By Professor Doom
Time and again I’ve covered state universities where faculty were
mandated to pass students in their class, regardless of student performance.
Mostly these mandates are for lower level courses—nonexistent entrance
requirements let hordes of kids who have no business on campus (not making
judgements here!) have little choice but to take only entry-level courses.
Failing these kids would get them off campus quicker (a good thing, actually),
but doing so cuts into that sweet student loan money…quite often admin mandates
to faculty an 80% pass rate, if not higher. Such mandates don’t come in writing
but faculty “get the memo,” honest.
A recent alleged scandal at Arizona State University is the reverse:
supposedly admin wanted a certain failure rate, no more than 70% passing. ASU
is denying everything, of course, but after years of denials of the bleeding
obvious at other state schools like Penn State, UNC, and several others…I’m
hard pressed to take a denial at face value, even if I support the “innocent
until proven guilty” notion in general.
In this case, despite the strangeness of the claims, I’m sensing some
credibility here. The allegation comes from faculty:
The first reason for credibility is circumstantial: the professor lost
his job for making his allegation. I’ve seen many, many, professors fired for
daring to tell the truth, and, ultimately, someone doesn’t make that kind of
sacrifice for no reason at all. In today’s deranged world, the idea that a man
might be willing to lose his job rather than support fraud might sound strange,
but the alternative, losing his job to advance a lie at no benefit to himself,
is even stranger.
The first accusation from Goegan
is that students are forced to pay for an online service to turn in their
homework so that the university could get money from the company.
This first allegation gets a solid “And?” from me. Students are forced
to pay for a wide variety of things at inflated prices (Hi textbooks! Hello
dorms! Howdy recreation fees! Greetings parking tag! Goodness, this could go on
for quite a while…). The university denies this allegation, of course, but it
would just be business as usual if they did it. I wonder where they draw the
line?
“In order to convince Cengage to
give the Provost a large monetary grant, the department agreed to require all
ECN 211 and 212 students use MindTap - a Cengage product. This deal requires
students to pay just to turn in their homework,” wrote Goegan in his email.
Wait,
a grant? I actually have some familiarity with the company involved here,
Cengage…I don’t think they work that way. I could see a bribe or kickback, mind
you, but not a grant. What kind of denial does the university give?
The
misinformation claims that…Cengage gave ASU a grant for using the program,
…
That denial seems….off. Did the professor
really say there was a grant going to ASU? Let’s highlight the key part of the
allegation again:
In
order to convince Cengage to give the Provost
a large monetary grant,
--emphasis
added
That’s not going to ASU, it’s going to
the Provost. Reading between the lines, I can’t help but suspect ASU’s
“official denial” has been carefully chosen so that when it comes time for a
real court, they can say they didn’t lie…just used words to distract from the
issue.
Anyway, I’ve seen the like often enough,
this allegation is hardly worth a denial, except our state schools just don’t
like to admit how money-hungry admin are.
The vast majority of admin are paid to
make things worse on campus, and that often means doing harm to students. This
little alleged bribe also is not much different than business as usual.
Now to the real allegation, the one
which should make students angry:
The
second policy was put in place to ensure that the Provost's project was made to
look good. All ECN 211, 212, and 221 courses were required to prevent at least
30% of students from passing the class. We were told that we needed to set a
baseline against which the Provost's project could be compared. For many
instructors, this meant setting students up to fail so it could seem like the
Provost swooped in and fixed a problem that doesn't exist.
We’re looking at 2nd year
courses here, what qualifies as “advanced material” on our campuses today,
which more and more focus on pre-high school level. By the second year, you’re
getting “real” college students who study and care about their grades. There is
an ocean of difference between 2nd year students and everyone before
that level.
To succeed as an administrator, you have
to either grow the school (get more new students) or increase retention (keep
students on campus).
Trouble is, our schools have expanded to
ridiculous levels, and already pull in most students right out of high school…there
just isn’t more room for growth.
To increase retention, well, the easy way
is to mandate higher passing rates. But that’s what the previous Provost did,
and the previous, and the previous, too. It’s why coursework has dropped to
very little while the average grade has risen to A-. How to improve retention
when you’ve already sold out the school every possible way? Be extra sneaky.
So, based on this allegation, I speculate
on what the Provost was doing here. He mandated a higher fail rate for a year
or two. That was the start of the plan, but this professor exposed him before
he could finish the rest of the plan.
The rest of the plan? The Provost would
give a speech to faculty or change the course in some way, and (off the record,
of course) would eliminate the “fail 30% of students” mandate. Pass rates would
rise, and the Provost could claim his “leadership and innovation” increased the
pass rates. Brilliant!
Faculty are pretty helpless against such
machinations, because they know full well that if they complain, they will be
fired. And, hey, this faculty member complained, and was fired.
The university denies it all, of course,
and instead says the faculty making the allegations was just a mean meanie-face.
Again, I’ve heard the like many times, a faculty with a stellar record and top
notch job evaluations suddenly was “a problem we worked with for years before
finally letting him go,” and it always coincided with the faculty displaying
integrity.
“They are blatantly lying about
not requiring students to pay to turn in homework,” she said. “I have had to
pay for homework for classes multiple times."
--it’s easy to find students willing to say
ASU is lying. I couldn’t find any saying ASU is telling the truth, but
I could have missed someone, somewhere.
It’d be nice if, instead of their weird
denials, ASU produced real evidence, such as widespread students saying the guy
was terrible (ASU could find some unhappy customers if they existed in any
numbers), or produced evidence that classes were not being forced to use
Cengage product (via course syllabi, submitted to admin every semester), or produced
evidence that pass rates didn’t mysteriously drop to 70% when this Provost came
on board (pass rates are tracked very closely every semester, easy to track
them down).
All of the previous evidence should be
easy to produce, if the faculty were lying and ASU was telling the truth.
Instead, they’re going with:
We
generally do not comment on the details of disciplinary matters related to faculty,
and there are many reasons that a faculty member's contract might not be
renewed, including when a faculty member resists course-correction of multiple
shortcomings despite supervisory intervention.
I’m not buying ASU’s denial here. They could easily produce
evidence showing he’s lying, and instead are going with blanket denial and a
firing, actions which will only prolong the scandal, instead of snuffing it
out.
I remind the gentle reader every other
state school has treated faculty with integrity in this manner, forcing the
truth to come out only after years of investigation, investigation against
schools far too willing to use cover-ups and retaliation (like blanket denials
and firings…) to prevent revelation of the truth.
I don’t think this particular kind of
scandal goes on at many schools, but the bottom line, our plundering
administrators are running out of illicit ways to make themselves look
“excellent.” I can’t help but suspect we’re going to see ever more imaginative
plans, like the one alleged above, in the future.
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