam, no external surveys. We are not here to be marketed to; we're a bunch of academics who are here to goof off, vent, get advice, and share stories from the podium. Using the poll function in a post is, however, acceptable to let users weigh in on how they feel about an issue. For IRB approved surveys, you can message the Mods with a pitch and we will consider allowing it.

  6. No Bigotry: Racism, bigotry, sexism, or homophobia, or any other similar despicable type behavior will get your comment(s)/post(s) removed and you muted or banned. We will try not to penalize politically challenging speech (we mods are only human, after all), but it is essential that it be delivered thoughtfully and with circumspection. Low-effort sloganeering and hashtag-mentality posting will be removed; offensive content will result in a mute or ban. You will not always agree with the mods’ decisions in this regard, but it is the price we pay to have this little corner of cyberspace to ourselves.

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a_statistician@lemmy.ml
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Buy Me a Chair - The wacky world of university endowments (musgrave.substack.com)
submitted 1 year ago by pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to c/professors@lemmy.ml
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These days, any serious administrator of a university, public or private, will spend an enormous chunk of their time raising money from donors. How much? One informed rumor suggests that a third of their time would not be off-base—and this at a public university.

Presidents, chancellors, and provosts seek to finagle gifts because the core business of universities—providing credits to students in exchange for tuition—is both volatile and insufficient to meet the boundless ambitions of administrators and faculty alike.

It’s easy, and wrong, for faculty to be cynical about this. First, these operations reflect the gloriously incongruous medieval nature of the university. Higher education in its upper reaches resembles medieval monasteries, and such monasteries provided not just seclusion and sanctity for their initiates but the possibility of the purchase of virtue for the wealthy. So, too, do universities offer grateful alumni and those sentimental about the generation of knowledge opportunities to turn worldly wealth into tax-deductible noblesse oblige.

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