Professor Sues Over Required Gibberish

By Professor Doom

Admin:     “Be sure to pass out your syllabus on the first day of class…”

     Every college course must have a syllabus, a summary of the course material. It isn’t just mindless paperwork, the syllabus is important when the student tries to transfer his course to another institution, which is entitled to know what, exactly, the student knows. At least, that’s the theory.

Admin: “Be sure to include the course number, course name, section number, room number, and times the class meets on the syllabus…”

     Every year, admin adds another requirement to the syllabus. I try very hard to keep my syllabus down to one page—it’s not so much about the environment/saving paper, I just see no need to flood the students with information that they generally don’t care much about.

Admin: “Be sure to include our statement regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act…”

     Every year, another line or two was added to satisfy administrator requirements…and I removed more actual class information from my syllabus to keep it to a page.

Admin: “Be sure to put in writing what you consider cheating, and what the penalty for cheating will be…”

     Another line here, another line there, it all adds up.

Admin: “Be sure to have an outline of what assignments are graded in your course, especially tests, and what will be on those tests…”

     It was tough to have everything on the syllabus I wanted, also comply with administrative requests…and keep that syllabus down to one page. Finally, a request came down from the Masters of the Universe making it impossible to keep it all on one page:

Admin: “Be sure to include the required learning outcomes and associated assessments matrix on your syllabus…”

      What, pray tell, is the “required learning outcomes and associated assessments matrix”? Well, it’s another foolish thing from Educationists. Educationists have a creepy powerful influence over education, and it doesn’t matter how unproven, how demonstrably ineffective their ideas are. Even when we know Educationist ideas are harmful, we’re still forced to use them. I’ve mentioned before the idiotic Bloom’s Taxonomy theory which influences higher education, but a recent event brought back memories of that “matrix” I was required to put on my syllabus, when I was at a bogus community college:

Professor Sues College Over Syllabus Requirement

     You really do have to pick your battles in higher education, and compared to the near constant fraud, incompetence, and corruption I was already dealing with there, I wasn’t about to challenge community college administration over these new matrix things. The professor suing was actually removed from teaching; this is what comes of resisting Educationists nowadays. 

The college has maintained that the requirement is linked to accreditation requirements.

     Yeah, that’s crap, and it’s what I was told as well. The gentle reader is welcome to read accreditation requirements in detail and see this is a lie (there is an institutional requirement, but that’s an administrative chore, not a faculty one). Those requirements incidentally, list absolutely no penalties whatsoever for violation of those requirements, which is why so many of our schools violate accreditation with open impunity. What matters is subservience to administration, but I digress.

     So, what exactly is that matrix? Administration at the community college helpfully gave us an example, and it looked something like this:

Admin: “Here’s an example of a Student Outcome and Assessment Matrix for Speech 101:”

Outcome	Assessment
Learner will be able to speak clearly	In class participation, class presentation
Learner will be able to analyze and evaluate discussion	Tests, peer review
Learner will be collaborate and identify multiple perspectives	Group project, group presentation

      I’m simplifying the above chart a little, but it was a whole page of stuff like the above. Admin passed out the example chart to all faculty. I picked my battles at this place, and as much as I wanted to keep my syllabus to one page, I admitted that was now impossible. I went back to my office, and typed up a matrix for my courses, adapting the example to fit each course (eg, for algebra, I would have “learner will be able to solve a system of equations” as an outcome, with “tests, homework” as assessments--we don't have students, incidentally, we have "learners," because changing words around is about all Educationists know how to do when it comes to improving education).

     I keep referring to that school, where I worked to change its status from “unaccredited” to “accredited,” as bogus, and I honestly don’t do so lightly, so allow me to relate the ultimate effect of including those student outcome matrices on our syllabi (beyond doubling the amount of paper we wasted on syllabi).

      So, three years later, we have an accreditation review. These things are mostly a joke. All accreditation does is ask administration to self-assess how good a job administration thinks the school is doing (I’m serious, this is all accreditation is, which is why we can have schools everyone knows are fake, stay in business for decades), and ask for some documentation of what goes on in our classes. “Some documentation” is a bit of an exaggeration, all they really ask for is our syllabi…more accurately, the syllabus of one of the classes taught at the institution.

      Accreditation asks for a syllabus, and admin provides the pseudo-chemistry professor’s syllabus. Our accreditor notes that the Chemistry 101 syllabus, for some idiotic reason, has a Student Outcome and Assessment Matrix for Speech 101 attached to it. To clarify: the chemistry teacher, like a good little automaton (he was an extraordinary sycophant) simply stuck the “sample matrix” admin had told him to stick onto his syllabus, and nothing more.

      Accreditation rightfully thought that a Chemistry syllabus with Speech outcomes was invalid, and so asked for another. Admin dutifully pulled out another syllabus, from a social studies course. Sure enough, it too had the same Student Outcome and Assessment Matrix for Speech 101 as the last page as well.

