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The main point which hit home for me was that the students are running the asylum now and there is no respect for the professors or faculty attempting to teach
by at-fates-hands 11y ago
The main point which hit home for me was that the students are running the asylum now and there is no respect for the professors or faculty attempting to teach them.
From the comments:
The key to this article is the explicit statement that administrators are aligned with students against faculty. I work at a major university, and my department head has often sided with students without even contacting me to hear my take on the incident. I get an angry email from him saying that a student complained that I say hello (Really! I didn’t say hello!), or that I must give a student the opportunity to do an assignment after the deadline, because she said it was impossible to do it for technical problems. In fact, though, 21 students had completed it successfully, despite the alleged technical problems. Still, I was ordered to allow the student to complete the assignment late, for full credit. I was never consulted, or I would have mentioned that the student spends most of class on facebook, among other things. Another time, a student sent him an email saying that I “diminished her” in class. The head sent her a passage from the student handbook saying that students are to take it up with the professor. She refused, saying that made her “uncomfortable.” Instead, the department head insisted on visiting my class to observe my teaching. At the time, I said that he was spineless -- that she had told him to jump, and he did. That may or may not have been correct, but I’ve since realized that backbone had nothing to do with it. Instead, the head was actively searching for opportunities to baby students. It explains, for example why I was told to teach a student to use a calculator that I do not even require in my class.
I feel like this professors experience is fairly consistent with what I know. I had six friends who all went into academia and education. Within a year nearly all had exited the profession and only two remained. They all cited the same thing - the over coddling of students by administration or faculty. The stories they told were eye opening to say the least. The crazy part? This was going on in the early aughts, nearly two decades earlier.
- lordCarbonFiber 11y agoYou come so close to figuring it out there at the end. The truth, it's always been happening. There were no "good old days". The pecking order has always been: research prof > students > teaching prof.
- ginko 11y agoSeems the main problem here is the high tuition fees, which to some degree give the students the impression that they deserve good service for which they have paid. Coming from a country where most of university is state funded (minus a nominal fee of about 300€ per semester), I can see that I might have had other expectations of my professors had I paid ten thousands of dollars per year.
- staticint 11y agoAdditionally, while I do not know in which country you reside, generally countries who fully subsidize higher education have much more stringent requirements to entry, allowing only those who are completely serious about receiving an education access. In America, if you are willing to pony up the cash, you're pretty much guaranteed a spot. Combine that with the common idea that you will not be able to find a job without a degree and you end up with a lot of people who aren't really in it for an education, but feel like they have to be there anyway.
- cmiles74 11y agoThe Atlantic article linked at the top of this piece spends more time on this, which I also think is more important.[0] The tension between the professor who thinks he's having a conversation and the student simply demanding compliance was surprising to me. [0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-...
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago> They all cited the same thing - the over coddling of students by administration or faculty. The stories they told were eye opening to say the least. The crazy part? This was going on in the early aughts, nearly two decades earlier. In my experience, they're not doing things to appease the students, they're doing things to appease the students' parents.