How is your alma mater holding up?

This is news to make a professor shudder: a university closing its doors.

A Massachusetts liberal arts college is set to close permanently due to low enrollment and financial problems.

The board of trustees of Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Amherst founded in 1965, pointed to “financial pressures” that have been “compounded by shifting external factors”.

Universities have been under attack for decades, thanks to our ‘friends’ in the Republican party. Authoritarians and conservatives hate new ideas and helping people rise up out of poverty, and they’ve been whittling away at support for universities, throwing so much debt onto the shoulders of our students. The pandemic hit many colleges hard, too.

Hampshire College hits a little bit close to home. It was a little smaller in enrollment than UMM, my school, and was founded a bit more recently. It was also a liberal arts college, like mine. It differed in some significant ways. According to Wikipedia:

The college utilizes an alternative curriculum, with an emphasis on progressive pedagogy and self-directed academic concentrations, a focus on portfolios rather than distribution requirements, and a reliance on narrative evaluations instead of grades and GPAs.

That’s interesting and I appreciate innovative education, but it does make the work of that university harder. UMM has a more traditional curriculum, but we’ve also struggled over the past few years. Our enrollment bottomed out about two years ago — which is why my senior level genetics course has only 8 students this year, rather than the 30-40 I used to see. (We’re working ourselves out of this hole right now — my fall courses are fully enrolled already, and we may have to pack more students into the class.)

The situation of Hampshire College is a reminder that the situation of all universities in this country is precarious.

Genetics progress

Today was a lab day, and I’m happy to report that the students have achieved perfection. Every fly bottle was beautiful, full of maggots and pupae, and not one hint of contamination among them all. And so many pupae already! This is excellent news, because next week swarms of adult F2 flies will emerge and the students will have to score and count them all to finish this mapping cross.

Score. And count. ALL. Next week’s lab will require extra time to complete, and I let them know that today. It’s been typical to count 10-15,000 flies in the final cross in this class, but I don’t expect that many this year (it’s a small class of only 8 students*), and I don’t grade them on raw numbers but on how well they analyze and interpret the numbers they do get. I think this experiment will be ending on a high note, at least, and the maggoty-side will be over next week, leaving them two weeks to put together a lab report.

I also committed the students to a specific in-class presentations on the 27th of April, the last week of class. We really are winding down.

*8 is an unusually low number of students — we hit a trough in enrollment numbers a few years ago. I wouldn’t mind classes this small every year, but I suppose we need a larger enrollment to sustain the university. I see good signs for the future**: my cell biology course in the Fall is nearly full, and registration isn’t quite over yet.

**I would like to have my final year here, the 2026-2027 academic year, be a bountiful year. I’d like to exit with a good term.

The Future of Education!

It’s Pure Genius! Check out the website, but be sure to put on your sunglasses first.

In case you can’t tell, this is a satire site mocking all these nobodies who are selling “education” as a commodity without bothering with the “teaching” part — that’s hard, you know, but marketing degrees and the illusion of skills is a good way to make money.

The hints are pretty broad, beyond just the glaringly ugly design. Complete your bachelor’s degree in a single day with our efficient learning is a good clue, as is Double Points During Crises: War, shootings, natural disasters? Learn how to stay focused on what matters. Bragging about Essays Harvested and extracting premium intelligence with their AI reveals the real purpose of these kinds of sites. They’re made of AI Slop for the purpose of generating more AI Slop.

There’s a lot more money in selling web nonsense than actually doing the hard work of teaching.

Now I know what they do at faculty meetings on the humanities/social sciences side of campus

They’re planning armageddon.

The floating text for this cartoon reads, “Anyone who thinks the humanities makes people more expansive should spend four minutes in an English department meeting.” It’s too true. I would never go over to the other side of my campus for one of their meetings, but here in the sciences building we have a statistician as chair who bangs through the meeting agenda on a tight schedule and doesn’t permit too much digression. We’re scared of the anarchy in the English department.

I don’t want to try to imagine what’s happening in the Art or Music departments. I’m pretty sure it involves other-worldly horrors and ritualistic chanting.

How to kick a professor off campus

The bowtie makes me suspicious right away

I shouldn’t have to tell my students that I don’t regard their backpacks as urinals, but apparently some professors have issues.