      As did the next syllabus. As did the next syllabus. Finally admin thought to submit my syllabus, their 5^th choice.

Admin: “We had to submit a syllabus five times. The accreditor found your syllabus satisfactory.”

--I asked why it took so many tries to get a valid syllabus, and that’s how I got the story I’m relating here.

      Now, the gentle reader should understand, the reason why so many community college faculty had that Speech matrix appended on the end wasn’t a protest; these guys had no clue what was going on (at the community college level, competence is neither sought nor encouraged by admin), and just followed the instructions from admin as best they could. I’ve discussed before that higher education is mostly a sycophantocracy now, and I assure the gentle reader it’s at its worst at the community college level. So many faculty there were so clueless, they would tell me “you should just follow orders” with no understanding of the potential for evil in doing so. They, of course, always followed orders from admin.

      I’ve mentioned before how at community colleges, the syllabus is a complete fraud, that faculty have no intention of following what’s on the syllabus. Studies, of course, back me up, detailing how many of our community colleges are simply unhinged, filled with exactly the fraud I’d seen many times with my own eyes.

      To further emphasize what a joke these places are, at my school these syllabi, with a page of essentially complete gibberish stuck on the end, were passed out thousands of times, in dozens of classes, over the course of years. Not only did no faculty go “You know, it seems kind of stupid for me to have Speech outcomes on my Biology syllabus,” but not a single student looked at that syllabus and said “Yo teach, why do we have these stupid outcomes for a different course on our syllabus? Are we really going to learn this here? Why do I get these identical weird looking box things in other courses?”

     I trust the gentle reader now understands why I have such a grim opinion of many community colleges: even at an accredited school, I know with certainty that many of the faculty and most of the students have not the slightest idea what’s supposed to go on in a college course. I don’t blame the students, for what it’s worth.

He's going too far, but the fact that we're pressured to use the almost Orwellian phrase "learning outcomes" instead of "results" or "goals" or "aims" indicates how dumb and irritating some of this ed-speak gets. Education departments, people look down on you for good reasons.

--a comment from a news piece on the lawsuit.

      I totally respect the professor bringing the lawsuit for not wanting to put this stuff on his syllabus; it’s very clear that it’s just an administrative make-work project of no relevance. It’s not a fight I want to have, but I wish him the best with his lawsuit all the same.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

      

MA Program Cancelled, Stranding Students

By Professor Doom

Parking Minion: “We can’t sell you the parking tag until the semester starts.”

Me: “That’s 4 days from now. Why can’t I get this $250 tag now?”

Parking Minion: “We’ll have them next week, sir.”

Me: “But there’ll be huge crowds next week. Why not plan ahead?”

Parking Minion: “I don’t know, please move along so I can help the next customer.”

--It’s merely funny to have parking on campus cost more than tuition when I was a kid. It’s outright bizarre that campuses can’t plan ahead to prevent long lines.

     It’s so weird how our campuses are ruled by people with degrees in Vision and Leadership, but they can’t seem to look ahead even a little, the better to lead the way. The post before this was the debacle of admin firing all the faculty the day before classes start…none of the administrators felt the responsibility of leaders, to take care of the students who paid for classes that now had no teachers.

     It isn’t just at the undergraduate level that our “leaders” are so clueless how to run things. I’ve covered insane art school shenanigans before, where an entire first year class resigned rather than be cheated by administration. It goes both ways, as administration sees no problem with cancelling a whole program when they wish:

Pacific Northwest College of Art Cancels an MA Program Days Before Classes

     Pursuing a graduate degree is a major life choice; prospective students had to pack up and move to come to this campus, had to sign rental contracts, and pay other expenses. There should be some integrity here by the campus rulers, some planning so that students don’t hurt themselves.

     Hey, enrollments are falling, and I can see that at some point you might have to close up. But couldn’t the leaders with their degrees in Vision see there weren’t any students from a mile away?

Oliver and Sanders tell artnet News they had recruited a full cohort of 17 students; the school says only five had actually enrolled and made deposits.

 

     So, the faculty running the program says they had enough students, admin says no…I’m hardly inclined to trust admin, and I suspect regular readers of my blog aren’t, either. Look, 5 students still represents well over $100,000 in tuition, and the school had other programs (and around 500 other students). The smaller program wouldn’t bankrupt the school. In fact, the school was paid in advance to start this program, as well as others:

The CT+CR program, though, was one of no fewer than a half-dozen new graduate programs initiated at PNCA in the last several years. In 2007, the school received a grant of $15 million from the Ford Foundation to found no fewer than six graduate programs.

    Wow, 15 million bucks, and they charge tuition on top of that. Seriously, admin is wetting their beak just a little too much, and I don’t just mean at this school. No matter that the money has been provided, there’s just not enough profit for admin.

