Well, fortunately, we won’t have to worry about that much longer, since most students in the future are going to be taught by contingent faculty who can be fired at a whim. /s
They don’t, unless it threatens the bottom line somehow. Sad state of affairs.
Ouch, good point. And to be fair to tenured profs, like I said, this guy wasn’t just tenured, but revered. His whole family are local art and science rockstars. So criticising him was criticising A [Surame]. I was even told by my ex (who was a big fan of the prof) that I should make allowances because it was so hard for someone of that genius to come down to first-year level. (What was that about genius assholes again?)
Don’t get me wrong… I’m not saying at all that tenured profs can’t or aren’t sometimes bad at their jobs (or part of their jobs, in this case the teaching part). They totally can be. But I think it’s important to remember that their primary job isn’t teaching, it’s producing knowledge (at least as major universities). Especially for people coming out of elite institutions who end up tenure track faculty at major universities, teaching isn’t their primary function, so they get little to know training on how to teach their subject matter. It’s almost always a trial by fire as a TA, and then maybe teaching one class, usually an upper division course in their specialty. GSU was unusual in that we have a pretty heavy teaching load with our TA duties.
Seems to me that part of the problem with the tenure system, I think, is that almost all phd programs act as if their graduates are going to be at a university where they have a small course load and much more time for research, instead of ending up spending more time teaching at a smaller school or a public university. Most phd programs act as if their students are coming out of harvard or yale and we’re not. Most of us end up teaching and are frankly woefully unprepared for that reality. It helps explain the bitterness of lots of academics.
They shit marble statues?
Most of my tutors during my undergrad were at least two decades into their tenure and made no secret of the fact that teaching undergrads was nothing but a tiresome chore to them.
At one point, I almost had to skip a year because my faculty had left dissertation supervision as a purely voluntary act, which meant that undergrads had to go round all of the available professors and literally beg them to give feedback. If you failed to find a tutor, you couldn’t graduate.
It’s worth mentioning that by this point, 4 years of my 5-year degree had already cost me somewhere in the region of USD 50,000 and there was a possibility I could fail entirely based on the whims of the academic staff of the university.
Right in the middle of this, one of the tutors who consistently blanked my requests for a meeting (I had been assured that he was “a very busy man” when I asked another faculty member why he hadn’t replied to any of my emails) found enough time in his schedule to provide a quote to the BBC about why sumo wrestlers hold tuna fish in New Year photos. Definitely forwarding the knowledge of humanity, right there.
I understand the mentality of career academics who think that their goal in life is somehow loftier than teaching, and that kind of makes sense if you completely ignore the fact that they are paid to both teach and research. Were it not in their contract (and had I not ended up paying USD 60k to be taught by them) I would be a lot more sympathetic. As it is, I feel like most of the tutors I interacted with at university were completely unrealistic about how employment works.
“Well yes, of course I would like to turn up and help myself to free coffee while reading things that I want to read and write the blog that will some day make me famous; shouldn’t that be enough to justify my salary? Why should I have to talk to clients or answer emails?? Don’t be so unreasonable!”
Not to mention that they didn’t exactly spring from the ground with a thesis in their hand themselves. Even the most independent learner needs some sort of teaching support.
Sure. And for my part, I think that teaching is incredibly important part of my job (well it is my entire job at this point, actually) and I don’t think that would change if I did find a tenure track position. I also find scholars who look down on undergraduate teaching as beneath them to be real assholes.
I think it’s a two fold problem that we’re discussing here - that people mistake the role of tenure track academics at research universities to be primarily that of teaching, when it’s not and that almost all phd programs pump out people whose expectation that they will be tenure track at a research university, when the vast majority of us are not doing that. I’ll also say, that there is a good deal of anger and bitterness in academia right now, across the board, espeically in the humanities.
And I do know quite a few people in my field who do embrace their role as educators as much as they do their role as producers of knowledge.
I think this is largely because they are not being made to understand the realities of the job market right now. Things have changed even since the early 2000s and most tenure track faculty aren’t really faced with the realities, so they aren’t really preparing phds for those realities.
So it comes down to teaching again. Teaching/communication seems to be the common theme no matter where you are with your studies.
Off topic, but your Comp sci story is my freshman Chemistry for Engineers story. In that prof’s case, he got what he wanted - a ban from having to lecture freshmen.
Especially if they have a lot of grants. That >50% overhead to the university isn’t to be sneezed at. Who cares if they can’t teach? (Actually I only had a few of those, especially one who said “Go to the library and work on a paper. See you in a month.” Well, he had zero talent as a teacher, so it was no great loss.
I think that’s the heart of it, really; most of the career academics I know see it in exactly that way but they’re all under 50.
I don’t doubt that the marketisation of academia is a thing, or that the vast majority of the new generation of academics see how their roles as teachers and researchers is changing. The problem is that the people who control the intake/syllabi/allocation of work are all in their dotage and refuse to adjust to the idea that they should adapt.
Reminds me of an oft-repeated joke:
“How many Oxford dons does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“CHAAANGE??”
This might be worth considering for these professors doing laps on the tenure track.
http://www.math.utah.edu/~yplee/teaching/feynman.html
Go Dr. Feynman!
Pinnochio always did scare me.
That picture is not changing my mind.
That’s a good reminder that the production of knowledge is ALWAYS dialectical, not a bolt of lighting.
Ever read the original book? Much darker than the Disney film.
Nope. Not even going near it.
Thats quite lovely!!
And OT but not really… we just hired a Professor… a FULL professor, not adjunct, not assistant, not associate, not tenure track, but a fully tenured professor… and I am so confused. So it happens, still, I guess? But man oh man is it ever rare!
Wow. They must have REALLY wanted them.
Either that or they had serious dirt on the university.