Posted on 01/26/2018 8:03:28 AM PST by 3161J410
Higher-paid professors at research universities spend less time instructing undergraduate students compared to their lower-paid counterparts. Considering that faculty pay makes up on average two-thirds of total instructional costs at American research universities, the impact of classifying faculty research activities as an instructional cost could have a substantial impact on tuition rates. But more research doesn’t guarantee better research, as noted by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein, who says a “publish-or-perish” mentality has gripped professors at American research universities. Bauerlein points to the excessive level of focus the academic community places on William Shakespeare as an example. Some 21,674 scholarly publications on the English poet were published in a 26-year period between 1980 and 2006. What more can be said about Shakespeare?
And who’s teaching undergraduates while professors are busy hammering out the 21,675th study on Shakespeare? Numerous studies have shown that undergraduate students bear the cost of pervasive “publish-or-perish” mentality in higher education results in the form of higher tuition, larger class sizes and higher student-faculty ratios.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
WTH. Research universties require their tenured faculty to engage in research. Of course they don’t spend much time teaching undergraduates.
Even if they want to teach undergraduates, they may not be the best teachers. The level of creative brilliance that some of these people possess is best utilized at the graduate level.
Very good. I’m happy somebody picked up on the fact that they are called research universities for a reason. The U.S. tradition of liberal arts colleges has traditionally provided a counterpoint to research universities. It is true that things might be thought through and reconfigured, but it should suprise no one that a thing functions in the way that it is configured.
I have a good friend who is a professor emeritus from University of North Carolina. Perhaps his foremost work is a treatise on North Carolina Bar B que. “Holy Smoke”
At 75 or so, he and his wife still literally travel the world to teaching gigs at universities all over the world.
they worried about getting in a specific retirement community but it seems to me they are never at home, always on the road. The perks include paid retirement
This is nothing new! I graduated in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1965. Most of my classes were taught by Indian Teaching Assistants. The only notable professor at Berkeley who actually taught classes was Dr. Edward Teller, Father of the “H” Bomb. He taught “Sorority Girl Physics” ( aka Physics for Non-Physical Science Majors), and his classes were overflowing. He taught one group in a “snake pit” and had the “snake pit” next door full of students watching his lectures on big screen. He was a spell-binding lecturer, one of the very few.
I’m an adjunct professor at a community college. Even though we are not a research university we are closely affiliated with one. Each semester I teach a course load that is 60% the size of the full professors. I get 1/4 the pay for the same coursework instruction. My students have consistently praised my work and the value of my instruction. Over the course of the last 9 years, several of them have changed their majors after I introduce them to proper history. While I hate the pay differential, I am fortunate in that I am already retired. I can teach pretty much what I want (academic freedom cuts both ways) and not worry about pleasing the apparatchiks in the department or college administration. I let my classes know on day one of each semester that I am not politically correct and that history isn’t either. If they need a “safe space” then they are advised to find another professor....
Most of my engineering classes were taught by Ph.D. professors. A few were taught by assistants, but they had a good handle on the subject matter.
Many people here in Virginia are retiring to the southern coast of NC, around Wilmington/Ocean Isle Beach.
The tools of American cryptology were developed for textual analysis of the Bard. Sometimes liberal arts spins off something useful.
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