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Posted on 05/24/2015 3:17:18 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
In what is apparently a vogue of Republican state legislators exercising misplaced vendettas against college professors, Iowa Sen. Mark Chelgren recently made headlines when he introduced Senate File 64, “an Act relating to the teaching effectiveness and employment of professors” at Iowa public institutions.
Each year, the bill stipulates, any faculty who fails “to attain a minimum threshold of performance” based solely on student evaluations would be automatically fired regardless of rank or tenure. Lest you think that firing professors based on a questionable assessment metric affords them too much dignity, rest assured there is more. Some beleaguered governing body would also publish the names of the five professors with the lowest acceptable evaluations, and the student body would then “vote on the question of whether any of the five professors will be retained.”......
.....When, for example, a diner at a restaurant pairs tilapia with zinfandel, and then raises a holy fit about how disgusting her tilapia tastes, the manager has little choice but to restrain the irate sommelier and comp the food, even though it is the customer’s fault the food was “bad.” The staff would not dare suggest the customer try a different wine, because that rude attitude would be yet more fodder for a scathing Yelp review; e.g., “If I could give this place negative stars, I would!”....
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
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This is college-level pap for non-logical, emotion-driven critical thinking: Preposterous!
Medical patients aren’t customers either, at least when the Rats finally succeed in forcing the dumb-masses onto single payer (while the elites STILL find ways to pay for their own superior private care)...
” based solely on student evaluations would be automatically fired regardless of rank or tenure. L”
What’s the problem with that?
Rank and tenure doesn’t guarantee excellence.
Rather, it discourages it.
By their own statement they are admitting that rank and tenure doesn’t guarantee excellence in teaching.
The problem is that none of those is a good measure of an effective professor.
Under the GOP plan we’ll soon have only standup comics “teaching” our college students.
We currently have clowns and psychotics teaching them, so how would it be any different?
At least by doing away with tenure enforced mediocrity you could remove entrenched idiots if need be.
Back in our day, college was much cheaper, and the cost of tuition, room and board was within reach of most families. For those for whom it wasn't, state colleges and universities were reasonably enough priced so students could work and pay their own way.
It would be so much better if a very large percentage of those now going into debt for college degrees they're not qualified for would be in a trade skill, developing a talent that would provide job opportunity and knowledge appropriate to their interests and aptitudes. The sad irony is that so many of those without real aptitude for college work go into so much debt that that technical training is no longer affordable for them.
That’s a separate issue—doing away with tenure makes sense.
Basing renewals only on student evaluations is stupid.
...and everyone will get an "A"!
I don't know how smart it is for parents to spend $250,000 to send their kids to college to graduate with an unmarketable major and less knowledge than they had when they began -- but this plan seems even worse than what colleges are doing now.
How about basing professor's tenure and compensation on their effectiveness in teaching their students how to think, and measuring that by the percentage of students who are employed and how much they are earning one year and five years following graduation?
An extremely simple fact is being overlooked here:
Public schools (grades 1 through 12) are not commercial enterprises. They are paid for by local property taxes from all citizens. In most cases tenure does not exist in non-unionized schools.
Colleges are not paid by local property taxes by all citizens and is a commercial enterprise. In Colleges tenure is the rule. As a matter of fact, they are huge commercial enterprises.
Now, to tenure: The idea of tenure was to protect professors from reprisals if they voiced opinions other than mainstream. The punishment would be firing.
Back in the early days a college education really meant something but now a piece of paper is simply a piece of paper unless it ACTUALLY TEACHES A SKILL whether technically or administratively. Today many college graduates come away with a degree that is equivalent to a high school graduate of 1965.
Why? Because political indoctrination and pressure overcame the actual need to learn a trade or profession...and due to the tenure rule, the colleges can’t do a thing about it...and don’t want to because (after all) they are a commercial enterprise and that’s what the CUSTOMER wants.
Students are indeed customers, given that they are are (over)paying for their ‘education’. Student evaluations should count, but to use them as the sole measurement is a stupid idea. No, more than stupid.
".......I don’t know about condemnation and ridicule…. We scholars are trained to be critical – to question claims, test them, validate or invalidate them. I am familiar with the ongoing scholarly critique of claims of American exceptionalism. I myself have made some small contribution to that critique. For many years I have been studying the ideology of space exploration, in hopes of finding some way to develop a 21st century rationale for space exploration that might be more meaningful to the majority of human beings who are not engaged in or otherwise enamored of the enterprise (and who, by the way, are not American or “Western”). See, for example, my chapter on “Ideology, advocacy, and spaceflight: evolution of a cultural narrative,” in Societal Impacts of Spaceflight (2007).........
[That link above and the sources that are cited - with snips of how academia works to diminish our national "can-do" mood, is very enlightening; below is the link to the excerpted article, written because of the author's problem with an article on American Exceptionalism. - Written in 2007, I have no doubt that what Obama has done to the military and to the U.S. program meets with the author's approval. That's what passes for scholarly work - how a national spirit that animates our military and our space program is a problem (that we need to make "peace" and "life on Earth" the driver of our national discourse). I'm sure the students are required to buy some of these anti-military, anti-space program books.]
