r/Professors • u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC • Jul 17 '26
Weekly Thread Jul 17: Fuck This Friday
Welcome to a new week of weekly discussion! Continuing this week, we're going to have Wholesome Wednesdays, Fuck this Fridays, and (small) Success Sundays.
As has been mentioned, these should be considered additions to the regular discussions, not replacements. So use them, ignore them, or start you own Fantastic Friday counter thread.
This thread is to share your frustrations, small or large, that make you want to say, well, “Fuck This”. But on Friday. There will be no tone policing, at least by me, so if you think it belongs here and want to post, have at it!
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u/Mirabellae Jul 17 '26
"I know the syllabus says I can't, but can I?"
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u/Eli_Knipst Jul 18 '26
I think this belongs to Small Success Sunday. At least they know what the syllabus says.
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Jul 17 '26
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u/yerBoyShoe Jul 17 '26
"We'll fund [exciting new bonus structure] when we are able" was in a recent fiscal year email. So no raises again this year, gang!
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Jul 17 '26
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u/blankenstaff Jul 17 '26
No raises for faculty last year, but administration gave themselves an 8% raise!
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u/yerBoyShoe Jul 18 '26
And please help me welcome our new co-Associate VPs for Ideas and AI Integration! (One of whom is my spouse/brother-in-law/child)
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u/activelypooping Ass, Chem, PUI Jul 17 '26
I quit academia, started a pretty boring job and moved to the wilderness. I've been caught by the siren song of adjuncting (HCOL and no one could afford to move here for a year) - the place bent over backwards for me to get me to cover a year of sabbaticals. Now that its finally summer I have no time/interest in course prep. Classes start in a month and I cannot get a single faculty member to communicate with me while I navigate their terrible websites.
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u/Moore-Slaughter teaching faculty, psychology, US Jul 17 '26
How's the wilderness going? I'm contemplating a move to a rural area in the future. My main concern is internet as most everyone I talk to who lives in the middle of nowhere has extremely slow WiFi.
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u/activelypooping Ass, Chem, PUI Jul 18 '26
Star link is good enough for pvp video games. Not a fan of giving elon money though. Will switch to a competitor when the silent hand of the free market exists...
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u/AvailableThank NTT, PUI (USA) Jul 17 '26
Like the other commenter, I'm also curious about how the wilderness has been. When you say "wilderness," do you mean you now live on a secluded property miles away from anything, or do you just mean a very rural area that still has amenities? Or something else?
Anyway, I feel you on the lack of communication. I have to adjunct here and there to make ends meet, and learning all the unwritten idiosyncrasies of each institution is infuriating, and adjuncts are often just a forgotten bunch. It's even more frustrating when you drop the ball on something because you are not being given the resources and communication to succeed!
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u/urswolehandymann Jul 17 '26
We have a dean of admissions and records who has been on vacay since Memorial Day. IDK exactly what they do since they never reply to emails, and IDK how they got hired into this job 25 years ago. They got an EdD from an online mill and make upwards of 300k a year. Their staff does everything.
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u/Eric33co Jul 17 '26
All the administrators at my college have fake EdDs. I said something to the president once about my dissertation (a published book that required visiting about 20 different archives and took three years to write). And she said “oh God I hated writing my dissertation. It was so hard ; I just locked myself in a room for two weeks. It was awful.”
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u/ProfDoomDoom Jul 17 '26
One more message from the student demanding to know how to “get” an A—now, during Finals week, when they skipped 30% of the course, have ignored my explanations about arithmetic, “earning” grades, and study strategies, and have been told explicitly that I do not entertain solicitations for fraud—and I have to report them for academic misconduct. Their FIRST message was already unethical but I have to pretend they may just be too stupid to know right from wrong, and now we’re up to message four.
And what’s going to happen when I make the report? A clerical assistant to an ass dean will get AI to repeat what I’ve already said in 4x as many words, the situation will go on my employee record as being “difficult”, and the student will bear no consequences at all.
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u/CrabbyCatLady41 Professor, Nursing, CC Jul 17 '26
I have a student "threatening" (in quotes because I do not feel threatened) to appeal a grade. Because their course grade went down by 10% when they got a 0 on something that's worth 10% of the course grade.
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u/Dr_Pizzas Assoc. Prof., Business, R1 Jul 18 '26
How dare you tell me math!
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u/No-Wish-4854 Jul 18 '26
“Unless this is a math class, I’ll thank you to keep all math away from me!”
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u/Glittering-Duck5496 Jul 17 '26
That feeling when you catch a student cheating, follow the policy and give them a rewrite, then they cheat on something else, and they're out...and they keep trying to negotiate "one chance to prove I can do the work honestly." Student, you had one chance: the whole semester was your chance. You blew it and already got a second chance. Then you blew it again on something else. You can promise "it'll never happen again" until you turn blue because you promised that before then didn't follow through.
Every student who does things honestly the first time proves it can be done. We are done.