A Macalester College student has accused her chemistry professor of pissing (“urinating,” to use the legal term) on her backpack last December, reports the Mac Weekly. That prof, identified in a police report regarding “fourth-degree intentional damage to property” (well that really removes a lot of the nuance from the incident), is Paul Fischer, who is no longer a Mac employee.

That’s a first to me. There is an official police report on the incident.

A report from the St. Paul Police Department (SPPD) states that, on Feb. 6 at 9:41 a.m., a Macalester student informed SPPD officers that an individual had urinated on her belongings on Dec. 5, 2025, on Macalester’s campus. The report names former Macalester chemistry Professor Paul Fischer as the suspect in the case.

According to a statement SPPD spokesperson Alyssa Arcand made to the Pioneer Press, the student left her backpack unattended for several minutes in a classroom building and discovered urine on it when she returned.

So the event happened at the end of Fall term. Then, at the beginning of Spring term, Fischer is abruptly terminated.

On Feb. 19, chemistry Professor Keith Kuwata sent an email to all chemistry majors and minors, as well as biology majors with a biochemistry emphasis, stating that “Fischer is no longer an employee of Macalester College and is not authorized to be anywhere on campus.”

Kuwata’s email also notes that it has been “an unsettling time for many of you.” He stated that the department’s top priorities were student well-being and academic success.

My sympathies to the chemistry faculty at Macalester, that’s a rough decision to make, to suddenly drop a professor early in the term. I hope the students aren’t too traumatized by a professor suddenly losing his mind. That comment about “an unsettling time” suggests there is a lot more to the story, but they aren’t talking.

Apparently, Fischer started teaching at Macalester in 2001, not much different from me, starting at UMM in 2000. Do professors typically start falling apart around the 25 year mark? Should I be worried?

Again, I want to reassure my students that I probably won’t start pissing on everything.

I could have told them that

Conservative media likes to play up their persecution complex — and colleges are a common target. We’re too liberal, they say, we try to silence conservative students. None of that is true, as a recent poll shows.

According to a report that Gallup and the Lumina Foundation published today, just 2 percent of all college students—including 3 percent of Republicans—say they feel they don’t belong on campus due to their political views. That’s one of the many disconnects between public perceptions about higher education’s climate and value and what students say is actually happening on campus, according to the report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.”

Two to three percent sounds about right, and probably represents the fraction of faculty who are outright assholes (we’ve always got a few of them, any slice of humanity you can choose will have a few bad apples rattling around.) Almost all students are welcome, we like to discuss controversial issues and present dissenting views, and we actually have expectations for passing a class that do not ever include holding a particular political affiliation, or what kind of haircut you have, or who you voted for in recent elections.

However, I was disappointed by one result from the poll.

The results showed that two-thirds of college students said most of their professors encourage them to share their views, including those that make others uncomfortable. At the same time, 71 percent said their professors create a classroom environment that supports both students who express unpopular opinions and those who may be upset by such views.

Only 71%? I don’t believe it. One of our most common challenges is getting students to speak up — I want students to raise their hand or just shout at questions in the middle of a lecture…please please please interrupt me and tell me what you are thinking. I think that’s true of every faculty member, getting students to think and express themselves is our job. Too many students want to just get through the class and get out of there, and getting a conversation going is harder than just taking notes and listening quietly.

I have never objected to conservative students taking my classes. If anything, it goes the other way–I’ve had students put me on lists at FIRE and TPUSA, they’ve reported me to the campus police (that never goes anywhere), they know me at local churches that I do not attend. A few years ago, we had a TPUSA chapter that constantly posted posters with their stupid slogans on them — I’ve seen a few with Sharpie ‘enhancements’, but that’s about the limit of their oppression. One of their representatives did go on to win notoriety by graduating, joining Project Veritas, and getting arrested for breaking into a Louisiana politician’s office. Note that he did graduate.

Come to think of it, I just checked our list of student organizations, and TPUSA isn’t on it! We must have hounded them out of existence. Or, more likely, the former members were so aggressively antagonistic and unpleasantly ineffectual that they tainted the reputation of their organization for years to come, and no one wanted to join. I didn’t kick them out, despite their feeble efforts to kick me out.

A seismic change

Today has been a day full of meetings (with another to come tonight!) and now I’m tired. One of the meetings gave me mixed feelings: a division meeting of all the science faculty to give our final approval of a decision to get rid of our geology discipline.

