Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cycomanic 30 days ago
> When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34 years, believes this is not enough. “That cannot be the university’s position before an incident of this magnitude. Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own

Is anyone surprised that the academics are essentially being left on their own about is? University management has become increasingly disconnected from the academics doing the work on the ground at least during the last 20 years that I've been in academia. Covid was really an eye-opener in this respect, at our university academics were told with very short notice to make all lectures remote. There was essentially zero support from central management, there was not even budget to buy headsets or cameras and academics were expected to use their research funds.

At the end of the pandemic academics were thanked with two years of 0 and 1% salary increase, due to a tough economic situation. During the same time the president received a 8% raise. The tough economic situation was entirely due to mismanagement, i.e. the university had invested pension funds into fixed interest investments which did not keep up with pension growth (during a time when stock markets were going from strength to strength).

2 comments

> At the end of the pandemic academics were thanked with two years of 0 and 1% salary increase, due to a tough economic situation. During the same time the president received a 8% raise.

Let us know when they institute stack ranking and 10% mandatory cuts every spring. Then academia will have been fully corporatized!

Are you asking for the president to make a snap decision undermining the authority of the Academic Code Committee? How to teach and test students who have to start work under the current AI frenzy let alone who will still be working alongside whatever it becomes in forty years is an extreammly under-researched and unanswerable question. Even an interim answer will require the full consideration of the faculty and beyond; a good leader facilitates that not replaces it. Yes the should probably _some_ discipline for students who broke the rules written in a past and very different world; but I certainly would not want to hire any who didn't challenge them.
I agree with your position, however the absolute silence, as quoted, paints it in a poor light.