Author: mikeduncan

I could write about a great many things today – the World War III Ukraine is fighting for NATO, the circus of U.S. politics, another dry theoretical piece, some great PC gaming I’ve been doing, or how cool Strange New Worlds remains.

But I’m in the mood to talk about Canvas.

For many years, the University of Houston-Downtown has used Blackboard as its CMS to deliver online courses, much like desperate individuals often sign a dark pact with demons for temporary relief. I made a separate peace with BB many years ago, agreeing only to visit certain less distasteful circles of its clunky hellscape, and clinging to the fairly certain hope that they would not follow me as unforgivable sins into any hypothetical afterlife or my mythical permanent record.

This summer I opted my summer courses into a pilot program for Canvas, UHD’s choice for a Blackboard replacement. I was on the Academic Technology Committee that had some input into this choice, and I punted at the time. My opinion was, and still remains, that offering the faculty a choice of what CMS they might want is not as important as giving them adequate training and support in what ends up being used. In that sense, the CMS is a lot like the university’s calendar (I was on that committee, too, and took the same stance).

Experienced cynicism generated this response; the usual reason the faculty are “consulted” on such decisions is to give some lip service to “shared governance,” to bless the eventual bad result, and to spread any blame (there are exceptions to this general rule, but not many). The stated reason for a CMS switch was the BB did not meet federal accessibility guidelines; deeply ironic, since the faculty has been castigated for several years to do a better job of accessibility in BB. Accessibility is generally a good idea, but just like assessment, its cheerleaders often take on a cultist aspect.

Actually, let me take that back. Assessment is a straight-up cult.

Credit is due, however. I’d like to give Canvas a solid B+ so far. I’m almost two weeks in the June semester and it’s a definite improvement.

The most dramatic advance is its phone app. Unlike BB’s bug-laden mess, I can actually do some light grading and maintenance on my phone. Nothing serious – the major work is still done on desktop, but I can spread the workload around more.

Canvas also automates several pesky tasks that BB could only do with workarounds. It can automatically apply late penalties, for example, and perform more complex grade calculations that I used to do on the side. Its discussion board front-end is not a horror story told to frighten young UI designers. Support is plentiful and the eventual solutions to minor issues rarely require opening up the hood.

Most importantly, however, Canvas feels stable. So far, it does not generate strange errors, delete my work, or trouble the students with baffling messages.

I am reminded of the paradigm shift of going from Windows 98 to 2000, where all the promises of usability and stability that Gates and his minions had promised but never quite delivered suddenly became real.

I realized quite recently that until a few weeks ago, I had never owned both a new washer and dryer. Both, or at least one, were always crunky cast-offs, purchased from a moving sale, a scratch-and-dent, or handed down. It is odd, refreshing, even civilized, to wash a load and dry it with little doubt as to if the cycle will complete, or the clothes will actually be dry.

Canvas elicits that pleasant feeling – a quiet satisfaction that a longstanding and difficult problem has finally resolved, and entropy, the final enemy, has been defeated for now. I hope this little victory lasts for a long time.

Around March 20, 2023, my English department’s anti-racist statement was removed from my university’s website (yes, it’s a broken link).

Fox and many journalism-adjacent sites got wind and turned this into a story, as well as academia-adjacent ones with a different take.

But the actual faculty committee of over ten people that wrote the statement didn’t have a clue.

The committee was not asked to remove the statement. Or, even, edit it. They were not even notified it was going to be removed. Or that it was removed. This happened after they spent a considerable amount of time in 2022 composing the statement in response to both university initiatives and departmental need. It was on UHD’s website for months without issue. UHD still even hosts other related statements, but English’s statement is gone. I do not believe a full version exists online anywhere at the moment; the various stories that quote it tend to do so partially or out of context to render it a straw man that can be easily countered.

I know all this from being a member of that committee.

Naturally, we asked our chair, our dean, and eventually our provost and our president what happened. Many prolonged and patient inquiries later, we learned next to nothing.

As of today, May 22, 2023, the statement is still missing, the committee has no accountability on who removed the statement or a specific reason why it was removed, and despite that lack of transparency, it’s also become quite clear that the statement will be kept off the website for unspecified reasons.

I’ve worked at the University of Houston-Downtown for 14 years. Like all universities, it is far from perfect, but it’s not a bad place to get a degree. The favorable ratio between its relative low tuition and the quality of instruction remains hard to beat, and counterbalances the mostly bureaucratic negatives most of the time.

However, this Kafkaesque affair, where the removal seemingly has no causal agent, is beginning to give me doubts.

Academic freedom is the absolute cornerstone of all our successful endeavors as higher education faculty. Despite what you may have heard, “academic freedom” is not a set of bullshit abstract principles that lets faculty mouth off irresponsible nonsense and indoctrinate students. Mouthing irresponsible nonsense does happen occasionally, though I have yet to witness a single student (or faculty member) change their mind about anything important, much less be “indoctrinated” in those 14 years. Still, the occasional wild card professor is a very modest price for the immense long-term benefits that academic freedom brings: an environment, free from censorship and fear, that allows the long-term development of faculty members.

Academic freedom is thus the carefully tended soil of a garden where professors, particularly younger ones, pursue their research and teaching without worrying about political meddling, so they can grow into seasoned faculty that know what they’re about. Such an environment is a massive advantage when hiring faculty, which is why all serious universities offer tenure-track lines. Sometimes it is the only advantage that more cash-strapped public universities have when competing with the big ones. “You won’t make a lot of money here, but we’ll leave you alone and you don’t have to worry about being fired because someone doesn’t like you,” is a surprisingly effective recruitment strategy.

Academic freedom is not just about research subjects, though. It’s also about teaching. “The faculty own the curriculum” is a repeated axiom for a reason. Competent administrators are necessary for the smooth functioning of the complex, interlocked, and often competitive structures of a large university, but the flip side is that way down at the department level, the faculty decide what to teach and how to teach it, within the broad categories of the many academic disciplines. Furthermore, any regulation of such teaching or research standards is done solely by peer colleagues in the same disciplines, who, again, generally know what they’re about. Teaching, like research, is left to the people who know how to do it.

Unfortunately, the committee’s anti-racism statement was full of exactly those specific teaching stances that remain the responsibility of the faculty who wrote them. And, accordingly, the committee, with a large cross-section of every sub-discipline in the department, got peer criticism about the statement even before it was written – despite any claims to the contrary. Indeed, peer dialogue remains a reasonable avenue for critique.

But censorship is not.

Removing the statement without accountability or explanation suggests, at least on a prima facie basis, that UHD does not value maintaining an environment of academic freedom, and that an environment of uncertainty and fear is preferable. Such a stance does not bode well for the long-term development of its faculty.

I really hope that changes.

In the meantime, the tenured professors of the committee have filed a faculty grievance to have the statement restored.