OK, that’s overly dramatic. We’re not actually getting rid of any of the geology classes, or any of the geology faculty, we just won’t be giving out geology degrees, and the existing structure of the discipline is getting folded into our Environmental Science program. Nothing will be lost, it’s more of an administrative shift, and apparently this is a common kind of change at many universities, but I still feel like it’s a historical break. Before there was a biology, there was geology, and geology was one of the core research fields in natural history. It’s being absorbed into a broader academic discipline, which is OK, I guess, but as an old guy I feel like something is being lost.

I wonder what will happen to biology in a few decades…what grander concept will expand to encompass my little domain?

Don’t tell me physics.

I’ve been distracted lately

If you’ve noticed that I’m posting less, it’s the timing: my sabbatical is ending, I’m getting ready to plunge back into the teaching grind in January, and I’ve got a lot of prep work to do. And then we were hit with more cloudflare errors…but now we’re back.

Last year, I incorporated a significant unit on race and genetics; this year, I’m going to prepare the students a little better by including readings from the scientific literature throughout the semester, so I’ve been searching for good, easily digestible papers on the subject. One that I found (but probably won’t use in the course) is “Teaching the Science of Race and Racism,” by Kevin N. Lala, Jasmeen Kanwal, and Kalyani Twyman, which came from this book, Innovations in Decolonising the Curriculum: Multidisciplinary Perspective. The abstract for the paper hit me a bit hard, personally.

Social Science departments of universities regularly teach the history of scientific racism and how contemporary genetics undermines biological conceptions of race. By contrast, biology departments rarely embrace this challenge, and ‘race’ and racism barely feature on the curriculum. Seemingly, professional biologists shirk any social responsibility to educate future generations about these pressing social issues, despite the fact that racism is heavily reliant on the propagation of biological misinformation and that biologists are well-qualified to teach facts related to ‘race’ and racism accurately.

Harsh, but that’s why I added the topic of race to an otherwise convential transmission genetics course. I am feeling simultaneously vindicated and embarrassed for my discipline. I guess I’ll have to continue expanding on the subject.

I don’t think I’ll be facing much pushback from students and colleagues — the authors didn’t, after all.

Here we describe the experience of teaching a senior undergraduate course entitled ‘The Science of Race and Racism’ within the School of Biology at our institution in the UK. The module discussed the history of scientific racism, how contemporary genetics undermines biological conceptions of race and tackled race and sport, race and health, and race and intelligence controversies. Misgivings that delayed our offering the course proved unfounded: the course was extremely positively received by the students, and extraordinarily rewarding to teach. We encourage others to grasp the nettle and teach similar courses.

My students seemed to appreciate it last year, let’s hope they like it and learn something this year. I might only be teaching this course this year and next year before finally retiring!

Sympathy for Samantha Fulnecky

The Algorithm keeps throwing articles and videos about this bad essay that was written by OU student Samantha Fulnecky. I can understand that — there is so much content being generated over the terrible writing by this student, because the internet is full of educated people who in many cases have professional expertise in evaluating writing. I’m going to be teaching a class in writing scientific papers this Spring, so I’m familiar with the work. Here’s an example:

If you didn’t watch it, that’s OK, you can find hundreds of similar examples on the internet. And that’s the problem!

I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of student papers, and some of them have been atrocious and earned zeroes. But I would never drag a student publicly, I would never shame a student’s lack of rigor or talent or ability on the internet. We have strict rules about that — I would get dragged into the division chair’s office, and get a few phone calls from the university’s lawyers, and face disciplinary action if I did that, no matter how badly the essay I was mocking was written.

However, in this case, Samantha Fulnecky exposed herself — she gave her awful essay to Turning Point USA, and they cruelly posted it online with full attribution, and invited the brutal savaging she is getting. I cringe a little bit deep inside every time I see these dissections of her paper, because normally a teacher would do that in confidence, one on one, with the goal of helping the student learn and get better, not to rip her apart in a public display.

I experienced this myself. The first essay I wrote in graduate school was for a physiology class, and I apparently expressed a view on the role of synapse structure that the professor did not like, so he spent an entire class hour going over it line by line and telling the entire class how stupid and wrong I was. It was not a good learning experience, except that I did learn that this one professor was an asshole.

