THEIR WORK EXPANDS TO FILL OUR TIME. A few weeks ago, Inside Higher Ed quantified the proliferation of REMFs, which prompted the dean at Anonymous Community to note, not at Anonymous. (And, as a generalization, not in community colleges, where stingy budgets also place cheap and contingent labor in positions where experience and stability are helpful.) The rising tail-to-tooth ratio at the four years, whether they be obscure, mid-major, land-grant, or high-priced private, provoked this Rate Your Students call for observations.

I'm only in my second year of teaching, but it seems to me that there is no end to the terrible ideas, suggestions, and mandates that come down to mere faculty from the administration, the Dean's office, and the department chair. Everything seems designed to make the job harder, to give more and more power to the lowest common denominator, and to suck any of the joy out of being a college proffie. What's the worst "new idea from the President" or "program change for better education" that has ruined your job?

The call elicited multiple responses. I can classify many as self-defeating efforts under the rubric of access-assessment-remediation-retention, and most of what remain as respect-destroying attempts to lessen the proper social distance between student and professor. I wonder, though, whether any of the colleagues who sent these anecdotes in have ever done anything to change the academic environment at their university.

I wish to exclude the post's gripe about writing-across-the-curriculum from either characterization. Life after college is more than likely to be a sequence of reports than a sequence of scan-trons, and life after graduate school is a sequence of term papers (to crib from Dale Jorgenson or Mike Rothschild or perhaps it was Robert Solow.)