“…suspension of the program is all part of a coordinated effort by the school to turn their one-year program, created as such to make it relatively affordable, into a more lucrative two-year program.”

     It was just a 1 year program! But, admin, dollar signs perpetually in their eyes, want to bloat out the program, to increase profits. The professors, of course are protesting, not that it does any good—this is a no-tenure school, and so faculty have no choice but be subservient to administrative whims.

The calls for fiscal responsibility ring hollow to some of the faculty, who feel they have been the ones getting the squeeze. The latest uproar follows protests by students and faculty this past spring, over what they called the abrupt discontinuation of the employment of many adjunct faculty. They complained of rising pay for school executives while adjunct faculty members scrape to get by, and Ellen Lesperance, who teaches at the school and has participated in the protests, points out that adjunct instructors represent about three-quarters of the school’s faculty.

     Now, for your basic undergraduate degree, half or so of the coursework is “general education”; it keeps kids in college a couple of extra years, but that’s the price of education (well, it was the price, before the student loan scam also added “be in debt forever”).

      But graduate school is different, it’s supposed to be focused. So, there’s no reason for grad school programs to take 4 years, or 2 years, or any particular length of time…the program is supposed to train the students in very specific skills, and nothing more. If it only takes a few months to learn the particular skills, then a few months is all the program should take…not years.

     The student loan scam, more accurately the plundering leaders who rule higher education now, don’t like that at all.

     I know, most readers will blow this all off, saying “I’m not getting a graduate art degree anyway, so who cares?” The gentle needs to understand that what’s happening here is happening most everywhere else in higher education: even “specialized” programs are being bloated beyond all reason, to increase profits and growth. Faculty used to be able to stop this behavior, but 75% of the faculty at this school are helpless adjuncts (and over 50% of professors in higher education today are adjuncts) and can do nothing. The helplessness of faculty is a big reason our schools are all too often scams, sucking student in and loading them down with irrelevant coursework until the loan money runs out.

      I again point out how community colleges epitomize this scam, especially the “transfer institution” which focuses just on semi-legitimate at best general education courses, to the exclusion of any degree-related coursework. The majority of students stumble out of those places after years, with no actual knowledge of anything, as I’ve shown so many times.

      So, watch these art students being cheated, and be unconcerned by it if you must, but be fairly warned: all of our kids are getting sucked into this kind of system.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

LIU Ends First Faculty Lockout

By Professor Doom

     I’ve written a few times of one solution to the abuse of faculty in higher ed: unions. The main problem with unions is getting administration to allow them…unfortunately, sooner or later, administration realizes that unions cut into the money administration could keep for themselves. This leads to inevitable conflict, and admin rather holds all the cards.

     So what happens when admin decides a union shouldn’t exist? Extermination, wholesale:

Long Island University's Brooklyn campus, in contract fight with faculty union, tells 400 professors not to come to work and cuts them off from health insurance.
--yes, that includes "tenured" faculty.

     It wasn’t just health insurance, LIU also killed the faculty’s e-mail accounts, making it difficult for them to communicate with each other (yes, there are other ways to communicate, but the union mailing lists and such were all through the campus server, of course).

      Please understand, classes were to start the days of the lockout, so this was not done randomly. In the past, the union, as a show of solidarity, would cancel the first day of classes…but only the first day. 

…printmaking professor Hilary Lorenz has not been able to ride her bicycle. It’s locked in her campus studio, to which she’s been denied access. Also held hostage in the studio are two of Lorenz’s own printing presses and a 20-year archive of her personal work.

---these administrators are pricks…I know, that’s unprofessional language, but administrative behavior here is (exceptionally) unprofessional.

      Now, cancelling classes is a disruption, but for the students, “the first day” is easily the best day to have suddenly cancelled (and they received advance warning when the union did it, because faculty actually care about students). I won’t claim to know all the details, but I do understand that a union is only effective if the members act as a group, so I’ll let the union’s cancelling of a single day pass.

In a letter before the start of classes, LIU President Kimberly Cline assured students the lockout would have no effect on the beginning of the school year. But since the semester started last week, classes have been taught by replacement teachers. Many are scheduled to teach subjects for which they have no experience. In what the school later called an error, the university’s chief operating officer, formerly a professor of political science, was slated to teach yoga. The dean of students for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, a botanist by training, was tapped to teach ballet.

--honest, admin doesn’t care about education. Here’s a nice Doonesbury strip that sums up what it’s like to teach at most places.

      On the other hand, removing 400 faculty members on the first day of class? This is a massive disruption. If LIU cared much about education, they’d have hired faculty in advance. If they cared even a tiny bit, they’d hire 400 new faculty members to come on to campus and slap together a course with essentially no notice. If they cared nothing about education, they’d toss anyone into the class.