Now, even worse, the entire internet is shredding Fulnecky’s paper, and probably millions of people are wallowing in schadenfreude over this one student’s disgraceful inability to make a coherent argument. What has Samantha Fulnecky learned? Probably only that she has to be more careful about letting people see how she expresses herself.

I also suspect that I’m seeing so much criticism of Fulnecky’s paper because she made herself fair game for the dammed up resentment so many of us have for the bad papers we have to routinely read in detail. Finally, we get to explode at this garbage we have to carefully evaluate, rather than being professional and courteous!

I see presentiments of my future fate

Sometimes, students earn a failing grade. I hand back essays or exams with zeroes on them, and inform students that they aren’t passing the course…and suggest that we meet so we can work out the problem. At the end of the semester I might log into the Peoplesoft database and put an F in a little square box, and the students are clear about who’s putting the black blot on their transcript — it’s me, not them. So I still worry that they might hate me or take action with the administration to get me in trouble. It’s part of the job.

Sometimes you have to evaluate a student’s performance, and sometimes they fail. And now we have a new generation of entitled and ignorant students that think they can just go over the instructor’s head to demand that their biases get approval.

The University of Oklahoma has placed a trans graduate instructor on administrative leave after a student received a zero on a psychology assignment that described transgender people as “demonic” and asserted that gender roles are “Biblically ordained.” The dispute has quickly escalated into a statewide political flashpoint.

The controversy began when junior Samantha Fulnecky submitted a 650-word reaction paper for a course on how social expectations shape gender. Instead of addressing the assignment’s questions using data, her essay claimed society is “pushing lies” about gender, warned that eliminating strict gender roles would be harmful, and described transgender identities as “demonic,” Them reports.

You can read Fulnecky’s essay for yourself. It’s terrible. It might pass muster in Sunday School, but this was submitted to the University of Oklahoma, which has somewhat higher standards. It contains no data, unless you count quoting the Bible poorly as data (you shouldn’t). The central theme of the essay is that you shouldn’t question conservative interpretations of the the Bible.

I do not think men and women are pressured to be more masculine or feminine. I strongly
disagree with the idea from the article that encouraging acceptance of diverse gender expressions
could improve students’ confidence. Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and
everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth. I
do not want kids to be teased or bullied in school. However, pushing the lie that everyone has
their own truth and everyone can do whatever they want and be whoever they want is not biblical
whatsoever. The Bible says that our lives are not our own but that our lives and bodies belong to
the Lord for His glory. I live my life based on this truth and firmly believe that there would be
less gender issues and insecurities in children if they were raised knowing that they do not
belong to themselves, but they belong to the Lord.

The TA’s evaluation was spot on, and Mel Curth should have a bright future in academia, although maybe this experience will sour her on the career.

Graduate teaching assistant Mel Curth, who graded the paper, wrote that the zero was based on academic criteria, not retaliation for the student’s religious views. Curth wrote that the essay “does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.” Curth also noted that portraying a marginalized group as “demonic” is “highly offensive,” and urged the student to use empirical sources rather than doctrinal statements when critiquing course material.

Does Fulnecky learn from this instruction? No. She immediately turned to Turning Point USA to advocate for her, filed a religious discrimination complaint with the university, and got the governor of Oklahoma to intervene. You’d think he has better things to do with his time.

Fulnecky wasn’t penalized for her beliefs. She was penalized for not doing the assignment and using her biases instead of data.

The university has bent the knee and removed the TA from the class and put a full-time professor in charge (I wouldn’t want to be in their position — imagine taking over a class with cocky students who have learned that they can get rid of instructors who don’t give them the grade they want.)

A state representative is demanding that Curth be fired.

To use academic power to punish or pressure a student simply because she stood firm in her faith and cited real science in her essay is not leadership. It is inappropriate, unacceptable, and should be investigated for discrimination.

The University of Oklahoma must address this. This individual should not be teaching in higher education — period.

Take another look at Fulnecky’s essay. Can you find where she cited any science?

I’m trying to avoid imagining a student in my genetics or evolution class complaining that a known atheist was teaching about stuff that contradicts their religious beliefs. It could happen, it has happened, but so far it’s always been confined to private meetings in my office, with me reassuring them that I don’t care what they do on a Sunday morning, but that the course content is well defined by the textbooks and the evidence.

And afterwards I thank God that I don’t live in Oklahoma.

If you care about getting a good education, don’t go to the University of Oklahoma. Go further north.