I'm with David and Catarina here: I think it was an affectionate joke. As was my picture link, if anyone is wondering.

A few tangential but relevant issues. 1. Part of what's going on as well is the shrinking TT to adjunct ratio, such that each hire becomes an extremely precious and conflict-inducing prize: "this could be the last hire we make for 5 years, so I'll be damned if we waste it on Jones's candidate in Phil of X!!! We really need Smith's candidate in Phil of Y!!!" 2. AFAICT, sociologists would say there is no job "market" but an alliance-making system, such that the agents are departments making alliances and the candidates are mere tokens symbolizing those alliances.

http://sandymacgillivray.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/5781094-lg-12.jpg

The following saying got me through many rough patches in my career: "You can't take rejection personally; there are far too many factors in the hiring process that don't really focus on your unique qualities. In fact, you can't even take success personally, for exactly the same reason."

In any case, my first comment is aimed at the obtuse nature of Professor Noor's quoted comments: To be clear, Mr. Noor says he believes dismantling departments and replacing them with MOOCs would be “reckless.” But the Duke professor also believes that, in such a case, “the fault lies with the reckless administration,” and not the professor who furnished the MOOC to the vendor that furnished the MOOC to the administration. “I don’t see it as particularly my business how people use the stuff once I put it out there,” Mr. Noor says—though he adds that if dismantling departments were all a MOOC was being used for, “then I’d stop.” I mean, come on now. At best, creating a MOOC in 2013 is akin to an "attractive nuisance" is it not? Sure, I can leave a sign on a keg in a frat house "for responsible use only" but does that really get me off the hook? And yes, I am seriously comparing the ability of admins to resist using MOOCs in the manner of the SJSU president to the ability of frat boys to resist binging on free booze.

Colin, when you say "But part of the argument against MOOCs, as I suggested in an earlier thread on this subject, has to come from how humanities professors teach. And far too many of us depend far too much on lecturing" I want to ask you your evidence for this claim. How do you know what any of us are doing, let alone "far too many of us"? And what level of lecture is "far too much"? And assuming you could know what other folks are doing, and that they are doing "far too much" of it, what is the ideal level of lecturing you would have us adopt? I ask this as a typical day in a 80 minute class for me would be about 20 minutes of scene setting, followed by 15 minutes of small group work, then 35 minutes of my animating discussion, using the group work as points of departure. About 10 minutes is course management, including lots of "affect management": encouraging students to hang in there, to prepare in advance for their reading and writing assignments, and so on. So that's about 25% lecture for the class meetings. But when you take into account other factors, the lecture portion of my interaction with the students falls below that. For instance, there is the weekly writing they do: one student in each group of three prepares a 1-2 page reading response paper each week. The author circulates a draft to the other team members who comment on the draft, using the comment function on Word. Then the author sends me his / her final draft, incorporating the edits of the team members. I then (briefly, to be sure) comment on the final draft and return to all the team members. There is also the work on the term paper, which includes my comments on their topic statements, bibliographies, and drafts. Plus one or two mandatory office appointments per semester (I cancel one of the classes that week). Now this is only feasible with reasonable class sizes (22 in Phil Mind and 18 in Foucault this semester, for instance). But if you are to blame teachers of large courses for a lecture-to-other-modalities ratio that you don't consider ideal, then the real problem is admins saddling us with big courses, not with teaching modality ratios.

Well, it's not really a good sign to see an expansion in NRA style "ethical" "thinking." "MOOCs don't kill departments, admins do!"

Hawks insists that the discussion has to be proposal-specific, and he supports the SJSU philosophy faculty rejection of the Sandel MOOC. His complaint is about what he sees as a blanket attack on the idea of MOOCs. I don't think he reads the SJSU letter correctly, as they object to those MOOCs that "will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities." 1) That is not an attack on online education or even on MOOCs as a whole; it is a call to avoid producing products that have predictable bad effects like the product under examination in this specific case; if Hawks or someone could produce MOOCs that would not produce bad effects, they would avoid the SJSU appeal. 2) In the following, Hawks claims he does not "imagine" that his MOOC will be used in a way that he disapproves of; I hope he has some legal guarantees that will give this wish some teeth: Neither I nor anyone else is imagining that another institution will take my MOOC, clap on a teaching assistant, and charge students tuition to take it. I personally think such a plan would cheat students by charging them for learning they could do for free. 3) Hawks's charge, which you echo, that this is "guild thinking" ignores the last clause of the SJSU appeal: "provide a diminished education for students in public universities." Again, there is no conflict between stable jobs for HE faculty and quality of student education; on the contrary, the two are intrinsically linked: better work conditions for faculty produce better education for students. So, when you say I'm not going to weight the interests of the guild of educators over the interests of vast numbers of students in having access to a better education than they could otherwise have hoped for This begs at least two questions: 1) you assume without arguing that MOOCs will give access to a better education to (an allegedly vast number of) students than they would have without them. But that's the whole point of contention: you have to argue to show that MOOCs will give better education. and with the "guild" bit you again assume without arguing 2) that there is a conflict between quality education and faculty work conditions, when in fact the two are intrinsically and synergistically linked. Finally, with regard to your employment prospects, I spent ten years in precarious labor before getting a TT post. After a good bit of study of the situation, it seems to me that the people pushing MOOCs (administrators and state legislators) bear a large part of the blame for the shifting TT vs precarious labor ratio that hurts your prospects of getting a TT job. That shifted ratio in turn hurts the quality of public HE, such that those admins and state legislators (and sundry others, as enumerated above) can then turn around and justify pushing an "innovation" like the SJSU MOOC and others like them. Perversely, these tactics take the crisis they helped produce as a pretext for exacerbating the very trends that supposedly justify the MOOC proposal. In other words, many admins have taken to heart the slogan "never let a good crisis go to waste." And in still other words, looking to see "guild thinking" in faculty misses the real enemy: class interests in the practices of admins and state legislators.

