By
Professsor Doom
Yes, I’m a little one-sided here in my
blog, but it’s so rare to find even a laughable attempt to justify that what’s
going on in higher education that it’s hard for me to present any other point
of view.
The Guardian recently posted a defense by
one of the people responsible for the
decay of higher education.
Our institutions of higher education are
responsible, on paper, for teaching and research…despite what all the football
stadiums on campus might indicate. Allow me to quickly discuss administration’s
role in the destruction of teaching and research before addressing the defense.
The reality is administration doesn’t care
about teaching, since teaching can’t be precisely quantified. All admin really
wants is happy students, and lots of them. Thus administration encourages
faculty to remove course material, to allow cheating, to accept plagiarism. I’ve covered
this before because teaching is what most people experience in college. Teaching
has been quantified down to student evaluations, and faculty have altered their
coursework and teaching to get the happy customers admin wants.
On the other hand, I’ve seldom discussed
research, because the average student doesn’t get anywhere near this aspect of
higher education.
One might think that research might not
be quantifiable. After all, how can one determine if a paper interpreting some
Shakespeare sonnet is really more relevant than a paper identifying a new
variant of a subatomic particle? One cannot, and certainly not an
administrator.
But, an administrator can count, and
that’s how administration quantifies research: a published paper is research,
no matter what the paper says, or how many names are on it. The same counts for
books. Research is simply defined as the number of papers and books with the
professor’s name on it. I was part of setting promotion policies, and I’m
serious: “quality of research” and “numbers of papers with the researchers name
on it” are the same thing in administrative eyes, even if the latter are never
read, never cited, and contain nothing.
I could write quite a bit on how faculty
manipulate this measurement method, but a quick overview will suffice. Professors force their names on papers
their students write.
Professors publish irrelevant books
that nobody would dream of reading, or even glancing at (warning: this link totally misses
the point of why professors write these books). Professors also enter into “writing
circles” with other
professors—each writes a paper, but shares credit with other professors on the
paper, multiplying “research output” (as measured by clueless admin) by several
multiples as each professor shares with each other professor. Churn out enough
output, and tenure and promotion are yours for the taking, at least at those
few research-oriented institutions left that still have much in the way of
tenure.
Teachers and researchers didn’t set the destructive
policies degenerating our institutions of higher education, administrators did.
Anyway, despite the above well-documented
situation at our schools of higher education, an administrator puts forward the
notion that “just because you people, faculty, have determined empirically that
admin doesn’t care about education, doesn’t mean you’re right. We really do
care about education. Seriously!” I’m getting ahead of myself here, so allow me
to further set the scene.
Unlike most faculty, admin can post their
real names when they talk online about higher education, without fear of
retribution. The administrator in this case is Andrew Derrington, who holds the
high falutin’ title of “Executive Pro Vice-Chancellor of Humanities and Social
Sciences.”
The gentle reader might recall that
earlier in this blog I proposed, as a quick means to cutting overhead costs at
our perpetually cash-strapped institutions, to just get rid of every
administrator whose title is 5 times as long as his name. Mr. Derrington’s
title here is 64 characters long, whereas his name is a mere 17 characters long.
So by my standard, which is every bit as legitimate as how administrators judge
teaching and research, this guy would get to keep his job…but seriously, there
are way too many administrators in higher education today.
So, here’s his defense regarding assertions that administrators
in higher education are responsible for the degradation of higher education,
summarized:
“This
accusation is wrong. Managers are not malicious. We are not stupid. We are
misunderstood.”
I ask the gentle reader to consider the
forced leave and psychiatric evaluation of a professor, for posting a picture of his child doing
a yoga pose. I ask
the gentle reader to consider long running sex scandals on campus,
which administration overlooks (and even promotes the perpetrator). I ask the gentle reader
to consider the outrageous activities of the kangaroo
campus courts, set
up by administration. The gentle reader should also consider the reduction of professor pay to the
point that food banks specialize in helping professors get enough to eat, while administrators eat at personal high
end restaurants
built and paid for by the campus they rule. I could continue with such
examples, but if I were to pick an explanation for such behavior amongst
options of “malicious, stupid, or misunderstood,” I just can’t accept
“misunderstood” as a possibility.
This is, unfortunately, the entirety of
the defense. Faculty are simply viewing what administration does in a bad
light, they really do mean well. Apparently, this administrator knows not where
the road of good intentions leads…even if anyone were stupid enough willing
to accept good intentions by administrators.
In addition to the links above
illustrating administrative behavior, allow me to repeat a personal anecdote:
A high-powered Educationist was paid to
come on campus, and help us learn how to teach better. Most of the advice was
the usual idiotic stuff from Ph.D.s in education: “give more extra credit,”
“give more credit for attendance,” “give more credit for plagiarism,” and other
insights that really don’t take years of graduate school to learn.
Then I got an e-mail from the Educationist: “For my research,
can you identify the parts of your course that students have trouble with? We
want to focus on those parts to provide better education in future courses.”
My reply: “Sure. Systems of linear equations in three vaiables
(sic). Inverses of non-linear functions. The difference quotient. Oh, and
applications of exponential and logarithmic functions.”
Educationist: “Thanks! This will really help.”
Next semester:
Administration: “To improve retention, you need to remove the
following from your course:
1. systems of linear equations in three vaiables (again, sic).
2. Inverses of non-linear
functions.
3. The difference quotient.
4. Applications of exponential and logarithmic functions.”
--note
my typo was preserved.
I ask the gentle reader to consider that
e-mail from admin, asking for wholesale removal of content from a course, not
to improve education (which I’ve never heard an administrator indicate as a
goal in my decades of teaching in higher ed), but to improve retention, to
increase the number of butts-in-seats.
I ask the gentle reader to consider the
evidence I present above regarding how the administrator came to that decision,
and consider the possibilities of malice, stupidity, or, and I can hardly
suggest it without laughing, misunderstood.
The possibility that really should be considered, in light of this and
extensive other evidence, is “willingness to sell out everything to enhance
growth.”
The administrator’s defense ends with:
If there
really is a fundamental difference in outlook between you and the senior
management of your university, then someone is not doing a very good job. Are
you sure it isn't you?
After having seen countless faculty with
integrity stand up and try to do something about the mess of higher education
today, only to be terminated by administration ready to take the “disloyal”
faculty’s salary and add it to their own, I am, once again, hard pressed to
accept that it’s the faculty that are the problem here. But this administrator,
in addition to believing that his caste is just misunderstood, thinks the
friction might well be the faculty’s fault, as well.
Administrators really do tend to be
remarkable pieces of work.
The comments section naturally lambasts the
defense, one (anonymous) faculty summarizes nicely:
What an
ill-advised piece of writing; indeed, if evidence is so important, and I agree,
I would like to see some evidence that teaching is a valued skill in
universities these days…
I guess it’s possible that administrators
mean well and that all our highly educated faculty (even the psychologists!)
just don’t understand them, but I think it more likely that I should update my
guidelines:
How about we get rid of administrators
whose titles are merely three times as long as their names? At the least, I
could hope for fewer Executive
Pro Vice-Chancellors of Humanities and Social Sciences, and that would be a
good thing.
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