For years the college heard dark rumors of graduate students being exploited, forced to work for poverty wages while taking on massive student loans. They heard about students mortgaging their futures to gamble on being one of ten thousand chosen for a tenure-track job. They watched those students work for free for years, producing journal articles for free in the hope of bolstering their chances at one of those rare jobs.
The tenured wizards watched with dismay, too, as most of their students failed and ended up in adjunct or lecturer positions that held no hope of rising to the security or pay they themselves knew. A scant few managed to obtain positions on the tenure track, but even these lucky few sacrificed years more in unpaid service and free labor producing 'peer-reviewed' scholarship in hopes of finally gaining tenure.
All the while, however great their discomfort, the tenured wizardry let the wicked cabal feast upon the blood of the young and the weak. They kept their own safety around them like a cloak, sorrowing for their students but defending their own gain.
And then one day, it turned out that the blood feasts had brought unspeakable power to the wicked circle at the core of the college. That was the day they proved strong enough to feast upon the tenured, too.
13 comments:
From the linked blog post: "If this move survives legal challenges, it will undoubtedly spread. And in 'red' states, there will be a real risk in the years ahead of a purge of faculty for political reasons."
The post tags are: Academic Freedom, Authoritarianism and Fascism Alerts
So, the elimination of tenure enables fascism, but there's no discussion of how the professoriate became overwhelmingly leftist or what effect that has had. There is no way, I suppose, that a bunch of lefty professors, once their own positions are secured, would discriminate against conservative students and new PhDs to keep them out of the tower.
From the article the blog links:
"University System of Georgia officials maintain the changes are needed to better measure student success in the tenure review process, which they say is critical to improving their efforts of getting students to complete their degrees. The changes include adding a student success component to reviews to evaluate how faculty members interact with students outside the classroom through mentoring or advising.
"Faculty members are worried about changes that weren’t in the prior guidelines, such as the potential for them to lose their job if they have two consecutive subpar annual reviews and don’t meet improvement requirements."
Hm. That doesn't sound like a red-state political purge, but maybe "student success" is just a dog-whistle for "We're coming for you, Commies!"
My guess is that any surviving conservatives will be the first to be purged; tenure was the last thing standing between them and the woke.
I read through it and immediately caught the 'red-state' conclusion, too. One might be forgiven for settling on Scott Adam's "One screen two movies" thoughts on how different audiences might perceive the same material differently, but.....in this case, how could you? What examples could be produced that illustrate academic intolerance and insistence on adherence to dogma? I honestly can't think of any Conservative examples. I can point to Evergreen College, a few years ago. I can point to the cancelled MIT lecture, today, and lots of examples in between. Is it my bias speaking?
Well, they aren't getting rid of tenure. They're just saying if you're a crappy teacher and don't take the required steps to improve for 2 years, you might get fired even though you have tenure.
But you are probably right that, in the end, it will probably be conservative professors who pay the price.
Does "crappy teacher" mean that your students do not gain appropriate knowledge of the discipline's core material, or that they are not sufficiently inspired with their "social responsibilities?"
Has tenure really protected academic freedom? I'm sure it has in some cases, but it often seems to have led to a closed circle of like-thinking people.
Yes, James, that's the question. The intent is probably the former, but given the current political situation in most university administrations and faculties, as well as the prevalence of left-wing student activist groups, it will likely be the latter.
Of course, it is tied into the problem that a significant number of students who begin a 4-year degree don't finish. To the extent that a failure of instruction is the problem, it seems like a reasonable attempt at a solution. However, I think there are a lot of facets to the problem, such as the hostility of most universities towards conservatives and conservatism, and I'm curious if anything else is being attempted to solve this problem. Only blaming the professors doesn't seem right.
A possible negative effect would be further grade inflation. If the problem is that a professor isn't passing enough students, the simple solution for the professor is just to pass more students, regardless of whether they have learned the material.
All that said, I've had tenured professors who were crappy teachers. They wasted my time and money, but no review I could give them would matter because they had tenure. I am not terribly sympathetic to the idea that tenure should allow a professor to be a crappy teacher.
And I think David has a very good point: Our current system hasn't worked in protecting academic freedom on the whole. Maybe it's time to try something else.
I suspect that the main measure will be student surveys. They conduct one after every class.
"I suspect that the main measure will be student surveys"
(shudder)...Surveys can be very useful, but they have to be interpreted with some judgment. For example, I've never conducted customer surveys of sales reps working in my organization...it could be useful to get answers to questions such as "Does Melinda try to really understand your business needs?" but an overall question such as "How satisfied are you with Melinda as your sales rep?" might be skewed by her escessive willingness to give unnecessary discounts (in situations where the rep has that authority)....makes the customer happy, but may not be so good for the profitability of the business.''
The analogy of course is to the 'easy graders' among professors.
Student surveys are highly correlated with grades. Students making As in a class generally give positive reviews while students making Ds generally give negative reviews.
I'm not sure how useful they are in general, but they may not be of any use if you're trying to find out how to keep students from dropping out of university. There are just too many variables: Did they decide they couldn't take on more debt? Did they get a good job? Did they just decide they didn't like school? Etc. There are all kinds of factors that have nothing to do with the quality of instruction.
If you can get them to take a survey, it might be useful to create one specifically for people who intend to drop out in the near future or who have just dropped out.
I agree with James and Tom that the "student opinion survey" method of contract renewal makes me uncomfortable. When I was at Flat State U, I got bad reviews on the end-of-class survey, because no one had told me that I had to go to the Education Department, get the survey forms, schedule the survey, and then administer it. I just got an angry letter the week of finals demanding to know where my survey results were. I had to give it during the final exam. That generated the amount of unhappiness that you would anticipate.
Granted, mine was/is an extreme case in several ways, not the least because no one in either my department or the Education department saw fit to tell me the procedure, and I did not know to ask.
LittleRed1
". . . in 'red' states, there will be a real risk in the years ahead of a purge of faculty for political reasons."
I cannot remember ever seeing a more blatant example of projection.
Are you alloqwed to talk about qabal?
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