From the chapter:
......“Everything now suggests,” Nisbet wrote 25 years ago, “that Western faith in the dogma of progress is waning rapidly.” This faith appears to have remained alive and well, however, in the ideology of spaceflight. Christopher Lasch wrote 5 years ago,“almost everyone now agrees that [the idea of] progress—in its utopian form at least,” no longer has the power “to explain events or inspire [people] to constructive action.” But in the current cultural environment, perhaps it does—at least among space advocates. Progress is, indeed, modern American dogma and a key element of pro-space dogma. But it does not resonate well—as Pyne and others have noted—in the current postmodern (or even post-postmodern) cultural environment, where public discourse is rife with critiques of science, technology, the aims of the military-industrial complex, and the corporate drive for profit.......
"This brief historical review has shown how the rhetoric of space advocacy has sustained an ideology of American Exceptionalism and reinforced long-standing beliefs in progress, growth, and capitalist democracy. This rhetoric conveys an ideology of spaceflight that could be described, at its worst, as a sort of space fundamentalism: an exclusive belief system that rejects as unenlightened those who do not advocate the colonization, exploitation, and development of space.
The rhetorical strategy of space advocates has tended to rest on the assumption that the values of “believers” are (or should be) shared by others as well. Although the social, political, economic, and cultural context for space exploration has changed radically since the 1960s, the rhetoric of space advocacy has not. In the twenty-first century, advocates continue to promote spaceflight as a biological imperative and a means of extending U.S. free enterprise, with its private property claims, resource exploitation, and commercial development, into the solar system and beyond. Pyne, among others, has addressed the problematic nature of these arguments: “the theses advanced to promote [solar system] settlement,” he noted, “are historical, culturally bound, and selectively anecdotal: that we need to pioneer to be what we are, that new colonies are a means of renewing civilization.”
Spaceflight advocacy can be examined as a cultural ritual, performed by means of communication (rhetoric), for the purpose of maintaining the current social order, with its lopsided distribution of power and resources, and perpetuating the values of those in control of that order (materialism, consumerism, technological progress, private property rights, capitalist democracy). Communication research has shown how public discourses—those cultural narratives or national myths—“often function covertly to legitimate the power of elite social classes.” And this review has shown how the rhetoric of space advocacy reflects an assumption that these values are worth extending into the solar system.
......although she has noted that “the WASP space cowboy version of spaceflight” has persisted from the apollo era into the present, Constance Penley also has observed that NASA “is still the most popular point of reference for utopian ideas of collective progress.” In the popular imagination,“NASA continues to represent . . . perseverance, cooperation, creativity and vision,” and these meanings embedded in the narrative of spaceflight “can still be mobilized to rejuvenate the near-moribund idea of a future toward which dedicated people . . . could work together for the common good.”
This historical review of the rhetoric of space advocacy reveals competing American cultural narratives, then. The dominant narrative—advancing the values of the dominant culture—upon which the narrative of U.S. spaceflight piggybacks, is a story of American exceptionalism that justifies unilateral action and the globalization of American capitalist democracy and material progress. The story of spaceflight is embedded in this broader narrative. That story is also woven into a competing narrative, a vision of “utopian ideas of collective progress” and “a spiritual humbling of self.” This competing narrative may be a site within which the ideology of spaceflight might rejuvenate itself—where the vision of a human future in space becomes a vision of humanity’s collective peaceful existence on Spaceship Earth and the need to work together to preserve life here and look for life out there........."
I’m with you on measuring effective teaching—but student earnings after graduation aren’t necessarily a good measure of that. (Some students prefer less remunerative work, become stay-home parents, etc.)
For some subjects in the sciences, there are objective tests that can measure how well the students have learned a set body of material. But for other subjects, “teaching to the test” would make for poor instruction.
And kiss the Constitution good bye.
I made a suggestion on a thread earlier in the year that a fix for the present system could be that students, instead of paying for college directly, could be assessed a percentage of their post college gross earnings that went to fund the institute of higher education they attended.
Seems to me that this would solve most of the problems we are confronted with today...
No more student debt that is impossible to pay.
No more accepting kids into college that had had a low likelihood of success.
Effectively eliminating tenure.
Forcing the college to be responsible for the quality of the education they provide.
Etc...
I will stand by that suggestion for now.
Paying for a service certainly makes you a customer, it’s like tipping the wait-staff after a meal. Oh wait, the elite like Clintons and professors don’t tip, that’s only for the untermench.
And why shouldn't we have our turn? It is the left that has turned the Academy into an ideological whorehouse.
They’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall.
Most college teaching should be moved online. Why does someone have to stand up in front of you, talk and write on the board and be entertaining in order for you to learn? At the high school level and below you need a teacher but once you make it to college you are an adult and there are these things called books that hold all the information. If you need to hear someone talk then watch a youtube video. As it stands professors are going out of their way to win popularity contests to get tenure, the standards sink lower each year, students learn next to nothing and end up with mounds of debt and no skills for the privilege. Put it online and standardize the exams and assessments.
i ended up becoming an electrician myself, didn’t accumulate much debt in the trade school, and well, had a growing vocation that allowed me to get started paying off for the degree that I actually earned.
If there’s anything underrated today, it’s the trades.
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