The anti-MOOC arguments have a marked tendency to conflate the self-interest of academics with the interests of students. This is very unhelpful, on four counts. One, you inflict on us the abstract notion of "anti-MOOC arguments." Please be concrete and identify which elements of which arguments you find exhibit such a "marked tendency." Two, this particular targeted argument against the SJSU program (and not simply and abstractly against "MOOCs") explicitly includes all sorts of concern for the interests of students, alongside that of teachers. Three, you haven't at all made the case that the slogan "the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of students" is a pernicious "conflation" rather than a perceptive insight. Four, you seem markedly uninterested in the self-interest of at least six groups: a) the star professors (in this case, Sandel); b) the admins at Harvard-MIT behind the creation of edX; c) the admins at SJSU; d) the folks at the Gates Foundation whose pilot program funded the fall engineering MOOC which the SJSU admins are using as their leading edge; e) the folks waiting to create spinoffs using student data captured by edX; f) the venture capitalists who will be recruited to fund those spinoffs. (If we were discussing Coursera and Udacity, we could talk here about the currently existing venture capitalists, as does Bob Meister here: http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php ) But that doesn't mean MOOCs aren't all things considered massively beneficial for students, especially those who who don't fit the standard model (18 year olds with legal residency who can afford to move into a residential institution for 4 years). Statements such as this are unhelpful. You are perfectly free to distinguish possible effects of MOOCs on different segments of the population. What I don't find helpful in the least is the "all things considered" calculus that sums up differential effects and claims "massive" benefits to some non-existent abstraction called "students." The discussion *between* Lisa Shapiro and Ed Kazarian just above is much better at discussing such differential effects without such a problematic summation.

Simon, yes, that's very well put.

I'm with the OP here: "to tear a new one" has a heavy (prison) rape connotation, at least among the kids I used to play basketball with. Of course terms drift over time, but there's no question to me that the rape aura is still there in many, many tokens of this phrase.

Nobody could have expected schoolmarmish civility-trolling.

Bannister should feel proud of himself. As should you. Rarely have we been treated to such a virtuoso performance of passive-aggressiveness. You must have had a lot of practice.

Yeah, you meant to be a complete asshat. And you succeeded. Now, what about Bannister?

She did, at 52 on that thread, to which you contributed with such grace, intelligence, and total lack of passive-aggressive bullshit.

Yes, it's true, Anon3, I have been known to deploy snark on occasion. I try to discuss some justifications for the use of snark here: http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/02/in-defense-of-snark-or-breaking-down-the-walls-of-the-universal-seminar-room.html But it's not true that I have a picture of Doug Piranha on my study wall.

Let me add that Anonymous at 15 is not the same as Anonymous at 23, 33, and 42 [fixed per 49]. But there's no way for KA at 25 to have known that. So her reply at 25 to Anonymous 23 was predicated on her reasonable belief that Anonymous 23 was Anonymous 15.

Alright, I'll restore both versions of the comment, at 32 and 41. [Edit: now at 33 and 42, after rescue of Cogburn at 31 from spam hell. Don't ask why Typepad would spam-box one of the contributors to a blog.]

Your concerns are noted.

Yeah, I pulled down that comment, because I didn't like its tone of unearned condescension. Here's our comment policy: http://www.newappsblog.com/comments-policy.html I would have emailed him to discuss how to fix his tone, but he didn't leave a valid email.

My own question is, why is sexual identity somehow beyond the pale of consideration here? Indeed, why woudn't one's sexual identity be an important compoenent in the upbringing that shapes a person's predilictions? This is begging the question; you're assuming there is such a thing as "sexual identity," which my anti-essentialist arguments, which you said you would think about, deny. So please do think about those arguments, and engage them, before you assume what needs to be argued for.

Well, for me, after the critiques by Buller, Dupré, the Roses, and a bunch of other folks, the burden of proof should be on you to show that Ev Psych is "empirical" rather than wishful thinking. In any case, please take it down a notch with the "totalitarianism" bit, okay? Srsly.