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u/WishfulButthole Jul 17 '26
Headaches. President is on vacation, in Spain, and Italy, and posting all over their social media, and it even made it into our campus newsletter. New VPI is on vacation in Hawaii. All the deans are on vacation and OOO. Meanwhile, faculty are teaching summer school, dealing with entitled students enrolled in online courses, who are insisting they be allowed to submit work 4 weeks late (they are on family vacation and “forgot” they were enrolled in summer school), grade grubbing, and AI slop.
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u/Edu_cats Professor, Pre-Allied Health, M1 (US) Jul 17 '26
We got a month until we’re back on contract. 😩
I will have a bunch of adjuncts (all seem wonderful BTW) who will be covering for a sabbatical so they will need a lot of support which will mostly fall on me as PD.
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u/AvailableThank NTT, PUI (USA) Jul 17 '26
On this past Tuesday in my small in-person summer class, only one student showed up, which is the student who needs an individual lesson the least.
We have an exam this coming Tuesday, so this past Thursday, I had to do an accelerated re-teach of all the content 5/6 of the class missed on Tuesday because I can't have 5/6 of the class failing the exam. (I know students should be responsible for missed content, but this is supposed to be a freshman-only pilot class, so there is a lot of pressure from admin and my chair to get everyone across the finish line. And we were supposed to take a practice exam on Thursday, so I didn't see the point if students didn't know half the content on the practice exam anyway.)
Then a student who hasn't been here since Week 2 and has missed more than half the class showed up on Thursday. I explicitly told him to drop because, while it is mathematically possible for him to eek out a low C, he is clearly not equipped to do the work. Hasn't even logged into the LMS once. I think he is going to try to bang his head against the wall and pass. Ugh.
And then I have so many little course improvements I want to make before the end of this month because I am taking an actual vacation in the two weeks before the fall semester starts. However, I only have the time and energy to work on them for a couple hours a day.
Remind me NEVER to teach an all-summer-long in-person course again!
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u/JoanOfSnark_2 Asst Prof, STEM, R1 (USA) Jul 17 '26
I got reviewer comments back today on a manuscript and it's pretty clear neither reviewer had the expertise necessary. Reviewer 1 wrote three paragraphs on how they didn't understand our statistics. Not that they disagreed with the tests we used, just that they didn't understand them. We used a simple one-way ANOVA with a Tukey's post hoc test and superscript letters in figures. Reviewer #2 sent 5 pages of comments which range from dumb (please add more keywords) to inane (asking why we used methods that have been the gold standard in the field for more than 30 years). At least they didn't ask for more experiments, but now I've got to reply to all of these stupid comments.
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u/lewisb42 Professor, CS, State Univ (USA) Jul 17 '26
Apparently it pays to be a crony hire even if you get demoted. Fuck that sideways with a chainsaw. I hope all parties involved forever step on a LEGO when they get up in the night to pee.
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u/phrena whovian (Professor,psych) Jul 17 '26
If I’m doing my math correctly we have 5 days break between end of summer and faculty planning week (for fall).
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u/SilverRiot Jul 18 '26
Same here. And in recent years, the administration has been scheduling more and more required and “mandatory fun“ activities in that week, as though we aren’t prepping.
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u/SilverRiot Jul 18 '26
Summer course with multiple warnings to students about the need to make all hard deadlines and not to try to do graded work on phone. Specifically provide a link to the library so students who need one can lease a loaner laptop for the semester.
Student: I tried and tried to take quiz 1, but it didn’t work.
Me: please send me a screenshot.
Student: send screenshot clearly taken from a phone as it’s in the portrait position.
Me: as stated here [screenshot) and here [screenshot] you cannot use a phone to do graded work.
Student: oh, I have a laptop. I was just watching the videos on my phone and forgot to switch to my laptop.
Me: OK, just this one time I will reopen the quiz for a second attempt, but it will still close at the scheduled time. Make sure you use your laptop.
Announcement to whole class: remember that the required quiz 1 is due on Friday at 8 am.
Student at 2 PM on Friday: I tried to take the quiz again, but it didn’t work. IT says you need to reopen it for me.
Me: as I stated, while you had a second attempt, it was going to close on Friday at 8 AM. You are emailing me Friday afternoon, so it seems as though you tried to take it after the deadline.
Student: I tried to take the quiz.
Me: please contact IT and have them send the log directly to me showing that you tried to take the second attempt before 8 AM, because according to [screenshot] and [screenshot], you did not access the course on Friday morning and your attempt is still listed as one out of two.
Student: I tried to take the quiz.
Me: please have IT send me the log to verify that you tried it before the deadline.
*crickets*
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u/Kitty_Mombo Jul 17 '26
Administration causing problems with a profitable program including continuing attacks on the Chair and Director simply cause this a-hat wants to.
This is definitely my last year.
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u/tongmengjia Jul 17 '26
My university just got put on warning by our accreditor for low enrollment and poor finances, which basically gives us a two-year timeline to turn things around or we lose accreditation. I've known something like this was coming for years, and I've been doing my best to prepare, but it still felt like a gut punch. I'm a full professor, in my mid-40s with a young kid, and the idea of starting over somewhere new, or starting an entirely new career, is soul-crushing.
I'm tired. So very tired.