     Hmm, what will they do?

“They’re assigning administrators to teach art classes,” Barry says. “I think it’s fraud for the university to tell students that they’re going to get qualified experts as teachers and then not provide that.” Barry’s ceramics class is being taught by an administrator in the research grants department. The Administrative Assistant to the Dean of Pharmacy at LIU — who has a masters degree in International Policy Studies and no art background — is teaching drawing and painting. “One student said they went into class and the person [filling in] just read to them,” says Susan Ziegler, a locked-out adjunct art professor.

--yes, it is fraud, but admin doesn’t care. Neither does accreditation.

      Admin had the whole summer to fire faculty and get replacements, and instead they decided to do it in the worst possible way for their students.

William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, said he could not think of an instance when a college or university had used a lockout against its faculty members.

---note his title, “executive director” is a sane length. He must not be a higher education administrator, then.

     To obliterate the entire faculty in one swoop is a tremendous show of force by admin here. This is yet one more reason tenure should return to campus (and be honored, unlike at this place, which even removed the tenured faculty), so that at least a few faculty will remain behind to help clean up administrative messes like this.

     The dispute, of course, is about money:

The main issue in the dispute, according to the Long Island University Faculty Federation, the union, is inequity between the pay levels of faculty members at the two main LIU campuses. Currently, half of Brooklyn faculty members are paid less -- in many cases significantly less -- than their counterparts at Post, says the union, which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. The university is also proposing benefit cuts, the union says. The union also says that tuition rates are the same at both campuses, as are faculty qualifications.

      Because there are no real overhead costs in public supported education, what you pay the faculty can vary wildly. Most of the money that used to go for faculty pay now goes to admin, and that appears to be what’s happening on one campus, but not the other. Asking for equal pay for equal work is hardly an unfair request, especially if both schools charge the same tuition.

     LIU admin of course says it’s all about the students:

“…the university tries to limit expenses so it can limit tuition increases…”

     It’s hard to accept this excuse when admin just screwed over the students like this. It’s going to be pure chaos on that campus for at least this semester. If they don't let the faculty come back, it'll be at least 3 years until this campus is anything close to normal again.

      Gentle reader, imagine you just got hired at this school as faculty. How much are you going to trust admin not to screw you over when the time comes? Did anyone in administration think this through at all?

The statement also questioned how shared governance could exist after the administration "blocked access to the university and its website for half the membership" of the Senate, meaning "this governance body is rendered unable to function."

     In theory, there’s supposed to be “shared governance” on campus, but, bottom line, admin controls the money, and the golden rule (“He who holds the gold makes the rules”) applies. Faculty at this school got a hard lesson: there’s no shared governance, and there never has been. 

     It’s hysterical how admin insists they had the student’s needs at heart here:

The university released a statement Monday that said it was trying to protect students. "LIU's first priority is our students," the statement said. "We maintain an unwavering commitment to ensure that students continue their studies without interruption and that tuition remains affordable.

      They fired everybody, just as classes started. There is no way the courses offered this semester will be comparable to the courses offered in prior years…these students are screwed, and admin made the choice to screw them. Admin is asking students to just trust them, promising to keep their tuition increases low but…that requires trust in administrative promises. How can you possibly trust them now?

      I love news sites that allow comments, as so often there’s a commenter that knows far more than the reporter of the story. One is willing to provide some data to explain how admin is spending the money:

* Grand Total Varsity Athletics Spending (measured in 2012$ -- using December CPI)
2004-05: $9,659,396
2012-13: $14,475,236
% Change: + 49.9%
* Spending per Varsity Athlete (measured in 2012$ - using December CPI)
2004-05: $35,512
2012-13: $53,023
% Change: + 49.3%
* Spending on Instruction/ FTE Student (measured in 2012$ - using December CPI)
2004-05: $14,150
2012-13: $11,583
% Change: -18.1%
* Spending on Academic Support/ FTE Student (measured in 2012$ - using December CPI)
2004-05: $4168
2012-13: $3529
% Change: -15.3%

      So, the administration that supposedly cares so much about students has greatly increased spending on sportsball….and cut funding for instruction and academic support.

      Again: how can you trust an administration that does this?

     I’m ambivalent towards unions because of their tendency towards violence. Will that eventually happen with LIU? If administration continues to act in such a reckless manner, I find it certain, unfortunately.

     On September 15, the lockout ended, and the professors returned. Gee, can anyone guess what the mood is like on that campus? I know if I was admin at this place, I’d be polishing up the ol’ resume, because declaring war on the faculty just isn’t going to make for a pleasant environment. If I was faculty, I’d also be looking elsewhere.

      If I was a student, I’d go anyplace but here…and admin shaped that decision. In a few years, when the school cuts most classes due to a sharp drop-off in enrollment, you can be sure faculty will pay the price.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com