Comment by csomar
19 days ago
Not only that but he is shooting the messenger
> My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.
They (the prof class) created this situation. They could have upheld their standards and seen the number of students go down but they preferred to fill their classrooms at the expense of quality.
This is like a manager who is complaining that no one can code while offering McDonalds hourly rates.
Professor here. We did not create it, we responded to administration prioritizing profit over performance and prestige. They passed the decision down to us instructors by threatening our employment if we failed too many students. Since tenure is heavily dependent on student outcomes, giving a student a lower grade than what they think they deserved will almost certainly result in negative feedback, which threatens your tenure. For non-tenured faculty it could result in a contract non-renewal.
I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role."
In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome?
At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts.
As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.
You are just going in circles to justify that you are the victim of all of this "non sense". That's like a guy saying "I didn't want to break the law but my employer forced me to it and he would have fired me, etc. etc. I am not saying you broke any laws but drawing a parallel here.
Professors are not (at least not supposed) to be a decoration in a University. They are what makes a University; or break it. You have all the leverage. You accepted the situation, went along with it and now it's backfiring.
That’s like saying the workers have all the leverage. They make the product, they should have all the power.
Unfortunately, leverage in the workplace comes from controlling the budget, which is the administrator’s job, not a professor’s.
3 replies →
Did you finish reading? The author said later on that holding the bar high wasn't an option since it would risk his job. The blame should be on the universities, not on the professors who don't have much power to fix the problem.
But how far do you go with the blame?
If the universities hold the bar high, they'll risk their funding from parents not wanting to enroll their child and the government not funding a failing school. The blame should be on society?
I think professors are in a good place to actually step up and say no. They're all highly educated individuals who can likely leave academia and get jobs in the private sector. They're best set up to break the cycle.